Talk Cocktail

A cancer on the Church

Just recently we heard about tens of millions of dollars in cash being laundered in the Vatican. Clearly the Vatican and the Catholic Church are still imperial institutions, very much disconnected from the real world.  Nowhere has this been more evident than in the almost twenty year history of sex abuse in the Catholic Church.  

We often think about these stories on a very human, very tragic case by case basis.  But from thirty thousand feet, the numbers are staggering.  500+ priests sent to prison, over 3 billion paid in settlements, single priests that have abused more than 200 children and these are just a few statistics.

How did this happen?  How did horror and human degradation become so institutionalized, covered up and almost accepted from the Pope on down?

This is the story that Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Michael D’Antonio tells in his new book Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal.

My conversation with Michael D'Antonio:

Gettysburg +150

Today we mark the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. One of the great battles of any war and one of the most significant in US history.

Yet, even a century and half since the Civil War,  we are still learning new historical facts, new insights and developing new understandings of what really happened and why. 

Two recent books, highlight this:

In A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War, historian Thomas Fleming reminds us that we need appreciate that we might have avoided the war altogether, had not the rhetoric and passions and hatreds of the times lead to what he calls “a collective and incurable disease in the public mind.”

Civil War historian and Gettysburg College history professor  Allen Guelzo, in  Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,  takes a look, for the first time, at the raw politics of the war.  How political and sometimes petty decisions, that were little noted at the time, will be long remembered for their impact on the war, the lives of men and their families and the course of history.  

My conversation with Thomas Flemming:

My conversation with Allen Guelzo:

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Gettysburg +150

Today we mark the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. One of the great battles of any war and one of the most significant in US history.

Yet, even a century and half since the Civil War,  we are still learning new historical facts, new insights and developing new understandings of what really happened and why. 

Two recent books, highlight this:

In A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War, historian Thomas Fleming reminds us that we need appreciate that we might have avoided the war altogether, had not the rhetoric and passions and hatreds of the times lead to what he calls “a collective and incurable disease in the public mind.”

Civil War historian and Gettysburg College history professor  Allen Guelzo, in  Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,  takes a look, for the first time, at the raw politics of the war.  How political and sometimes petty decisions, that were little noted at the time, will be long remembered for their impact on the war, the lives of men and their families and the course of history.  

My conversation with Allen Guelzo:

The environment...now!

There are always those people who seem to be on the cutting edge of whatever the public meme might be.  Psychologist Mary Pipher is one of those.  Before anyone else, she saw the need to empower our daughters and changed the landscape of girls around the world.  

She later anticipated the “sandwich generation” that would cause so many baby boomers to take care of their aging parents, and she long ago was prescient about the trials and tribulation of immigrants in America.

Now she turns her attention to our environment.  And while the issues have been around awhile, you get that sense that Mary’s decision to take it on, means we’ve reached some kind of tipping point in our public consciousness.

Mary Piper is the best selling author of  Reviving Ophelia, The Middle of Everywhere and Another Country, now she takes us on the journey of The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture.

My conversation with Mary Pipher

Paris

There are but a few places on the planet that conjure up whole images, thoughts and emotions. Regardless of whether you’ve been there or not.  London, New York, Ireland and Paris, to name a few.  All are the subjects of sweeping novels by internationally bestselling author Edward Rutherfurd.  

He was last on this program to talk about his novel, New York. Now he turns his talents to Paris: The Novel and gives us a dazzling historical portrait of the City of Light.

My conversation with Edward Rutherfurd:

The patients point of view

Ours is an age which we consciously pursues health, and yet often only believe in the reality of sickness. 

Susan Sontag, understood this when she said in Illness as a Metaphor that "any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.  Often because it overwhelms us."  Because in an age in which we are all focused on health, it is often the reality of sickness that changes our world and our world view.

This was the experience of journalist and author Nora Gallagher, as she traveled into the nation of helath care, only to hit landfall at the Mayo Clinic.  She tells her story in The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic.

My conversation with Nora Gallagher:

What Doctors Feel

Medicine and hospitals have long been a great source of drama.  From Marcus Welby and Dr. Kildare to General Hospital and Grey’s Anatomy and House, medical drama has kept us riveted.  Perhaps never better than in Paddy Chayefsky's The Hospital. There, the Chief of Medicine's wife has left him, his children don’t talk him, he fears he suffers from impotence and his hospital is falling apart.  Yet..he soldiers on treating patients.

Ironically in spite of all of this, we somehow think that Doctors are above allowing emotions to impact their work, that somehow they all took that class in medical school in Detachment 101. Nothing could be further from the truth.  

Now Dr. Danielle Ofri, Associate Professor of Medicine at NYU School of Medicine and long time doctor at New York's Bellevue Hospital, takes a look at the connection between how doctors treat patients and how they feel.

My conversation with Dr. Danielle Ofri about What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine.

Mexico and the United States, and the Road Ahead

The Mexico / U.S. relationship  is front and center today in the US Congress. But how much do you think members of Congress know about what’s really happening in Mexico?

If you were to think about a country that has made remarkable economic progress;  a nation whose once closed economy has become one of the most open in the world;  a country that has a growing middle class, a thriving multi party, competitive democracy and a growing skilled workforce that is helping to restore manufacturing;  most likely you would not think of Mexico.

Rather,  when we think of Mexico we often think of one of the most dangerous nations.  A place were over 70,000 people have been killed in criminal violence and whose law enforcement and judicial system has broken down.  The fact is that all of these things are true of Mexico.

It’s complexity and it’s future are open questions for the 21st century.  Few understand this better than  Shannon K. O’Neil.  She is a senior fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has degrees from Yale and Harvard and is the author of Two Nations Indivisible: Mexico, the United States, and the Road Ahead.

My conversation with Shannon K. O'Neil:

I Spy

Certainly the subject of spying and secrets is front and center today.  For Scott Johnson it  almost always was.

It has been written that the sins of the father shall be visited upon their sons. 

In a broader sense it's clear that often, as we try to reach escape velocity from our fathers, we end up becoming just like them.

Journalist and long time Newsweek foreign correspondent Scott Johnson tells such a story in his memoir The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA.

My conversation with Scott Johnson:

Bill Dodd

My conversation with Napa County Supervisor Bill Dodd

You must remember this....

Tower of Basel

It’s no surprise that the world financial markets are shrouded in secrecy.  We don’t need a whistleblower to tell us that.  But in an age in which what happens in Greece or China or Singapore can have ripple effects in financial markets around the world, often in seconds, it is certainly important to understand where the worlds levers of financial power really are.

As Paul Krugman pointed out this weekend, they are no longer just in big banks, or big governments, but like so much of globalization, they rest in multinational organizations. Often far, far removed from the people they impact.

One such organization is Bank for International Settlements.  It meets every other month in Basel, Switzerland and it’s work is often hidden, while its impact is not.

Adam Lebore, in his new book Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World pulls back the curtain.

My conversation with Adam Lebore: 

DSM 5 - The Book of Woe

It has often been said that to name something is to own it, or at least give it meaning.  This is generally true as a marketing concept, but we would think perhaps it’s less true in an exacting field such as medicine.  However that has been the underlying idea of the American Psychiatric Association in creating and fostering the DSM since 1952.

A volume that tries to define the parameters and terms of mental illness, is without the kind of scientific reliance used even for an auto repair manual.  Yet the fifth volume of this work has just been completed.  We’ve all heard of it, Doctors rely on it, and it may in fact be detrimental to our mental health...that is if we could define it.  Psychotherapist Gary Greenberg explains in The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry.

My conversation with Gary Greenberg:

History is the Third Parent

Edmund Burke wrote "that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." But what happens when good men do take action, and the net result of their efforts is to, in some way, fuel the evil and worst of all, become impacted by it in ways that taint their goodness.

In many ways, history is filled with such examples, certainly the history of Middle East over the past ten years is perhaps the penultimate example. And this is the framework of Nadeem Aslam's new novel of grace under pressure, The Blind Man's Garden.

My conversation with Nadeem Aslam:

The power of family

If we were to look at and try to understand the vast panoply of how people live their lives, how we connect with each other, hurt each other and help each other, we’d see that we would look first at families. Not just because, as Woody Allen says, "we need the eggs," but because they are a kind of living laboratory of human emotion, human strength, and human frailty.

Perhaps that’s why literature has so often focused on the family as a centerpiece or fulcrum of stories?  Such is the case with Khaled Hosseini.

He is the multiple bestselling author of THE KITE RUNNER and A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS. His new novel, looking deep into the lives of family, is And the Mountains Echoed.

My conversation with Khaled Hosseini:

Alysia Abbott's memoir of her father

It is that rare  event that happens when a life and a time come together in a way that better enables us to understand both.  Alysia Abbott has lead such a life.

Her father, poet, writer and literary figure Steve Abbott was one of the early leaders of the gay rights movement, first in Atlanta and then in San Francisco.  Alysia’s mother would die in a car accident when she was two, and she would be raised by her gay father in 70’s San Francisco.  Long before being a gay parent would become mainstream.

Shortly after his death from AIDS, in 1992, Alysia would find her father's journals.  Now she tells her story and his, in her memoir  Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father.

My conversation with Alysia Abbott:                    

The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

Few people understand president Obama better than Jonathan Alter. He has covered Obama since his days in Chicago. He wrote an early Newsweek cover story that help bring Obama to national prominence and has been one of the preeminent chroniclers of Obama's campaigns and more importantly, it’s connection to the Obama Presidency.

Over the years there have been several books central to changing our view of politics. Theodore White’s, Making of the President, F. Clifton White’s Suite 3505, Joe McGinniss’ Selling of the President 1968, and Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the 1972 campaign. Now Jonathan Alter, award winning reporter, columnist, former senior for Newsweek, adds his new book The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies to that list.

My conversation with Jonathan Alter:

An Inner History of the New America

Earlier in the week I spoke with British MP, Jesse Norman about Edmund Burke and the old idea of Conservatism as a way to address social order and care for the needs of generations past and future. After reading George Packer's new book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, it makes you think that perhaps we need some of that institutional conservatism today.

Packer deconstructs the past thirty years of "progress" in America and in so doing brilliantly gives narrative drive to the changes in almost every aspect of American life. You come a way with the realization that we are no longer held together by trusted institutions, but by individual brands, all competing in the marketplace. The questions is, is this any way to run a Democracy?

My conversation with George Packer:

Farm to Health

We see demographic statistics that in the next 20 years more than 65% of the world will live in cities. We seem to be moving further and further from the land.  In spite of it’s current romanticism, the number of family farms continues to shrink, at the same time that science and technology promises that we may soon be able to create food from 3D printers. While urban Farmers Markets grow, as perhaps the last vestige of our evolutionary roots to the land, one wonders how this shift will really impact us?Can we move so far away from our biological heritage, and still be truly healthy? Daphne Miller, MD is a family physician,and Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of California San Francisco and she looks at all of this in Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing. My conversation with Daphne Miller:

The First Conservative

Conservatism was a once great political idea. However, in the US today, it bears little resemblance to its roots. Edmund Burke, often referred to as the first conservative, saw the purpose of politics as being not to satisfy the interests of individuals living now: but to preserve a social order and address the needs of generations past, present and future. Hardly something conservative political leaders in the US are thinking about. In fact, most of the neocons and theocons of today's Conservative movement  have no idea about the roots of their so called "philosophy." Jesse Norman is one of the rising stars of the British House of Commons. A Tory member of Parliament, he was educated at Oxford and University College London and has now renewed our acquaintance with Burke in Edmund Burke: The First Conservative. My conversation with The Hon. Jesse Norman:

Mexico's Descent into Darkness

As is the case with most of our political debates in this country, we never seem to understand context. As immigration reform is once again front and center, the debate about immigration, particularly from Mexico, should be about more than just numbers and citizenship. We are in fact dealing with a nation going through transition. And while it has been widely reported that Mexico is changing, that it is sprouting greater economic prosperity, greater democracy and less violence, it’s blood soaked tide is still very powerful and still pulls many into to it’s wake One of those has Alfredo Corchado. Carchado is the Mexico bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News, and his new book is Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent into Darkness. My conversation with Alfredo Cochado:

Why is Thinking Clearly so difficult?

TS Eliot wrote, in 1934, “Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” He might well have written those words yesterday. Certainly we’ve never had more knowledge, more information and seemingly less wisdom than we do today. What is the connection? How is it, that the more we know, the less we seem to understand and the less we seem to able to clearly and logically process it?  The answer it seems is part evolution, part science and part human behavior. It’s part of what  Rolf Dobelli examines in his bestselling book.The Art of Thinking Clearly. My conversation with Rolf Dobelli:

The Education of Samantha Power

Samantha Power is brilliant and President Obama’s pick to be the newest member of his cabinet and our new United Nations Ambassador. Her views have often been controversial, but always with a deep moral grounding.

Part of this comes from her study of and admiration for the late UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello. de Mello was killed in Iraq in 2003, engaged in the ongoing struggle to balance morality with the practical nature of diplomacy.

Back in 2008, upon the publication of her book on de Mello,  Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World, I spoke with Samantha Power.  Listening to that conversation today, we get some very real insights
into the education of Samantha Power.

Back to the Future

Imagine the world of today's high technology, but instead of sleek Apple like design, it is all powered by steam, driven by gears and could actually be taken apart and fixed. That’s the world of Steampunk. Brian David Johnson is a futurist at Intel and sees both the appreciation of and cultural irony in Steampunk.  He writes about it inVintage Tomorrows: A Historian And A Futurist Journey Through Steampunk Into The Future of Technology. My conversation with Brian David Johnson

Big, Hot, Cheap and Right

Throughout the history of America, and its federalist system, different states have personified, both politically and economically, the ethos of a particular era.

New York would came to represent the economic boom of the 20’s and Chicago with its big shoulders, the apotheosis of industrialization. California would represent post war America and the dreams of the golden land with its promise of freedom and education. Today many would argue that Silicon Valley represents the future. But my guest Erica Grieder thinks we need to look toward the Lone Star State.

That a place many of us instinctively turn away from, may be closer than we think to representing the future of America. It's a place that Erica Grieder says is Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas.

My conversation with Erica Grieder:

The Autistic Brain

We are creatures of exploration. Today with so much information available to us, and travel so easy, we might be like Alexander the Great with no more places left to conquer. But perhaps the one great mystery, the one great area still left for exploration, is the workings of the human mind. We see it day in and day out with how kids learn, how we process information and how all of our styles of learning are so different. Temple Grandin has been an explorer extraordinaire on this journey. In her previous works, Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation, she gave us great insight into the human side and scale of autism. Now in her new book, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, she literally takes us inside the brain, to give all of us an affirmative understating of autism itself. My conversation with Temple Grandin:

Is Mass Extinction Possible?

When we think about the future, and the vast array of dangers that we face as a society and a species, how big do we think? Is our future measured in days, weeks, hours or perhaps millennia? For Alvy Singer, the Woody Allen stand-in in Annie Hall, the future was far, far away as the young man worried about the “universe expanding” while sitting in Brooklyn. The fact is that Alvy was thinking in species time, and history tells us that species do go extinct; that our day will come to an end and that maybe it is something we should be thinking about. Science writer and blogger Annalee Newitz, has certainly been thinking about it, and she lays it out in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. My conversation with Annalee Newitz:

Bad Boy

Eric Fischl is one of America's most celebrated and accomplished artists. At a time in the 80’s when painting was declared to be dead, he and others of his generation prevailed and gave new life to art. Through the years Fischl sought to bring his work and life into harmony and in so doing has constantly strived to reinvent himself and his work in order to remain relevant. His newly published autobiography, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, proves he has succeeded. My conversation with Eric Fischl:

"Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold."

The New York Times in their obituary called him a "Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold." Andrew Greeley was all of these. “A Roman Catholic priest and writer whose outpouring of sociological research, contemporary theology, sexually frank novels and newspaper columns challenged reigning assumptions about American Catholicism.”

He was a true maverick who was willing take on all sides in any debate. He was not a fan of what the institutional Catholic Church had become, but was just as harsh on what he saw as "secular intellectuals."

I had the chance to speak with him, just once, back in 1999 on the publication of the second volume of his memoirs Furthermore! Memories of a Parish Priest. So much of what he said thirteen years ago still has relevance, and yet he was so wrong about the pace of progress in the Vatican, and in Latin America.

Here is that conversation.

Dan Savage on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

Few controversial issues in contemporary American life have seen the kind of rapid sea change in public opinion that we’ve witnessed on the subject of gay marriage. In fact, recent polls show almost 60% of the American public, in support or acceptance of same-sex marriage. Even members of the GOP, like Sen Rob Portman and numerous party operatives, have expressed support.

The gay magazine The Advocate had a recent cover saying that “gay is the new black.” But is this debate really similar to race, or does the issue have its own politics, tied to broader themes of sexuality? And if so, how will this current debate impact these broader issues of sex and sexuality and might it perhaps move us beyond American puritanism.

Standing for years on the ramparts of all of these issues is prominent sex advice columnist Dan Savage, most recently the American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics.
author of

My conversation with Dan Savage:

Confessions of a Sociopath

Imagine if you could say things and interact with people unrestricted by conscience. If you had an unfettered capacity for risk, engaged in irresponsible behavior, and felt it unnecessary to conform to social norms. For this to happen one of two things is usually true, either you are a politician a or a sociopath....or maybe even a trial lawyer.

And then imagine if these things could be combined? Then you would have M.E. Thomas. She’s a trial lawyer, a law professor and an admitted sociopath.

In her just published memoir Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight, she shows us that all sociopaths are not Hannibal Lecter, but they do have many of the same traits.

My conversation with M.E. Thomas

How the Green Generation came of age

Even amidst all of the domestic and international policy issues that come and go with each administration, perhaps the one that has the greatest staying power, is the environment. The roots and reasons go back almost thirty-five years.

Originally conceived in September of 1969 as a nationwide environmental teach-in, the first Earth Day was a call to action that inspired thousands of events across the country.

Becoming larger than the biggest civil rights and anti war demonstrations of the 60’s, roughly 1,500 colleges and 10,000 schools held teach-ins. Activities that took place in hundreds of churches and temples, in city parks and commercial and government buildings, it created a lasting “eco infrastructure.” And that first Earth Day in 1970 would give rise to the first green generation.

University of Delaware Professor Adam Rome looks back in his book The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation.

My conversation with Adam Rome:

Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know

It’s hard to imagine that for young people growing up today, seeing the Middle East as the center of American military and foreign policy concerns, that for over fifty years and eight Presidents, Cuba had been at the center of American concerns. Ninety miles off America's shores, for the entirety of the cold war, it represented the penultimate point where Americans and Soviets were eyeball to eyeball. Today when celebrities travel to Cuba and some try to make an issue of it, most people wonder what all the fuss is about? Is that progress, has Cuba really changed or is it a kind of collective Cuba fatigue or amnesia? Julia Sweig is one of our nations reigning experts on Cuba and has just completed her second edition of Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know. My conversation with Julia Sweig:

The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert

Look around at our culture today. Oddity is all around us. Reality television takes us to the fringes of human behavior. The Supermarket tabloids provide a freak show we secretly devour, while waiting in line. We seem to seek comfort, or perhaps reinforce our own sense of normalcy, by seeing the extremes of others. Perhaps the first to understand this was not a psychologist or psychiatrist, but a man named Robert Ripley. We know him as the man who created Ripley’s Believe It or Not. In fact, in understanding Ripley, we understand a little bit more about America. Acclaimed biographer Neal Thompson, has written a compelling biography A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley. My conversation with Neal Thompson:

The Making of America's First Muslim College

The recent events in Boston once again raise questions about the place of Islam in modern American society. The impacts for muslims trying to live and practice their faith in the US, is that they often run headlong into popular misconceptions about the faith. One of the places taking on this challenge is Zaytuna College, the first Muslim four year undergraduate liberal arts college founded in Berkeley in 2008 Scott Korb, who teaches writing at New York University and the New School, spent time with the College's inaugural class and writes about the first year of Zaytuna College in his new book Light without Fire: The Making of America's First Muslim College. My conversation with Scott Korb:

In search of moral behavior

One of the central tenants in the debate about religion, is that some claim it provides the only construct for understanding moral behavior. In fact, science, research and even our own pets should tell us clearly that empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity are all traits we see in animal behavior. This is particularly true of the primates.

And just as the monstrous instinct exists in all of us, including animals, so to do the traits of social cooperation. It’s simply the other side of the same coin.

No one has done a better job of explaining this than Frans De Waal in his new work The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates.

My conversation with Frans De Waal:

Finding Your Story

We would all like the ability to see the future. Unfortunately, few of us have the appropriate psychic powers. What we can do however, is invent the future, at least our own. For we each have our own unique path, our own unique story that is evolving right here and right now, even as we listen to this. Unfortunately, too often we lose our place in that story. We’re told, often as young people, to abandon it in favor of some standardized norm of education, business and career. The fact is that conformity does not work. It’s the enemy not only of creativity, but of an authentic life. Trying once again to find our place in our own story is what best selling author and thought leader, Sir Ken Robinson is trying to teach us in Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life. My conversation with Sir Ken Robinson:

The New Reality of Adoption

Adoption today is a far cry from the idyllic portral we imagined and maybe have even witnessed, years ago. It has become engaged in international politics, domestic politics, and the abortion debate. Add to this, the current complexity of the process, the expanding landscape of open adoptions and you have a space that is no longer just about the love of a child, but an emotional minefield that prospective parents have to learn how to navigate.

That’s the backdrop for The Mothers,a new novel that provides a powerful portrayal of modern adoption by Jennifer Gilmore.

My conversation with Jennifer Gilmore:

The New Gospel of Adoption

In the world of international adoption, market forces have always played a key role. The issues of supply and demand impact both policy and outcomes. But the adoption business, which has long been the province of religious and secular agencies, has lately been overtaken by evangelical advocacy. Evangelical organizations and churches, which have been build upon the cultural practices which they oppose, like abortion and gay marriage, now seem to have found a cause they can champion....but what are its consequences for the children? Kathryn Joyce had plowed deep into this world in The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption.My conversation with Kathryn Joyce:

The Plateau Effect

Often it seems as if there is a hopelessness with respect to personal progress. That it is our ultimate destiny not to go forever forward, but at some points to be pushed back or stuck in our past. It would seem that this is almost a part of our DNA as a species,  or at least as Americans. But does it have to be so?  Investigative journalist Bob Sullivan thinks not. He believes we can overcome what he calls The Plateau Effect. My conversation with Bob Sullivan: