Talk Cocktail

I have a friend who doesn’t understand the value of travel. He thinks that the virtual world provides him all of the insight he needs into new places and new experiences. I think nothing can be further from reality and believe that author Pico Iyer is a living embodiment of that. For years he has introduced us to his experiences of the world in books like "The Lady and the Monk," "The Global Soul" and "The Open Road." In his new work, The Man Within My Head he shares with us his own internal journey of a life lived not behind a screen, but in the real world, interfacing with real people and real experience. My conversation with Pico Iyer:

It was Oscar Wilde who said "the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." For to long we've been very good at measuring how much, the price of everything is, but very bad at figuring out value, defining what value means, how it to can be measured and  celebrated as the currency of an interconnected, global society. Dov Seidman, in his work and in his new book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything, argues that "our world is being dramatically reshaped. The rules of the past no longer apply. In the 21st century, it's no longer what you do that matters most but how you do it." My conversation with Dov Seidman:

San Francisco Bay is a remarkably resilient body of water. In spite of the urbanization and cosmopolitan life of the 46 cities that surround it, the ethos of the Bay Area continues to make sure that the environmental restoration is ongoing. Ariel Rubissow Okamoto's book Natural History of San Francisco Bay takes us on a tour of this remarkable body of water.

My conversation with Ariel Rubissow Okamoto:

Just as we often use living viruses to cure disease, so the Right argues that the cure for financial crises, environmental degradation, minimal national investment and no energy policy is less of all of them. The idea, which the country bought into in 2010, is that only by less regulation, more crony capitalism and more rewards for the economies winner, can we solve the problems of the average American. Sounds like Alice in Wonderland, but it's the basis of the platform of this years Republican candidates. Thomas Frank, bestselling author of "What's the Matter with Kansas," explains what's going on in his new book Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right. My conversation with Thomas Frank:

Bobby Kennedy used to be fond of quoting George Bernard Shaw in saying that “some men see things as they are and ask why, other see things that never were and ask why not.” It can be said that esteemed civil rights attorney and activist Connie Rice has shared that vision in the work she has done, both in the courtroom and on the mean streets of Los Angeles. Rice is the co-founder and co-director of the Advancement Project in Los Angeles. She has received more than 50 major awards for her leadership of diverse coalitions, and her non-traditional approaches to litigating major cases. She is a graduate of Harvard and of the New York University Law School and has been call the "conscience of Los Angeles."  She has now written her memoir  Power Concedes Nothing: One Woman's Quest for Social Justice in America, from the Courtroom to the Kill Zones. My conversation with Connie Rice:

The subject of how to deal with war crimes has plagued the moral conscience of civilized man for millennia. In more modern times, after World War II, the allies debated how to treat the Nazi leaders. What emerged from that debate, the Nuremberg Trials, would become the precedent for post war justice. But how we deal with war crimes in the terrorist era is another matter. Where war is ongoing, where civilian destruction is part of the enemy's plan, and the news cycles feeds martyrdom, how do we proceeded? The debate over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and how the mastermind of 9/11 should be tired reflects this debate. Few know the subject better than William Shawcross.  A distinguished journalist and author, his father, Hartley Shawcross, was Britain's lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.  His brilliant analysis of the current situation is Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. My conversation with William Shawcross:

Conservatism evolved from the reaction against the elitism of the French Revolution. It was given up for dead in the mid 1950’s then redefined by Bill Buckley and others in the early ‘60s, as a duel between Christianity and atheism and the struggle between individualism and collectivism.  All of this history is the primordial stew out of which the modern Tea Party movement emerges. Today the Tea Party, bolstered by its 2010 success, is reshaping the Republican Party, conservatism and the nation in ways that are generating profound negative and frightening consequences. Theda Skocpol, Harvard Professor of Government and Sociology and past President of the American Political Science Association explains, in her new in depth look at The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.My conversation with Theda Skocpol:

If nothing else is clear about this years Presidential election, it’s certain that not only our economy, but our current forms of capitalism are going to be on trial. From the early rhetoric of the campaign, to the Occupy and Tea Party movements; the success of Ron Paul, even a recent piece by Lawrence Summers in the Financial Times assessing that state of capitalism, prove that our current systems and institutions are seeing pressure as never before. But how will all of this play out?  Will we be asking the right questions and will the politics keep up with the reality of technology and our changing and interconnected world? These are just some of the questions as by University of Maryland Professor Gar Alperovitz in his new book America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy. My conversation with Gar Alperovitz

The shocks of the current economic crises have confused the country. Historically like all such confusion, it can give rise to fear and allow demagogues of both the left and the right to exploit those fears. Back in 1932 we were in a similar situation. At the depths of the Great Depression, FDR came to office with a basket full of ideas to try and solve the nation’s problems. Not unlike today, many of those ideas infuriated both the left and the right. Today, Wall Street bankers have become public enemy number one, while gun ownership is at an all time high. In the 1930s, the results of a similar crises resulted in similar dangers. Historian and journalist Sally Denton looks back at a time  that all to closely parallels our current situation. My conversation with Sally about her new work The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right.

After watching Mission Impossible and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy you've seen both the past and the future of espionage. We all remember stories of espionage during the Cold War. The rainy, grey streets of Eastern Europe, the moral twilight of Le Carre, U2 flights and prisoner exchanges on a deserted bridge. Today espionage has gone digital;  with keystrokes rather than micro-fish, with the likes of hackers like Kevin Mitnick replacing James Bond. At the same time the stakes have never been higher, as all of our secrets are more vulnerable than even. Former senior counsel at the National Security Agency, Joel Brenner takes us inside this new world of America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare. My conversation with Joel Brenner:

It estimated that in the next decade as much as seventy percent of the world's population will be living in cities. How we make those cities safe, may very well determine the quality of life for future generations. There is no better example of keeping crime down than what happened in New York where, over nineteen years, the crime rate dropped 80 percent! Criminologists and urban planners have been at a loss to explain the dramatic drop in crime, but in his book The City that Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control, U.C. Berkeley's Franklin Zimring explains the tactics and techniques that have challenged long-held notions about law enforcement. My conversation with Franklin Zimring:

Around 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville revealed a unique set of American character traits. Traits that in total, would come to define the American experience. Today most of those traits are still with us;  but we often lose sight or forget about them.   Like de Tocqueville, sometimes it takes an outsider to remind us of those things that make us, if not exceptional, at least unique in what we've been able to achieve. Daniel Hannan, is a Conservative member of the European Parliament and first came to international prominence when he took on then British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, regarding his economic polices. In his recently published book The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America,  Hannan sounds a clarion call to America not to be seduced by all that seems attractive about the European system. Since the original publication of his book, he has proved prescient in several ways. My conversation with Daniel Hannan:

What does poverty look like in America today? Almost fifty years ago, Lyndon Johnson, during a State of the Union address, proposed a War on Poverty.  Today, in many ways, we seem to have lost that war. The plight of the poor in America is growing worse and the attention paid to them declining. Perhaps if we really understood, separate from the politics of economics, what that plight was like, if we really understood the stories of individuals, beyond the stereotypes, maybe then society might take notice and take action. A significant effort in this regard is under way with a new project, encompassing a website and ultimately a book. The project is entitled Voice of Poverty and it’s the idea of freelance journalist and U.C. Davis lecturer Sasha Abramsky. The project could radically change how we think about the poor in America. My conversation with Sasah Abramsky.

Now that the war in Iraq is officially ending, just maybe we can go back and look at why there really was an Iraq war. Not because of the so called “weapons of mass destruction” that Sadam allegedly had; but because one man had made it his life's mission, from the time he was a teenager, to overthrow Sadam. Over the years he tried many ways, but none would be more successful for Ahmad Chalabi than co-opting the Bush administration, the CIA, the New York Times, and the Defense Department. How did pull it off, and in so doing precipitate what may very well be the biggest and most expensive foreign policy blunder in us history? Five time Emmy winner and 60 Minutes Producer Richard Bonin takes us up close and personal to Ahmad Chaabi and how be lead the US into a calamitous nine-year war. He lays it out in Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi's Long Journey to Triumph in Iraq. My conversation with Richard Bonin:

More than twenty years ago, Patricia Cornwell originated the modern-day forensic thriller. In so doing, she changed the face of contemporary crime fiction with the creation of medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Since then, she has been often imitated, but never copied and continues to be the #1 bestselling crime writer in the world today. My conversation with Patricia Cornwell about her latest Kay Scarpetta novel, Red Mist

Scientists announced Tuesday that they had found hints, but not quite definitive proof of the particle that is believed to be a basic component of the universe. Clearly physicists are closing in on an elusive subatomic particle that, if found, would confirm a long-held understanding about why matter has mass and how the universe's fundamental building blocks behave. Few people outside of physics can fully comprehend the search for the Higgs boson, which was first hypothesized 40 years ago. However, Oxford University physicist Frank Close, in his new book The Infinity Puzzle, takes us inside this very human and high pressure quest to uncover the order of the universe. My conversation with Frank Close:

This weekend it was reported that movie attendance is at a recent low. Our interest in politics and politicians couldn't be lower. However the one area where where both attendance and interest continue to explode is the world of sports. In part, it's the clarity of story, the colorful, volatile and often egotistical personalities and also a whole new perking order of quality sports reporting.  Perched atop that order is John Feinstein. The author of twenty-eight books, most notably  A Season on the Brink and A Good Walk Spoiled, he is also a commentator on NPR's Morning Edition, a regular on ESPNs The Sports Reporters, and a regular contributor to The Washington Post. His new book, One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game is a look at his relationships with some of those legendary personalities in sports. My conversation with John Feinstein:

At the Republican debate, this past Saturday night, the question was raised about the impact of fidelity and by connection trustworthiness, on Presidential character. Perhaps that was the wrong question. Perhaps the better question was not on how trustworthiness impacts character, but how a sense of trust and moral understanding might actually impact public policy, economies and fairness? How does trust, morality and a sense of fairness shape our view of how the economy should work? To answer, we only need look at how greed and pure opportunism has shaped the events of the past two years. Professor David C. Rose, in The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior shows us how moral choices do play a role in the development and operation of market economies. My conversation with David Rose:

Back in the 1930's and 40's no one had heard of women engineers. Woman were not trying to "have it all," and the Hollywood women of the day represented the apotheosis of beauty, surfaces and dreams. Yet out this time emerged a woman who not only was considered the "most beautiful woman in the world," but in her spare time, from making hit movies, gave us the technology that we still use today in our cell phones, GPS devices and in Bluetooth. A woman of brains and beauty, Hedy Lamarr was a true Renascence woman. Yet her story has been little know until now when Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Richard Rhodes captures her story in Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr. My conversation with Richard Rhode

In the movie Wall Street, Oliver Stone told us that "the only thing worse than not having money, is to have had it and lost it." Such is certainly the case with the family of Bernie Madoff. But the question still remains, for this family that lived high on the hog for so long, "what did they know and when did they know it?" Journalist Laurie Sandell was the first to really get inside the Madoff family and tried to ascertain whether or not we should have any sympathy for Ruth, Mark and Andrew; or should we simply share a sense of schadenfreude for the destruction of this American family. In her new book Truth and Consequences she spends hours talking to members of the family. My conversation with Laure Sandell:

It seems like every day now, as certain drugs move to generic formulation, we're told how wonderful the original is. Every day, on television, we see advertising for the latest, so called wonder drugs.   These ads are filled with images of families, health and vibrancy. Little do these ads tells us about what really goes on behind the scenes of the big pharmaceutical companies. How are these miracle drugs developed, marketed and tested? And then imagine a drug that looks wonderful on paper, except that it never really worked for a disease that never really existed....and it came with powerful risks. Investigative journalist Kathleen Sharp in her new book Blood Feud: The Man Who Blew the Whistle on One of the Deadliest Prescription Drugs Ever takes us inside Big Pharma and shows how one good man, a whistleblower named Mark Duxbury, fights to project the vulnerability of innocent patients. My conversation with Kathleen Sharp:

In this time of renewed labor unrest, particularly in the public sector, it's worth looking back at the most momentous public sector strike of the second half of the 20th Century. It came when the Professional Air Traffic Controllers, a group that would reflect he progressive idealism and hope of the 60's, would run headlong into Ronald Reagan's conservative revolution of the 1980's. These two forces, which had been on a collision course since JFK signed an Executive Order allowing government workers to organize unions, had their ultimate collision on August 3rd, 1981. Since that time, like the big bang, the the pieces from that moment of collision are still being thrown off and still shaping our politics today. Georgetown University labor expert Joseph McCartin takes us back to that moment and the events that lead up to it in Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America. My conversation with Jospeh McCartin:

As Republican candidates move around the country trying define their conservative credentials, it's worth noting, as perhaps they should, that this year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication, by a then 26 year old William F. Buckley, of GOD AND MAN AT YALE. A book that many consider the seminal text of the modern conservative movement. It was a book that would redefine Conservatism in the cold war era and beyond. It was a conservatism that had evolved from Edmund Burke and the French Revolution, and was near death in the late 40's and would be given new life by Buckley. Buckley would go on to found National Review, provide the intellectual heft to continue to drive conservatism, provide the ideological underpinnings of Barry Goldwater, run for Mayor of New York, write over 50 books, appear in almost 1500 episodes of Firing Line and all the while define the difference between the passion of ideas and passion of friendship. Roger Williams University Law Professor Carl T. Bogus gives us a modern view of Buckley in this new book Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism. My conversation with Carl Bogus:

While the American Revolution was primarily about political independence, there were a strain of individuals who wanted the United States to gain cultural and social differentiation from its former colonial masters. But it proved not so easy cutting loose from a nation that for two centuries, had set the standard of civilization, not only for the colonies, but for the world. In many respects these issues of trade, of inferiority, of race and of exceptionalism, are still issues we as a nation, are still dealing with today, three hundred plus year later. Keriann Akemi Yokota takes us back to the roots in Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation My conversation with Keriann Akemi Yokota:

Over the past several years millions of words have been written and spoken about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rarely in history has a conflict gone on this long, without a resolution, or without taking some kind of corrosive toll on its participants. Today, it seems clear that the intransigence of Israel's leaders threatens not only Israeli and American relations, internal American politics, the stability of the region itself but also threatens Israel's future as an enlightened democratic nation. This is the premise of Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg, in his Book The Unmaking of Israel. My conversation with Gershom Gorenberg:

"To thine own self be true" Shakespeare tells us. Little did he know that in calling for this, he was going up against centuries of evolutionary behavior. In fact, renowned biologist and anthropologist Robert Trivers argues, in his new work The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, that self deception has been favored by natural selection. That we lie to ourselves in order to be better able to lie to others and throughout history, to the liers go the spoils. My conversation with Robert Trivers:

There is a reason that Hurricane Katrina still resonates with us. Not just because of the magnitude of the catastrophe, but because it signaled something profound about the American condition. Because it brought into bold relief the lives of many who lived behind a curtain of poverty, suffering and innate courage. This is the backdrop for the winner of this years National Book Award for Fiction Jesmyn Ward and her novel Salvage the Bones. My conversation with Jesmyn Ward:

What is conservatism and does today's conservatism bear any resemblecne to it's European roots?  Why does conservatism today seem so often un-conservative, so radical and nontraditional? From its reaction against the French Revolution, to the intransigence of today's GOP, who do conservative thinkers have in common?  Brooklyn College Political Science Professor Corey Robin has sparked a new and needed public conversation about the past, present and future of the conservative movement, in his new book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. My conversation with Corey Robin:

A decade after her death, Pauline Kael still remains the most important figure in film criticism today. In her view the critic "was the only independent source of information." As she viewed it, "all the rest was just advertising." It's fair to say that all critics today are measured against Kael. For those that love movies and are of a certain age, we all remember waiting for those Wednesday reviews in The New Yorker. In his new book Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, Brian Kellow gives us that first look behind the lens of Pauline Kael. She liked to say that her work was her biography, but Kellow gives us so much more. My conversation with Brian Kellow:

Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, Cleveland High School. They all conjure up painful images of boys gone bad. We’ve all heard the teacher or the neighbor talk about what a good student or a nice boy some of these perpetrators were. But nice boys, normal boys, don’t kill their fellow students or themselves. So what happened? Can we ever really fully understand what goes on in the minds of these boys and what they tell us about ourselves? Was Cesar right, that “the fault is in ourselves.” Few have looked deeper into this abyss than novelist and journalist David Vann in his original Esquire article about Steven Kazmierczak and the Northern Illinois University shooting and in his most recent book Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter. My conversation with David Vann:

Jerusalem is not just a city,  it is a state of mind. It represents an almost metropolitan version of the three thousand year story of western civilization. Yet, while it might seem strangely disconnected from the modern world, it is at the same time ground zero for so many of the 21st century's problems. Perhaps today, as it has been so many times before in history, as Jerusalem goes, so goes the world.  This is the central pillar of Simon Sebag Monetifiore's Jerusalem: The Biography.  My conversation with Simon Sebag Monetfiore:

We've spent some time lately talking about the 70's.  Today we go back even further.   When once asked about the impact of the French Revolution, former Chinese Premiere Chou En-lai said it "was too soon to know." Certainly the scope and impact of history is always evolving. So too is the reputation of the thirty-fourth President. Originally thought to be modest, in the wake of the Kennedy excitement of the early 1960's, history has come to appreciate the calm, no drama approach of the Eisenhower Presidency and what it actually accomplished. Looking at today's leaders, a well seasoned grown up might look pretty attractive. Veteran journalist Jim Newton, takes a look at Eisenhower: The White House Years. My conversation with Jim Newton:

In 1975 a now famous headline in the NY Daily News read, "Ford to NY, drop dead." Perhaps that was really the beginning of the culture wars. As the New York of the day represented the center of chaotic, noisy, economic and social change. It was as if all the juvenile energy of the '60's has been "matured" into a kind of angry, rebellious, adolescence that the NY of the time came to symbolize. Vanity Fair's James Wolcott captures the pitch perfect tenor of the times and his place in it, in Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York. My conversation with James Wolcott:

For fifteen years, Ron Nessen enjoyed an extraordinary career covering the major national and international events of the 1960s and 1970s for NBC News and later serving as White House Press Secretary to President Gerald R. Ford. His most recent book, Making the News, Taking the News: From NBC to the Ford White House remembers the events and personalities that dominated national politics during his career. His tenure in the White House included, among others,  Cheney, Rumsfeld and Kissinger. It was just like today...it was nothing like today. Nessen, who is currently a journalist-in-residence at the Brookings Institution talks to me about those days.

At no time in human history have we been better at fighting disease. Yet modern life has also made us so much more vulnerable to the threat of global pandemic. The speed of human travel and interaction, in short globalization, makes it imperative that we stay focused of where the next disease or pandemic might come from. For disease too has also become globalized. No one is more on top this issue than Dr. Nathan Wolfe, who has been referred to as the "Indiana Jones of virus hunters." In fact, Wolfe is a Professor in Human Biology at Stanford, the founder and CEO of Global Viral Forecasting, with degrees from Stanford and Harvard the author of The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age and was named recently as one of Time magazines' 100 Most Influential People in the World. My conversation with Nathan Wolfe:

The benefits of living in a digital, globalized society are enormous; so too are the dangers. Governments and the private sector are losing billions of dollars each year, fighting an ever-morphing, often invisible, often super-smart new breed of criminal: the hacker. Misha Glenny's fascinating new book, DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You, explores the three fundamental threats facing us in the 21st century: cyber crime, cyber warfare and cyber industrial espionage. My conversation with Misha Glenny:

Many have spoken of the structural problems we face in our economy and in our democracy. Individually, our broken financial system, the power of money in politics, our failure to meet the global challenge of 21st century education, and our decaying infrastructure are all very real problems. But collectively what do these problems, and the degree to which they have been neglected for so long, tell us about our society, our values and and what it means to be a citizen of this country? Have we in fact reached a tipping point where failure to address these issues will will result in what Tom Friedman calls a very bad century for America. This is the starting point for The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity, Jeffrey Sachs' sweeping look at the state of our not so great society. My conversation with Jeffrey Sachs

With the rapid 21st Century growth of globalization, we've witnessed one of the great migrations of history. Millions of people have moved from rural areas to the cities of the developing world. These cities, some of which didn't even exist twenty years ago, have populations in the millions. In China, for example, there are cities of 10 million people; cities that we don't even know the name of. The growth of these so called "instant cites" has provided great opportunity, but they also pose enormous challenges, problems and risks. One such city is Karachi in Pakistan. A city that sits not only in a center of development, but also straddles the geopolitical fault lines of its region. The co-host of NPR's Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep, has been traveling to Karachi since 2002 and has witnessed its growth up close and personal. In his first book, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, he takes us inside Karachi as a model of this migration that is changing the world. My conversation with Steve Inskeep:

We all seem to agree that our political system, in fact our democracy, is broken. But what does that mean? How did this happen, what's at it's core and what, if anything, can we do about it? To begin we need to heed the dictum of Woodward and Bernstein's famous Deep Throat, who said "follow the money." This is the lesson that famed lawyer and internet advocate Lawrence Lessig tries to teach us in his new book Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It. Lessig goes to heart of what's fueling the current "occupy" movement and what they might do to achieve real success. My conversation with Lawrence Lessig:

The seemingly endless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, might make us believe we live in the most violent age ever. But Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, explains that just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and continues to diminish, even in our modern times. In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined he looks at human nature, psychology, and history to explain how this has happened. My conversation with Steven Pinker: