Talk Cocktail

While many of you can recite the great battles of WW I and II and even the Civil War, the more recent battle that have been fought in the Middle East against ISIS are already forgotten. Certainly, the battle for Mosul was one of those Beyond that, there is the relevance to events taking place today. The battle for Mosul, which helped take down ISIS in 2017, had as a major component, the forces of...

There is not a morning that goes by without some story about the impact of social media. The power of Facebook or Twitter, or Instagram. With all of that, it’s easy to forget the power of television. Its impact on our lives growing up, its power today and what it has wrought. It’s given us Ronald Regan, Josiah Bartlet, and Donald Trump. Howard Beal laid it out for us in Network, but James Poniewoz...

In many communities you often see people wearing a button that says Be Kind. In an ever competitive and sometimes selfish world that’s not always easy to do. Our political dialogue makes it even more difficult. Add to that our economic and personal pressures and the acceleration that we all face, and kindness often gets left way behind. But suppose we found out that kindness is not just something...

Imagine if you went to buy a car and rather than one price for the car, you had to essentially buy it ala carte. You had to negotiate a separate price for the wheels, for the engine, for the paint, for seats, all separate. All from different suppliers and all with hidden fees. Sound ridiculous? But that is essentially how we pay for health care in America. It’s no wonder that there is no more pola...

The world is a complex place. The news comes at us at hyper-speed and 24/7.  All while we have to deal with family, work and life. Therefore more than ever, it’s critical that there are those among us, journalists mostly, whose job it is to distill and explain events to us. Not to tell us how or what to think, but to present the big stories in-depth and in a narrative that allows us to be smarter...

Harold Bloom, who died last week at the age of 89, was one of our great teachers and literary critics. Often out of sync with contemporary literary fashion, he defended the “Western canon” and fought against what he called “the School of Resentment,” multiculturalists and those whom he argued betrayed what he saw as literature’s essential purpose. I had the opportunity to know Professor Bloom as a...

Beyond the common denominator of poverty what are aspects of the poor that we just don't understand? We've learned that poverty itself creates a different life, a different view of the world. A view that arguably accounts for the fundamental failures of so many well-meaning programs. Why this is, what works and why has it been so hard to find the magic bullet. Trying to answer this has been the wo...

A look at the news any day reminds us that America is no longer the singular dominant power in the world. This is true vis a vis soft power, moral persuasion, and now cultural power. American movies, music, and art no longer are the single option for global entertainment. Perhaps not since the British invasion of the ‘60s have we seen so much art and entertainment coming from outside of the U.S. T...

Once upon a time, we didn’t have to think about political correctness. And we survived as a culture! We self-corrected, we became more sensitive to others, we learned to accept and appreciate diversity. It was sometimes difficult, even painful. But a lot of it was organic. Often we slipped up. We fell backward, and sometimes it even took appropriate legislation to provide better guardrails for our...

Most of us remember being transfixed, just one year ago, to the hearings from now Supreme Court Justice Brent Kavanaugh. This week, as the court begins its new term, Justice Kavanaugh will be part of a court deciding on some of the most fundamental cases that affect our politics, our culture, and our freedoms. All in an atmosphere that, if even possible, is even more polarized than it was a year a...

So much of what passes for history today is one dimensional. We see the events, the names, the places the timeline and the heroes and the villains. But there is often another dimension. Not so much a secret history, but almost like the moon, it has a dark side, hidden from us. It’s there, we just don’t see it and therefore we don't’ appreciate it and its broader impact. So it is with Silicon Valle...

  Today Trump's war is against Congress and the intelligence community. Previously he went to war with the FBI with the same mob boss approach that resulted in the firing of Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe and the repeated attacks on the integrity of the FBI What can that recent history tell us about where we are now? About the strength and/or fragility of our fundamental law enforcement and intellige...

As a nation we’ve certainly gone through difficult times, times that as Thomas Paine said, try men’s souls. We’ve been divided as during the Cold War and the Civil War. But rarely have we been as tribal as we are today. Rarely have we been as willing to throw off facts, science, and reality, in the service of a cause. It’s almost like we’ve all joined cults. Little by little we’ve been encouraged...

No matter who we are, we are touched by food, shelter, and clothing. Of the three perhaps clothing is one we most take for granted. Unlike our food, we don’t usually think about where it comes from, unlike shelter, it’s in abundance and unlike these other necessities, the price keeps falling while style keeps improving. It’s almost too good to be true. And maybe it is. Maybe there is a darker side...

Our attention span grows shorter while the events creating a whirlwind around the world, increase. N. Korea, Iran, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, plus domestic turmoil is everywhere. In all of this, it’s easy to forget, just 18 short years after 9/11. I often wonder how we’ll see this period that we are living through from the perspective of 50 years. But with respect to 9/11, the rearview mirror is...

Over the many years of doing this program, I'm sorry to say I only had one opportunity to talk with Cokie Roberts. We talked  back in 1998 upon the publication of her book about mothers and daughters, and the changing role of women.  It was a long time before Me Too, but she was prescient about so many of the issues that would evolve over the next 20 years.  I share that 1998 conversation.  Get fu...

In All the President's Men, as reported by Woodward and Bernstein, Deep Throat says to Woodward, in the bowls of a garage, “it leads everywhere, get your notebook, there’s more.” And so there was. Just as there was with the story of Harvey Weinstein. But on a larger canvas, it was the story of men behaving badly for a long time and getting away with it. Fortunately, journalism is more than the fir...

Silent Cal Coolidge is reported to have said “that the business of America is business.” Correct or not, it’s fair to say that by looking at only American business over the past 60 years, we can see the full arc of our contemporary history. Think of all of the things that have been front and center in our politics and our culture that have sprung from business, going all the way back to the 60’s....

In most places around the country, school is beginning. This includes the nation's colleges and universities where about 2 million high school graduates will soon start college. Yet 40% of those incoming freshmen will drop out before graduating. Many with debt, limited job prospects, and shattered confidence. Why is this number so high? Why are some colleges succeeding in keeping kids engaged and...

Our founders devised a political system that was inherently difficult to change. They saw almost every aspect of the desire for change as needing to be cooled before even the most white-hot desire for progress could be codified. With respect to race and gender, it’s been even more difficult. Those were the prejudices and stereotypes baked into the founding documents themselves. This is certainly o...

Long before the Internet, in the early days of talk radio, the all-night hosts were the progenitors of modern-day conspiracy theory. Hosts spent hours talking about crop circles, animal mutilation, Area 51, the Kennedy assassination and all manner of events and evidence that could be used to construct a hidden narrative. The idea was that strange things were happening, that evidence in plain sight...

Hollywood is a place where the assets go home each night. Not just the Stars, but the hard-working men and women who make magic happen. Who each play a singular and unique role in telling cinematic stories. Each is a piece of a large puzzle and without each individual piece, the picture never comes together. Sure Hollywood is a business and billions are dollars are always at stake. But without the...

Once upon a time the South was a solid Democratic block of votes. Many of those segregationist senators that Joe Biden recently talked about were in fact Democrats. Republicans just didn't get elected from there. And then things changed. The civil rights movement, the voting rights Act, the trailing impact of demographic change from the great migration, and broader cultural changes, including the...

I know someone who is absolutely fascinated by true crime stories. She says that Silence of the Lambs is her Star Wars. And why not? Crime stories, especially true crime stories about the likes of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, or Jeffrey Dalmer, fascinate us, as it takes our thinking to the edges of human behavior. Understanding what makes these people tick stretches the human imagination. That is e...

It’s clear that like it or not, race will once again be the issue of our time. You’d think by now, we would at least the the language right. But maybe that’s the very problem. We’re still talking about it precisely because we’re having the wrong discussion. Almost as long as anyone can remember, we’ve sincerely directed our efforts to eradicate racism by talking about a color-blind society. The go...