Books Shows Tunes & Mad Acts

Law professor and public education policy expert Derek Black joins us to talk about his new book "Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy." In this informal but profound discussion, we review how the country's founding fathers and early government documents linked public education to the survival of the new democracy and where we have arrived today with public s...

A modern-day town crier gets some ominous messages to read about impending pestilence in Paris while mysterious backwards 4s begin appearing on doors. The 2001 policier by French crime novelist Fred Vargas was translated into English by David Bellos and adapted into a movie by Régis Wargnier. Colorful characters, understated humor, and the complexity of Chief Inspector Adamsberg come through in th...

San Diego native, percussionist, guitarist, and producer Jeff Berkley talks about his musical evolution, his band Berkley Hart, song writing, record production, and why we keep coming back to acoustic music. Most unusually, he relays the nuts and bolts of making a living as a professional musician and shares some occasions when things they thought would be funny on stage didn't quite work out. He...

In this zombie-apocalypse novel, literary novelist and dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker Colson Whitehead imagines three days in the life of a "sweeper," a civilian who works as part of an operation to clear NYC of zombies so it can be re-inhabited. The story is imaginative and exciting (after the first day), and the writing is expressive, arresting, cynical, and amusing. Whether you love or hate zombie...

Robin Kardon, author of "Angel Flight," the new second novel in the Flygirl trilogy, joins us to talk about love and work in the life of an ambitious female pilot who is trying to succeed in a male-dominated environment. The fast-moving story finds Tris falling for a handsome captain with a mysterious past who she then discovers is competing with her for a promotion. We talk about romance at work,...

The correct starting place to negotiate the base salary for a position is its value on the open market. Happily, that information is now usually available. Unhappily, certain laws and corporate policies have been advanced that work against open dialogue and fair negotiation. For example, California's law prohibiting companies from asking for salary history ends up exaggerating the gender pay gap,...

Mann began his novel The Magic Mountain with the intention of exploring comedic elements broached by Death in Venice, but World War I intervened which distracted him into writing about German culture and nationalism. When he returned to the novel, his attitudes had changed, and so the novel is Bildungsroman mixed up with a bunch of philosophical and mythological characters and ideas. The setting i...

Rebecca Jade joins us to talk about her musical history, how she ended up in San Diego, and why she stays. She talks vocal technique, musical education, career development, and clapping on the beat. We also talk about playing on the trolley and with Peter Sprague--and most importantly, where the best places to go for music are in San Diego. Finally, Rebecca offers advice to aspiring professional m...

New York journalist Pete Hamill passed away this month after a stellar career as a columnist, essayist, and author. He and Jimmy Breslin inspired a generation of newspaper reporters, including our guest Brian O'Neill, a columnist in Pittsburgh for the last 30-some years. We talk about Pete's interest in people, how his writing revealed New York, and why his writing is so relevant and timeless. We...

Thomas Mann's 1912 novella is about an esteemed artist suffering from writer's block who travels to Venice and becomes enamored with a beautiful Polish boy just as the city is falling prey to a cholera epidemic. It was made into a striking film in 1971 by Luchino Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde and then into an opera by Benjamin Britten as his last work. A simple story belies the torment of passion...

Being a boss is a big responsibility, even before you realize that your employee's poor performance is your fault. Yikes. We talk about reporting lines, performance appraisals, monitoring performance, and performance improvement processes. We provide a simple but effective tool for providing feedback and course correction in an informal context and how that leads into performance evaluations that...

Stanford professor Nick Bloom shares his research about working from home: who likes it and why, what it does to productivity, what it exposes about performance metrics, some thoughts about face-to-face meetings, and what the office of the future might look like. Although he explains that "now is odd," a terrific understatement for the pandemic, we have learned a lot about working from home in the...

In a continuing effort to improve our workplaces, particularly where management is concerned, we return to first principles in this episode to re-discover the value of longtime, hardworking employees who, although they don't appear on the balance sheet, really are your greatest assets. We review your responsibilities to nurture and grow them and how you trade resources and support for their knowle...

Harvard economics professor Rebecca Henderson's new book "Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire" outlines how capitalism has let us down in recent decades, how free markets have been thwarted, how government has been weakened and corrupted, and how Americans and our planet have suffered. Chockfull of data and evidence, the book is ultimately inspirational, pointing out where businesses and pow...

This 2014 novel starts with the death of a Shakespearean actor followed quickly by a pandemic which wipes out most of humanity and causes the collapse of civilization. We pick the story up 20 years later. Despite its dystopian setting, I found the book uplifting, ultimately hopeful, and surprisingly nostalgic. Of the 16 books of our Sunday pandemic literary series so far, this is the first I recom...

Today we honor Takoda, Ayla, Journey and Buster, real SAR or recovery dogs who work in the Eastern Sierra. Although their work might seem a bit grisly, they don't think so and demonstrate their enthusiasm and pride through their work ethic and good spirits. We talk about their breeds (Golden retriever, Swiss shepherd, Border collie, and Black lab), training, talents, and experiences. Some have bee...

Biographer Bob Kealing talks about his book "Life of the Party," the story of how an ambitious saleslady rose to be a top seller of Tupperware, an executive in the company, and on the cover of Business Week, only to be forced out and written out of the history of Tupperware. Kealing's research reveals new behind-the-scenes glimpses of jealousy, discrimination, and vindictiveness of this remarkable...

W. Somerset Maugham's 1925 novel concerning an unfaithful wife whose husband takes her to China during a cholera epidemic was adapted into a 2006 movie starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts. We contrast the surprisingly edgy and page-turner style of the book with its dreamy romantic representation in the movie. The book presents some themes about sexuality and feminism ignored by the movie while...

We talk about the immigrant experience where second generation Americans express their appreciation and respect for what their parents went through to get them to where they are, whether it was working menial, low-paying jobs, multiple jobs, being underemployed, or being invisible to their employers. We talk about what occupations are likely to be filled by immigrant workers and what typical pay r...

Joe Payne, the CEO of Arcturus Therapeutics, is back to talk about exciting progress on their messenger RNA Covid-19 vaccine and answer questions about testing for antibodies versus T-cell immunity, potential longevity and timing of the vaccine, and what countries are signing up for the potential Arcturus solution. He also talks about what we might expect after the pandemic slows and how Covid-19...

Yay! Another novel about a dystopia caused by a virus! This time, Canadian Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale, presents her view of an over-engineered world of capitalism run amok, leaving it vulnerable to mad science. Despite its length, it's a simple tale of love and morality, and, as it is the first in the MaddAddamm trilogy, there must be some hope left. Another in our Sunday liter...

Here are five ways to quickly improve your spoken English and improve your understandability. I've been offering the Your American Voice program for many years, and I find people often think that improving their English is going to be harder than it is. These tips include learning stress inside a word, rhythm inside a sentence, better pronunciation of just a few sounds, making connections between...

Linguist Nick Enfield joins us to discuss ways that humans collaborate during a conversation, from turn-taking with split-second timing to using continuers to encourage a speaker. He also explains how filler words like "um" and "uh" can serve as traffic signals and how a listener can help or derail a storyteller. We also discuss how nuances of conversation reveal relationships and the subtleties o...

Maxwell's semi-autobiographical novel is told in three parts from the perspective of two young sons and a husband who lose their mother and wife to the 1918 Spanish flu. It's a moving work, full of vignettes of the objects and home that make up a domestic life in the Midwest, and heart-wrenching in its eventual portrayal of loss from an epidemic. Here, we shed the tears so you don't have to and ex...

Extolled by management societies and consultants, Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, laid the groundwork for a clear demarcation between labor and management: management was for planning, guiding, and measuring, and labor was for moving stuff around and doing as it was told. Controversy still rages over the genius or evil of this approach and what it has meant for a c...