Talk Cocktail

Not just here in America, but throughout the world, the forces of liberty are battling the forces of authoritarianism. These forces are global as well as local. Here in America such battles played out after George Floyd’s death, and on January 6th, and we still don’t know what might happen between now and 2024. These are moral battles for the soul and future of the country. But hopeless as it may...

On Tuesday we will have our first election since January 6. There is every reason to believe that things will get worse. That January 6 was merely an inflection point on the road to a government we may not recognize in a few years. This according to my WhoWhatWhy podcast guest, New York Times Magazine reporter and author Robert Draper. In his new book, Weapons of Mass Delusion, Draper explains how...

Almost since the beginning of time, men have shaped society. From ancient times to Man Men, patriarchy was the defining framework of our society. Men dominated in industry, as workers and leaders, in college graduation, in earnings, in national and local leadership, and in protecting our society. Women and girls were left behind In the 70s and 80s, all of that began to change. Things like Title IX...

Few subjects engender more reaction and discussion in our politics and our culture than immigration and education. When the two come together in our schools they sit at the precipice of both politics and our future. We are not talking of the dreamers that have been here, but waves of new young people that are on the front lines of shaping the immigrant experience in the United States. What’s reall...

The great screenwriter William Goldman once said of Hollywood, that “nobody knows anything.” I hope that we have learned by now that this does not apply to science. Random as knowledge sometimes might be, it is safe to say that the entire technological infrastructure of modern society, all of Silicon Valley, is built on top of the reliable functioning of the laws of mathematics and physics. The fu...

Look at the British press most days, and you’ll find that the government and the royals are being skewered and made fun of. The Brits have a long tradition of publicly calling out their leaders for absurdity, stupidity or embarrassing behavior. In America, it seems that part of the population almost embraces this kind of behavior; that rather than calling it out, it votes for it. It celebrates it...

If our current era is one of politics, technology, and economics, it's fair to say that the 60s were an era where social science, self-reflection and cultural anthropology ruled the day. And if places like Stanford, and MIT are the intellectual hubs of our day, Harvard was an intellectual hub of the ’60s Nowhere was that more true than in Harvard's establishment of a Department of Social Relations...

Early on in the pandemic, in the earliest days of the lockdown, we wondered how this was going to change the world. Ironically, it was easier to look out and to try and figure out its impact on the world, rather than dig deeper and wonder how it might affect us. But it did give us time to think, to wonder, and for some, to be deeply creative. It gave us all a springboard to see the familiar in new...

In spite of the supposed transparency of the internet age, more and more we live in the age of complicity. Last month we saw it with the trove of documents and stories that came to light about UBER. Tim Miller’s recent book about Trump's enablers shows how it’s happened repeatedly in the White House, just as Michel Lewis showed us, several years ago, how it happened on Wall Street in the face of t...

Modern Washington has always offered up an impressive roster of toadies. Yet the Trump administration seems to have offered up a unique period of bowing and scraping. Historically, sucking up takes a variety of forms, from pretty compliments to cloying flattery and outright treachery.  But it doesn't stop there. The kind of sycophant we see from the GOP combines other attributes like hypocrisy, ly...

We spend our life negotiating. At work, at home, with kids and with friends. Rich Cohen stories of his father Herbie, is the story of making all of this work for you, and what it looked like up close and personal.  As Rich tells his story, it's not Geoffrey or Tobias Wolf seeing their father’s story through the lens of deception, but through a celebration of the power of imagination.  Rich Cohen i...

When we talk about our dreams, it's usually in the context of limitless possibilities. It’s the one often private place where we are free from the constraints of reality. Seemingly limited only by our imagination, our dreams often hold the key to how we see our future. But those dreams have a context. Our life experience, our social position, race, gender and status all shapes those dreams. It’s a...

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It seems we live in a society where everyone wants to be protected. We don’t want to hear views we disagree with for fear that it might upset us, we don't’ want to go back to the office because we get stressed by a commute. We are afraid to let our kids go out and play unless they are supervised. We are anxious about money, about politics, about family…it’s no wonder there is an entire drug indust...

Think about how different the world is because of whistleblowers. Think about the impact of Daniel Ellsberg, Coleen Rowley, Sherron Watkins, Jeffery Weigand, and Karen Silkwood. Each changed the trajectory of a company or a government for the better, and in doing so risked making their own lives so much worse. So why do they do it? Why do some individuals put their own moral compass ahead of the r...

For journalism, it may be the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand the national media is more vibrant than ever before. The NYT, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, as well as broadcast news and cable news networks are thriving, even amidst the post Trump drop in ratings.     For these outlets the transition to digital has been painful but successful. In other efforts, r...

It’s the power of narrative that shapes every aspect of our lives. We rush to tell stories to our friends and family to validate our experiences. We buy products and brands because of the story they tell us. We vote, make friends, and even enemies, because of the stories that we believe. Narrative has an emotional pull on us. Sometimes we take away joy, anger, laughter, or sadness. People don’t ru...

At no time in civilization have so many forces been at play in reshaping the world. The complexity of everything is growing. Global geopolitical risks are rising. Technologies are impacting everything and creating new anxiety. Climate change is reshaping our very topography. The economic gap within and between nations is rising, and a younger generation feels alienated from being able to control t...

The story of how the world's oldest living language adapted to the modern world is one that carries within it the story of how language itself shapes our vision and our thinking. How the quest for progress is often stronger than the pull of history. It’s how a language can literally be reinvented, iterated and adapted, and at the same time carry a country along with it. That is the story of the ev...

For as long as humans have interacted with each other, spies in one form or another, have been with us. To quote the legendary John le Carre, “Jesus had only twelve friends over for dinner, and still one of them turned out to be a double agent.” And while the nature of spy-craft has evolved, its fundamental missions remain the same. To gather actionable information. To get results. So when we look...

Imagine a political leader that is not about celebrity or attention? In a time when we have elected a reality show star as President, when celebrity politics is the lifeblood of the American political class, it’s hard to imagine a politician or world leader whose life is private; who keeps their own counsel, who listens first, who shuns celebrity, and yet proves powerful as a leader. Such was Ange...

As we witnessed on January 6th, the level of hostility and anger awash in the country today has real consequences. Demagogues and hateful rhetoric have real power. And while some argue that history teaches us that such rage burns white-hot and then dies out, what happens while it's burning hurts people and sometimes changes nations. It’s really no different than when we see protestors in other cou...

Too often when talking about the media and journalism we engage in a board discussion of ideas, policy, and how the levers of power really work What we often forget is that all of this is made up of people. People who bring to the exercise of power and of reporting on it, their own values, education, and personal history. In that fact lies much of what is wrong with the media today. It's how we lo...

The link between what we watch in movies and on television and the business, the money and the people behind it, are inseparable. Business decisions impact and shape what we see, just as one hit can change the finances of an entire company or industry   The story of HBO, and the way in which it disrupted television, beginning back in the early 1970s, is perhaps the penultimate example. Just as tod...

Think of all that has changed as a result of startups and creative destruction. Nothing is the same as it was because of the sometimes revolutionary ideas of entrepreneurs. In a similar way the 1960s were a time of creative destruction for America and the world. The post war paradigms that had shaped the country through the late 40’s and early 50’s were shattered. And just as today we are struggli...