Talk Cocktail

In  The Universe Is on Our Side: Restoring Faith in American Public Life  Bruce Ledewitz argues that there has been a breakdown in American public life that is beyond issues or politics. He argues that America is living with the consequences of the death of faith, which Nietzsche presumed would be momentous and irreversible. According to Ledewith, America's future requires that we begin a new stor...

For the past 40 years, the debate about the proliferation of guns in America has revolved around the NRA. All public policy has been shaped and driven by the political influence of the NRA. Few if any lobbying groups in American history have ever been so powerful for so long. But how did this power evolve, and what led to its downfall. What was behind its scorched earth “never give an inch” philos...

Amidst all of the noise and debate about vaccine mandates, less than clear information from the CDC, and the broader context of healthcare and society, it’s easy to forget that these vaccines are truly miracles of modern science, and that the herculean effort to develop them in record time, is a science story for the ages. But the story doesn’t exist without the understanding the players. The glob...

Never have so many individuals been actively engaged in trading in the equity markets. Robin Hood, Reddit, meme stocks, crypto, blockchain are the language of a whole new world of mostly young traders. And most of them will lose money. They think they can outperform markets that have long humbled the smartest guys in the room. So back in the early seventy, a group of those guys got together to ima...

Workers left their jobs at a record pace in the past few months. They left because of health concerns, child care issues and because, post pandemic, they did not want to return to what they saw as rotten jobs. Jobs that were ethically and morally challenging. The pandemic has brought new light to these workers. Often, in what has been called essential work. It has highlighted and personified the w...

Without comparing one historical era to another, suffice it to say that we live in a nation filled with anger, despair and at best anxiety. Our ideological, economic and cultural divisions have infected every fiber of the public square. And all of this is happening amidst loss of faith in our once valued institutions, both public and private. A loss of faith in facts and truth, and in the fundamen...

A recent survey showed that the reason people are reluctant to go back to the office has nothing to do with COVID, but with their commute. It’s not the office they object to, it’s getting there. Particularly in places like New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington DC, commute times have exploded in recent years. Perhaps when the dust settles, perhaps what we will have changed as a result of...

I suppose even the most ardent technologists have at times wanted to get off the grid...usually that urge doesn't last long. But for the people of Green Bank, West Virginia, it’s an ongoing state of affairs.  The only town that is designated as a national radio quiet zone, is actually not all that quiet. It seems that just as before technology subsumed us, people do find other ways to communicate,...

It wasn’t very long ago that to see a foreign language film, you wound up in the smallest theater in the multiplex or a little art theater somewhere in a college town...or you lived in New York or San Francisco or Boston. But like everything else, creative destruction has done its job. Streaming and the long tail of the internet has moved to supplant cable, movie theaters, broadcast television, an...

The more we know about disasters, the more we realize that most were preordained. Covid 19 or Katrina, the current fires in California or the deep freeze this past winter in Texas. None of them were what we would call Black Swan events. We are certainly, because of climate change, complexity and complacency, going to be experiencing more such events, we had better become much better at disaster pr...

Survey after survey shows that trust in the news media is at an all time low. And it’s not just the left/right divide. A recent study by the American Press Association reveals that not all Americans universally embrace core journalistic values, and that the trust crisis might best be understood through people’s moral values even more than their politics. When journalists say they are” just doing t...

Almost everywhere in the world, liberal democracy is, if not under siege, or at least being tested. Only in rare historical times have would-be autocrats found such fertile ground. But why?    The world's and yes, America’s standard of living is rising overall. As Steven Pinker has pointed out, crime and violence is down. The census tells us that diversity is naturally occurring and technology has...

From Alexis de Tocqueville, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn to John Lennon, it has often taken those born outside of America to help us understand and define America back to those of us that have grown up here. Those of us long engulfed in both the popular culture and political noise inherent in our society, often can’t see the proverbial forest from the trees. Today British/American broadcaster Roger B...

If someone pitched the story idea of a guy who was a former baby clothes salesman who then started a company that sublet co-working office space to millennials, and that that company would then become the most well financed startup ever, and that the story of its eventual rise and fall would give birth to an Apple tv series, a Hulu documentary, an HBO movie, several books, and two podcast series,...

If daily news reporting is the first draft of history, books that come out almost contemporaneously to events are I suppose the second draft. But today the world is speeded up. Today, especially in the wake of Trump, we need the facts much sooner. We need to learn not just how to escape the mistakes of history but to escape their repetition and to learn quickly from the actions of recent times. Pu...

While everyone has their own personal list, we could all maybe agree on some of the most iconic cars ever made. The VW Beetle, the 1968 Ford Mustang, the 1960 Corvette, the 57 Chevy, the Porsche 911, The 1955 Mercedes gull-wing, the DeLorean, and just for good measure, the 1963 Aston Martin. But equally important is a vehicle that gets little attention, All of its models together only traveled und...

When Hal asked Astronaut David Bowman to “open the pod bay doors,” it was as if our most primal fear of machines came rushing headlong into the 20th century. Today, in our 21st-century world, we understand the basics of the artificial intelligence behind HAL. We see on display every day our interaction with Siri and Alexa, our reliance on algorithms in flying our planes and soon our self-driving c...

In the period immediately following WWII, the United States dominated the global economy. We had won the war, and the economic status that went along with it.    Then over time, and initially as a result of our efforts and generosity, other economies began to grow. Japan, West Germany, Canada and Australia would stir, but the world would, in the war's aftermath, acquiesce to an American imposed sy...

Some days it seems that everything we’ve taken for granted with respect to the functioning of America and American democracy is under siege. Hundreds of thousands of words are written and spoken almost every day as to why. However, before we can even begin to answer that question, we must understand what it is that’s being attacked and how the system was built before we can shore it up. It’s like...

We are awash in data and information. So much so that we wonder if it has any meaning at all? But what if the very existence of the information and data was actually our society's knowledge. A kind of intuitive database acquired from absorbing all the information that surrounds us. And as we do so, how does it change us? Are we even aware of it, or like velocity and position, can it even be measur...

Back in 1953, it was reported that Charlie Wilson, the then head of General Motors, said that what’s good for General Motors was good for America. While that quote is a bit apocryphal, the idea was real. The notion that the success of any particular business was inextricably tied up with the success of the nation. Perhaps in the 70’s it might have been said of Exxon. Today it might very well be sa...

There once was a time when we were, if not united, at least we had a common set of cultural touchstones. Movies, TV, sports, even the three networks that delivered the evening news were part of a national town square that provided both water cooler conversation and comity. No more! Over the past 40 years, all that has changed. The long tail of the internet coupled with the evolution of our politic...

In an effort to make urban American understand rural America, particularly since the 2016 election, books about rural America have become almost a genre unto themselves. Works by J.D. Vance, Sarah Smarsh, Nancy Isenberg, James Fallows, Sara Kendzior and Nichols Kristoff, and others, have cast a class driven and almost apologetic eye on rural America. Certainly much is wrong there. In part as a res...

I think we can all stipulate that we are at a precarious moment in the relatively short history of American democracy. Even among those not following it on an hour by hour basis via an addiction to cable news, people are anxious.  So many, on both the left and the right, are using millions of words to comment on the moment. But perhaps the only way to really understand it is through the sharp lens...

Think of all the things you have believed in that have recently been shattered. That the government might protect us from a pandemic. That Congress and our democracy were secure. That COVID came from a wet market in Wuhan, and that Bill Gates was a paragon of business and virtue. Now add to this growing list, the belief in quality and ethics of the United States Secret Service. With respect to the...