Talk Cocktail

Fifteen months ago most of us knew very little about viruses. Today, spike proteins, mRNA, and monoclonal antibodies are household words.    Perhaps it’s this new knowledge that has forced science and the media to confront the reality, long ignored or covered up, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Our new knowledge and vocabulary are now libera...

Ever since 1960, the campaign memoir has become almost a genre unto itself. Over the years many of these books have shaped our view of politics.    In each of these stories men and even some women have competed for the presidency with the strongest of passion, with the proverbial fire in the belly. In many cases that ambition and their foibles have driven the country's narrative.    As divided as...

As divided as we are today about the state of our current politics and the debate about facts, it seems that at least we should be able to agree about our shared history. And yet even that is debated today.  When did America begin? Who gets credit, and how did it shape us?    Patrick O’Donnell is one of our most distinguished military historians and he always trying to answer these questions.  He...

  Many of our great cities are known for one or two things. Detroit certainly for the auto industry, San Francisco for the 60s and Tech. Houston for the oil industry, and Los Angeles for Hollywood. New York in so many ways transcends that. Sure it’s the home of Wall Street and the capital of finance, but without putting down any other cities, New York stands alone as a pantheon to the very ideas o...

  We have a fascination with scoundrels. Especially if they are public figures. We love to build them up, to celebrate their success and then when they make mistakes, and disappoint our false expectations, we love to tear them down. It’s a cycle we see repeat itself over and over again. And this is not just an American phenomenon, it’s a global one The publisher Robert Maxwell is a keen example. O...

One year ago fear stalked the world. That fear created a common bond. We celebrated those on the front lines who walked into danger, we worried about our neighbors and felt kinship without those suffering halfway around the world. And yet, a year later we celebrate a return to normal, and yet our divisions have intensified. Normal is now represented by a mass shooting every week, and even wearing...

Almost as wide as the wealth gap in America is the gap in the way we view wealth. We look at it as a monolithic thing. Yet part of the country demonizes it, part covets it and part of the country manages. The same is true for kinds of wealth. Those that inherit it are different from those that win it, or those that start from nothing and create it for them and for others. All wealth is not the sam...

Great art, particularly movies at their best, reflect the times in which they were created. In 1968 political assination paralyzed the nation. In 1969 we were mired in Vietnam, New York City, was in decay and getting worse, The Stonewall Riots were energizing gay people, generational warfare, race riots were the norm, Woodstock reshaped and energized music and Richard Nixon was a year into his pre...

Origin stories are usually part myth, part apocryphal and they often come to define the culture and sometimes the products of the companies themselves. What they always do is to reflect the dreams and perceptions of the founder. The business of news and media is no different. The founders of our great news brands all have a story to tell. Such a powerful origin story is the founding visions of Nat...

The nature of work in America has changed. Good paying jobs in the manufacturing sector have been diluted, the service sector has exploded, and the gig economy is not just about Uber and Postmates. Today, even hard, brutal work in the oil fields has been gigafide. For the men caught up in this change the price is high, but so are the lessons and yes, even the rewards. Michael Patrick F. Smith is a...

Someone once said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. In many ways that’s been the story of scientific progress. It seems there is always someone that leads us into the future. Someone whose vision and entrepreneurship and obsessive drive combine to turn the next big idea into the next big thing. This has been true from Franklin, to Edison, from Henry Ford to Thomas Watson, fr...

There was once a time when we didn’t think a global pandemic was possible in the 21st century. The events of 9/11 took us by surprise as they did at Pearl Harbor and Midway. Yet all of these tragic events were imaginable and some aspects of them even made their way into fiction, long before they happened. They remind us that events like a pandemic or a world war are mostly at core, a failure of hu...

Those of you that are old enough, will remember when people got dressed up to fly. When having a meal onboard, especially on a transcontinental flight was like dining in a fine restaurant. When inflight service was more than peanuts and admonitions about the size of carry on bags. It was also a time when those that provided that inflight serve, were a different breed than Cassie Bowden in The Flig...

It’s been a while since the British monarchy was so front and center in our consciousness. The Crown, on Netflix, and Meghan and Harry have pulled back the curtain on the sometimes romantic notion of royalty. But more importantly, it’s also given us a look into what’s been called The Firm or The Institution, the British monarchy and its wider political economies of wealth and power. Because behind...

Racial identity, socialism, the role of art in society, the responsibilities of artists and the position of the artist in popular culture. These subjects which sound like they are taken from today's headlines are also part of the life of Frida Kahlo.   They are all a part of new biography of Kahlo by Celia Stahr that looks at Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist .   My conver...

While the world has changed in so many ways lately and turned most of our routines upside down, the one constant I suspect for many is their ritualistic morning coffee. For the moment it may not be in your favorite coffee shop, but nonetheless, the magic elixir helps start each day and power it along with consistency as the uncertain future unfolds.   But how did Coffee of all things become not ju...

Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks was working at the Pentagon when she heard about the D.C. Metropolitan police corp program. Intrigued, much to the consternation of friends and family she joined up. Suddenly she had a badge, a gun, a uniform and a whole lot of academic ideas about cops, criminal justice, law enforcement and what it means to protect and to serve.  Suddenly she was over and insi...

During the past year, perhaps a year like no other year, we have been bombarded with statistics. Covid cases, numbers of deaths, positivity rates and flattening the curve. Add to this an election and polling data that drowned us in information.    On top of all of this is disinformation and the traditional ways in which numbers and statistics can be used to deceive us.    And then just this week,...

Amidst the cacophony of social and cultural noise that’s all around us, we have too often neglected the role of the arts in shaping who we are and how we might be better, or at least different.  Like almost everything else, we tend to commodify the arts. Everything from streaming revenue, to box office grosses, to the price of paintings at auction.    I would argue that what we don’t do enough of...

Once it was the moon. Today Mars is the holy grail of space exploration. In the coming months three missions, one from the US, one from Taiwan and one from the UAE will be approaching and/or landing on Mars. Next year Russia, Japan, and India have missions planned. It could get crowded up there!  And while NASA, the President and Congress may be less enamored by space than by that latest social me...

As we work the phones and Zoom calls, it makes you wonder if physical connection is even necessary? Has the pandemic given us a new normal. How has it impacted things like conversation in the hallways or parking lot, a lunch meeting or a discussion over a glass of wine.  Just like science, when you change the way and the amount of elements you mix together, you get a different result. It’s just ch...

For some of us, a sense of history is the only thing that gets us through each day. As divided as we are, as angry as we are, as exhausted as many of us are, history tells us that we’ve been here before.  And while history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, as Mark Twain says, it often rhymes. To better understand our current moment, the run up to the Civil War gives us clues.    We were a country goi...

The great baseball manager Casey Stengel famously said that he never makes predictions, especially about the future. That also might be good advice for political pundits.    For months in the run-up to the election, we heard pundits talk about the Latino vote, that they were all reachable by Democrats and it was just a matter of Democrats committing more time, more energy, and resources. Latinos w...

If you follow business, you know that part of the lure of every company is its founding story or myth.    Over time the myth takes on a life of its own, as it comes to define the company and its products. In a similar way it’s true of nations, including the United States.    We were a nation forged from disparate regions. The Northeast, the South, the West, Midwest. Each with different cultures, d...

When we think of the past four years of the Trump administration, the analogies to The Godfather come  immediately to mind. The reality truly reflects the sometimes magisterial and always violent family saga of the large organized crime family But what about for the foot soldiers that have been corrupted by Trump? Those who have taken on his imprimatur to lie, steal and cheat. To understand them,...