Talk Cocktail

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...

From the moment that Jackie Kennedy branded the Kennedy presidency as Camelot, in an interview with author and historian Theodore White, royalty was suddenly bestowed upon the survivors. The recoil effect from that simple phrase on Ted and Bobby and the rest of the family was impactful. But at least they were able to understand and process it. For John F. Kennedy Jr. he would immediately become a...

We all remember that Al Capone was ultimately busted on tax fraud, even though he had a long, violent and ugly criminal career. We see it play out in politics where someone is charged with one crime that the government is able to prove, while it is really reflective of a career of many crimes. So it is with the mythology of Linda Taylor. Busted in 1974 for welfare fraud, Taylor had a long history...

Many of you may have started watching the Showtime series, THE LOUDEST VOICE IN THE ROOM, about Fox News founder Roger Ailes. The problem with it is, that with respect to what Ailes did, what he is credited with accomplishing at Fox, very little of it is true. Sure Ailes understood television and politics. But at core what he did was to take the world of talk radio, combined it with a bit of “blon...

My 2014 conversation with Gabe Sherman on his then just-published book, THE LOUDEST VOICE IN THE ROOM. It's a great preview for the Showtime series that begins on Sunday   The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

Once upon a time war had structure. There was a kind of narrative arc to war. A beginning, a middle and clear end. In the modern era, certainly since Vietnam, they have become what Clausewitz called “protracted conflict.” Even the efforts to find resolution are nothing more than wars by other means. Most have heard the biblical quote, that “you will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but be not alar...

Today, more than one-half of the world's population lives in cities. In every corner of the world, people are moving to cities at a rapid and geometric pace. The urban migration taking place today is both historic and inevitable. Our cities represent the ultimate triumph and organizing principle of humanity. They are more than either the concrete jungle portrayed by Billy Wilder in the Lost Weeken...

Never before in human history has so much change been so rapidly foisted on human beings. Not during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution. Today, technology in all of its forms; from smart machines to robotics, from AI to VR to 3D manufacturing, to genetic and biomedical engineering, will make sure we are never the same It's estimated by some that almost eighty million j...

The evidence is overwhelming that in our schools today, the successful curriculums are those that are directed toward deeper learning, project-based learning, and social and emotional learning. Learners that feel empowered and hands-on, that collaborate and learn empathy are the ones who excel academically. So why shouldn't the same be true of parenting? The recent cheating scandal certainly shows...

Mark Twain is reported to have said that history does not really repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Today we live in a climate, not unlike the late ’40s and early ’50s, where fear is weaponized,  and where suspicion of the other is exploited as a salve for change. Yet there always seem to be brave men and women trying to rise above. As Ed Murrow said in his takedown of Senator Joe McCarthy,” we w...

Today as we sometimes contemplate the real possibility of the end of the American experience. We think about its roughly 250-year history, often in the context of the people that have led us, good and bad, and taken us to where we are today. So perhaps it might be instructive to look at the 500 years history of the Roman Empire, and look at some of its leaders. Some who drove it to great heights a...

Immigration and the fear of outsiders is a deep strain in the American psyche. It didn’t start with Donald Trump. In fact, it hasn’t even reached its full flowering under this administration. When Trump talked of murderers and rapists coming to the border, of other nations not sending us their best, he was merely echoing a historical context that has actually played out in far worse ways in our hi...

Every day, no matter what the issue — whether it’s election integrity, rule of law, climate change, guns, impeachment, or the Mueller report — what’s at stake is not just daily political wins and losses, but the very survival of the republic. As was the case at its founding, during the Civil War, and at a select few times in US history, Americans would be making a huge mistake if they took the sur...

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...

Even though it may not seem like it, domestic terrorism, particularly built around white supremacy, is nothing new. Given that racism is our nation's original sin, it should not be surprising that in the post Civil War period, the historical efforts to deal with the Ku Klux Klan are both instructive in their own right, but at the same time foreshadows the thru lines that lead us to where we are to...

America has often been a divided nation. Battles at our founding were often settled at 50 paces. The western ethos that is part of half of America fueled many of those divisions. Brother fought against brother in the civil war. The industrial revolution gave us riots, and death and violence. The cold war and fear of communism gave rise to whole careers and lives ruined just by accusation. The ’60s...

Ukraine just elected a comedian as its president. A reality TV character holds the most powerful office on the planet. Talk show hosts are driving the agenda of US policy and not a day goes by that we don’t hear talk about more celebrities running for office The membrane that separates news, governance, and entertainment has all but disappeared and efforts to raise any conversation above the noise...

Sometimes the personal is professional. It’s not all that common when ones work and one's survival is linked so inexorably together. They are in the story Tom Patterson and Steffanie Strathdee. Imagine, you're climbing a mountain, you slip and your spouse is the clinging to the rope above you and that’s the only thing keeping you alive. In the story of Tom and Steffanie, it was Steffanie clinging...

Old songs, like old memories, are the purveyors of a kind of double imagery. Triggers of thought that somehow short circuit time and make yesterday's events today's reality. So when we write or read about the past, particularly in novels or memoirs, what we are reading, or writing, is not necessarily factual, but represents our remembered past..almost a separate world unto itself. Award winning no...