Talk Cocktail

When we talk about the broad swath of technology and its progenitors in Silicon Valley rarely are we talking about great breakthroughs. A new app for dating or dog walking, the one-hundredth messaging app or new forms of enterprise collaboration are hardly the stuff of Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates or Mitch Kapor or Robert Noyce or Bill Hewlett. But every once in a while there is a new new thing that...

How many times a day do you hear or read someone opining on what’s wrong with America and American politics? As is too often the case we love to look for the simple solution. The one answer that will explain it all. The unified field theory of American politics. But unlike physics, the answer to understanding politics, the business and the interaction of people, is more nuanced, more complex and m...

As underemployment grows and many who once seemed solidly middle-class are losing their economic foothold, the working class is getting larger and more frustrated. Both its size and perspective make the working class more important than ever before. So perhaps, more than ever, Americans across the class spectrum have good reason to try and understand working-class culture and experience. Millions...

We’ve talked before about those frightening four words heard all too often. “This time it’s different.” Perhaps, besides Wall Street, nowhere else is that said as much as in Silicon Valley and the among the purveyors of every aspect of today technological and digital revolution. No question that today is different. But it also fits into a pattern of human invention that has been a part of our evol...

The 19th century has often been referred to as the imperial or British century. The period, after WWII was, in words coined by Henry Luce, the American Century. Today, as we move headlong into the 21st century, we are entering what Parag Khanna sees as the Asian Century. This dramatic change is not just about China, although China is a big part of it. It’s also about the 40 other countries that ma...

We live in an age of extremes. We talk about it every day with respect to the economic divide, the political divide, the racial divide, and the gender divide. Particularly with respect to gender, how can we explain the election of the most patriarchal President ever, in an era of me too? A President whose election was supported by the majority of white women who voted. Today, in our politics, we d...

We wonder why millennials are different. Imagine growing up in our current highly partisan, polarized political environment, and not knowing anything else. Not knowing an America where compromise is possible, where division within the political parties produced candidates that moved to center. They did not watch Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil work across the aisle, or Lyndon Johnson exhibit politica...

According to a report just released by Freedom House, a watchdog group that advocates for democracy, political rights, and civil liberties became weaker in 68 countries. The report also says the U.S. freedom score has declined by 8 points (from 94 to 86) over the past eight years. At the same time we know that voters are unhappy, We are told that democracy is collapsing, that fascism is on the ris...

Ken Starr, Archibald Cox, Leon Jaworski, Lawrence Walsh, and Robert Mueller. These names are almost as familiar as the Presidents they investigated. What does that say about the role of Special Prosecutors, the power the have, the evolution of their role in history and how we should see them today? When a lesser know name, John Henderson was the special prosecutor pursuing Ulysses S. Grant in 1875...

In an era in which everything it politicized, from the TV shows and the movies we watch to the places we shop, it’s not surprising that architecture and design would also be reflective of the politics of the day. This phenomenon is nothing new. For proof of this, we need to look no further than Philip Johnson. Considered one of the greatest of modern architects, he would spend a good part of his l...

All over the world, as populism surges, as creative destruction makes economic change inevitable, the focus on manufacturing and manufacturing jobs is often front and center. Maybe it’s the old romantic of a nation of big shoulders; the factories and machines spinning noisily, providing well-paying jobs. But the fact is that far more jobs, almost 30 million, exist in the retail sector in the US, a...

The Blue Wave of the recent election would not have been possible without black women voters. The election of Doug Jones in Alabama would not have been possible without the turnout of black women. The recent focus on Stacy Abrams, Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters, Oprah, and even Michelle Obama speak to the fact that Democratic and progressive politics today, as well as our cultural politics, is being...

The poet John Milton writing in the 17th century got it right when he said that “They also serve who only stand and wait.” No better description could be written to capture the essence of military families. Today, as a nation, we have acknowledged that service. We have some, but still not enough understanding and services for those waiting at home. But back during the Vietnam war, when those servi...

Over the past two decades, we’ve seen a modern great migration as more and more Americans move from suburban and rural America to cities. This trend cuts across all demographic groups but has been especially true for millennials and aging boomers. As a result, our great cities have experienced skyrocketing rents, displacement of the poor, gentrification and protracted conflict between NIMBY homeow...

Every day we talk about disruption as if it's mostly positive within the business and consumer environment. But for companies today, both large and small, an array of challenges and potentially disruptive events can have a real negative impact on the company, its earnings, its employees and its customers. Corporate executives today realize that the degree to which they can anticipate and prepare f...

Some of you may recall a few weeks ago, newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a splash, talking about $21 trillion in misappropriated Pentagon money, which she claimed was enough to take care of Medicare for all. She based her conclusions on the misreading of an article in the Nation by investigative reporter, Dave Lindorff. It’s too bad, because her misreading took the focus a...

Social, cultural and technological change is all around us. We live in an era of upheaval, not unlike the movement from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy that took place 100+ years ago. At the time, many thought it was, to borrow a phrase, the end of history. Many spoke about the evils of cities. They thought that leaving the farm was anti-American, that it went against the Jeffersonian ideal...

We think that politics might actually change the world for better or for worse. It probably won't. It's certainly more likely that climate change, weather, and rising sea levels will have a far more profound impact. The recent UN report on climate indicated that we could be facing existential risks within 20 years. So what is the world to do? Jeff Goodell, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, t...

How much of your work day is about emails, texts, Slack, Basecamp or Shift? And how much is about phone calls or meetings or basic human contact? If you’re like most people today, a large portion is devoted to apps, to screens, and to technology. And less and less to human contact. How many times have you sent a work text or email to someone yards or even feet away? How many Holiday texts or email...

The U.S. imprisons a higher portion of its population than any country in the world. The so-called “prison industrial complex” is, for many towns in rural America, a driving force for its economy. At the same time, many of these prisons have been turned over to private companies, like Prison Corporation of America, to be run as cheaply and profitably as possible, regardless of the damage inflicted...

It seems that every day, as Trump makes another seemingly horrible comment, we ask ourselves how did this happen? Millions of words have been spilled trying to answer that question. Fascism, bigotry, populism, social and cultural issues, have all been trotted out. But first and foremost is the jingoistic nationalism that seems to be rampant among Trump's base, as it is around the world. As disloca...

At a time when journalism is under siege when the attacks sometimes result in too much caution when the goal of politicians is to attack journalist like they are working the refs, it’s worth thinking about times when we’ve seen full-throated, muscular and sometimes participatory journalism. The kind practiced by the likes of Jimmy Breslin, or H.L. Menken, George Plimpton, Truman Capote, Norman Mai...

When we hear the phrase follow the money, we’ve come to understand that it usually leads back to nefarious political activities, self-dealing and corrupt public servants or worse. But sometimes that money trail leads to something that’s become so commonplace we hardly notice it anymore. The business of corporate bribery, and kickbacks around the world As the global economy becomes ever more interc...

Each day more of our national political and governmental norms fall away. Our national leadership is at best in a moral vacuum, at worst, a corrosive force, an autoimmune disease eating the very fabric of the nation. The violence of the past months reminds us that it does no good to hold the Pollyannaish belief that everything will all be all right, that we’ve been through this before and that the...

For those that study and write about politics, the holy grail is to find those seminal moments in the nation's public and political life that change everything. And while the antecedents of those events may be years in the making, they usually create a perfect storm that results in an event that is a kind of tipping point; one that marks a permanent tectonic shift in the political landscape. Somet...