Talk Cocktail

There is a line from the 1973 movie The Way We Were, where Katie Morosky, played by Barbra Streisand, talks about Hubbell Gardner, played by Robert Redford. She says of Gardner/Redford, “In a way he was like the country he lived in; everything came too easily to him.” And that has been a narrative, albeit, often a false one, of ease and grace that the public often seeks to buy into with respect to...

Woody Allen once said that the world was divided into the horrible and the miserable. The horrible he thought were people with terminal cases, blind people, and the crippled. “I don't know how they get through life,” he said. “It's amazing to me.” To answer Woody Allen's existential question, it is usually hope that carries the day. But the form that that hope takes can vary widely. Sometimes, it...

Isn’t it interesting that the more we have technology to save us time, the more we complain about not having enough time. Before the digital revolution we never heard as much talk about everyone not having enough time. Just think about how much time we spend setting up our CRM and To do list apps, when a simple list in a notebook might have actually been faster. And while the technology of everyth...

There is not a day that goes by that the subject of immigration is not in some way part of our national discussion. However, even with all the talk, there is little focus on either the large number of immigrants that arrive from China, or on the their immigrant experience. We think very little about what it must be like leaving one's country, friends, family and culture behind, to begin anew as a...

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson enacted his war on poverty. Three years later Robert Kennedy knelt in a crumbling shack in Mississippi, watching a toddler pick rice and beans off of a dirt floor. What Robert Kennedy saw on that trip would impact him personally and in part, drive is run for the Presidency one year later. While Vietnam was the seminal issue of the day, poverty and its nexus with the civil ri...

The legendary studio boss Harry Cohn once said to one of his writers, that if you want to send a political message, use Western Union. The point was that movies were for entertainment. Some have even tried to make that argument with respect to novels, but over the years, this has hardly been the case. One of the great examples is Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Released 75 years ago, this month. This...

Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg understood how to maximize social media to achieve the highest in democratic ends. The Russians and Cambridge Analytica used that same social media to undermine democracy, to spread lies, and to manipulate facts. Recently we’ve seen Mark Zuckerberg and members of Congress musing about the business model of Facebook and the holy grail of hyper-directed advertising. All...

I think it was Howard Cosell who first referred to sports at the “toy department of life.” Oftentimes player performance has been put down as people say that “it’s not rocket science.” The fact is however, that we now know it is neuroscience, computer science, medical science, AI, and a whole lot more. We often talk about the game of golf as being so much inside the heads of players. But now, new...

In the movie Jurassic Park, perhaps the most famous line is that “nature will find a way.” It might just as accurately be said today, that technology will find a way. Think about where we are. Fear of Facebook, the attacks on Amazon, the opioid crisis, and the kind of mini “techlash” we’re going through and the anger of a great many voters in former manufacturing hubs like Michigan, Pennsylvania o...

Religion, violence, anti-semitism, and the fate of the Catholic Church. All subject as contemporary as today’s headlines. To often we see these headlines and think about these issues in the moment, in the now. Yet to really understand any of these issues, begs for a deeper understanding of history. And what better way to get that history, then in the storytelling of a great novel. That’s what Jame...

Spend any time watching television and you’ll see the apotheosis of western medicine. There is a drug for everything. We live in a pharmaceutical culture where every pain, ache, and known and unknown disease has its own pill. The areas of mental health, depression and anxiety have become a kind of hedge fund for the drug companies. And while we see the occasional pushback to this western model of...

Lately, there have been countless articles about the rise of authoritarian regimes. One aspect of all of these regimes is, even as we’re seeing here in America, the dramatic extremes in corruption. Often fueled by power, money laundering, drugs, and simply all manner of crimes upon the public. Perhaps nowhere in contemporary times was this worse than in Columbia in the 1990s and 2000s. Amidst a co...

I don’t think there is anyone that would argue that the world is a far more complex place today. All of the machines and technology that are supposed to make our lives easier have, at times, made it more complicated, more frustrating, and more subject to things going wrong. Anyone who’s tried to operate the GPS or radio in a new BMW, or even to operate their television knows exactly what I mean. T...

Back in the 1960s, Richard Nixon would talk and write a lot about the Middle East in general, and about the Israeli situation specifically, and he talked about how it easily could become the flash point of the next world war. Certainly almost 60 years and many crises later, this is still true. Today, as a second and third generation still hears about settlements and a one and two-state solution, a...

Every so often the media picks up the meme that books and readers are on the decline. That our short attention span, along with our Twitter and Facebook driven culture, has supplanted long form narrative. And it seems that every time those stories circulate, something happens to change or debunk the narrative. Even the national obsession with a book like Fire and Fury, proves something. Joan Didio...

What is the nexus between our political system and our economic system? Certainly during the Cold War we fought to defend our political system against the economic threat of communism. So, does it work the other way around? Do we now have to defined our republic and our democracy against the threat of a new gilded age, of oligarchs and of deep income inequality? Is the fight for civility and justi...

Everyday we are reminded how difficult it is growing up, and being a teenger. The work of Jean Twenge and others has shown the impact of technology and social media on our culture. Add to this, the reality of what it’s like growing up black or hispanic in America and the pressure becomes even more intense.. Even tougher, imagine what it must be like growing up in America as a Muslim teenager.. par...

There is no question that the easy availability of guns, especially assault weapons, has contributed in some way to the rash of school shootings. However, we would be naïve to think that this is the totality of the problem. Beyond guns, the broader questions always should be how these shootings can be averted. How can we understand and interpret the data from so many past events in ways that help...

Every day the news gets darker. Polarization is increasing, constitutional norms are being overthrown, the social fabric is tearing and as Yeats said, “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Still, as bad as it appears on cable news each night, it’s nothing compared to what was happening in the 60’s and 70’s. Cities were burning, violence was loose upon the...

We often hear that we live in a post industrial world. Yet all of those consumer goods we and the rest of the world love so much, are made in factories. Factories that, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, did not always represent the best of working conditions. Today, out of nostalgia, we romanticize them and long for the “big shoulders” of the industrial heartland. Today things are still pr...

We hear over and over again that the future belongs to China. Looking at what the Chinese are accomplishing in both infrastructure and technology, it’s easy to believe it. But what about in human relations and the issues of the gender wars? As the #MeToo movement reshapes or recalibrates the nature of sex, work and gender relationships in America, it’s worthwhile to look and see how and if these s...

A couple of weeks ago, The N.Y. Times ran a story about “global nomads.” People whose work allows them to plug-in anywhere in the world. This may not be for everybody. But it’s a reminder that the fundamentals of work are changing. How do we work today in an always on, 24/7 world. In a world where intellectual capital is increasingly the coin of the realm, we are essentially at work. whenever we a...

In the debate about immigration we are reminded of the original notion of America as a melting pot. As a nation that could absorb different cultures, different identities and different ethnic groups. The trade off was the embrace of an American identity. A kind of super nationalism that would subsume these subgroups and, at its best, world supersede ethnic and religious tribalism, and replace it a...

There was a saying during the Vietnam era, the attribution of which is a bit fuzzy, that said “if you grab them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” I suppose this was not inconsistent with another quote of that era that said, “come let us reason together...or we’ll burn down your village.” Vietnam, like so many counterinsurgency efforts, before and since, was or should have been, ab...

Years ago, the great Dorothy Parker said that the movie business was the only business where the assets went home at night….Well that may have had a ring a truth then, but today in a world where intellectual property and human capital are what makes our economy tick, it seems that the assets always go home at night. And what they do, what they think about, and what they conceive of when they are h...