Talk Cocktail

For most of us, the pressures of daily life in the 21st Century are intense.  Emails, calls, social media, commutes, every changing technology, all on 24/7. Regardless of the economic and social discussion from all of this, there is the question of the impact it’s all having on our bodies and on our psyche.  Given how slow evolution moves, can human psychobiology cope with all of this? That’s why...

T.S. Eliot wrote, in 1934. “Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” He might have written those words yesterday. Certainly we’ve never had more knowledge, more information and seemingly less wisdom than we do today. What is the connection? How is it, that the more we know, the less we seem to unde...

When we examine the roots of today’s chaos in the Republican party, we see that much of it has been caused by the party using and manipulating social issues to hold together Red State voters, while ignoring and even acting counter to their real economic concerns. This was the premise of one of the seminal books of our modern political age, What’s the Matter with Kansas, by my guest Thomas Frank. T...

A popular desire for authoritarian rule in the face of a changing and sometimes shaky economy. A overheated sense of nationalism, to cover up uncertainty about the future. Scapegoating and military adventurism as a salve for a lack of purpose and policy, a dislike of outsiders and a desire to crackdown on journalists to cover up anger about the changing nature of employment.  Sounds like a certain...

Just for fun, pull out or get a copy of the originally published version of the best seller What Color Is Your Parachute. Originally published in 1970, virtually no job that it listed that even touches technology, is even close to the same today.  Remember that came out 46 years ago,  just as the boomers were going into the workforce. Today’s changes, human, technological and social, are happening...

We've all heard it before. Sixty is the new fifty, fifty is the new forty, etc. It's all in the service our fear, or dread of aging; of death and the lost endless possibilities of youth. We believed that as we turned the corner onto the proverbial back nine, that a kind of midlife crisis would overtake us. For a generation of narcissistic baby boomers, it seemed like the logical step. But a surpri...

Andy Grove, perhaps more than anyone other than Steve Jobs transformed technology, drove the growth of Silicon Valley and shaped the views of so many of the people that run tech companies today.  To say that he was the Godfather of Silicon Valley would not be an understatement.  Andy Grove, who passed away yesterday,  was one of the founders and CEO of Intel Corporation, where he transformed the r...

If we examine why so many students don’t graduate High School, we find that failure to succeed at High School math is often at the core of the problem.  Yet we are told almost every day that STEM and that math are the keys to the kingdom of success in the 21st Century. The fact is that most jobs, even very good ones, don't require the geometry, the algebra, the trigonometry that we  are forced to...

The power and reach of corporate America has become a staple of our political dialogue.  Consolidation and corporatization has touched almost every area of our culture.  The Disneyfication of our communities is almost complete. Food,  retail, coffee, service, music, movies and now even sex and our most intimate fantasies.  Where once strip clubs had unique and individual identities, fulfilling a w...

In this age of consumerism, instant gratification and information, it’s often hard to think about something as abstract as the “meaning of life.” The ideas of birth, death, and infinity, which used to introduce a popular television show of the early 60’s, are ideas seldom thought about today. Yet these are questions that human beings have been asking since the beginning of time. Lee Eisenberg,  wh...

Last week Elizabeth Warren gave a scathing speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, about the seven year efforts, on the part of Republicans, to delegitimize the Obama Presidency.  From the birther efforts to Mitch McConnell, saying that his goal, from day one, was to defeat Obama. It’s not possible to carry on this discussion without accepting and understanding race as a part of it. The burden of...

Today, globalization faces a crisis of its own success.  The international movement of goods, money, communications and ideas has been going on since even before the 12th Century.  However, today the context of that globalization has changed. Where once driven individuals could change the world,  today the very complexity of the world that globalization has created means that it can no longer exis...

Money and politics have become synonymous.  Politicians spend that majority of their time raising money, (which they claim they hate) while the cost of campaigns escalates and more money is needed and more money needs to be raised.  And where does that money come from….not usually from small contributions, but from large and vested special interests.   The result is a system that is inherently cor...

It’s funny how history repeats itself.  In the mid 19th Century, partly in response to the Great Famine, waves of Irish immigrants came to America. Most landed in New York, to seek a new and better life.  Then as now, questions of immigration, assimilation and criminal behavior filled the air.  The appropriately named Know Nothing Party  grew up in opposition to these waves of immigration and fill...

With all the technology around today, doctors still often fail to make the right diagnosis.  Usually not due to any failure of knowledge or smarts, but because diagnostics is often as much art as science. As such, it requires an almost intuitive and/or subtle understanding of the patient, his or her circumstances and sometimes it’s as much about what is not said by the patient, as that which is vo...

Although, incorrectly attributed to Churchill, most of you have heard the quote that   "if you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart.  If you're not a conservative by the time you're 40, you have no brain."  While it’s a little silly, it does go to the core fact that personal beliefs can change as we grow, as we evolve and as context changes.  And while people like Jonathan Haidt have...

It always amazing with famous people, particularly those that sit atop the world stage, to find out things, even after decades, that we didn't’ know.  It’s interesting information. But most of all it reshapes how we understand them and the how these new surprises might have shaped the world they touched.  Such is the case with Winston Churchill and his underreported years as a journalist and war c...

Say the word immigration today, and the political implications are both ugly and controversial.  On the plus side a survey out just this week shows that a significant majority of young people in the US see themselves as citizens of the world, and not just citizens of America.  A full 58% feel that the US is no better than many other countries in the world.   It is against this backdrop of hope and...

While I have not seen the movie, I do know from talking to some teens that the new film Pride and Prejudice Zombies has actually inspired kids to ask questions about Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austin. It's a surprise that in our media saturated culture, at a time when texting seems like long form communications, compared to Instagram, many kids are still interested in reading. How is this possib...

How many times have you gone to the movies, or to an art exhibit or read a book  and not really felt that you’ve completed the experience until you’ve talked about the movie or show or exhibit with someone else?  Either the person you went with, or somebody who read or saw the same thing.   This is at once both the most primal of social media and also emphasizes the importance of opinion and criti...

This year, in a very tired and traditional way, the Grammy’s focused on the world of Pop music.  But the fact is, no matter how traditional the show, what’s undeniable is that the world of music is nothing like it was twenty years ago. Today, in your pocket is virtually all of the world's music.  The long tail of music has never been longer.  And yet in our music, not unlike our politics, our conf...

We are all driving cars with parts made all other the world.  Our phones, our appliances, our banking is either made, touched and/or connected to every part of the world.  Globalization is not going away. In fact, it expanding to now include even our health care. Where once the rich might engage in medical tourism for cosmetic or exotic procedures, today medical tourism is an international busines...

I suppose it's the historian's curse that sometimes the people they are writing about become such icons, that getting to the truth becomes impossible. Certainly two such icons of our time, of the civil right era, are Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. Both have become larger than life characters, whose actions and whose longtime friendship and then estrangement shaped not one, but several areas of our cu...

Millions of words have been written about Donald Trump.  But one thing always seem to be certain with Trump.  Unlike the warnings in the security industry, past performance is absolutely an indication for future returns. So what exactly do those past performances look like.  Long before Campaign 2016 started, Trump telegraphed pretty much everything we are seeing today.  Even 10 years ago my guest...

Paper Moon, The Sting, American Hustle, The Grifters, House of Games, The Matchstick Men; just a few of the movies we love about con men and hustlers.  Yet in real life, we don’t love the likes of Bernie Madoff, or Barry Minkow, or Steven Kunes or Charles Ponzi.  So why the disconnect?  Why do we feel joy in being taken in by movie con men, but not so much by the real thing?  The answer may very w...