Talk Cocktail

Think about how much the world has changed in just the past 25 years and then think about how little our politics has changed.  Not just that we’re still talking about Clinton and Bush, but that the issues, the ideas and the ways in which they are discussed has not changed.  One does not have to throw out the principles of our Founders to retool the political process.  In fact, it is precisely tho...

This year's GOP primary race, perhaps more than others, does not exist in a vacuum. When Barry Goldwater accepted the GOP nomination in the SF Cow Palace in 1964, he spoke of extremism in the defense liberty and eschewed moderation.  Ever since that moment, so called conservatives have been falling all over themselves trying to live up to those words.  Words that had very little to do with the tru...

There must be a dozen books out right now talking about the disfunction in our politics.  Every day pundits, commentators and journalists analyze why our political system doesn’t work. Most all of them don’t see the forest from the trees.  What they miss, and what Harvard Professor and onetime Presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig understands, is that the central institution, at the core of our d...

This is a political year like few others.  The traditional laws of political gravity have so far, not seemed to apply.  Part of it is due to the collection of candidates, the public mood, and the long simmering divisions within the Republican party. It’s also a result of the changing demographics of America, congressional gerrymandering and the ways in which the idea that “all politics is local,”...

Two of the most powerful threads in American history are the immigrant experience and America at war and the impact that those wars have had on the nation and it's people The impact of WWII, the Japanese American experience and the relationship with Japan that evolved out of the ashes of that war, are the penultimate manifestation of that uniquely American story.   Pamela Rotner Sakamoto has, in h...

Last month Saudi woman cast their votes for the first time in municipal elections in Riyadh.  And while this is an incredibly positive development in the region, it also, by its very nature points out how limited many of these woman are and how the deeply conservative and gender segregated world of the Middle East has changed so little. When we look around the world at developing nations, we see t...

After its loss in the Presidential election of  2012 the Republican Party felt it needed to do its own after action report.  In the end, it was determined that all was basically ok and that the party only needed to broaden its tent and do a little better with Hispanic voters.  Enter Jeb Bush. How did that work out?  Not so well!   What we are seeing today is a total repudiation of a Republican est...

What goes on inside of a marriage is always a mystery. With a political marriage, even more so.    We all know the stories of the neighbors who have the apparently idyllic marriage, that ends in divorce.  Or the couple that battles incessantly, that have been together for 40 years.  These dynamics, and the psychological mechanism behind them are truly a riddle wrapped in an enigma. However, with p...

How many times have we heard the phrase, “Big Oil,” when sometimes what we really mean is authoritarian oil. There seems to be a direct and long standing historical nexus between those nations that have much in demand natural resources and countries which have corrupt, brutal and inept economies. Our increasing demand for these resources, including oil and all the new resources needed by high tech...

We live today in a world of instant communications. Our computers coupled with services like Skype, allow us to travel to anyplace on earth at the speed of light.  We have seen the surface of the Moon and of Mars and have been in meetings with participants all over the world. So should this tell us that anyplace is everyplace?  That things like geography, place, and indigenous cultures don’t matte...

There is almost nothing that we do the way we might have done it just ten years ago.  The way we book travel, get a car, find places to stay, take photographs, date, communicate with your friends, or consume the news.  Creative destruction is everywhere.  However a few of the places where such change have been very late to the party, has been with respect to education, government and healthcare. I...

We live in a culture that is about sharing.  First we shared music, then we shared our likes on Facebook, our photos on Instagram, our dating preferences on Tinder and now we share our cars, our houses, essentially our life. Amidst all of this, has been our ongoing and growing appreciation of memoir and of personal stories.  Where once fiction provided a place to explore our inner lives and our mo...

No matter how  many times we hear the stories of pedophile priests in the Catholic Church, it’s hard to grasp that such things could go on, that they could go on for so long and that so many could be involved as both perpetrators and in the cover up.  Perhaps it's that people didn't want to believe.  Like the story told by a victim in the new movie SPOTLIGHT.  It the story of a mother, who, even a...

The world has changed in many ways since 9/11.  One of those clearly has been the way we look upon Muslims, South Asians and Sikhs.  Arguably these attitudes and prejudices and the degree to which they have become embedded in the fabric of our national DNA has had a corrosive effect on all of our relationships with people of color and people that might be different than ourselves. Today, since Par...

Think about the real divisive issues today, both at home and in the wider world.  Radical Islamic faith tearing apart the Middle East. The faith that drives suicide bombers to the far corners of the planet, and at home, divisions about abortion, marriage, and end of life issues. At a time when the focus both home and abroad should be on the global economy, health, energy, science, hunger, ending t...

We’ve been told for years that one of the key goals of technology was to simplify our life.  In fact, for many people the opposite has happened.  The combination of complexity, feature creep, and the ever updating world of new technology has made the complexity of the process sometimes not worth the effort. Enter David Pogue.  He spent thirteen years  writing about personal technology for the NY T...

There is a school of thought in crisis management that says, if you have a completely intractable problem, sometimes the only solution is to create a larger problem.  In fact, to blow things up to the point where you get to start over. Sometimes that’s a strategy that happens not just by design, but by outcome. When then Newark Mayor Cory Booker, N.J. Governor Chris Christie and Facebook's Mark Zu...

When Oliver Wendell Holmes talked about Roosevelt's first class temperament, he never explained why that was important. It didn’t explain how, for a future President presiding over victory in two wars in just one term, without braggadocio, might matter,or respecting those with disabilities and allowing it to become a civil rights issues mattered, or how respecting manners in the conduct of both pu...

To say that music and pop stars today are transitory is an understatement.  Very few performers today are building careers for the ages, as did entertainers like Frank Sinatra.  Now on the 100th anniversary of Sinatra's birth we’re joined by poet David Lehman for a look at Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World . My conversation with David Lehman: Get full access to Talk Coc...

In these highly polarized times, we all hear the admonition, especially around holidays and family get-togethers, to make sure you never discuss politics or religion.   So what is it about both of these subjects that are so personal, so internal so potentially inflammatory that we’re admonished not to discuss them? Long time NBC journalist and former host of Meet The Press, David Gregory has, for...

Even long before the current extreme stratification of America, we heard about two Americas.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Michael Harrington and than John Edwards all talked about two nations living side by side.  One of relative middle class ease on the cutting edge of technology and education and another mired in poverty, resistant to or fearing change. Today, the same can said about Africa. For in...

We have seen that in almost any area of public endeavor, changing the status quo is almost impossible. The combination of entrenched special interests, coupled with the basic human resistance to change, in an era where change is a constant, creates a level of cognitive dissonance and fear that makes changing public policy almost impossible. So what do we do when the only alternative to change is c...

But what happens when two countries, two trading partners do not have parity on the production of a particular product, but have interlocking and conflicting needs, jealously, interests and misunderstandings?  The results, can create a crisis on a global level..even if the product is wine. That’s the story my guest Suzanne Mustacich tells in Thirsty Dragon: China's Lust for Bordeaux and the Threat...

How many of the candidates that are running for President today, have the depth of character and ideas that, if they were to be elected, we still might be talking about them, studying them and being surprised by them, 150 years after their death?  The answer is probably none. That is certainly not the case with Abraham Lincoln.  150 years after his death, people like esteemed Lincoln scholar Harol...

We live in this world usually someplace between the mundane and the absurd. But regardless of which, it's one that is probably organized to the Nth degree.  Our technology is almost embedded in our personal DNA, in order to keep us on task.  But is all this structure an impediment to creativity?  And if so, where might we get back to our youthful sense of play, of wonder and of discovery. For some...