Talk Cocktail

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...

We think we know a lot about American history. About the events that shaped the formation of the republic. And while that knowledge might get you an audition for Jeopardy, at its roots sometimes, it's also true that everything we think we know is wrong.   Essentially what that means, and maybe it's even a factor in what’s gone so wrong today, is that we tend to know only surface.  That when we dri...

It used to be, during the dark days of the Cold War, watching the Kremlin and trying to read meaning into every nuance, tea leaf and coming and going, was elevated to an art form. Today, it’s the same for the Fed.  Every meeting, every utterance of the Fed Chair and Fed Governors is parsed and analyzed and poured over for some hint of what the Fed will do and what it might mean for the markets, fo...

We’ve seen that different cities often emerge as the the center of their times.  This has been true from the Greek city states, through the Roman Empire and right up until the present, here in America. It seems that every major cultural, social and political movement of the modern era seems to be anchored in its own place. New York became a kind of capital of the 50’s.  In the 60’s places like San...

Everything starts somewhere.  Even very bad things. Many of the tremors we face today had their roots in the Ottoman Empire, in the run up to the First World War.  In what’s come to be called the Armenian genocide.  There we began to see the rise of Muslim extremism, the battle for post WWI borders in the Middle East, the plight of refugees, the competition between national and corporate interests...

This Sunday over 50,000 people will run in the NYC Marathon. For many participants, part of the appeal is to be part of something larger and more personal than a Facebook group.  For others it’s about achieving a personal best.  But for a much smaller group of elite marathon runners, it’s about what once seemed the impossible dream...breaking the two hour mark for the 26 miles through the streets...

Most of us will go into the hospital at some point. When we do, we might be subject to anesthesia, even for a minor procedures.  What goes on while we're asleep is, at least to the patient, a complete mystery.  At the same time, we look to the technology of medicine as the panacea to solve so many of our health problems.  Yet when it goes wrong we get angry.  Clearly, our emotional nexus with tech...