Talk Cocktail

I’m often the first to criticize the way in which we are too quick to put things in political terms.  Too often the rush to label “red” or “blue” America gets us into trouble.  But one aspect seems to hold.  We are bluer politically as we get closer to water.  Look at any map and coastal America seems to have a different mindset.   Perhaps it is because water and proximity to water make a differen...

We are told, almost from childhood, that we have a legal system and a government of laws and not of men.  Yet it is a system created by man and subject to the biases, frailties and inherent actions of human behavior. Yet from such a system we often dispense the most draconian of punishments in the name of all of us. At a time when even member of the Supreme Court of the United States talk of the F...

To about the same degree that Captain Renault was “shocked, just shocked” to find gambling going on Casablanca, that’s how shocked many of us are to find that politicians and business leaders lie to us. Whether it’s the latest candidate promising to make the world a better place, or Coca Cola offering the Real Thing,  the idea of marketing and even misrepresentation has been around before spin doc...

We all remember Ben Franklin flying his kite, or Alexander Graham Bell calling for Watson, even Jonas Salk working quietly in his laboratory. Today science, or at least big science, is a global effort. It involves governments, private enterprise, universities and vast institutional support.  Think about the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, and even before all of that, the Ma...

As we hit the half way mark in the Baseball season, how many players are injured, how many are burnt out already?  Are we creating a softer group of players or is 162 games in 180 days, just too many games? Washington Baseball writer Barry Svrluga explores this in  The Grind: Inside Baseball's Endless Season . My conversation with Barry Svrluga: Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffsche...

We have always studied other cultures so that perhaps we could better understand our own. The realm of cultural anthropology has provided us keen insights into our evolutionary nature and why we do the strange things we do, as human beings. Wednesday Martin, has used the tools of cultural anthropology to zero in on one very narrow subgroup.  The tiny percentage of the “One Percent” that reside in...

Listen to any of the Republican candidates and it’s clear that the culture war issues that have driven so much political debates over the past 50+ years, are still going on. Our political discourse is has polarized as ever.  Even to the point where we’ve come to accept that you are never going to change anyones mind about social issues.  So when we do talk, when we do try and debate, we simply tal...

Most of us know the legendary story of the group of blind men  who touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk or the tail.. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement about what they experienced This is the story of Richard Nixon.   So much has been written about Nixon. Much of it has co...

Most of us know the legendary story of the group of blind men  who touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk or the tail.. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement about what they experienced This is the story of Richard Nixon.   So much has been written about Nixon. Much of it has co...

Long before Steve Jobs and Jony Ives bridged the divide between design and technology,  before Target began selling Michael Graves tea kettles, Charles and Ray Eames made the connection between design, public perception and function. They created designs for furniture, architecture, toys and film and in so doing set the stage for much of the way we view our world today.   They were visionaries, wh...

We live today in what many consider the age of technology.  Everyday there are new apps, new ways in which incumbency is disrupted.  But very few of the creators or inventors of today, understand the long view, or the way they are changing the world. Steve Jobs understood. Elon Musk understands.  Maybe even Mark Zuckerberg does.  Part of  that understanding come from education.  From seeing the wo...

Today boys want to grow up to be professional athletes, or tech billionaires.  But there was time when being a secret agent seemed like just about the coolest thing to do. Whether it was the literary exploits of Bond or Bourne, or the real story Philby, or the moral twilight of le Carre, spycraft, particularly during the days of the Cold War, held a magical appeal.  It certainly did for Naveed Jam...

There is always someone that leads us into the future.  Someone whose vision and entrepreneurship combine to make the next big idea, the next big thing. This has been true from Franklin, to Edison, from From Henry Ford to Thomas Watson, from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs and today  Elon Musk may very well be the inheritor of that mantel. Electric cars, commercial space travel, high speed transportation...

Many of you, I’m sure, think you’d love the idea of seeing your life portrayed in movies or television.  But imagine if you knew nothing about it.  If one day, you saw an ad for a TV show, and you, or at least your life, was the central character.  Would you be scared, shocked, angry, a little excited. Cleary Wolters experienced all of thee things. As she saw her life in prison portrayed as Alex V...

In the world of families, all eyes are on same sex marriage.  In the Courts, in Statehouses, and in the political arena.  But on the ground, in the households and families where people live, this is just one manifestation of the change in family structures and family relationships. As such, the world of law and particularly family law, has changed. The way in which these new, creative and ever cha...

Today we have talking heads and pundits.  But back in the second half of the 20th Century we had writers and public intellectuals, whose ideas, attitudes and personalities became a part of our public discourse. Two of those that were the touchstones of the times were William F.Buckley and Norman Mailer.  Both wrote about history, about sex, about politics and sometimes all at once.  They were the...

If we have problems in America, the solution is usually simple, check with the Founding Fathers.  Can’t figure out modern health care, check with the Founders.  Can’t deal with modern weaponry on America's streets, check in with the nation's Founders.  Need to improve education for our kids..maybe a trip to Mt. Rushmore will solve it?  Need to fix our airports, increase cancer and genetic research...

Many years ago, Harvard Business School perfected something called the “case study method.”   A new educational innovation that presented the challenges confronting companies, nonprofits, and government organizations—complete with the constraints and incomplete information found in real business issues. Students learned that through the process of exchanging perspectives, countering and defending...

It was Churchill who reminded us that history is written by the victors.  Well this is as true of religious history as it is of military, political and geopolitical history.  Do you ever wonder how our religious and political divides of today came to be?  How it is that the Republican party became a vehicle for the notion of America as a Christian nation? We’ve all been feed the story that it’s so...

We all remember the youthful spiritual song Dem Bones, about the angle bone being connected to the shin bone, the thigh bone being connected to the hip bone, etc.  What the song didn’t include is the connection between the stomach and the brain.  And it’s not just about what you eat.  It's about the vast array of bacteria and microorganism that live in your gut, and the impact they have on how you...

Everyday it seem the world speeds up.    The advances of technology, the need to make faster decisions, multitasking and a sometimes dizzying array of options, are all part of the creative destruction that is making the world a more efficient an  in many ways, a better and freer place. On the other hand human evolution is a slow, deliberate process. So, to what extent have our brains evolutionary...

In talking to someone recently about my guest, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, they went into a bit of tirade of criticism of him, saying that he was “just one of those Democrats they trot out to make things go away, to sweep things under rug.”  My friend went on to say, “it proves that it's all just one big party.” Well the other side of that same coin is that Senator George Mitche...

It has often been conventional wisdom that the military is always fighting current wars, based on lessons learned from the last war.  That’s why we used centralized WW2 tactics in Vietnam, and then turned around and used the lessons of Vietnam in Iraq.  But the fact is that today there is a whole new breed to military tacticians and strategists whose ideas come not from the last war, but from the...

We are a culture obsessed with youth.  We are told that youth is wasted on the young, but we do everything in our power to stay young. Growing up is seen as giving up.  We are told that with each passing year, doors close behind and head of us.   In short, youth is and has been the foundational cultural idea of the West for almost half a century.  From the 60’s mantra of “never trust anyone over 3...

It sometimes seem that every generation has its disease.  In earlier generations it was Tuberculosis, in the 40’s and 50’s the fear and the scourge of Polio gripped the nation. In the 80’s and 90’s, the fear and reality of AIDS overwhelmed the national consciousness. When we look at these diseases...the death tolls from them, the way they were perceived, the medical mystery, the research, the trea...