Talk Cocktail

Even back in the tumultuous 60’s  we were enamored with the space program.  The idea of man “slipping the surly bonds of earth,” captured the nation's attention at a time when so much other news was negative.  Kids everywhere wanted to be astronaut. There even was an airline at the time that referred to itself as “the wings of man.” Our landing on the moon, in 1969, instead of being the beginning...

If there is a single point of cognitive dissonance in our world today, it revolves around change.  We love change.  We think we like to embrace the new, and yet we fear change.  We hang on to a the past, forgetting that the past, that feels oh so comfortable, is but a floating endpoint of much previous change. So to the Catholic Church. For the Church, constant change has been one of its most basi...

Our College and University system in America grew up in opposition to the old European model.  Americans didn’t want to be locked in to specific training or apprenticeships.  We believed that the goal of education was to engage the mind in the realities of the world and so liberal arts education grew up. It  emphasized writing and speaking and creative endeavors in the pursuit of interests beyond...

Most of us remember the theme song from Mash, “Suicide is Painless:” Through early morning fog I seevisions of the things to bethe pains that are withheld for meI realize and I can see… Philip Connors, through the suicide of his brother, would come to see many things. About his brother, about his own life and about the pain of loneliness and of childhood trauma.  And most of all, about the need to...

Few classes in law school are drier and more arcane than courses on patents and copyrights.  And while the debate about intellectual property includes the worlds of entertainment, literature and technology, we don’t often make the connections between those arcane laws, the Constitution that laid down their predicate and the creativity that they seek to protect.  But that is exactly what Elizabeth...

Our mission statement as a country tells us we are a government of laws, and not of men.  Yet without great men, including Adams, who said this, we would not have the laws that have provided the framework for our greatness. Today, the laws that shape our contemporary society, civil rights, the environment, the social safety net, head start, and college loans, were in large measure the result of th...

As novels and movies have repeatedly shown us, when both partners in a relationship tell the story of that relationship, the images, the memories, the experience is generally profoundly different. Even in good or strong relationships, the perception is shaped by the stories and yes, even the lies we tell each other and ourselves, as a kind of lubrication for intimate interaction. Over time, the st...

As we watch presidential candidates, on both sides, putting together their respective teams for 2016, it reminds us that politics and public policy is indeed a team sport. Both sides draw from a deep bench of those that served in previous administrations and also bring up young and upcoming rookies,  that then go on, if they win, to be the future veterans. Just as it’s true in campaigns and policy...

We’ve all heard the expression, “you are what you eat.” Yet when we think about some of the things we consume, the fast food, the junk food, the endless meals out, assembled with unknown ingredients, perhaps it’s no surprise that we have an obesity epidemic and that so many public health issues can be traced back to what we eat. On the other side of the table is a vast food/industrial complex, tha...

To the extent that we are all the sum total of our wider experience and our private moments, imagine how that might be magnified amidst the terror, turmoil, and violence of Middle East. A place where even the quiet moments of love, life and even pain are amplified by events in the present and memories of the past. Mai Al-Nakib’s stories in her collection The Hidden Light of Objects , takes us into...

It was Thoreau who said that “the masses of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The characters at the center of Daniel Handler’s new adult novel   We Are Pirates  want very badly to avoid that fate.  And yet, they find that sometimes the alternative is even more desperation. My conversation with Daniel Handler: Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

Fifty-five years ago Joseph Heller gave us the paradox of Catch 22.  It came to mean a set of contradictory ideas and rules that conflicted with themselves. And while Catch 22 remains a cornerstone of American literature, it also just might be a cornerstone of the Obama Presidency. Barack Obama came to office on a wave of hope and change.  He came to Washington to change it.  Only to realize, that...

It’s been said that if you live to an old age, you give give up all the things that make you want to live to an old age.  At a time when 10,000 boomers a day are reaching retirement age, when the generation that sought to change the world, is being changed by the ravages of age, when the cost of care for this huge generation of seniors could bankrupt us personally and as a nation, it’s time for a...

Can you imagine if immediately after 9/11, filmmakers like Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, Fincher or Apatow would enlist in the military to make films about the war on terror?  Films that would show America at war against its Taliban and Middle East enemies.  Well with  the exception of Clint Eastwood, that's pretty hard to imagine. Yet in WWII, that's exactly what happened.  Filmmakers John Ford,...

How many times have you heard someone say that they were of two minds on a particular subject?  What they were in fact reflecting and acknowledging, is the idea that we are literally of two minds. That the left and right hemispheres of the brain represent different and sometimes independent parts of the whole.  Discovering this, understanding the foundations of cognitive neuroscience, how the brai...

How many of you have ever left the house, gotten half way to your destination and were convinced that you had left the oven on, or left the door open, even though the rational side of you knew you had not?  The more you tried to think about it, the more you became obsessed. Until you had no choice but to turn back, go home and find that yes, the oven was off, or the door was closed.  Then imagine...

For the ten million or so people that saw Fifty Shades of Grey this past weekend, or the many more millions who read the books, in a way what they were doing is trying to understand touch.  The complex ways in which our bodies and our brains process pleasure and pain. Why childhood development is so crucial to that process and the ways in which touch shapes our sexuality,  our cooperation, our wel...

There is a principle in physics known as the uncertainty principle.  the idea simplified is that it’s impossible to observe or measure certain phenomenon without having an impact on that which is being observed or measured. In many ways we might look for the same impacts among those that give us the images of war and disaster. What do these images tell us about sufferings of people in faraway plac...

Back in the early 1960’s, in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, the world took note of the decadence of life in the Italian capital of Rome.  Inspired by two major political/sex scandals of the era, the film which would win the 1960 Palme d'or in Cannes, depicted a Rome that was ultra sophisticated, ultra modern, ultra decadent and ultra cool. Fifty plus years later,  Rome is kind of  antidote to America.  ...

Short Stories, films ,novels and performance art.  Over the years we’ve spoken to many guest that do some of these things, at the top of their profession.  However,  Miranda July has done them all and all of them exceedingly well  Her collection of short stories, NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU won numerous awards and has been published in 23 countries. Her film,  ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW...

We often throw terms around in our political and geopolitical debates like capitalist, and communist, and oligarch, and class divide.  But very few who use these hot button terms truly understand the deep essence of what they really mean. One of those that does understand is Bill Browder. He rebelled against communism as a teenager, became of capitalist and then made millions in Putin’s Russia.  W...

It was Woody Allen who said that “marriage was the end of hope.”  We know from the behavior of millennials today that while they strongly favor equality of marriage, they are not to keen on the institution for themselves. Arguably marriage today, like so much in our society, is undergoing a transition and even disruption.  Marriage today is certainly not your parents marriage….but is it maybe your...

If any one issue has dominated both our international and domestic dialogue it is the subject of energy.  A developed and developing world, with every increasing energy needs and, in spite of the current glut, not an endless supply of oil. Enter alternative energy...wind, solar and the battery.  If only we could prefect the later. With range anxiety for electric cars, computer anxiety on long flig...

It is often said that to name something is to understand it.  If that’s true, than Scott Stossel has a greater understanding of anxiety than anyone else.  In his book, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind , he takes us through the litany of his multiple anxieties and treatments.  In so doing, we come away with a far greater understanding of and sympathy for the an...

Why is it that certain cultural and/or ethnic groups tend to have successes, far in excess of their percentage of the population?  Jews, Indians, Iranians, Chinese, Mormons, and a few others. These groups are simply more financially and academically successful than others in the US. And while hearing this, often sends powerful signals to our racial antenna, the fact is that if we can answer the qu...