Talk Cocktail

Today we have talking heads and pundits.  But back in second half of the 20th century we had writers and public intellectuals, whose ideas, attitudes and personalities became a part of our public discourse. Gore Vidal was one of those.  He wrote about history, about sex, about politics and sometimes all at once.  He wrote non-fiction, novels, movies, and was the guest you wanted to have at a dinne...

The world is a dangerous place.  We no longer have the moral clarity and security of the cold war, or of earlier wars where we knew precisely who our enemy were.  Today, as non state actors battle nations and each other, the asymmetry of conflict has created new opportunities for paid armies, and for mercenaries on all sides. Just as we outsource call centers and the delivery of packages, today we...

It is one of the tragic ironies of the psychoanalytic age that we are attracted to people, particularly our partners, who often turn out to be the very ones that begin to repel us later in life. At first, its those once endearing and now annoying habits. And then, it becomes annoyance at their larger world view. Perhaps it's because in partnering, we seek to make up for those things that we are la...

Imagine a machine that can rewire itself, finds its own way to work around non working circuits, heal its own bugs and viruses, find and adapt to new sources of energy and know when it needs repair and attention. No, it’s not the latest product from Silicon Valley, it is the human brain.  The recent discoveries about the brains ability to adapt,  its neuroplasticity, have truly redefined how we im...

Sometimes the reality of war is just too complex and absurd to be understood in real time.  Perhaps that why books about war are so powerful and important.  That’s why novels like  Catch 22, Slaughterhouse 5, The Things they Carried, A Rumor of War, and The Yellow Birds, have been essential for our understating. Equally important to our understand is grasping the impact of PTSD on those who served...

As music and the music business evolves today, the content of the music often plays second fiddle to the debate about economics.   About digital royalties, performance royalties, Pandora, Spotify, etc.  In many way the medium impacts the message, the songs we hear and what gets produced and what becomes popular. And why not?  After all, it is the music business!  In fact, it always has been a busi...

Revolutions are hard AND exciting. They combine courage and new ideas and the excitement of once in a generation change. However what’s even harder, is what comes next. The way in which the apogee of a moment of revolutionary fervor sticks and is translated into changes in government and in bureaucratic institutions. And perhaps most importantly, the way in which the multilateral ideas of the dive...

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, defines personality as “an unbroken series of successful gestures.”  Certainly that is the outer manifestation.  But science, brain research and  cutting edge psychology tells us that it's all part of a much more complex overall system.  A system that shapes our lives, our identities and our emotions.  It's a system that determines that the way in which we...

American political history is a complex and dynamic process.  In that process, there have been periods of entropy and period of great progress and imagination.  Both have been a function of a political system designed by our founders.  But also, the temper and tenor of the times and the degree to which individual leaders have known how to work those levers of power has also shaped our political de...

So many of the weaknesses of our media today are blamed on the digital revolution.  Certainly the transition to digital has rendered change.  But to a large extent those changes only magnify some of the fundamental flaws that afflicted American media as it evolved in the 20th century The weakening of regulation, the increased power of the free market to shape coverage of news and the increasing co...

Our nation was founded in opposition to dynasty.   From the push back to George III, to our concerns about another Bush/Clinton Presidential race, Americans have always been suspicious of the dynastic impulse. Yet today, we seem to be smothered in a dynasty of the elites.  Even while the politics of the fringes gets all the media attention, the centers of power in both political parties seem fixed...

Just as we demand a lot from our political leaders today, we also demand a lot from CEOs. Even if they are not founders,  they need to be telegenic, charismatic, visionary, have a detailed plan, and adept at working the politics of the boardroom.   They need to be comfortable in being a part of the one percent, have media coaches and PR people and be on a short leash from  quarter to quarter. Toda...

We live in an age in which everything has become politicized.  The coffee we drink, the food we eat, the shows and movies we watch, and the cars we buy,all seem to convey some kind of political message. Where once these things represented class, or taste, or education, today it’s all about politics.  Even in non-partisan races, political ideology becomes the central issue. So what impact does this...

The industrial revolution changed the world.  It changed the nature of work, it displaced workers, it ushered in the Gilded Age and created more inequality.  It shrank the world, drove consumerism, and reshaped political ideology. The Internet revolution, 150 years later, has had  startling  similar effects.  We worship at the altar of creative destruction, we fetishize technology and the freedom...

Long before radio, I spent years in Hollywood.  This was just as the Word Processor and the high volume copy machine were taking hold.  When those things came along, everyone joked that screenwriting software and easy access to copying machines would lower the quality of screenplays.  Little did those jokesters know, that was just the beginning. Not only did the medium become the message, it subsu...

It was Churchill who said that when the present sits in judgment of the past, we loose the future.  Obviously not the attitude of memoirists. But also not the attitude of someone who looks back on the totality of one's life and tries to understand who they are and where they came from.   Barbara Ehrenreich discovered, late in life, a journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence. She writ...

When something goes wrong with a car or an appliance, or even the human body, the “instructions” for repair are often clear. However my guest argues that the manual that tries to define the parameters and terms of mental illness, is without that kind of scientific basis. He says that even an auto repair manual, much less a biology textbook, has more science than the DMS 5 Yet with the fifth volume...

What might our knowledge of history be like if snapchat had been around in earlier centuries? The good news is that it wasn’t.  In a time when people wrote letters, not texts or emails, those letters got saved and later curated.  Letters that give us little glimpses into personalities, history and the human condition at another time, in another place. Shawn Usher, has devoted himself to being a cu...

Remembering the early days of the cell of phone, we all remember, “can you hear me now.”  For most of us this was modern nuisance.  But for some, those that are hearing impaired, or profoundly deaf, those words have far greater meaning.   While much progress has been made in the technology, treatment and study of deafness, we are just beginning to understand the broader implications, with respect...

What would it take for you to give up your Western lifestyle, move to Ghana, live in a mud hut and commit yourself to helping thousands of lost children? You would think that this kind of thing only happens in the movies, or in literature. That real lives are generally not a kind of fairy tail. Not true.  Lisa Lovatt-Smith did exactly that.  She traded in her glamorous life in Paris and a glamorou...

To achieve proficiency in a new language late in life is near impossible.  But suppose you didn’t just want to learn the language, you wanted total immersion.  You wanted to learn the culture, the origins of the language, to become one with the language.  That’s what my guest William Alexander set out to do with French. He wanted to be French and language was simply the vessel. But even with that...

It used to be that the classroom prepared you for a career.  Today your lifetime career is a classroom, where you must be continuously learning.  In doing so, the horizons open up and opportunities abound. The traditional straightjacket of education and career have been, like most things, disrupted. In it’s place, possibility and creative destruction.. Along with this comes a whole new way of doin...

One of the foundations of the changing nature of education, is the idea of deeper learning.  Direct, hands on mastery of content, though solving real world problems in a collaborative way. This has created dramatic results in all academic areas. But it’s also something that can take place right at home.  That’s what best selling author Mark Kurlansky did with his daughter Talia.  They combined cul...

To dream the impossible dream has been the great engine of progress in the world.  From the early explorers, to scientists and engineers, to man's quest to explore the planets.  The story of exploration is the story of mankind.   When John Kennedy laid down the predicate of reaching the moon by the end of a decade, he defined for the whole county that kind of clear goal that also drives individual...

Conventional wisdom has long held that we live in a vast and indeed expanding universe, in which we humans are but a seemingly small and insignificant part.   But in that classic view, are we not giving ourselves enough credit? Perhaps we are more unique than we think.  Perhaps we are not all that ordinary, on a not so ordinary rock in the vast cosmos.   Just maybe, that classic view, needs to be...