Talk Cocktail

During the recent Ebola scare, we were often reminded of the dozens of science fiction thrillers that set the stage for our fears.  From the Andromeda Strain, to World War Z, The Stand and The Hot Zone, to name just a few. Today, the cutting edge of genetic manipulation, often provides the basis for similar fears.  The brave new world of Bioengineering, plays upon our most primal instincts of what...

We live in an ironic age.  The speed of modern communication, juxtaposed with the traditional entrenched problems we face, provides a disconnect that only humor can bridge. Think about it this way. How often has humor engaged us to better understand tragedy?  How long after certain tragedies, do we hear the first joke?  Not out of disrespect, but out of a way to get our arms around something that...

Even amidst the concerns about the impact of cattle on global warming, the disgrace of industrialized farming and slaughterhouses, and the increased worldwide population that has sworn off beef, it’s still very much a part of our diet.   And perhaps it should be.  But is there a better, more sustainable, more humane way to process that beef and bring it to market?  In what too often seems to be wo...

John Wanamaker, the famous department store magnate, once said that he knew that at least half of his advertising budget was wasted.  Problem was, he didn’t know which half.  For anybody that’s in business today, you know how difficult it is making your product or service stand out among the competition and noise of today’s marketplace. It’s a lot tougher than it was for Don Draper. Advertising is...

I can’t even count the number of times that guests on this program have spoken about what’s become known as the Marshmallow Experiments.  In conversations ranging from business, to public policy, to personal psychology, the impact of this experiment in determining self control, executive function, the predilection for addiction and even intelligence, has been profound. Walter Mischel started think...

We live in an information age.  The goal of virtually every App on our phone, and most websites, is perfect information; about the world, about our neighbors, about our friends and about ourselves. So how is it, that with all this information, the world is so much more dangerous.  That secrets are sometimes so much deeper, that bad actors, and even good ones turned bad, can often outsmart, out run...

It was actually Winston Churchill, not Rahm Emanuel who said that we should never let a serious crisis go to waste. A crisis often creates a great opportunity to face, to talk about, and even sometimes to act on issues that had been previously frozen Or, as Donald Rumsfeld once inarticulately put it, “sometimes the only solution to an unsolvable problem, is to create a bigger problem.” But often t...

Someone once remarked that when they saw a snake and a vulture having sex in Washington, and thought it was just business as usual.  Fitzgerald said that he rich were different, because they have more money. Politicians are different, usually because that they have more insecurities The fact is that most politicians and other high profile inhabitants of our nation's capital are just flesh and bloo...

Recently we spoke of the 50 Anniversary of Freedom Summer and the early flowering of the civil rights movement.  Much has been written of the historical roots and narrative of those events. But now Jacqueline Woodson tells her personal story and the larger story of the journey of a movement from the Deep South, to urban core of America.   The story of   Brown Girl Dreaming  is a story made all the...

When we do think about the state or origins of language, we often think about it as something based in the distant past.  But language is very much a living thing, with a direct nexus to our cultural evolution.   The choices we make about the words we use, reflect both our own place in the culture as well as the state of the culture itself. This is all part of the unique work of Princeton Professo...

As we listened to election results last week, the one thing we heard over and over again is the slicing and dicing of the electorate.  Into generations, incomes, ethnicity, etc. Certainly we hear repeatedly about the complexity and challenges of today's multi- generational workplace. With all of this talk about division, it's perhaps worth looking at what might actually unite us.  There is an answ...

In a business environment as data driven as ours is today, it’s not surprising that we don’t view success through the lens that Fitzgerald used to describe Gatsby, who saw his success as “an unbroken series of successful gestures.” Still success to be sustainable and replicable, both personal and professional, has to be more than habit or behavior, or just data.  In a world in which changes take p...

If the past 30 years of television has been about anything, it’s been about specialization.  While ESPN was the leader and Granddaddy of specialty television programming, you can now watch nothing but Sci Fi, or old movies, or cartoons, and of course food. Food programming, like sports has had a cultural impact far beyond the screen. The Food Network, like ESPN, has both shaped our perceptions and...

Throughout history, from Cesar thru Lincoln,  from Archduke Ferdinand and Gandhi through the Kennedys and Malcolm X, a bullet has changed the world. But what’s different when assassination is not a random deranged act, but an instrument of policy.  First, it’s the stuff of movies.  Think about it;  The Manchurian Candidate, Day of the Jackal, Executive Action, Parallax View, to name a few.  Add to...

We are in the midst of a great migration to cities.  The number of farms and people engaged in agriculture continues to decline.  Yet human ingenuity has produced abundant resources of food, through innovation and technology.   Historically, when disaster has struck and we have been threatened as a species, we’ve always seemed to find a way out, particularly with respect to our food supply.  This...

Todays workplace bears very little resemblance to that of our parents.  It’s multi generational nature, its focus on employee empowerment and its reflection of broader changes in society, education and culture, all create a perfect storm that requires whole new skill sets from today’s leaders.   These are the skills that Susan Fowler writes about in Why Motivating People Doesn't Work . . . and Wha...

Back in the early 1960’s the world took note of the decadence of life in the Italian capital of Rome, in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.   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 and ultra decadent. Fifty plus years later, Prof. Roger Friedland would decide to move to Rome...

Almost no aspect of life has not been touched by the forward march of science and technology.  The world of sports is no exception.   When we watch a game, or even multiple games as in the Olympics, we want to see things we’ve never seen before.  The narrative of human performance drives our love of any sport.  And today, science is glad to oblige. As we learn more about the brain, the body, genet...

The Middle East is always ripe with stories.  Unfortunately, few get to the heart of the absurdity of the human condition there.  In much the way that Catch 22 or Mash did for our wartime military, The Hilltop , a new novel by esteemed Israeli writer Assaf Gavron, does for the settlements on the West Bank. My conversation with Assaf Gavron: Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtma...

How many of you have been asked recently to name your favorite or most influential books?  It’s a process that has been all the rage on social media. And while such lists have been around for a long time, perhaps what inspired this current flare up is New York Times Book Review Editor Pamela Paul’s weekly Q & A with authors and journalists in the BY THE BOOK feature in Sunday’s New York Times. The...

The world of historical fiction always plays an interesting role.  On the one hand, it's an entertaining way for us to understand, often from 30k feet, the broad historical sweeps of history. But beyond that, it’s an opportunity for us to see, up close and personal, how conflict, change, stress, fear and intimacy affects the human condition. To see how others act, and to better understand and appr...

Although it doesn’t seem like it in today's world of images and 140 characters, words, stories and literature once moved people and nations and changed the world.  In fact, even in our own nation, the act of reading was once even seen as subversive. Yet it fueled the quest for freedom,  fired up our democracy, and launched a nation. Today that same nation and its discontents, seems to eschew liter...

As we watch day after day, the government response to a potential Ebola crisis, we are reminded of so many mistakes that various government agencies have made in response to other disasters. It hardly fills us with confidence. Katrina, of course, remains in all our minds. And more recently Superstorm Sandy, exactly two years ago, where municipal response, particularly in N.Y. City, would have emba...

There are many legacies of the 1960’s.  The Civil Rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the efforts of women to have reproductive choice. Of these, arguably the reproductive freedom of women has had the most profound, lasting and  global impact. Before the efforts of four mismatched anti establishment characters in the 1960’s, women had, since the days of ancient Egypt, sought to control thei...

When we think about the Supreme Court, and its hushed, hallowed halls, and John Adams dictum that we are a nation of laws and not of men, words that do not often come to mind are  passion, Salsa Dancing, ambition, and people skills.  Yet all of these have been a part of the life and Supreme Court tenure of Sonia Sotomayor.   Her story is not just a legal story, it’s the story of the rise of the La...