Talk Cocktail

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, genetics and biological evolution itself, scientists and engineers find news ways to enhance innate athletic ability.
It’s no accident that story abounded recently about how the newly minted World Champion SF Giants, had hired a sleep expert to advise them when it was best to travel.
So what’s going on now, and where will it all lead?  That's what Wired editor Mark Mcclusky set out to discover in his new book Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes--and What We Can Learn from Them.
My conversation with Mark McClusky:

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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:

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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 feature is an all access pass into the private world of authors, as they reflect on their work habits, reading preferences, inspirations, and recommendations.
Now she brings together sixty-five of these exchanges, in their uncut and original form in By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review.
My conversation with Pamela Paul:

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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 appreciate the diversity of humanity in our current world.
That's what Mark Fine has done in looking back at apartheid in South Africa in the late 1970's. He tells this story in The Zebra Affaire.
My conversation with Mark Fine:

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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 literature as a form of creative engagement, of social discourse and as an element of citizenship.
How we got here and what it might mean for the future is part of the backdrop of Azar Nafisi’s new work The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books.
My conversation with Azar Nafisi:

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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 embarrassed even the Keystone Cops.
Kathryn Miles, in Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy, dives deep into Sandy.  What she tells us could, if we pay attention, save a lot of lives in the future.
My conversation with Kathryn Miles:

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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 their biological destiny.  
And while today, we look at The Pill and birth control as the norm, the efforts to develop and market it were anything but normal.   In a time now when we think that an App on our phone can change the world, it’s worth looking back at something that truly did. That's what Jonathan Eig has done in The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution.
My conversation with Jonathan Eig:

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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 Latino population in America and it’s ever larger and growing role in the politics of the nation.
My guest Joan Biskupic tells that story in Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor and the Politics of Justice
My conversation with Joan Biskupic:

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Today, as we look around the world, it sometimes seems to be spinning out of control. It feels like a time, to quote Yates, when the falcon cannot hear the falconer, when the best lack all conviction and the worst seem full of passionate intensity.
Does the fault lie in the vagaries of human nature, or in our leaders and institutions?  The answer is that both are intimately linked in ways that, when fully understood, explain the essence of how the world works.
This is the journey that Francis Fukuyama takes us on in his two volume masterwork on political order.  He has just published the second volume, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy.
My conversation with Francis Fukuyama:

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For a while now technology has seemed to focus on only one aspect or another of  information.  Everything from Google to Facebook, to Instagram, to all aspects of the sharing economy are essentially all about trying to achieve perfect information.
Slowly the emphasis is beginning to shift.  Now voice recognition,  robots, drones and a renewed interest in artificial intelligence are all pointing to a new technological direction.
Just as we’ve had to readjust to the creative destruction and social shifting of the information economy, now the the automation or AI economy is upon us.  What will it change?  How will it reshape the social contract and perhaps most of all, how will it reshape the nature of work? 
Nicholas Carr, the best selling author of THE SHALLOWS, and THE BIG SWITCH turns his attention to this future in his new book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
My conversation with Nicholas Carr:

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