Talk Cocktail

Living in the West, it's easy to forget that one-sixth of the world's population subsists without sustainable sources of food, medical care, or housing. 
More than a billion people around the world are believed to live on a dollar a day... or  less. While the circumstances leading to that sort of poverty are varied and complicated, the situations faced by the planet's poorest are depressingly familiar. 
Now we get an on the ground look at that world, in a new work by Thomas A. Nazario. He is the founder of a nonprofit The Forgotten International, and the author of the vividly reported and beautifully photographed, Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World's Poor.
My conversation with Thomas Nazario:

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Few nations have as long a history of uninterrupted conflict and misunderstanding as the United States and Iran.  The markers along that road are tall.  The US coup that installed the Shah, the hostage crisis, Khobar towers, Lebanon, holocaust denial and the continually failed US efforts to seize opportunities when presented by Iran, have all contributed.
The issue of US/Iranian relations have run through the center of American foreign policy for the past 60 years, through ten successive administrations, Republican and Democrat alike.
Yet with each successive effort or treatment, the disease always threatens to burst out and become full blown. This is where we are once again, in the nuclear talks in Vienna, and in an effort to stabilize Iraq and Syria.  
Are we at a new critical point in this relationship or is it all just another failed effort at rapprochement? Long time Iranian diplomat and now a Professor at Princeton, Seyed Hossein Mousavian thinks there is reason for optimism. He makes his case in Iran and The United States: An Insider's View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace.
My conversation with Seyed Hossein Mousavian:

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Several trends are shaping the world today.  One is immigration and migration.  The mass movement of peoples from rural to urban area and across borders, in search of a better life.
Concurrently, globalization and cultural homogenization are confusing the very idea of national identity.  As the recently concluded World Cup proved, we are deeply committed to our ethnic and geographic identity, and yet it’s all within the context of an increasingly borderless and global world
Inherent in this contradiction lies many issues faced by multi racial Americans and particularly Chinese Americans, torn between two models of success
Eric Liu’s story sits at the epicenter of these ideas. Ideas that form the basis of what we really should be discussing as part of our immigration conversation and what Eric talks about in A Chinaman's Chance: One Family's Journey and the Chinese American Dream.
My conversation with Eric Liu:

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For ten days in March 1971, the Rolling Stones traveled by train and bus to play two shows a night in many of the small theaters and town halls where their careers began. No backstage passes. No security. No sound checks or rehearsals. And only one journalist allowed. That journalist was Robert Greenfield and now, thirty-three years later,  he gives us his first an account of this landmark event, which marked the end of the first chapter of the Stones’ extraordinary career.

Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye: The Rolling Stones on the Road to Exile is also the story of two artists on the precipice of mega stardom, power, and destruction. It was both the best of times and the worst of times for the music business and the end of innocence in music.
My conversation with Robert Greenfield:

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To paraphrase Shakespeare, that fault is not in our food, but in choices we make. Specifically about what we eat, where it comes from and the policy choices that surround it.
There is no questions that we are meat eaters.  But given the forces of big agriculture, and the fast food industry, we have to reassess not the practice of eating meat, but the kinds of meat we choose.  Things like factory farming, antibiotics, and many of the practices of the food industry, seek to undermine those choices.
Patrick Martins, one of the leaders of the sustainable food and slow food movement, sounds a clarion call to these issues in The Carnivore's Manifesto: Eating Well, Eating Responsibly, and Eating Meat
My conversation with Patrick Martins:

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Immigration seems the issue on everyone's mind today.  Yet with all the thinking and all the talking, we forget half the story.  It’s not just about how the receiving country deals with new immigrants, it’s also about the immigrant’s experience and how that experience, especially for young children, will shape their lives, and in turn their contribution to and role in, the greater society of which they become a part.  
When we look at the mass migration to America’s shores at the beginning of the 20th century, we get a glimpse of how that plays out.  
Alex Tizon, came to America from the Philippines.  He would go on to become a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the former Seattle bureau chief for the LA Times and currently teaches at the University of Oregon.  
His memoir of his immigrant experience is Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self
My conversation with Alex Tizon:

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It’s easy to forget that long before the intelligence failures of 9/11, the misinformation about Iraq's WMDs and what has become almost the militarization of the CIA,  the agency had done well as the bulwark of American Intelligence efforts in the Cold War and in helping to define America's place in the world.  
Perhaps there is no better way to look back at that effort, than through the lens of the CIA’s most Zelig like character, Jack Devine.
Devine served eleven Directors of the CIA.  He was there when Allende fell in Chile,  in the effort to aid the Mujahedeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, in the morass of Iran/ Contra, in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, during the Haitian coup in 1991, and he ultimately served as leader of the Directorate of Operations, the nerve center of America’s covert operations worldwide.  He tells his fascinating story in Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story
My conversation with Jack Devine:

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It’s easy to forget that long before the intelligence failures of 9/11, the misinformation about Iraq's WMDs and what has become almost the militarization of the CIA,  the agency had done well as the bulwark of American Intelligence efforts in the Cold War and in helping to define America's place in the world.  
Perhaps there is no better way to look back at that effort, than through the lens of the CIA’s most Zelig like character, Jack Devine.
Devine served eleven Directors of the CIA.  He was there when Allende fell in Chile,  in the effort to aid the Mujahedeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, in the morass of Iran/ Contra, in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, during the Haitian coup in 1991, and he ultimately served as leader of the Directorate of Operations, the nerve center of America’s covert operations worldwide.  He tells his fascinating story in Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story
My conversation with Jack Devine:

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We all know that our system of government is broken.  Mostly we attribute it to bickering and bitter partisanship.  But also, in part, it’s the fault of millions upon millions of pages of rules and regulations that seemingly govern every aspect of our lives. This is true on the local, state and national level.
Many of these rules are well meaning.  They were put in place to address a problem, or right a wrong or fix an imbalance, but the process has gotten out of hand and hardly kept pace with the progress of the world around them.  What we have now, not only stifles innovation, it increases cost and runs counter to some of of our most cherished principles and ideas as to what our country is about. Philip K. Howard, the author of The Death of Common Sense, takes a look at all of these rules in The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government.
My conversation with Philip K. Howard:

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Back in the last 1960’s there was a very famous ad campaign that asked, What Becomes a Legend Most?  In fact, the real answer to that question is not the fur coat that was advertised, but really, it’s for a real legend to have a good biographer.
John Wayne certainly fits the role of a legend.  Wayne's is a story filled with contradiction, misinformation and of course the conflating of fact and fiction.  Today, 35 years after his death, Wayne is still a bit of a mystery, even while still one of America's favorite movie stars.
What was it about Wayne, his image, his life and his movies, that interconnected so perfectly with his time and his country.
Scott Eyman, who previously has written about John Ford, turns his focus to Wayne in a new biography John Wayne: The Life and Legend
My conversation with Scott Eyman:

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