Talk Cocktail

Whether you grew up in a big city or a small town, if you moved away and then went back to visit, years later, everything had probably changed.  
It probably triggered a kind of nostalgia that both made everything old new again, and at the same time reminded us that often the best way to go home again, is really in our imagination.
For Avery Corman, returning to the Bronx was not just an exercise in nostalgia, it was also a look at how the world and all of us have changed over the past half century. Corman details he experiences in My Old Neighborhood Remembered: A Memoir
My conversation with Avery Corman:

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History is a funny thing.  Time goes by, books are written  and we think we know all there is to know about a particular time and place.  Yet the complexity we sometimes feel about ourselves and about modern life, is no less true for history.
The true interpretation of motives and events we thought we knew, is always evolving and surprising us.  This it is certainly true with with respect to our own American revolution.  
As we try to understand other revolutions and the yearning for independence in other parts of the world, perhaps we can better understand, when we see more clearly, our own history.
Thomas P. Slaughter has done this for the American Revolution in Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution
My conversation with Thomas P Slaughter:

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We eat candy bars, because it’s a tastier sugar delivery system than just eating sugar granules.  Some smoke cigarettes, because it was once seen as a status form of nicotine delivery.  Chewing tobacco just didn’t have same kind of image.
In many respects, we drink vodka for the same reason. It’s a colorless, odorless, and some argue tasteless alcohol delivery system. Think of it as the alcohol equivalent of soy.  It takes on the flavor of what’s added to it.
Given this, why is it so popular and so lucrative? Why has it become America’s spirit.Journalist Victorino Matus looks deep into the bottle to try and find out how Vodka: How a Colorless, Odorless, Flavorless Spirit Conquered America.
My conversation with Victorino Matus

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A few days ago, The New York Times ran a story about how libraries in New York were helping to provide WiFi in parts of the city.  Obviously the link between libraries and information is long standing. 
But imagine that in the 1930’s, long, long before the world wide wide was even a kernel in the mind of Tim Berners-Lee or others, the idea of interconnected information, of hyperlinks, of understanding the connections between information and ideas and then trying to pull them all together in a patchwork of analog technology.  That’s what Paul Otlay envisioned, way head of his time.  His story, long forgotten and ignored has now come back to life in the work of my guest Alex Wright in Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age.
My conversation with Alex Wright:

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Already 2014 has been a huge year in the freedom to marry movement. Advocates have won 16 out of 16 federal and state court decisions across the country.  Polls show support at an all time high of 59%.  But, although it may seem that way,  this didn’t happen overnight. 
For over 30 years many have been in the trenches carrying the fight.  People like Evan Wolfson, and Bruce Bawer and Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan provided much of the early intellectual heft of the movement.  And then, when it came time for the legal battles to escalate into the federal courts,  one of the most unlikely partnerships in civil-rights history, David Boies and Ted Olson - two of Americas super lawyers, who squared off against each other in Bush v Gore, teamed up to fight California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, — all the way to the Supreme Court.
A year after their victory the have chronicled it, in Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality
My conversation with Ted Olson and David Boies:

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The Supreme Court today is more influential than ever. From Citizens United to the rulings regarding Obamacare and gay marriage, privacy and free speech, the current Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, has has had profound influence.   Yet it remains a mysterious institution. Like Churchill said of the former Soviet Union, it is often a riddle wrapped in an enigma, inside a mystery.
The motivations of the nine men and women who serve for life are often obscure and the internal influences inside the court, are even less transparent. 
What is clear, is that the Roberts’ Court, now almost 10 years old, is developing a personality of its own, even while its individual members very often defy the stereotypical roles that the public often assigns to them. 
Trying to make sense of this monolithic and opaque  institution of men and woman and laws, is Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe in his book Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution.
My conversation with Laurence Tribe:

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The American rate of juvenile incarceration is seven times that of Great Britain, and 18 times that of France. It costs, on average, $88,000 a year to keep a young person locked up — far more than the U.S. spends per child, on education.
To examine that system requires a two fold understanding.  One of the criminal justice system that sends so many young people into these facilities and secondly the nature of the facilities themselves and the public policy decisions that have allowed them to deteriorate to the point where it’s almost certain that young people sent to these facilities will have a dramatically greater chance of adult incarceration.
How bad is the problem, can it be solved with the tools we have, and frankly, in spite of what we say, do we even care enough to do anything about it?
Nell Bernstein has spent years up close and personal in the system.  The story she tells in her new book, Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison, should make us all ashamed.
My conversation with Nell Bernstein:

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How often have we witnessed tragic events and then, not too long thereafter, heard jokes about those events.  What this teaches us is not disrespect, but it continually reminds us that humor is often the only way we can grasp and understand tragedy.  That humor and tragedy are, even as Shakespeare understood, two sides of the very same coin.
In the ability to find the absurdity in life’s misfortune,  we are helped to see the world as it is, not through the lens of a “reality distortion field.”   
Writer and artist Matt Freedman has applied this idea to his own life, his own battle with cancer and graphically details it in his book Relatively Indolent but Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal.
My conversation with Matt Freedman:

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Few phrases get used more today than “creative destruction.”  What it really reflects though, is simply the way in which the world has changed.  Our forefathers, along with the very founders of the country, couldn’t have imaged everyday things like air travel, the interstate highway system, telephones, automobiles or even indoor plumbing.  Much less the internet, the splitting of the atom, or globalization.
So how is it that members of the our third branch of government, the Supreme Court, actually hold contemporary debates about constitutional ideas, in the context of what the founders world was once like?
The answer is Antonin Scalia.  Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1986, Scalia, has had a profound influence, far beyond his decisions and the world of Court conferences.  His ideas about original intent and originalism have taken hold as a real principle of debate.  And that fact alone, may well be his lasting legacy.
As this current court term comes to an end, Law Professor Bruce Allen Murphy tries to understand Scalia in Scalia: A Court of One.
My conversation with Bruce Allen Murphy:

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For centuries theologians have argued about how the sins of the father might fall upon their children.  Freud talked about the need for a father's protection of his children. And Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff showed us how a deceptive father can impact his sons.
As children have to cope today, with so many fathers in prison, for crimes all the way up to murder, it’s almost a public policy concern how this plays out.
But what if a child didn’t know, at least not until his 40’s, that his father was an infamous serial killer who had never been caught or brought to justice?
That’s what Gary Stewart discovered about his father. Stewart came to believe his father was the infamous Zodiac Killer, who stalked Northern California in the late 60’s.
That’s the story that Gary Stewart now shares with the public, in his book The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father . . . and Finding the Zodiac Killer.
My conversation with Gary Stewart:

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