Talk Cocktail

T.S. Eliot may have had the best take on trying to understand the world when he said   that,  “we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”  Perhaps that is even more true today, as some places in the world are ever changing and that with each visit we need to see and understand them anew.  

Haroon Ullah is a Pakistani American scholar and diplomat.   In The Bargain from the Bazaar: A Family's Day of Reckoning in Lahore, he gives us a picture of a slice of Pakistan today.  A county both a key part of and deeply removed from the world.

In fact in that contradiction lies the very reason we need to understand Pakistan. It has the power to upend the world even while it and its people try desperately to find a place in it.

My conversation with Haroon Ullah:

Years ago I was having dinner with a friend and a friend of hers, who was a member of the Joffrey Ballet.  I asked this young woman, how is was that she became a professional ballerina?  Her answer still sticks with me.  She said that she started at six taking ballet classes, like every other young girl.  The difference is, she never stopped.

What stuck with me is the idea, and we see it in so many endeavors, that at six or seven, we already embody the passions that will guide us, the rest of our lives.  

Jenifer Ringer knew at the age of ten that her destiny was the Ballet.  At twelve, she entered the Washington School of Ballet in DC.  At fourteen, she entered the School of American Ballet in New York and became a member of the NYC ballet at sixteen.  

After a long and complex career, she rose to become the principal dancer of the NYC ballet and recently retired from that company. She tells her story of grit, determination and cultural images and her expectations in Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet.

My conversation with Jenifer Ringer:

William James talked about “the bitch goddess success,” and the strange sacrifices that it takes from us.  Today, the same might be said of the pursuit of fame.  Whether it’s thousands of “Likes” on Facebook, millions of Twitter followers, ones own reality show, or simply 24/7 adulation, today fame is both the holy grail and the ultimate aphrodisiac.

But think how sad it would be to achieve fame, only after you're gone.  The idea of posthumous success is what drives Richard Vetere new novel The Writers Afterlife

My conversation with Richard Vetere:

Ever since the Iranian hostage crisis in November of 1979, political and diplomatic relations between the US and Iran have been irreparably ruptured.  Thirty years later, three young Americans would be hiking near the Iraq / Iran border.  They would be captured, accused of espionage, transferred to Iran's most notorious prison and held, sometimes for long periods in solitary confinement.

Their story is a cautionary reminder of the complexities of politics in the Middle East and most importantly of the  human face of news stories from the region that have, after 30+ years, and all that has transpired during that time, had an almost  numbing effect. But there is nothing numbing about the story of Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal & Sarah Shourd.  They tell their full story, for the first time in A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran

My conversation with Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal & Sarah Shourd:

We all know the equation E=MC2.  We’ve all read about Einstein's theory of general relativity.  But how many of us know what it means, how it came to be and how relevant it might be today, one-hundred years after it was put forth.

Much has been written about Einstein, but Pedro Ferreira in The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity gives us a real biography of general relativity and explains why we should still care.

My conversation with Pedro Ferreira:

Today, virtually everything in society has become atomized by the left/right, red/blue debate.  Whether it’s culture, entertainment, politics, sports, science and health,  all are shaped by how we see the liberal vs. conservative divide.  

But rarely do we stop to try and understand the roots of all of this.  Where did these terms come from, who were their intellectual fathers and how has their meaning morphed over decades and even centuries?

Conservative political analyst, and journalist Yuval Levin puts all of this in far greater perspective, in his new book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left.

My conversation with Yuval Levin:

We all intuitively know that the greatest gift we can get today, is the gift of time.  We just don’t have enough.   The pressures and stresses of work, parenthood, family and personal commitments pull us in multiple directions, all the time.

The technology that was supposed to free us up and make us more efficient, has become a kind of parolee ankle bracelet tying us down even more. Societal expectations of what it means to be a good parent or to lean in at work, add yet another layer to the demands.

Public policy doesn't necessarily help and sometimes it appears that our whole operating system of work and play, was designed for a mid 20th century world, when we are having to operate in the 21st century. The result is that often times we just, not unlike our computers, time out.  

But how did we get here and what do we do about it?  That’s the lens that Washington Post reporter Brigid Schulte looks though in her new book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time.

My conversation with Brigid Schulte:

We spend a lot of time talking about technological change. The impact that everything from our phones and the Internet to self driving cars are having on the way we live.  The fact is, the single greatest factor in changing the way we live, may be the demographic changes shifting right in our neighborhoods and workplaces.  

Boomers are, not so gracefully, aging out and retiring.  Millennials are trying to find and take their place in the world and, as many of the ads during the Superbowl showed us, we look different as a nation; our values and what constitutes a family are all changing rapidly.

This would all be just very interesting were it not for the fact that policy makers are literally ignoring these changes.  Be it entitlements, transportation, education, or health care, leaders in Washington and in Statehouse often act like these changes just aren't happening, or somehow they will just go away.  They won't.  Business knows it.  We know it.  The question is what do we need to do?

Pew Research, Executive Vice President, Paul Taylor gives us a look into The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown.

My conversation with Paul Taylor:

Someone once referred to advice, as sanctioned nagging.  It’s cute, but the fact is that we get advice all the time. Some of it is valuable, much of it useless.   But do we miss the value of the good advice by our defensiveness, by our pre programmed fight or flight response and simply our reflexive shutting down in the face of criticism?

Performance reviews, student conferences, even the old standby the report card, are all part of our feedback loop.  It’s all around us.

Those giving the feedback are often told that  it’s a skill, that there is an art and science to giving good advice.  But is the opposite true?   Is there also an art and skill in getting feedback?  Can we all make the process a whole lot more worthwhile by understanding how to maximize being on the receiving end? Doug Stone and Sheila Heen think so and they make their case in Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. My conversation with Doug Stone & Sheila Heen:

In this age of startups, creative destruction, public companies and activist investors, it's hard to imagine the idea of creating a huge industrial empire, run by successive generations of family

Few empires exemplify this better than the history of Anheuser-Busch.  From its Germanic roots in St. Louis, it’s a story of all that is American culture, good and bad.  Ambition, philandering divorce, substance abuse, violence, family feuds, all washed down with a beer.

It’s a saga of an American family and an American beer, told by longtime LA Times reporter William Knoedelseder in Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer.

My conversation with William Knoedelseder: