Talk Cocktail

Winston Churchill one refereed to the former Soviet Union as an enigma, wrapped in "a riddle, surrounded by mystery." Much the same might be said about the Vatican.  A large bureaucracy, competing political interests, the potential and reality of scandal and cover up.

John Thavis, has spent almost 30 years covering the Vatican. He walked the hallowed halls, was one of the "boys on the bus" on the papal plane and understands both the human and spiritual side of this seemingly monolithic and often flawed institution.

Now free of daily reporting, he allows himself to look back in The Vatican Diaries: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Power, Personalities, and Politics at the Heart of the Catholic Church.

My conversation with John Thavis:

As a 26 year old reporter covering the Nixon campaign in l968, Joe McGinniss would go on to write one of the seminal works of political reporting.  The Selling of the President 1968 would portray the next level of media in politics.  If the televised Nixon/Kennedy debate set the stage, the 1968 Nixon campaign and the work of a young Roger Ailes, as reported by McGinniss', would be main event.

McGinness would go on to write about many other controversial characters, both in the annals of politics and true crime.  His reporting on Jeffery McDonald and his battles with Janet Malcolm would put him at the center of a media and literary storm.  His last political work, a look deep inside the shallowness of Sarah Palin, would be fitting capstone for his political reporting.

Over the years, I spoke to McGinniss several times.  Here are the two most recent.  His look at Palin and his story Never Enough that captured the dark heart of modern family greed and averse.

Never Enough11/2/2007

The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin10/10/2011

Just like in The Wizard of Oz, sometimes it seems that events, coincides and serendipitous good fortune happen as part of a grand plan.  Later we think that it’s the the result of a great and powerful force pulling the ropes and levers.  Only much later do we discover that events happen on their own, and it’s only in a dream, driven by our penchant to find order and connection, that the events are tied together.

For many of us this happens all the time.  Thinking about an old friend who suddenly shows up or gets in touch, or a near miss of an accident that feels like an invisible hand saved us, or  finding something from the distant past at precisely the moment we need it.  

All of these are examples of the The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day. And now, thanks to David J. Hand, we have a new and much clearer understanding of why it works.

My conversation with David Hand:

Some people have jobs that are often very disconnected from everyday life. But Daniel Jones’ job is a form of daily life incarnate.  As the long time editor of the Modern Love column in The Sunday New York Times Magazine, since 2004 Jones is perhaps the reigning expert on love, relationships and why we all “need the eggs.”

If hundreds of years from now, an alien civilizations wanted to find out about the mating habits of humans, they could do no better than to look at Jones new book Love Illuminated: Exploring Life's Most Mystifying Subject (with the Help of 50,000 Strangers). My conversation with Daniel Jones:

I think we can all stipulate that we continue to witness growing income inequality in America.  Class mobility is at an all time low and if we don’t begin to address the problem, the consequences for American democracy will be severe.

But even if we embrace the problem, how to we begin to solve it?  Programs, including taxes to create any kind of redistributive fairness, are a non starter in Washington and in Statehouses everywhere.  So where do we begin?

UC Irvine Professor Greg Duncan and Harvard economist Richard Murnane argue in their book Restoring Opportunity: The Crisis of Inequality and the Challenge for American Education,that the answer actually may be right in our schools.  That only education can level the economic playing field.

My conversation with Greg Duncan & Richard Murnane:

Most of you know that the mad prophet the airwaves was Howard Beale. The very idea that we can listen to a clip from Network, made 38 years ago, and its sounds as relevant as if it were written yesterday, speaks to the genius of Paddy Chayefsky's script, and the serendipity of the movie and its production.

The movie was at once spot on in its portrayal of its moment in time and prescient about something as big and hard to hold on to as the television and the media landscape.  It is truly a movie for the ages.

Not to put down other efforts, but look at Network in the context of the simplicity and gloss of contemporary movies, and you begin to understand why we are still talking about Network today.We’re also talking about it because Dave Itzkoff, culture reporter at the New York Times, has written the definitive behind the scenes story of this iconic film, Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies.

My conversation with Dave Itzkoff

When we think about the cutting edge of technology, our thoughts usually turn to Silicon Valley, or to other tech centers around the world. When we think about technology and government, we tend to think about failure. The inability of the government to make a simple website work, or the fact that it was a big deal for the current President to get a Blackberry when he came to office, or that most government agencies, including the IRS, don’t function with email. In a funny kind of way, it should make us feel better about the NSA story. Knowing that when it comes to technology, the government is usually the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

However, what if all that changed? If the best and the brightest of technology came to Washington with the intent of controlling or subverting technology? With the resources and power that they have, they could do some real damage.

And so begins the world that Daniel Suarez portrays in his new techno thriller Influx. My conversation with Daniel Suarez:

The recent debate and court challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reminds us of what was the once and future fragility of registering black voters in the south. Back in 1966, a year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, James Meredith, who became the first African American student at University of Mississippi, set out on an almost solitary march from Memphis to Jackson Mississippi to register black voters.

At the end of that march, which started on June 5 1966, the civil rights movement would be forever transformed.  The movement's twin goals of the dream of integration and of nonviolence, would be replaced by black power and impatience.

It's a story that's not as famous as the Selma to Montgomery march a year earlier, but its impact was everlasting and its tensions still relevant today. This is the story that Aram Goudsouzian tells in Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear. My conversation with Aram Goudsouzian:

Years ago the Wall Street Journal ran an ad campaign referring to itself as the “Daily Diary of the American Dream.”  Today, we might say that the barrage of statistical information we get about the economy is that kind of diary.  Just this morning, we probably all heard the latest GDP numbers.  

But what does it mean and what problem is it solving?  Sometimes it seems there is a kind of “uncertainty principle” at work. In that the process of trying to measure every aspect of the economy and even our politics, actually changes those numbers because it changes the way we see the world.  And since perception is often reality, the daily recitation of these numbers from Washington and Wall Street actually creates its own unreal reality.

Zachary Karabell in his new book  The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World gives us a random walk though these numbers that often rule our lives, but mean very little.

My conversation with Zachery Karabell:

Amid the violence and upheaval in the Ukraine and the Russian response, a debate has broken out in Washington about the relevance of Cold War strategy. Whether it still should be relevant to viewing Russian actions and geopolitics?

It would be interesting to know what George Kennan might think about it.  He was after all, the architect of America's cold war policy of containment and perhaps our greatest political and diplomatic strategist with respect to the Russia and the former Soviet Empire.  

He was both a man of letters and a man of action. But his views, on domestic politics, and on modernity were far less prescient and far out of step with the changes taking place in America.  In short, he was a complex man, the likes of which we seldom see in public life today.

He also kept a diary for almost 90 of this 101 years.  University of Connecticut  historian Frank Costigliola has edited those diaries into The Kennan Diaries.

My conversation with Frank Costigliola: