Talk Cocktail

We are often quick to use the term “cultural phenomenon.”  Through the back lens of history though,  few things truly are. Yet fifty years ago we experienced something that lives up to that idea.  By now we’ve all been regaled by memories of the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan show fifty year ago last week.

But with that as the backdrop, what is the larger cultural significance? Perhaps it's fair to say that the Beatles transformed music, pop culture, fashion, and movies.  They  also created something we rarely see today.  A cultural experience that brought the entire nation together in one shared set of emotions.

Penelope Rowlands was there, literally on the barricades.  Now in The Beatles Are Here!: 50 Years after the Band Arrived in America, Writers, Musicians & Other Fans Remember, she’s culled some of the most interesting retrospective thoughts of today, trying to examine Beatlemania then, and even what it might mean for us 2014.

My conversation with Penelope Rowlands:

Great powers ebb and flow.  A random walk through history shows the Turks, the Germans, the British, the Japanese, the Spanish have all, at one time, shaped geopolitics.  For most of the past century, America has stood atop the world.  Now China, after three amazing decades of internal growth, is looking to secure its place in the world.  

But is geopolitics a zero sum game?  Does American influence have to wane in order for China to expand?  Can China effectively shape and use its economic growth to expand its sphere of influence in Asia and Africa and as it does, how should the US respond?

Geoff Dyer, a veteran journalist who’s covered China for years for the Financial Times, examines all of this in The Contest of the Century: The New Era of Competition with China--and How America Can Win.

My conversation with Geoff Dyer:

When FDR became president in 1933 he called for “bold, persistent experimentation.” He believed that it was essential to do something!  This was a far cry from Warren Harding, who  said in 1920, “that any experimentation will add to the confusion.  Our best hope lies in the administration of our proven system.”

Upon assuming the office of President in 1923 Calvin Coolidge world take these works very seriously.  He would actually and literally carry out the policies that Harding and Coolidge were elected on.  A policy of NO and of austerity.  It was a far cry from the politics of action what characterizes our modern presidency. 

What it wrought for the nation is still being debated today.  Amity Shlaes gives us a new take on all of it, in her new biography of Coolidge

My conversation with Amity Shlaes:

America has long gotten itself involved in civil wars around the world.  In Korea, Vietnam, Spain, on the African continent and more recently in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Syria.  It should not be surprising then to realize that other nations were engaged in the outcome of America's Civil War and that it provided Lincoln ample opportunity to engage in foreign affairs.

We think of Lincoln as our domestic president. Lincoln saving the union so that this nation would not perish.  But he also straddled the world during what might be called America's first age of globalization.

Kevin Peraino, a veteran Newsweek journalist looks at this side of Lincoln in Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power.

My conversation with Kevin Peraino:

We look to technology as the panacea to solve so many of today's problems. Yet we fear technology. When it goes wrong, like stealing our credit card information, or not allowing easy access to a government website, we get angry. Clearly, our emotional nexus with technology is out of balance with our intellectual understanding of it. The price we pay is fear, alienation, confusion and a degree of appropriate paranoia.

Few understand this better than bestselling novelist Dr. Robin Cook.  He has used this imbalance to scare the bejesus out of us in his books like Coma, Cure, and Fever.  Now in his latest work, Cell, he once again walks us through the cost benefit analysis of medical technology falling into the wrong hands.

My conversation with Robin Cook:

Even in the world of physics, celebrity culture often rules.  We’ve all heard about the search for the so called God particle, the Higgs Boson and the large Hadron Collider.

Yet those in the know, in the astrophysics community, have had their eyes focused on another subatomic particle, the Neutrino. These may really possess the secrets to the inner workings of the planet and the universe. 

Ray Jayawardhana is one of our leading astrophysicist and in Neutrino Hunters: he looks into this ghostly particle to unlock the secrets of the universe.

My conversation with Ray Jayawardhana:

In just  days the Winter Olympics begin in Russia.  In some respects the world comes to a nation that may be even more repressive than the Moscow of the 1980 Summer Olympics.

While President Putin has released some political prisoners, including two members of the group Pussy Riot, the release itself was a kind of de facto acknowledgement of the corruption and repressiveness of its political and justice system.

Masha Gessen has been  a long time activist journalist in Russia and recently moved to the US in light of Russia’s ongoing crackdown on the LGBT community. In Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, she gives us an up close view of what’s really going on inside Russia.

My conversation with Masha Gessen:

From the founding of the republic and the debates over slavery, until the passage of the Civil Right act in l964, took nearly 200 years.  With respect to the civil right issues of our time, from the Stonewall Riots in 1969, to the President of the United States supporting same sex marriages, took 43 tumultuous years. 

During that time, three generations would engage in the struggle.  A plague would descend upon and become part of the struggle and take the lives of many in the movement.  Public opinion would go from shock and horror to love and acceptance.  As the saying goes, oh what a strange trip it was. 

Sean Strub has been a kind of Zelig of gay rights movement.  He was there at all the key moments, with all the key players.  He was on the ramparts, in the living rooms and hospital rooms and courtrooms along the way.  He now gives us a memoir of his life and of the times we’ve all shared, in his new book Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival.

My conversation with Sean Strub:

John Lennon who wrote that “life is what happens while we're busy making other plans.”  Or as the old Yiddish proverb goes, “man plans and god laughs.” 

Artis Henderson experienced this in the most complex, profound  and sorrowful way.  After altering her own life plan, by surprisingly falling in love with a young soldier, her life would be shattered as his life would be taken in a helicopter crash in Iraq, shortly after they were married.  

She would become what in military parlance is an Unremarried Widow.

My conversation with Artis Henderson:

What are the forces that cause us to continue eating when we know we should stop?  Why has the quality of food that most Americans eat, deteriorated even while more and more healthy choices are available? Why are our children experiencing an epidemic of obesity, and what role does the food industry play in this?

And why, when controlling healthcare costs is supposedly  job one, we allow the epidemic of obesity in America to account for no less than 10% of all of our health care costs?

Is the fault in our food our in ourselves? Dr. Robert Lustig, whose work has focused on the effects of sugar on the central nervous system, shows what's really going on with the food choices we make, in Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease.

My conversation with Dr. Robert Lustig: