Talk Cocktail

We worry about too big to fail.  Yet bank losses pale in comparison to the degree to which the National Football League, has been too big to tell the truth.  Its denials have seemingly directly resulted in the death of NFL players.  Even worse, it has created untold dangers to young kids playing football, because their parents believed the leagues denials about the risk of brain injury coming from concussion and repetitive head trauma.  When seen in its totality, it’s  hard to deny that this ten billion dollar Park Avenue business, that is the NFL, does not have blood on its hands.

We’ve all heard the debate questioning the impacts of repeated concussions and head trauma on NFL players. But the facts are are not up for debate.  This is not a case where the cover up is worse than the crime.  For the NFL, the cover up is the crime.

Two of the top investigative journalists, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru look inside twenty years of denial on the part of the NFL in their book and Frontline documentary League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth.

My conversation with Mark Fainaru-Wada & Steve Fainaru:

We look at social media today, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, as if it’s something new that could revolutionize the world. In fact, the antecedents of social media define the very evolution of civilization. It is the mass media, newspapers, broadcasting and the one way dissemination of information, of the past two hundred years, that is the exception, not the rule. Today, the sum of all of our technology actually takes us back to our roots, as a more social and interconnected society.

Tom Standage, the digital editor of the Economist gives us historical context for social media and shows how it perfectly echoes past centuries, in his new book Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years. My conversation with Tom Standage:

We all remember, or have learned about, FDR telling the nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  In fact, it along with a clip from The Kings Speech is being used in a commercial for a new technology that might help us overcome, what is considered everyone's worst fear, that of public speaking.  

Perhaps we remember Woody Allen fearing that the universe was expanding, and how that seemed  like a good enough reason to skip school, in 50’s era Brooklyn.

The country is on the brink of disaster because we have elected officials who are afraid of voters, and most of all, afraid of not being reelected.

The bottom line is that in a macro world view, or in the intimacy of our personal lives, fear is a powerful motivator. But what would happen, how would the world change, how would we change, if we could mitigate or eliminate that fear.

That's what  Patty Chang Anchor set out to find in Some Nerve: Lessons Learned While Becoming Brave

My conversation with Patty Chang Anker:

Edwidge Danticat's new novel, Claire of the Sea Light is set in a small seaside town in Haiti where a little girl, the daughter of a fisherman, has gone missing. Claire's  mother died in childbirth, and her father wonders if he should give away his young daughter to a local shopkeeper who could give Claire a better life. Before he can make his decision, she disappears.

Every hour of every day, parents and children separate so that the child might have a better life.  It’s not a concept that comes easy to understanding in the West.  Edwidge Danticat, gives us a strong understanding that love means sometimes having to say goodbye.

My conversation with Edwedge Danticat:

In 1982, at the height of the feminist movement, Helen Gurley Brown, published a book entitled Having It All, love, success, sex and money.  A popular TV movie of the time, was also entitled Having  it All and had Dyan Cannon  with a high powered job on both coasts. Oprah has said that women can have it all, but not all at once.  And now 31 years after Helen Gurley Brown's book, the debate still rages on.  Sheryl Sandberg has recently talked about the efforts of woman in the workplace, and now Debora Spar, the President of Barnard College, in her book Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection, takes a fresh look of what is possible and and not for the woman of the 21st century.My conversation with Debora Spar:

While talk of sex is all around us, the fact is that  the origins of our reproductive lives are still a mystery.  And while 50 years ago Masters and Johnson set out to try and find the science of sex, much has transpired since in our understanding of science, and evolutionary biology.In his new book  How We Do It: The Evolution and Future of Human Reproduction Field Museum of Natural History curator Robert Martin draws on 40 years of research in biological anthropology to locate the roots of everything from our sex cells to the way we care for newborns. He examines the procreative history of humans, as well as that of our primate kin. His findings are a constant surprise.My conversation with Robert Martin:

Although the provenance is somewhat sketchy, it has often been said that show business is High School with money.  The point being that the battles, the cliques, the backstabbing, and yes even the deal making that consume Hollywood, are often the same skill sets that are required for a successful High School career.Journalist Michael Sokolove has found another more important link:  A group of High School students and a remarkable teacher who turns it all around and brings the positive things of show business to High School.  A sense of participation, an appreciation for narrative and story, a kinship in a bigger cause and a need to reach deep inside ourselves to do good work.  If only we all had that teacher.Michael Sokolove did!  And he returned to his High School in Levittown, PA to tell us the story of Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater.My conversation with Michael Sokolove:

Spies and covert agents are, by their very nature required to live lives of secrecy.  So when some spies, for whatever complicated reasons, become household names like Aldrich Ames, Kim Philby, or Robert Hanssen, it's a big deal. In 2003, the outing of  covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, by columnist Robert Novak, brought an end of her CIA career. But it also brought all of us, in ways not seen since the Cold War,  into better harmony with the symbiotic relationship that exists between politics, espionage, and government bureaucracy.The outing of Plame triggered a political scandal that would truly make her, the spy who came in from the cold. Now 10 years later, Valerie Plame is back, but this times masquerading as Vanessa Pierson, in her novel BlowbackMy conversation with Valerie Plame:

Our founding fathers created a system of government that respected opposing points of view and was designed to work even across differences. Throughout most of American history it has worked.  One time it did not was in 1861, when Abraham Lincoln, said the following: “What is our present condition? We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum." After the Civil War and for 150 years the system worked.  Today we are in danger of what Lincoln called “the end of us.”Perhaps it is ideal to look into contemporary history for what was perhaps the last time that our system of government worked as it was intended.  That would be in the 1980’s.  It was in part the personalities of people like Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil and it was also a different time and a different context.  Chris Matthews is one of our keenest political observers. He sorts through it all in his new book Tip and the Gipper: When Politics WorkedMy conversation with Chris Matthews:

From the days of Caligula, right on through to the Clinton's, the role of First Ladies has always been complex, political and sometimes exotic.  What’s interesting is how often we ignore the role of First Ladies, in nations other than our own. In fact, they have often played a key roles in determining US foreign policy.Perhaps nowhere has this been more true than in Vietnam in the early 1960's.  There, Madame Nhu, the young and glamours First Lady of South Vietnam, would play a key role in one of the darkest chapters of American history. Her perception has the Dragon Lady  only added to the US decision to support the coup that would topple the South Vietnamese government, in 1963.  Her husband and brother in law were murdered and the war in Vietnam would be forever escalated.For years no one really knew had happened to Madame Nhu. That is, until Monique Brinson Demery would dedicated herself to Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam's Madame NhuMy conversation with Monique Brinson Demery: