Talk Cocktail

The Bay Area is, in many ways, defined by its bridges.  Once famous for their architectural beauty and cutting edge design, the new span of the Bay Bridge  may be equally famous for its faulty construction, inflated costs and mismanagement.While its engineering, politics and construction may have many issues,  few can quarrel with it's design. That design is the work of Donald McDonald, an icon of bridge building throughout the world.  McDonald has over 30 years experience in architectural design, historic rehabilitation, planning, contract administration, and construction management of complex projects. He and his firm are responsible for the design of the just opened Eastern Span of the San FranciscoBay Bridge.My conversation with Donald McDonald:

Whenever there are lists of the greatest and most profound inventions of all time, we almost always hear, among other things, about air conditioning, the internal combustion engine and electric light.  This last one, electric light, has seen to it that vast tracts of human population have never had to experience anything like total darkness.  What impact has that had.  As technology moves so much more rapidly than evolutionary biology, how has that impacted our species.  We’ve all seen the aerial views of the world at at night.  Vast population centers stretching for hundreds of miles, all brightly lit.  At the same time,  our migration to cities continues to create a nighttime culture that is very different than what our ancestors experienced.That's the world that Paul Bogard takes us to in The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light.My conversation with Paul Bogard:

Throughout history we have always looked at technology as a tool to make life easier.  Whether it was a wheel, a shovel, a pencil or today, our smartphones.  Our current technology was in many ways designed and sold to make us more creative.  Instead, in many ways it has made us more fractured and distracted.  But the fault is not in the zeros and ones, but in ourselves.Dr. Alex Pang, a futurist and thought leader in the field of contemplative computing,  believes we have the power to change our relationship to our technology.  He’s written about it in The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul. My conversation with Alex Pang:

History and great historical sweeps are generally not just a series of unfortunate events. Rather, they are part of long connected progression of events, that circle around and become knotted in each other and that have far reaching consequences that last years, decades and sometimes centuries.  It  often seems that, because we seldom learn from such events, that these historical events don’t have a normal half life.Nowhere is this more obvious than in today’s Middle East. A place where today's troubles are often the result of yesterday folly.Might it have been different, if a century ago the British had listened to T.E. Lawrence, the man popularized in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia.  Journalist and author Scott Anderson, lays out the reality of those events that might have changed the world, in his book Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East.My conversation with Scott Anderson:

Given all the accolades that come to San Francisco, from its role in shaping our culture, and its inspiration for Tony Bennett, it’s often hard to believe that there are conflicting views. Recently, the co-founder of a start-up, credit card processing company, who was forced to move to San Francisco by his financiers, took to Medium with a different view.  He said,  “San Francisco! It's the worst. The weather, the people, the cyclists, the dreary architecture and glum landscape... just ugh--why would any sane person want to live in this urine-scented homeless wasteland? Without the skrillions of available venture funding dollar and generous tech tax breaks, it's obvious San Franawful would drift off into an ocean of irrelevance.”This is not the view held by Gary Kamiya, a Bay Area native, and a founder of Salon, who has just written Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco. My conversation with Gary Kamiya:

It has been said, although the origin is uncertain, that there are no atheists in foxholes. The same might be said of prisons.  Particularly prisons in America;  a country that has both a high regard for religion and and an even higher regard for mass incarceration.  Joshua Dubler, in his new book Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison, takes a look at how these ideas might be related and what his microcosm of prison and religion might say, not only about the men he talks to, but about our society at large.My conversation with Joshua Dubler:

Because there is no preparation for the burdens and responsibly of the Presidency, it would take JFK,  almost nine-hundred of his thousand days to reach his apogee.  With the death of his infant son Patrick, as a catalyst, the final 100 days of the Kennedy presidency, which began 50 years ago this month, would become the capstone of Camelot and the defining time of a promised unfulfilled.Kennedy historian Thurston Clark, in JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, takes us deep inside those final 100 days.My conversation with Thurston Clarke:

From the police logs in local newspapers to the Metro sections of major metropolitan dailies, from the pablum of TV drama, to pulp fiction, crime always sells.  But few dramatized it better than Elmore Leonard.  He was the author of 45 crime novels including Cat Chaser, Fifty Two Pickup, Be Cool, Get Shorty, Maximum Bob, Rum Punch, Cuba Libre, Glitz  and Tishomingo Blues. He was an American original, who was one of the earliest to understand the heroes needn't be perfect.  Long before Breaking Bad, or Tony Soprano, he created a series of stories and characters, that blurred the lines between “good” and “bad.”I had the privilege of talking to Leonard several times over the years, the last time in 2004. Here is compendium of some of those conversation:

Who hasn’t sat in endless brainstorming sessions, trying to be creative.  We’re told to think outside the box, to magically conjure up new and different ways of doing things.  Often without structure.  Yet when we look at the history of innovation, we find that there are clearly patterns and techniques that do make a difference.  We find that product after product, innovation after innovation shows very clear methods as to how they were developed.Marketing and innovation professor Drew Boyd has broken these down in a way that essentially enables us to think Inside the Box, to develop a Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results.My conversation with Drew Boyd:

A magical cave, a piece a cheese, a 260 lb man,  a modern journey into a time past, and a new, old understanding of food and life.  Just a few of the elements of Michael Paterniti's new literary work of nonfiction, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of CheeseBeginning in 1991 in a famed deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it’s a story, that like Robert Louis Stevensons’ s definition of wine as “bottled poetry,” resonates with the history and passion that some foods carries with them.My conversation with Michael Paterniti: