Talk Cocktail

It’s no surprise that the world financial markets are shrouded in secrecy.  We don’t need a whistleblower to tell us that.  But in an age in which what happens in Greece or China or Singapore can have ripple effects in financial markets around the world, often in seconds, it is certainly important to understand where the worlds levers of financial power really are.As Paul Krugman pointed out this weekend, they are no longer just in big banks, or big governments, but like so much of globalization, they rest in multinational organizations. Often far, far removed from the people they impact.One such organization is Bank for International Settlements.  It meets every other month in Basel, Switzerland and it’s work is often hidden, while its impact is not.Adam Lebore, in his new book Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World pulls back the curtain.My conversation with Adam Lebore:

Edmund Burke wrote "that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." But what happens when good men do take action, and the net result of their efforts is to, in some way, fuel the evil and worst of all, become impacted by it in ways that taint their goodness.In many ways, history is filled with such examples, certainly the history of Middle East over the past ten years is perhaps the penultimate example. And this is the framework of Nadeem Aslam's new novel of grace under pressure, The Blind Man's Garden.try {var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-6296941-2");pageTracker._trackPageview();} catch(err) {}My conversation with Nadeem Aslam:

If we were to look at and try to understand the vast panoply of how people live their lives, how we connect with each other, hurt each other and help each other, we’d see that we would look first at families. Not just because, as Woody Allen says, "we need the eggs," but because they are a kind of living laboratory of human emotion, human strength, and human frailty.Perhaps that’s why literature has so often focused on the family as a centerpiece or fulcrum of stories?  Such is the case with Khaled Hosseini. He is the multiple bestselling author of THE KITE RUNNER and A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS. His new novel, looking deep into the lives of family, is And the Mountains Echoed.My conversation with Khaled Hosseini:

It is that rare  event that happens when a life and a time come together in a way that better enables us to understand both.  Alysia Abbott has lead such a life.

Her father, poet, writer and literary figure Steve Abbott was one of the early leaders of the gay rights movement, first in Atlanta and then in San Francisco.  Alysia’s mother would die in a car accident when she was two, and she would be raised by her gay father in 70’s San Francisco.  Long before being a gay parent would become mainstream.

Shortly after his death from AIDS, in 1992, Alysia would find her father's journals.  Now she tells her story and his, in her memoir  Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father.

My conversation with Alysia Abbott:                    

Few people understand president Obama better than Jonathan Alter. He has covered Obama since his days in Chicago. He wrote an early Newsweek cover story that help bring Obama to national prominence and has been one of the preeminent chroniclers of Obama's campaigns and more importantly, it’s connection to the Obama Presidency.

Over the years there have been several books central to changing our view of politics. Theodore White’s, Making of the President, F. Clifton White’s Suite 3505, Joe McGinniss’ Selling of the President 1968, and Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the 1972 campaign. Now Jonathan Alter, award winning reporter, columnist, former senior for Newsweek, adds his new book The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

to that list.

My conversation with Jonathan Alter:

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Earlier in the week I spoke with British MP, Jesse Norman about Edmund Burke and the old idea of Conservatism as a way to address social order and care for the needs of generations past and future. After reading George Packer's new book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, it makes you think that perhaps we need some of that institutional conservatism today.

Packer deconstructs the past thirty years of "progress" in America and in so doing brilliantly gives narrative drive to the changes in almost every aspect of American life. You come a way with the realization that we are no longer held together by trusted institutions, but by individual brands, all competing in the marketplace. The questions is, is this any way to run a Democracy?

My conversation with George Packer:

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We see demographic statistics that in the next 20 years more than 65% of the world will live in cities. We seem to be moving further and further from the land.  In spite of it’s current romanticism, the number of family farms continues to shrink, at the same time that science and technology promises that we may soon be able to create food from 3D printers.

While urban Farmers Markets grow, as perhaps the last vestige of our evolutionary roots to the land, one wonders how this shift will really impact us?Can we move so far away from our biological heritage, and still be truly healthy?

Daphne Miller, MD is a family physician,and Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of California San Francisco and she looks at all of this in Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing.

My conversation with Daphne Miller:

As is the case with most of our political debates in this country, we never seem to understand context. As immigration reform is once again front and center, the debate about immigration, particularly from Mexico, should be about more than just numbers and citizenship.

We are in fact dealing with a nation going through transition. And while it has been widely reported that Mexico is changing, that it is sprouting greater economic prosperity, greater democracy and less violence, it’s blood soaked tide is still very powerful and still pulls many into to it’s wake One of those has Alfredo Corchado.

Carchado is the Mexico bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News, and his new book is Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent into Darkness.

My conversation with Alfredo Cochado:

TS Eliot wrote, in 1934, “Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

He might well have written those words yesterday. Certainly we’ve never had more knowledge, more information and seemingly less wisdom than we do today. What is the connection? How is it, that the more we know, the less we seem to understand and the less we seem to able to clearly and logically process it?  The answer it seems is part evolution, part science and part human behavior. It’s part of what  Rolf Dobelli examines in his bestselling book.The Art of Thinking Clearly.

My conversation with Rolf Dobelli: