Talk Cocktail

Samantha Power is brilliant and President Obama’s pick to be the newest member of his cabinet and our new United Nations Ambassador. Her views have often been controversial, but always with a deep moral grounding.

Part of this comes from her study of and admiration for the late UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello. de Mello was killed in Iraq in 2003, engaged in the ongoing struggle to balance morality with the practical nature of diplomacy.

Back in 2008, upon the publication of her book on de Mello,  Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World,

I spoke with Samantha Power.  Listening to that conversation today, we get some very real insights

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into the education of Samantha Power.

Imagine the world of today's high technology, but instead of sleek Apple like design, it is all powered by steam, driven by gears and could actually be taken apart and fixed. That’s the world of Steampunk.

Brian David Johnson is a futurist at Intel and sees both the appreciation of and cultural irony in Steampunk.  He writes about it inVintage Tomorrows: A Historian And A Futurist Journey Through Steampunk Into The Future of Technology.

My conversation with Brian David Johnson

Throughout the history of America, and its federalist system, different states have personified, both politically and economically, the ethos of a particular era.

New York would came to represent the economic boom of the 20’s and Chicago with its big shoulders, the apotheosis of industrialization. California would represent post war America and the dreams of the golden land with its promise of freedom and education. Today many would argue that Silicon Valley represents the future. But my guest Erica Grieder thinks we need to look toward the Lone Star State.

That a place many of us instinctively turn away from, may be closer than we think to representing the future of America. It's a place that Erica Grieder says is

Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas.

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My conversation with Erica Grieder:

We are creatures of exploration. Today with so much information available to us, and travel so easy, we might be like Alexander the Great with no more places left to conquer. But perhaps the one great mystery, the one great area still left for exploration, is the workings of the human mind.

We see it day in and day out with how kids learn, how we process information and how all of our styles of learning are so different.

Temple Grandin has been an explorer extraordinaire on this journey. In her previous works, Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation, she gave us great insight into the human side and scale of autism. Now in her new book, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, she literally takes us inside the brain, to give all of us an affirmative understating of autism itself.

My conversation with Temple Grandin:

When we think about the future, and the vast array of dangers that we face as a society and a species, how big do we think? Is our future measured in days, weeks, hours or perhaps millennia? For Alvy Singer, the Woody Allen stand-in in Annie Hall, the future was far, far away as the young man worried about the “universe expanding” while sitting in Brooklyn.

The fact is that Alvy was thinking in species time, and history tells us that species do go extinct; that our day will come to an end and that maybe it is something we should be thinking about.

Science writer and blogger Annalee Newitz, has certainly been thinking about it, and she lays it out in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. My conversation with Annalee Newitz:

Eric Fischl is one of America's most celebrated and accomplished artists. At a time in the 80’s when painting was declared to be dead, he and others of his generation prevailed and gave new life to art.

Through the years Fischl sought to bring his work and life into harmony and in so doing has constantly strived to reinvent himself and his work in order to remain relevant. His newly published autobiography, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, proves he has succeeded.

My conversation with Eric Fischl:

The New York Times in their obituary called him a "Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold." Andrew Greeley was all of these. “A Roman Catholic priest and writer whose outpouring of sociological research, contemporary theology, sexually frank novels and newspaper columns challenged reigning assumptions about American Catholicism.”

He was a true maverick who was willing take on all sides in any debate. He was not a fan of what the institutional Catholic Church had become, but was just as harsh on what he saw as "secular intellectuals."

I had the chance to speak with him, just once, back in 1999 on the publication of the second volume of his memoirs Furthermore! Memories of a Parish Priest. So much of what he said thirteen years ago still has relevance, and yet he was so wrong about the pace of progress in the Vatican, and in Latin America.

Here is that conversation.

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Imagine if you could say things and interact with people unrestricted by conscience. If you had an unfettered capacity for risk, engaged in irresponsible behavior, and felt it unnecessary to conform to social norms. For this to happen one of two things is usually true, either you are a politician a or a sociopath....or maybe even a trial lawyer.

And then imagine if these things could be combined? Then you would have M.E. Thomas. She’s a trial lawyer, a law professor and an admitted sociopath.

In her just published memoir Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight, she shows us that all sociopaths are not Hannibal Lecter, but they do have many of the same traits.

My conversation with M.E. Thomas

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Even amidst all of the domestic and international policy issues that come and go with each administration, perhaps the one that has the greatest staying power, is the environment. The roots and reasons go back almost thirty-five years.

Originally conceived in September of 1969 as a nationwide environmental teach-in, the first Earth Day was a call to action that inspired thousands of events across the country.

Becoming larger than the biggest civil rights and anti war demonstrations of the 60’s, roughly 1,500 colleges and 10,000 schools held teach-ins. Activities that took place in hundreds of churches and temples, in city parks and commercial and government buildings, it created a lasting “eco infrastructure.” And that first Earth Day in 1970 would give rise to the first green generation.

University of Delaware Professor Adam Rome looks back in his book The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation.

My conversation with Adam Rome:

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It’s hard to imagine that for young people growing up today, seeing the Middle East as the center of American military and foreign policy concerns, that for over fifty years and eight Presidents, Cuba had been at the center of American concerns.

Ninety miles off America's shores, for the entirety of the cold war, it represented the penultimate point where Americans and Soviets were eyeball to eyeball.

Today when celebrities travel to Cuba and some try to make an issue of it, most people wonder what all the fuss is about? Is that progress, has Cuba really changed or is it a kind of collective Cuba fatigue or amnesia?

Julia Sweig is one of our nations reigning experts on Cuba and has just completed her second edition of Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know.

My conversation with Julia Sweig: