Talk Cocktail

Back in 2008, David Sheff wrote a memoir that has become became a landmark in our understanding of addiction. Beautiful Boy was his powerful and personal story of the battle he fought alongside his son Nic, who was addicted to alcohol and various drugs.

The book catapulted David Sheff into becoming one of the country's most prominent and sane voices on addiction — not as a doctor, an addict or an academic, but as a father with real world experience. Now he takes a broader view of what we, as a society, are doing right and wrong in dealing with the still growing rates of addiction in this country.  His new book is Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America's Greatest Tragedy.

My conversation with David Sheff

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Every hour, 72 more hours of video are uploaded onto Youtube. The moving image has become the literature of our time. Perhaps not since the development of moveable type has the context of our world and our understanding of it, changed so dramatically.

But what do we really know and understand about the “grammar” and the structure of visual communication?  How are stories and our appreciation of them, different when we watch them, as opposed to reading them?

How will this new realm of visual literacy shape our children and how they see and set out to change the world?

These are some of the issues examined by Stephen Apkon, the Founder and Executive Director of The Jacob Burns Film Center, in his book The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens;

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My conversation with Stephen Apkon:

Some of our soldiers have come back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan missing arms and legs. We’ve heard about the phantom pain that often accompanies those losses. The feeling of pain in a limb that is no longer there. In many ways the same is true for mental anguish. For the mind also feels pain. Where once normal life occupied a space, now for many who have long since left the war zone, the psychological pain is all consuming and fills that once peaceful space.

This is part of the story of Brian Castner. Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them in Iraq as the head of the Explosive Ordinance Disposal Unit. He’s written about his difficult experiences returning home, in his book The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows

My Conversation with Brian Castner:

We baby boomers are aging. With all the talk about health care and retirement and 401k's and endless mail from the AARP, the one subject that seems to get skipped, is what it will be like being a grandparent.

We’ve spent so many years doting on and protecting and encouraging our own children, we almost forget that we get to do it again, sort of, with our grandkids.

Fortunately for those of us that do forget, we have Anne Lamott to remind us. Always a powerful and soothing voice for her generation, Anne Lamott, in her new book Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son, takes us on the new and unexpected chapter in her life, her own grandmotherhood.

My conversation with Anne Lamott:

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1989 New York was a time in which social systems were breaking down. The crime rate was peaking, crack was a serious epidemic, racial animus was strong and it was safer for black and latino teenagers to hang out in Central Park, than to hang out on the mean streets of their own neighborhoods.

Amidst this atmosphere the body of a white woman was found in the park; beaten, raped and left for dead.

This is the backdrop for what would become one of New York and the country's most infamous crimes, what was dubbed at the time as the Central Park jogger. Sarah Burns has written The Central Park Five: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City's Most Infamous Crimes.

Tonight her documentary, produced with her father Ken Burn, airs on PBS.

My conversation with Sarah Burns, last April:

One of the all too many problems with education today, is its relentless focus on what kids can’t do, as opposed to what they do well. This is particularly profound when it come to children with special needs.

If we need evidence of this, we need look no further than the story of Kristine Barnett and her son Jacob. At age two experts said Jacob would never be able to tie his shoes. Today at 14 he’s pursuing a PhD in physics.

Unfortunately, changing the system is not enough. It takes a mother deeply committed, not only to her son, but to turning the old paradigms on their head, and not caring whose proverbial apple cart she turns over. She tells her story and Jacob’s story in The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius

My conversation with Kristine Barnett:

Amidst all the talk about the importance of education, and all the endless debates about public policy, we often forget that at the heart of the debate, is what it means to be a teacher and the awesome power and responsibility that comes with that job.

Imagine a teacher who does not lecture, but leads; who teaches world peace by studying war; who respects students enough to instill in them the confidence to make the world anew...even while still in the 4th grade.

This has been the work of John Hunter. John is a teacher and musician and the inventor of the World Peace Game. He is the star of the new documentary and author of the new book World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements

My conversation with John Hunter:

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Today the digital revolution has ushered in a whole new set of concerns with respect to piracy, copying and the very definition of who owns certain intellectual property. In fact, music copying and piracy is as old as recorded music itself.   Moreover today, it’s the desire to share, that has created the world of social media, the very existence of which grows from this idea of sharing and repurposing copyrighted material.

If we understand this, if our legislators understand this, then perhaps we can undertake to redefine modern copyright and envision useful legislation and protection for the 21st Century.

Alex Sayf Cummings, at Georgia Sate University, has been looking at this issues and examines its past, present and future in Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century.

My conversation with Alex Sayf Cummings:

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In November of 2011, a British businessman by the name of Neil Heywood was found dead in a hotel room in China. The reverberations of that death would reveal both deep and systemic corruption as well as surprising layers of conflict within the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s a human story of lust and greed, that also gives us some unique insights into a society and a political system, often cloaked in enigma and mystery.

Chinese writer, journalist and translator Wenguang Huang, in his book A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China, takes us deep inside a system we hardly understand, but one that still shapes our world and in turn, our lives.

My conversation with Wenguang Huang:

Just as the politics our our time, often makes it difficult for science to find its way, so too was this the case in Victorian times. No where is this more in evidence than in the adventurers of a young man who would emerge from the jungles of Africa with evidence of great mysteries. Mysteries that would be co opted by one of the greatest scientific debates of the time; the arguments about evolution.

This the the story that former Washington Post reporter Monte Reel lays out in Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian World by Storm.

My conversation with Monte Reel: