Talk Cocktail

What do you do if you are a veteran Wall Street trader who worked for Lehman Bros. when the collapse came?  To make matters even worse you were struck down by an ambulance and had to go through months of recovery.  Then when you finally returned to work, you were fired.

What you might do is turn to a new job in the 380 billion dollar industry that can return profits even bigger than Wall Street....sports gambling.  That's what Joe Peta did, but with difference. He used his skills as a Wall Street trader to bring discipline and metrics to sports betting. Riffing off the work of Bill James and Nate Silver, he would turn his dark days into a 41% profit and in the process, shares his story in Trading Bases: A Story About Wall Street, Gambling, and Baseball.

My conversation with Joe Peta:

We live in a culture where victimhood is too often embraced. Usually, because we seem to lack internal motivation, we look to it to galvanize our actions. Buy why is this culture of victimhood so pervasive now?

Perhaps it springs from the early Christian myth of martyrdom, and the degree to which that Christian mythology and those who subscribe to it, are trying to shape our politics and our culture.  This is the heart of a provocative new book, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom,by Notre Dame Professor Candida Moss.

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My conversation with Candida Moss:

We know that companies like Amazon have vast amounts of data on our purchases and that they use it in order to recommend other products to us; just as Netflix can recommend our movies. But imagine aggregating millions of pieces of medical data, all with their genomic information, so that our generic profile can, with a high degree of probability, tell us what diseases we might get and how to treat them.    Think about how Google was able to head off a worldwide flu pandemic by aggregating vast amount of search data about flu.

This is the kind of data that can tell when we will be sick, even before we know it; or when our car will need service, even before it breaks down. Or, as in the movie Minority Report, data that can predict who will be a criminal, even before the crime is committed. These are just a few of thing we should be thinking about with respect to what’s referred to today as big data.

Ken Cukier is the data editor of the Economist and takes a look at these issues in Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think.

My conversation with Ken Cukier:

This past week saw the pageantry of religion in the selection of a new Pope. Next month we will experience a different kind of pageantry, as the baseball season opens and for many it will be a kind of religious experience in its own right.

Long the national pastime, baseball has a special place in the pantheon of sports and entertainment. But with all of the competition these days, does baseball still have the same kind of appeal? Has it’s superstitions, streaks, luck, and it’s sense of “you gotta believe," been flattened by metrics? Has William James been replaced by Bill James, and has the inspiration fostered by a father and son praying at the altar of driveway catch, given way to Nate Silver and Billy Bean?

This is part of the story told by controversial NYU President John Sexton in Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game. A book based on his wildly popular class at NYU.

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My conversation with John Sexton:

Remember, as a kid, playing the old game of telephone? Someone says something, and passes it on. After it goes through 5, 6 or more people, it often comes out very different on the other end. Well imagine if everything you heard had to go through that kind of process.

That’s just part of what Gerald Shea went though; dealing with partial deafness since he was six. He still managed to sing, play football and get through Andover, Yale and Columbia Law.

Gerald Shea has written about his experience in Song Without Words: Discovering My Deafness Halfway through Life.

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My conversation with Gerald Shea:

Often we associate writers with a particular place and their unique abilities to capture the essence of that place. Steinbeck with Monterey and Salinas, Frances May with Tuscany, Pete Hamil with New York, and James Conaway with the Napa Valley. The author of two international bestsellers, about the Valley, Napa: The Story of an American Eden and The Far Side of Eden, now turns to fiction to tell a story of wine, land and good & evil.

My conversation with Jim Conaway about Nose: A Novel:

Vietnam, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa, Burma are just some of the places in the world that have seen the profound violation of human rights and social justice. Beyond that, what they all have in common are the efforts of one woman, Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams, to to seek justice, to fight for those being persecuted and to never fear speaking truth to power.

Today this Nobel Peace Prize winner for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, has joined forces with six other women Nobel laureates to form the Nobel Women's Initiative and still continues to bring her considerable power and skills to bear in the fight against war, personal violence and injustice.

She shares a bit of how she got here, in her memoir My Name Is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl's Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize.

My conversation with Jody Williams:

Many us have powerful and painful memories of High School and Middle School. Sometimes, if we were not the most popular kid, something happened that we still remember as if it happened yesterday. The scar tissue of those years is even tougher if we were the victims of bullying. And For others it may be the guilt of being the one doing the bullying, or of not standing up for our friends.

Now Slate's Emily Bazelon looks at this in Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy

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My conversation with Emily Bazelon:

Imagine a "connected" car that when the check engine light comes on, it diagnoses the problem, contacts the appropriate repair place and makes the first available appointment for you, all without you having to do anything. Effortless, frictionless and some would argue, antithetical to the human need to have more control over our environment.

There is no question that the geeks and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley want to change the world. That they want digital solutions to all the worlds problems. The problem might be argued is that they also want to define those problems and in that way, may be trying to transform human nature in ways that may not be in its long term best interests.

These are some of the ideas of technology contrarian Evgeny Morozov.  He lays all of this out in his new work, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.

My conversation with Evgeny Morozov:

It sometimes seems like everything is going through change. Yet there are some institutions that, the more they change, the more they remain exactly the same. This is true for an appetizing store on Manhattan's lower East Side, that from its pushcart beginnings in 1907, to the new family members running it today, has remained a beacon of smoked salmon, herring, chopped liver and caviar,

But more importantly, it's the story of how one family persevered and grew a business, around all the change of 20th century New York.

Mark Russ Federman took over running Russ and Daughters in 1978 and a couple of years ago turned it over to the fourth generation. He tells his appetizing story in Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House That Herring Built.