Talk Cocktail

Twenty years ago we were engaged in a great national effort to make sure that girls were not left behind. From the travails of Ophelia to the full implementation of Title IX, we knew we wanted our daughters to have it all.

Well, as the saying goes, beware of what you wish for. Today girls are succeeding at every level. The majority of college and law school graduates are women. And while the glass ceiling still exists, progress continues unabated.

But what price for teen girls that now have new found expectations: To excel in school, in sports and in their social lives. In short, the pressure to be perfect. Ana Homayoun takes up this perfection in her book The Myth of the Perfect Girl: Helping Our Daughters Find Authentic Success and Happiness in School and Life

My conversation with Ana Homayoun:

Few things are more personal than how we grieve. While society is often quick to judge and volumes have been written about the process, no one can know how we individually feel pain, love and loss. In the end though, it’s like so many things in life. We bring to it our innate talents and skills and summon up our strengths to do that which is so difficult.

In the case of Danny Gregory, he would reach into his talents as an artist and designer to bring color and life to the darkness of grieving.  His graphic memoir of that experience is A Kiss Before You Go: An Illustrated Memoir of Love and Loss.

My conversation with Danny Gregory:

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New York in the late ‘70s; it was a time that is often derided, yet it was a time of great artistic expression, of raw energy and of diversity. A time before homogenization and disneyfication.  It was a time when Graffiti was everywhere and the practitioners of the art were seeking both fame and anonymity. It was a time of art and a time of vandalism. This is the jumping off point for Adam Mansbach's new novel Rage Is Back.

My conversation with Adam Mansbach:

Here in the Bay Area, particularly Silicon Valley and San Francisco, we have seen one of the greatest concentrations of business startups the world has ever known. Aside from very smart young people working for them, what else do they have in common?

Why is it that some succeed beyond all expectations and others fade away? Why do we see so many serial entrepreneurs? People without MBAs, that are able to take an idea, build a business, scale it and deliver remarkable results. What is the secret sauce?

David Kidder is one of those serial entrepreneurs. But he also set about to find out what makes other entrepreneurs tick. What are the startup secrets? So he put together The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs.

My conversation with David Kidder:

The inherent drama of presidential campaigns has given us a long line of great political reporting. From Theodore White, who set the bar in 1960, through Timothy Kraus, Richard Ben Cramer, who left us recently, Joe McGinniss and even Hunter Thompson. Today, Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed reporter Michael Hastings picks up that mantle.

In many ways coverage of a campaign is an inherently boring job, but some reporters make the connection between the campaign, the times and the candidate. That's what Michael Hastings as accomplished in his new ebook Panic 2012: The Sublime and Terrifying Inside Story of Obama's Final Campaign.

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My conversation with Michael Hastings:

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Maybe it was Gordon Gekko declaring that “greed is good,” or before that, Silent Cal Coolidge saying that “the business of America is business.” Or maybe it was simply the financial crash of 2008/2009? Whatever the reason, business today has an approval rating of about 19%...just about as bad as Congress.

But why? Business has been the great engine of progress of the American experience. From the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit to the jeans and turtlenecks of Steve Jobs. As David Brooks put it today, “America’s greatest innovations and commercial blessings were unforeseen. They emerged, bottom up, from tinkerers and business outsiders.”

So why does business get such a bad rap? Sure we idealize small business, but it’s big business that creates jobs, lifts people up and changes the culture.

John Mackey has been working on this problem, first in his own business, Whole Foods, and now in Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business.

My conversation with John Mackey:

Maybe it’s technology, or just the nature of our society today, but we seem to have long lost the art of writing letters. Letters were a way we once touched based with our friends; a way of exchanging ideas and feelings, of sharing the complexity and eccentricity of daily life.

It should be no surprise then, that one of our greatest literary lights of the twentieth century, William Styron, author of Lie Down in Darkness, Confession of Nat Turner, Sophie's Choice, and his seminal work on depression, Darkness Visible, should have written a collection of letters that will stand with any of the literary greats.

Years after his death, in 2006, Rose Styron, his bride of 53 years has organized and edited the the thousands of letters that would become the Selected Letters of William Styron.

My conversation with Rose Styron:

Certainly the world is getting smaller. As a result, every day in both our professional lives and our personal lives we are forced to deal with people who are different from ourselves and perhaps different than what we are used to. And sometimes, perhaps out of old habits, we might take refuge in sameness. The Us vs. Them mentality which has been so long a part of our culture may be receding, but it is still powerfully pervasive.

So how do we reset our individual approach to the world, so that diversity and difference become not only a driver of innovation, but a way that brings us pleasure and the joy of difference?

Professor Todd Pittinsky examines the realities of this costly and changing mindset in Us Plus Them: Tapping the Positive Power of Difference

My conversation with Todd Pittinsky:

Woody Allen once said the world was divided up into two groups. "The horrible and the miserable." The horrible are people with painful or terminal diseases or deformities; and the miserable...well, that was everyone else.

The good new is that this isn’t so. However happiness is still a serious business. We pursue it with fervor, yet it doesn’t seem to last. We’re taught as kids that he pursuit of happiness is a kind of fundamental right. So we pursue it.. But seldom do we understand it, it’s myths, delusions and even its joys. Trying to understand this The Myths of Happiness: Sonja Lyubomirsky.

My conversation with Sonja Lyubomirsky:

It may very well seem as if the fundamentalist right has been lying low. That there fervor of several years ago, has faded. In fact, they may only be practicing a new kind of stealth operation to make greater inroads into America's public schools. At least that what journalist Katherine Stewart discovered, as she uncovered her kids school's Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children

My conversation with Katherine Stewart: