Talk Cocktail

Two Hundred and Fifty years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville tried to figure out what made America tick. He traveled the country, talked to people and came away with a pretty good and enduring idea of America's character.

In the post-depression years, Studs Terkel in his seminal project, "Working," gave us the best picture yet of working men and woman. In so doing he raised popular oral history to an important and respectable level. He gave people a chance to talk and gave all of the country a chance to listen and better understand each other.

Today, it is those who are not working, who are experiencing the real personal pain of economic dislocation, that we must understand in order to better understand each other.

DW Gibson, has traveled the country to compile and tell these powerful and unifying stories in his book Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today's Changing Economy Rather than the “long tail” of technology pulling us apart, as some claim, perhaps these stories really are the key to bringing us together.

My conversation with DW Gibson:

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Today the Wine Country has become the Hollywood of celebrity chefs. But back in the 50’s there was no cooking channel, and their were no foodies. There were just TV dinners, tuna noodle casserole and the emergence of fast food culture.

But along came Julia Child to change all that.  Julia Child captivated her television viewers with“The French Chef." This woman, who brought fine cuisine into the homes of average Americans, transformed the way this country thought about cooking and eating. She was an early feminist who taught women to find pride in their culinary efforts and to take charge of their lives just as she had.

Two weeks ago would have been Julia's 100th birthday. I had the honor of speaking with her several times over the years, and last week I spoke with Bob Spitz, the author of her new biography Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child.

My conversation with Bob Spitz:

Almost every aspect of lives moves at rapid pace. We struggle to keep up. We’re told we have to keep up or get left behind. That to delay, is to procrastinate and that just may be the cardinal sin of the digital age.

But what if delay, be it a few seconds, a few weeks or more, helps us to make better decisions and achieve better outcomes? In life, in business, in the pursuit of happiness, delay may be our friend. Just maybe the procrastinators know something that we don’t. Law and Finance Professor Frank Partnoy explains in Wait: The Art and Science of Delay,

that delaying our responses can transform our experiences for the better.

My conversation with Frank Partnoy.

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The culture wars in America have resulted in a war on women, a war on science and a ridiculous war on drugs. Many of these strains come together in the debate over cannabis.

While marijuana still remains illegal under federal law, more than half of all Americans have used it, it is a cash crop generating tens of billions in untaxed revenue and the majority of the public supports its legalization. Significant numbers of states have already made it legal, even in violation of federal law.

It remains steeped in myth, and ideology, but it has proven to help people over and over again

Martin Lee takes us on a journey through the great American pot story in Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific. My conversation with Martin Lee:

People are often shocked by profanity, but after all, that’s the point. Profanity is a kind of social punctuation that we use when we need to shock, or describe in ways that other words just may not suffice. Perhaps few profanities today are as common or more attuned to our celebrity culture than the A-Word. A word that linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, in his new work Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years

, ties to the sense of entitlement that permeates so much of our culture.

My conversation with Geoffrey Nunberg:

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I’ve often quoted the former head of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNeally who once said, almost a decade ago that, “there is no privacy, get over it.” And that was before Facebook, apps, Foursquare, location based retail, etc.

To a large extent this raises the issue of a generational divide regarding our attitudes about privacy. But what we don’t often think about is whether or not our attitudes about privacy are shaped by culture, economics and class. Harper's contribing editor Garret Keizer offers an interesting new anaylsis in his new book Privacy.

My conversation with Garret Keizer:

50 years ago this week, the world awoke to the death of Marilyn Monroe. At her death she was already one of the most well known Americans of the twentieth century. In death she would become even more famous. Steeped in mythology and contradiction, she would become a symbol of her times; the lens of her own dysfunction giving her a unique ken on post-war America.

Now historian Lois Banner, in her new biography Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox, that Maureen Dowd talked about this past Sunday, gives us a deep and complicated woman, whose life would reflect many aspect of our society back upon us. My conversation with Lois Banner:

When disaster strikes and loss happens, both human loss and economic loss, people look to be both assured first and then compensated.   The assurance is often the job of government, of social institutions and of friends, neighbors and family.   When people look to be compensated for a disaster, the process is often a lot more complicated. Who pays, what’s the loss worth and and how emotion enters into the economic algorithm are all relevant issues. Few understand this equation better than Kenneth Feinberg.

Feinberg ran the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund, was the “Pay Czar,” for the TARP bailout and was in charge of disbursing all claims in the BP oil spill. He talks about all of this in his book Who Gets What: Fair Compensation after Tragedy and Financial Upheaval

My conversation with Ken Feinberg:

The Hawaiian monk seal ranks as the most endangered marine mammals in American waters. Also one of the cutest! Only about 1,100 of these seals are in the sea surrounding the Hawaiian Islands. When a two day old seal pup is attacked and abandoned, environmental officials have to intervene. Thus begins the remarkable journey of Kauai Pup 2.

Dr. Terrie Williams is the director of the Marine Mammal Physiology Project at U.C. Santa Cruz and she tells the story of the seal pup in The Odyssey of KP2: An Orphan Seal, a Marine Biologist, and the Fight to Save a Species.

My conversation with Terrie Williams:

The story goes that Marissa Mayer, the newly minted CEO of Yahoo, and a former VP at Google, once declined an otherwise brilliant job applicant at Google because they had once gotten a C in a math class.

Clearly in today's competitive world, academic success matters. The bar must be set high for academic success. But it must be set  just as high for creativity, innovation and collaboration. But what about the kids that are not cut out to be the renaissance children of the next generation? What about those kids, even those from privilege, whose interests lie elsewhere? Whose job is it to see to it that they too are educated well and steered toward important places in our society?

Dr. Madeline Levine, a Bay Area clinician and the best selling author of The Price of Privilege, looks at these issues anew in her new work Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success.

My conversation with Madeline Levine: