Talk Cocktail

For those of us that are parents, or grandparents, we are told over and over that parenting is the most important job we will ever have.  



The assumption is that if we buy Baby Einstein, enroll our kids in the best preschool, (sometimes costing as much as college)  provide just the right mix of extracurricular activity and teachers and pour in the right measure of self esteem, we will turn out, as if from a factory, the perfect child. One ready to take on the challenges and leadership of their world and one that will continue to be a part of the parenting/industrial complex



But is any of this true?  What do children, with all their curiosity, really need?  Do they need to be moulded, sculpted, or do they simply need room to grown and with lots of love as the fertilizer?



These are the questions that Alison Gopnik has been asking for years and now she bring all of this together in her newest work The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children.



My conversation with Alison Gopnik:

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Hollywood has always served a dual role, as both a reflection of the times is operates in  and a projector sending out its light showing the broader changes taking place in society.



Just as the original Hollywood moguls, people like Warner and Selznick and Mayer, represented a generation that changed the “white shoe” world of business, people like the founders of CAA, men like Mike Ovitz and Ron Meyer, personified and were the apotheosis of  the buttoned down world of Wall Street coming to Hollywood in the 70’s and 80’s. 



Like every business, things would continue to change. A new generation would emerge.  The old guard would be pushed out, or burn out and a group of so called young turks would emerge. 



This ongoing story of the history of CAA is both Shakespearean in its drama and contemporary in subject.  It’s that story that my guest James Andrew Miller tells in Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency.



My conversation with James Andrew Miller:

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There are many defining markers of particular eras in American history.  One of them is notorious crimes.



Think about it.  Sacco and Vanzetti , the Lindbergh kidnapping, Jeff McDonald, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.  All are indelibly etched into the American psyche and each represents a set of fears and cultural markers.



Today, when domestic terrorism is on all of our minds, the story of Patty Hearst, the Symbionese Liberation army and its rag tag affiliates were a time when literally thousand of bombing were taking place on US streets.  It’s a time well worth looking at. That what Jeffrey Toobin does in American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst



My conversation with Jeffrey Toobin:

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People used to joke that the one subject that everybody talked about was the weather.  Today, it may very well be that the subject is education.  Listen at school events, at the grocery store, at sporting events, everywhere there are parents and children, education is often topic one.



Along with that conversation are lots of buzzwords, opinions, traditional talk and the desire for change.  Dr. Thom Markham is at the cutting edge of that change.  



In the world of work, where people like futurist and Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly say that today's employers have to “train for skills but hire for attitude,” clearly we have to rethink what education is all about.  And few are doing that more than Dr. Thom Markham. 



My conversation with Thom Markham:

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Pick up any celebrity magazine in any grocery store line and the people gracing the cover were almost certainly unknown five years ago and most likely will be forgotten in another five years.  Such is the transitory nature of celebrity culture today.



Of course there are exceptions.  Mostly these exceptions are celebrities that are famous not just for being famous, but because they have given the public something unique in terms of their art, their personality and the narrative of how they achieved their fame.  Such is the case with Barbra Streisand. Biographer Neal Gabler gives us a the big picture in Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power.



My conversation with Neal Gabler:

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We throw around words and ideas about technology, about disruption, about progress and the impact of technology in speeding up our lives. 



The  fact is, it’s more than just technology. As we move to cities at increasing rates, as the workplace demands greater productivity, as global competition abounds, as we experience the globalization of acceleration,  the pressures to speed up are everywhere.



But how fast is fast?  How fast exceeds our evolutionary and biological ability to cope? And what happens to the the anger of those left behind in the cloud of dust from creative destruction.



These are just a few of the issues taken up by Robert Colvile in  The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster.

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In this time of asymmetrical warfare, terrorism, and the war images that have been projected into our living rooms since Vietnam, it's easy for those not alive fifty years ago to forget, or even not even consider, the fear, the horror and the specter of nuclear annihilation.



The President's recent trip to Hiroshima and the fear of Trump having nuclear codes are both reminders that the nuclear reality still lives among us.



That reality is what motivated three unlikely activists in the summer of 2012 to break into one of our nation's seemingly most secure nuclear facilities.  In so doing they triggered  political, legal and moral issues that had lied dormant for so long.



Telling this powerful story and what it says about the nuclear age is my guest Washington post reporter Dan Zak in Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age.



My conversation with Dan Zak:

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Daniel Patrick Moynihan is often quoted as saying that “you can have your own opinion, but not your own facts.”  This is as true in looking at the world, as it is here at home.  There are  lots of opinions about the US role and US actions in the world, specifically the Middle East.  However, facts come first.  And part of those facts include an understanding of the people, the history and the nuance of the region.  Our domestic politics has debates every day about who best understands the American people...we conduct our global affairs with a similar understanding of others?



When it comes to the Middle East in general, or to Afghanistan, to Iraq and even our international policy architecture in the post war era, few understand the people, the history and the nuance better than Zalmay Khalilzad. He’s served four Presidents and has traveled from a small village in Afghanistan to the pinacle of the Oval Office.  He tells that story in The Envoy: From Kabul to the White House, My Journey Through a Turbulent World



My conversation with Zalmay Khalilzad:

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In October of 1939, Winston Churchill said of Russia that “I cannot forecast to you the actions of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."



Today, almost 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we could say exactly the same thing about Russia.  The Russia that Gorbachev ushered in as the Cold War ended is seemingly a far cry from the Russia today of Vladimir Putin.



What happened?  Did the country change, the people change, or were the current tendencies there all along? Arkady Ostrovsky, the Russian-born journalist who has spent fifteen years reporting from Moscow, first for the Financial Times and then as bureau chief for The Economist, digs deep in his book The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War.



My conversation with Arkady Ostrovsky:

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It’s no surprise that the influence of western popular culture is everywhere, even in our affairs of state.  Remember  when Ronald Reagan spoke the phrase “evil empire?” It was just five years after the release of the original Star Wars.  The Empire was on all of our minds and the comparisons were immediate.



When was the last time your were pulled over and wished you could just wave your hand and call on the power of the the force?  



When George Lucas created Star Wars he was fully aware of the primal power of narrative. He was a long time devotee of Joseph Campbell and knew that Star Wars would become a palette of archetypes that would burrow deep into our consciousness.  



The only questions is how much Lucas and Star Wars reflected the culture of the time, or in fact, through its successes, helped to create and expand its own iconography.



Today, almost 40 after that premiere, legal critic and behavioral economist Cass Sunstein, deconstructs Star Wars in light of 21st century in The World According to Star Wars.



My conversation with Cass Sunstein:

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