Talk Cocktail

If we examine why so many students don’t graduate High School, we find that failure to succeed at High School math is often at the core of the problem.  Yet we are told almost every day that STEM and that math are the keys to the kingdom of success in the 21st Century.



The fact is that most jobs, even very good ones, don't require the geometry, the algebra, the trigonometry that we  are forced to lean in High School.  What they do require is a hi
gh degree of numeric literacy, critical and quantitative thinking and the ability to fully understand computation.  



That’s not what we are teaching.  Math Professor Andrew Hacker, took on this subject back in 2012 in a NY Times op ed pieces and the controversy hasn’t stopped. 



Now he’s out with a book entitled The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions.



My conversation with Andrew Hacker

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The power and reach of corporate America has become a staple of our political dialogue.  Consolidation and corporatization has touched almost every area of our culture.  The Disneyfication of our communities is almost complete. Food,  retail, coffee, service, music, movies and now even sex and our most intimate fantasies. 



Where once strip clubs had unique and individual identities, fulfilling a wide range of fantasies, today even they have gone the way of corporate homogenization.  Jessica Berson has witnessed it up close and personal and in The Naked Result: How Exotic Dance Became Big Business she shares her story.



My conversation with Jessica Berson:

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In this age of consumerism, instant gratification and information, it’s often hard to think about something as abstract as the “meaning of life.” The ideas of birth, death, and infinity, which used to introduce a popular television show of the early 60’s, are ideas seldom thought about today.



Yet these are questions that human beings have been asking since the beginning of time. Lee Eisenberg,  who previously looked at our relationship to money in The Number, now takes on these questions with even more enthusiasm than Monty Python did, in his new book The Point Is: Making Sense of Birth, Death, and Everything in Between



My conversation with Lee Eisenberg:

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Last week Elizabeth Warren gave a scathing speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, about the seven year efforts, on the part of Republicans, to delegitimize the Obama Presidency.  From the birther efforts to Mitch McConnell, saying that his goal, from day one, was to defeat Obama.



It’s not possible to carry on this discussion without accepting and understanding race as a part of it.The burden of being America's first black President, can’t even be imagined.



We know from the way this current campaign is playing out, how a large swath of white America has responded.  But how has the black community viewed Obama? Long time journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan takes a look in I Heart Obama



My conversation with Erin Kaplan:

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Today, globalization faces a crisis of its own success.  The international movement of goods, money, communications and ideas has been going on since even before the 12th Century.  However, today the context of that globalization has changed.



Where once driven individuals could change the world,  today the very complexity of the world that globalization has created means that it can no longer exist in an economic vacuum, free from the drag of domestic and geopolitics.



But to fully understand what we might need to do, we have to understand how we got here.  That’s the story that Jeffrey Garten tells in his new book  From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives.  Garten looks at ten people who have single handedly changed the world during the last 800 years.  It’s a kind of biography of globalization.



My conversation with Jeffrey Garten:

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Money and politics have become synonymous.  Politicians spend that majority of their time raising money, (which they claim they hate) while the cost of campaigns escalates and more money is needed and more money needs to be raised.  And where does that money come from….not usually from small contributions, but from large and vested special interests.  



The result is a system that is inherently corrupt and tilted toward big money.  Even when it is practiced by the most sincere and dedicated elected officials.  



We all seem to know this...what we don't see as clearly is the way in which this simple, fundamental and relatively recent development is responsible for so much that’s wrong with our democracy.   Our wealth gap, political gridlock, inaction on some of our most pressing environmental issues, 



For focusing on this core idea, Bernie Sanders has been accused of being a single issues candidate.  But no matter where you stand on Sanders, it’s increasingly clear that this single issues is the foundational idea underlying the paralysis of 21st century America.



This is the issue that Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman take head on in Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It



My conversation with Potter and Penniman:

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It’s funny how history repeats itself.  In the mid 19th Century, partly in response to the Great Famine, waves of Irish immigrants came to America. Most landed in New York, to seek a new and better life.  Then as now, questions of immigration, assimilation and criminal behavior filled the air.  The appropriately named Know Nothing Party  grew up in opposition to these waves of immigration and filled the political dialogue with fear and hatred. 



But fortunately leaders emerged in the Irish community that showed them how to be Americas. One of those was Thomas Francis Meaghar. He would become not just an Irish hero, but an American hero. Sometimes forgotten he is given new life by Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist Timothy Egan in The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero



My conversation with Timothy Egan:

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With all the technology around today, doctors still often fail to make the right diagnosis.  Usually not due to any failure of knowledge or smarts, but because diagnostics is often as much art as science.



As such, it requires an almost intuitive and/or subtle understanding of the patient, his or her circumstances and sometimes it’s as much about what is not said by the patient, as that which is voiced.



Drs. Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz have taken these ideas to the next step in their research about art of context and diagnostics.  Their work is revealed in Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care.



My conversation with Dr. Saul Weiner and Dr. Alan Schwartz

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Although, incorrectly attributed to Churchill, most of you have heard the quote that   "if you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart.  If you're not a conservative by the time you're 40, you have no brain."  While it’s a little silly, it does go to the core fact that personal beliefs can change as we grow, as we evolve and as context changes.  And while people like Jonathan Haidt have made the case that political belief is in some ways tied to evolutionary psychology and biology, we know from the lives of prominent Americans who have changed their beliefs, that this has it’s limits.



Writer and filmmaker Daniel Oppenheimer in  Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century looks at the lives of six prominent figures, not just whose politics have changed, but wholes ideas, and intellectual core beliefs shifted over time from left to right. In the process, they all profoundly impacted our political dialogue.



My conversation with Daniel Oppenheimer:

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It always amazing with famous people, particularly those that sit atop the world stage, to find out things, even after decades, that we didn't’ know.  It’s interesting information. But most of all it reshapes how we understand them and the how these new surprises might have shaped the world they touched. 



Such is the case with Winston Churchill and his underreported years as a journalist and war correspondent. This is the world that Simon Read takes us into in Winston Churchill Reporting: Adventures of a Young War Correspondent.



My conversation with Simon Read:

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