Talk Cocktail

In the desire to go to war, there is always the effort to sanitize warfare.  Shock and Awe, Death from Above, are all about disconnecting man from the faces on the ground. It’s also about how the decisions are made to go to war. It's always easier when it's less about committing blood and treasure and more about technological prowess.
Drones or Remote Piloted Aircraft are perhaps the ultimate manifestation of this attitude.  A kid in Kansas or Nevada sits at controls and drones not only see the world, but also have the potential to apply remote control and sanitized devastation.
These drones are here to stay.  They are now a key part of the modern military and of counter-terrorism.   Lt. Col. Mark McCurley in  Hunter Killer: Inside America's Unmanned Air War,provides us a unique look at this key elements of military policies that didn't even exist 20 years ago.
My conversation with Mark McCurley:

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Before Dick Cheney, before Homeland Security, even before the Cold War itself, there existed forces within the US Government bent on shaping their own agenda for personal political gain, financial gain and perhaps worst of all, out of a self serving righteous belief in privilege and its exercise of power.
During the dark days of WWII, Allen Dulles would would begin building, a national security apparatus, which would become centered at the the CIA, and which would grow exponentially during the Cold War and would ultimately expand its tentacle into to almost every aspect of American government.  Even if it meant short circuiting the the key instruments of America’s democratic institutions.
Now, with the help of recently released government documents, and personal diaries, investigative journalist David Talbot exposes Dulles and some of the CIA darkest secrets in  The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government
My conversation with David Talbot:

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The US seems to be giving up on training Syrian rebels.  The Russians continue the bombing of ISIS targets, even while some of their missiles land in Iran.  Refugees continue to flee from Syria.  All while ISIS continues on the march, Palestinian protests turn more violent. The cauldron that is the Middle East continues to bubble.
For a real and contemporaneous perspective we turn to author, journalist, esteemed Middle East foreign correspondent Charles Glass.
My conversation with Charles Glass:

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As a nation we have often faced existential crisis.  The Civil War, the onset of the industrial revolution, the robber barons, the great depression, McCarthyism, the struggle for racial equality, assassination and the changes of the 60’s  
Each time, polarization and the depth of the crisis has led many to believe that the country would not survive in it’s current form. And yet it has.
Today we face a similar time.  Extremism is rampant, nativism has shown its ugly head, the economic divided threatens a new kind of civil war, racial tensions have flared, law enforcement is often unchecked, faith in the nation's operating system is at an all time low.
Is this time different?  Or just another of those crisis which we will come through even stronger.  Or, as NY Times columnist David Brooks has said, will the laws of gravity simply return?
My guest Andrew Schmookler believe that many of us do not fully understand nor appreciate or see what we are up against today.  He makes his care in his new book What We're Up Against: The Destructive Force at Work in Our World - and How We Can Defeat It.
My conversation with Andrew Schmookler:

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Every great city has it’s defining era.  Not always good, but certainly one that shapes its fortunes and reinforces its place in the urban pantheon.  For New York it was perhaps the 50s, for Paris the mid 1920s, for San Francisco the ‘60s and for Hollywood, certainly the 1930s.
For Detroit, the eighteen months from the fall of 1962, through the spring 1964 marked perhaps the apogee and the beginning of the downward arc of that once great city.
A city that came to personify the American experience in the second half of the 20th century.  Detroit at the time was the epicenter of music, racial strife, labor and of a middle class that now seems a bygone dream.
Capturing that moment is Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist, and Washington Post Associate Editor David Maraniss. He captures the essence of this period in Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story.
My conversation with David Maraniss:

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The lyrics say that “nobody walks in L.A.”  That certainly has been true, in a city whose inhabitants were long hermetically sealed inside their cars...as if in a pneumatic tube shuttling from place to pace.  L.A. was for a long time, a place where as John Didion said, “the entire quality of life  accentuates it impermanence and unreliability.”
Today’s Los Angeles is a vastly different place.  A city of neighborhoods and of Freeways; a city both urban and suburban, a kind of hybrid that sits at the cutting edge America’s movement toward cities, while still trying to hang on to its suburban trappings.
In short, L.A. just might be some kind of cultural or urban capital of the 21st century  
Few appreciate and understand the city more than former L.A. Times book editor David Ulin. His new book is Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles.
My conversation with David Ulin:

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We all know the old bromide, you can’t fight City Hall.  Well imagine how tough it must be to take on the US Navy.   Especially if the cause is about the condition of whales, and those who are fighting are an environmental lawyer and a Navy whistleblower.  
Many of you have probably heard parts of this story, in news reports, and on 60 Minutes.  But now Joshua Horwitz, in his book War of the Whales: A True Story tells the full story of this David vs. Goliath battle, of the military industrial complex  vs. environment.
My conversation with Joshua Horwitz:

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Hollywood is a like sports or politics.  Each generation gives us stars and personalities that both reflect the culture and tenor of the times and also transcend it in ways that pave the way for the next generation.
By the 1970’s Hollywood had seen a lot of agents.  Names that you’ve seldom hear of. Men like Lew Wasserman, Myron Selznick, Swifty Lazer and Abe Lastfogel shaped the lives and careers of celebrities.
And while by the 70’s woman were emerging in the more cloistered world of New York literary agents, one woman would put her mark on Hollywood in a way that came to define an era. One that combined the glitz and glamor of early Hollywood, with the informality and countercultural fervor of the 70’s.
That woman was Sue Mengers.  She the subject of biographer Brian Kellow’s new book Can I Go Now?: The Life of Sue Mengers, Hollywood's First Superagent.
My conversation with Brian Kellow:

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The world today is a dangerous, unstable and violent place.  And while Stephen Pinker tells us that today is less violent than at any other time in human history, images from Africa and the Middle East would seem to belie that.
But when we look at places that have improved, in Africa, in Latin America and even in the West, we see that woman and the empowerment of women have played a key role in the transformation to a more civil world.  
What does this mean, why has it happened, and what does it portent for solutions to those places that still seemed mired in hatred and violence. Sally Armstrong has spent her career covering wars and global struggles and now examines this nexus between global progress and the empowerment of woman in Uprising: A New Age Is Dawning for Every Mother's Daughter.
My conversation with Sally Armstrong:

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We see today in the debate regarding immigration, a little bit about the the ways that falsehood and mass hysteria, mixed with doses of fear and change, can create a movement.
Back in the 1980’s a combination of delayed reaction to the 60’s, to the rise of woman, to the offshoots of feminism, coupled with the rise of the Christian Right and the changing American family, gave us a suburban fear that went beyond anything conjured up by Yates or Cheever.
One of the ways that it manifested itself  was in what became the longest criminal trial in US history, known as the McMartin preschool case.
Richard Beck takes us back to that time in his new book We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s
My conversation with Richard Beck:

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