The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

Few people understand President Obama better than Jonathan Alter. He has covered Obama since his days in Chicago. He wrote an early Newsweek cover story that help bring Obama to national prominence and has been one of the preeminent chroniclers of Obama's campaigns and more importantly, it’s connection to the Obama Presidency.

Over the years there have been several books central to changing our view of politics. Theodore White’s, Making of the President, F. Clifton White’s Suite 3505, Joe McGinniss’ Selling of the President 1968, and Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the 1972 campaign. Now Jonathan Alter, award winning reporter, columnist, former senior for Newsweek, adds his new book The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies to that list.

My conversation with Jonathan Alter:

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An Inner History of the New America

Earlier in the week I spoke with British MP, Jesse Norman about Edmund Burke and the old idea of Conservatism as a way to address social order and care for the needs of generations past and future. After reading George Packer's new book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, it makes you think that perhaps we need some of that institutional conservatism today.

Packer deconstructs the past thirty years of "progress" in America and in so doing brilliantly gives narrative drive to the changes in almost every aspect of American life. You come a way with the realization that we are no longer held together by trusted institutions, but by individual brands, all competing in the marketplace. The questions is, is this any way to run a Democracy?

My conversation with George Packer:

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Farm to Health

We see demographic statistics that in the next 20 years more than 65% of the world will live in cities. We seem to be moving further and further from the land.  In spite of it’s current romanticism, the number of family farms continues to shrink, at the same time that science and technology promises that we may soon be able to create food from 3D printers.

While urban Farmers Markets grow, as perhaps the last vestige of our evolutionary roots to the land, one wonders how this shift will really impact us? Can we move so far away from our biological heritage, and still be truly healthy?

Daphne Miller, MD is a family physician,and Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of California San Francisco and she looks at all of this in Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing.

My conversation with Daphne Miller:

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The First Conservative

Conservatism was once a great political idea. However, in the US today, it bears little resemblance to its roots. Edmund Burke, often referred to as the first conservative, saw the purpose of politics as being not to satisfy the interests of individuals living now: but to preserve a social order and addresses the needs of generations past, present and future. Hardly something conservative political leaders in the US are thinking about. In fact, most of the neocons and theocons of today's Conservative movement  have no idea about the roots of their so called "philosophy."

Jesse Norman is one of the rising stars of the British House of Commons. A Tory member of Parliament, he was educated at Oxford and University College London and has now renewed our acquaintance with Burke in Edmund Burke: The First Conservative.

My conversation with The Hon. Jesse Norman:

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Mexico's Descent into Darkness

As is the case with most of our political debates in this country, we never seem to understand context. As immigration reform is once again front and center, the debate about immigration, particularly from Mexico, should be about more than just numbers and citizenship.

We are in fact dealing with a nation going through transition. And while it has been widely reported that Mexico is changing, that it is sprouting greater economic prosperity, greater democracy and less violence, it’s blood soaked tide is still very powerful and still pulls many into to it’s wake. One of those has been Alfredo Corchado.

Carchado is the Mexico bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News, and his new book is Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent into Darkness.

My conversation with Alfredo Cochado

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Why is Thinking Clearly so difficult?

TS Eliot wrote, in 1934, “Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

He might well have written those words yesterday. Certainly we’ve never had more knowledge, more information and seemingly less wisdom than we do today. What is the connection? How is it, that the more we know, the less we seem to understand and the less we seem to able to clearly and logically process it?  The answer it seems is part evolution, part science and part human behavior. It’s part of what  Rolf Dobelli examines in his bestselling book.The Art of Thinking Clearly.

My conversation with Rolf Dobelli:

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The Imperial Presidency

As Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith states at the outset of his new book, “war and emergency invariably shift power to the Presidency. Permanent war and permanent emergency threaten to make the shift permanent.”

 Many believe that that 9/11 and the actions of the Bush administration, many of which were continued by the Obama administration, makes the idea of Presidential accountability impossible. But in his provocative book Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency After 9/11,Goldsmith makes the contrary argument. He says that post-9/11 American Presidents are more accountable for their national security decisions than ever before.

My conversation with Jack Goldsmith:

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The Education of Samantha Power

Samantha Power is brilliant and President Obama’s pick to be the newest member of his cabinet and our new United Nations Ambassador. Her views have often been controversial, but always with a deep moral grounding.

Part of this comes from her study of and admiration for the late UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello. de Mello was killed in Iraq in 2003, engaged in the ongoing struggle to balance morality with the practical nature of diplomacy.

Back in 2008, upon the publication of her book on de Mello,  Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World, I spoke with Samantha Power.

Listening to that conversation today, we get some very real insights
into the education of Samantha Power.

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Back to the Future

Imagine the world of today's high technology, but instead of sleek Apple like design, it is all powered by steam, driven by gears and it could actually be taken apart and fixed. That’s the world of Steampunk.

Brian David Johnson is a futurist at Intel and sees both the appreciation of and cultural irony in Steampunk.  He writes about it inVintage Tomorrows: A Historian And A Futurist Journey Through Steampunk Into The Future of Technology.

My conversation with Brian David Johnson

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Big, Hot, Cheap and Right

Throughout the history of America, and its federalist system, different states have personified, both politically and economically, the ethos of a particular era.

New York would came to represent the economic boom of the 20’s and Chicago with its big shoulders, the apotheosis of industrialization. California would represent post war America and the dreams of the golden land with its promise of freedom and education. Today many would argue that Silicon Valley represents the future. But my guest Erica Grieder thinks we need to look toward the Lone Star State.

That a place many of us instinctively turn away from, may be closer than we think to representing the future of America. It's a place that Erica Grieder says is Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas.

My conversation with Erica Grieder:

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The Autistic Brain

We are creatures of exploration. Today with so much information available to us, and travel so easy, we might be like Alexander the Great with no more places left to conquer. But perhaps the one great mystery, the one great area still left for exploration, is the workings of the human mind.

We see it day in and day out with how kids learn, how we process information and how all of our styles of learning are so different.

Temple Grandin has been an explorer extraordinaire on this journey. In her previous works, Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation, she gave us great insight into the human side and scale of autism. Now in her new book, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, she literally takes us inside the brain, to give all of us an affirmative understating of autism itself.

My conversation with Temple Grandin:

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Is Mass Extinction Possible?

When we think about the future, and the vast array of dangers that we face as a society and a species, how big do we think? Is our future measured in days, weeks, hours or perhaps millennia? For Alvy Singer, the Woody Allen stand-in in Annie Hall, the future was far, far away as the young man worried about the “universe expanding” while sitting in Brooklyn.

The fact is that Alvy was thinking in species time, and history tells us that species do go extinct; that our day will come to an end and that maybe it is something we should be thinking about.

Science writer and blogger Annalee Newitz, has certainly been thinking about it, and she lays it out in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction.

My conversation with Annalee Newitz:

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Bad Boy

Eric Fischl is one of America's most celebrated and accomplished artists. At a time in the 80’s when painting was declared to be dead, he and others of his generation prevailed and gave new life to art.

Through the years Fischl sought to bring his work and life into harmony and in so doing has constantly strived to reinvent himself and his work in order to remain relevant. His newly published autobiography, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, proves he has succeeded.

My conversation with Eric Fischl:

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"Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold." RIP

The New York Times in their obituary called him a "Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold." Andrew Greeley was all of these. “A Roman Catholic priest and writer whose outpouring of sociological research, contemporary theology, sexually frank novels and newspaper columns challenged reigning assumptions about American Catholicism.”

He was a true maverick who was willing take on all sides in any debate. He was not a fan of what the institutional Catholic Church had become, but was just as harsh on what he saw as "secular intellectuals."

I had the chance to speak with him, just once, back in 1999 on the publication of the second volume of his memoirs Furthermore! Memories of a Parish Priest. So much of what he said thirteen years ago still has relevance, and yet he was so wrong about the pace of progress in the Vatican, and in Latin America.

 Here is that conversation.

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Dan Savage on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

Few controversial issues in contemporary American life have seen the kind of rapid sea change in public opinion that we’ve witnessed on the subject of gay marriage. In fact, recent polls show almost 60% of the American public, in support or acceptance of same-sex marriage. Even members of the GOP, like Sen Rob Portman and numerous party operatives, have expressed support.

The gay magazine The Advocate had a recent cover saying that “gay is the new black.” But is this debate really similar to race, or does the issue have its own politics, tied to broader themes of sexuality? And if so, how will this current debate impact these broader issues of sex and sexuality and might it perhaps move us beyond American puritanism.

Standing for years on the ramparts of all of these issues is prominent sex advice columnist Dan Savage, most recently the American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics.
author of

My conversation with Dan Savage:

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Confessions of a Sociopath

Imagine if you could say things and interact with people unrestricted by conscience. If you had an unfettered capacity for risk, engaged in irresponsible behavior, and felt it unnecessary to conform to social norms. For this to happen one of two things is usually true, either you are a politician a or a sociopath....or maybe even a trial lawyer.

And then imagine if these things could be combined? Then you would have M.E. Thomas. She’s a trial lawyer, a law professor and an admitted sociopath.

In her just published memoir, Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight, she shows us that all sociopaths are not Hannibal Lecter, but they do have many of the same traits.

My conversation with M.E. Thomas

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How the Green Generation came of age

Even amidst all of the domestic and international policy issues that come and go with each administration, perhaps the one that has the greatest staying power, is the environment. The roots and reasons go back almost thirty-five years.

Originally conceived in September of 1969 as a nationwide environmental teach-in, the first Earth Day was a call to action that inspired thousands of events across the country.

Becoming larger than the biggest civil rights and anti war demonstrations of the 60’s, roughly 1,500 colleges and 10,000 schools held teach-ins. Activities that took place in hundreds of churches and temples, in city parks and commercial and government buildings, it created a lasting “eco infrastructure.” And that first Earth Day in 1970 would give rise to the first green generation.

University of Delaware Professor Adam Rome looks back in his book The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation.

My conversation with Adam Rome:

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