From Black Panther to convict to Oscar nominee

How's this for a resume: 

• Joined Black Panther Party at age fifteen
• Served eleven months in the infamous NY Rikers Island Jail
• FBI fugitive
• Member of Panther 21, one of the most emblematic criminal cases of the sixties
• At sixteen, one of the youngest spokesman and leaders of the Panther's New York Chapter.  
• Member of the Revolutionary Black Underground
• Sentenced to twelve years in Leavenworth
• Earned two college degrees while in Leavenworth and founded a prison theater
• Released from Leavenworth
• Becomes full professor and Chair of Columbia University's School of the Arts Film Program 
• Nominated for 2008 Academy Award in Best Song category
• Publishes memoir Panther Baby

My conversation with Jamal Joseph:

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Clash of cultures on the court.

Yao Ming, the Chinese basketball star said, when he first came to America, that "basketball, in America, is like a culture. For me it is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here." Pulitzer Prize winning NY Times foreign correspondent Jim Yardley proves the reverse is also true. That Chinese basketball has its own culture, its own landscape and its own unique language, just as difficult for Americans to learn.

Yardley, in his book Brave Dragons: A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing, take us inside the world of Chinese basketball. At a time when Linsanity is overtaking our game Yarldey gives us a whole new prospective on basketball inside a country that's been playing the game for as long as we have.

My conversation with Jim Yardley:

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They take home the Oscar, AND they are better parents!

When we think of the French we certainly think of wine, cheese, fashion, culture and this years Academy Awards. What we don't necessarily think about is parenting. We certainly didn't think that French mothers would give Tiger Mom a run for her money. Yet children do seem to behave differently in France.

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Pamela Druckerman found out first hand that French woman not only "don't get fat," they raise better behaved children. Druckerman reports from the front in her book Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting
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My conversation with Pam Druckerman:

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What's happened to the United States Senate?

It was once referred to as "the world’s greatest deliberative body."  A body who can claim as its members, Daniel Webster, Abe Lincoln, Everett Dirksen, Ted Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Robert LaFollette, Robett Taft and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, just to name a few. Where once great issues like civil rights and war and peace were debated, today it’s become the epicenter of partisan gridlock. What happened and were the halcyon days really as good as we remember?  This is the world into which Ira Shapiro takes us in his book The Last Great Senate: Courage and Statesmanship in Times of Crisis.

My conversation with Ira Shapiro:

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If the President does it, it is still illegal?

Listening to the current crop of Republican candidates, you'd think the eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration had never happened. No embrace, not even an acknowledgement! No surprise really. Economic disaster, wiretapping, illegal war and torture are good reasons not to talk about it.

Former Watergate committee member, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and former Brooklyn prosecutor Elizabeth Holtzman argues in her new book Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law, Plotted to Avoid Prosecution, and What We Can Do about It, that we still need to prosecute Bush and Cheney for violation of the rule of law.

My conversation with Elizabeth Holtzman:

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The Education of General David Petraeus

We have come a long way since Vietnam. Today the American military and our returning soldiers are looked upon as heroes, who often do give the last full measure of their devotion to serve their country. Much of this change in attitude has come, not from what many still see as the misguided mission of Iraq, but by the way in which that mission was transformed by Gen. David Petraeus. Petraeus has come to symbolize the iconic soldier- scholar-warrior ethos that we seemed to have lost for a long time in the American military. But who is the General who initiated and pulled off such profound transformational change.

Paula Broadwell, who herself  has decades of military service and experience in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, takes us All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.

My conversation with Paula Broadwell:

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Are there scarier words than "we need to talk!"

It has long been observed that the four scariest words a husband can hear are, “we need to talk.” The only thing that might be scarier is “we need to talk about making our marriage better.” With that as the basis, writer and journalist Elizabeth Weil began a quest that would take her and her husband into the heart of darkness of their marriage. But unlike Kurtz, they would return better off for the journey.

Elizabeth and Dan's journey was first reported in one of the most talked about articles in The New York Times Magazine,  Now it is Elizabeth Weil's book No Cheating, No Dying: I Had a Good Marriage. Then I Tried To Make It Better.

My conversation with Elizabeth Weil:

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Inside Apple

Winston Churchill, in talking about the former Soviet Union, described it as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, but perhaps," he said, "there is key and that key is Russian national interest.”

After reading Adam Lashinsky’s new book Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works, I feel we might say the same about Apple. A company that has been for so many journalist and business watchers, a puzzle difficult to solve. But Adam Lashinsky may have found the code.

My conversation with Adam Lashinsky:

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One is not the loneliest number

In our society today, one is no longer the loneliest number. In fact, in many places living along has become a luxury. There are currently 32 million Americans living along or 1 in 7 adults. Twenty percent of all households are single person households. Yet there is a big difference between living alone and being alone.

The social alienation that Robert Putnam talked about in Bowling Alone, is not part of this trend. It simply reflects some profound changes in the nature of work, relationships, and social norms. Eric Klinenberg has captured the discussion about this in his new book Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.

My conversation with Eric Klinenberg:

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The politics of a marriage

Politics in America has become, for better or worse, a part of our celebrity/entertainment complex. What we often forget is that inside this culture are not just politicians and Hollywood celebrities, but real people with real lives real, complex relationships and complicated and evolving marriages. Marriages that are like so many that we see every day, where the surface is like the iceberg; what we see represents only ten-percent of the reality. In fact, political marriages especially are like the proverbial snowflake, no two are ever alike.

NY Times correspondent, Jodi Kantor in her book The Obamas, takes a look inside the Obama family, the Obama marriage and the complexity of a modern professional marriage inside the crucible of the White House.

My conversation with Jodi Kantor:

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Queen for 21,900 days

Remember the movie,The Kings Speech,and the oldest daughter of the man who would become King? That young girl wold herself become Queen of England at the age of twenty-five and serve until this very day, almost 60 years, as the second longest reigning monarch of England.

It seems simple, yet this woman, Queen Elizabeth of England, has been in the public eye for 60 + years. Through generations, wars, twelve British governments, and the monumental changes of the 20th and then 2st centuries. And she has done it all with grace, composure, intelligence and even only one husband. Regardless of your view of the monarchy, what might we learn from this remarkable woman? Sally Bedell Smith, one of our preeminent biographers takes us inside the life of this woman, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch.

My conversation with Sally Bedell Smith:

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Are men designed to cheat?

How would our society, our culture and even our politics be different if men...and even woman, could "openly" cheat. Professor Eric Anderson of the University of Winchester argues, in his new work The Monogamy Gap: Men, Love, and the Reality of Cheating, that the desire for sexual diversity is the inherent biological and physiological norm and that we should "encourage" our partners to cheat as a way of balancing the cognitive dissonance between the desire for intimacy and the desire for sexual adventure. He argues that the problem is not cheating, that the problem is monogamy.

My very surprising conversation with Eric Anderson:

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Why can't choice be a settled issue?

The debate over artion rights has consumed our politics for decades. It seems that each time the freedom to choose seems like a settled issue, the nation becomes more divided. Why has this issues had such resiliency, why can’t the values of due process and privacy prevail, and why is this still even an issue of debate among young woman?

This story is all the more powerful through the lens of a woman who has been at the forefront of the movement. Her tireless efforts have put herself in danger, while fighting so hard for the rights of other woman. Merle Hoffman shares her story in her new memoir  Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Board Room.

My conversation with Merle Hoffman

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The need to go there!!

I have a friend who doesn’t understand the value of travel. He thinks that the virtual world provides him all of the insight he needs into new places and new experiences. I think nothing can be further from reality and believe that author Pico Iyer is a living embodiment of that. For years he has introduced us to his experiences of the world in books like "The Lady and the Monk," "The Global Soul" and "The Open Road." In his new work, The Man Within My Head he shares with us his own internal journey of a life lived not behind a screen, but in the real world, interfacing with real people and real experience.

My conversation with Pico Iyer:

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How

It was Oscar Wilde who said "the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." For to long we've been very good at measuring how much, the price of everything is, but very bad at figuring out value, defining what value means, how it to can be measured and celebrated as the currency of an interconnected, global society. Dov Seidman, in his work and in his new book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything, argues that "our world is being dramatically reshaped. The rules of the past no longer apply. In the 21st century, it's no longer what you do that matters most but how you do it."



My conversation with Dov Seidman:

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San Francisco Bay

San Francisco Bay is a remarkably resilient body of water. In spite of the urbanization and cosmopolitan life of the 46 cities that surround it, the ethos of the Bay Area continues to make sure that the environmental restoration is ongoing. Ariel Rubissow Okamoto's book Natural History of San Francisco Baytakes us on a tour of this remarkable body of water.

My conversation with Ariel Rubissow Okamoto:

Up is down, down is up...

Just as we often use living viruses to cure disease, so the Right argues that the cure for financial crises, environmental degradation, minimal national investment and no energy policy is less of all of them. The idea, which the country bought into in 2010, is that only by less regulation, more crony capitalism and more rewards for the economies winner, can we solve the problems of the average Americans. Sounds like Alice in Wonderland, but it's the basis of the platform of this years Republican candidates. Thomas Frank, bestselling author of "What's the Matter with Kansas," explains what's going on in his new book Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.

My conversation with Thomas Frank:

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The conscience of Los Angeles

Bobby Kennedy used to be fond of quoting George Bernard Shaw in saying that “some men see things as they are and ask why, other see things that never were and ask why not.” It can be said that esteemed civil rights attorney and activist Connie Rice has shared that vision in the work she has done, both in the courtroom and on the mean streets of Los Angeles.

Rice is the co-founder and co-director of the Advancement Project in Los Angeles. She has received more than 50 major awards for her leadership of diverse coalitions, and her non-traditional approaches to litigating major cases. She is a graduate of Harvard and of the New York University  Law School and has been called "the conscience of Los Angeles." She has now written a memoir Power Concedes Nothing: One Woman's Quest for Social Justice in America, from the Courtroom to the Kill Zones.

My conversation with Connie Rice:

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