Modern Love

Some people have jobs that are often very disconnected from everyday life. But Daniel Jones’ job is a form of daily life incarnate. As the long time editor of the Modern Love column in The Sunday New York Times Magazine, since 2004 Jones is perhaps the reigning expert on love, relationships and why we all “need the eggs.”

If hundreds of years from now, an alien civilizations wanted to find out about the mating habits of humans, they could do no better than to look at Jones new book  Love Illuminated: Exploring Life's Most Mystifying Subject (with the Help of 50,000 Strangers).

My conversation with Daniel Jones:

Is education the only route to economic equality?

I think we can all stipulate that we continue to witness growing income inequality in America. Class mobility is at an all time low and if we don’t begin to address the problem, the consequences for American democracy will be severe.

But even if we embrace the problem, how to we begin to solve it? Programs, including taxes to create any kind of redistributive fairness, are a non starter in Washington and in Statehouses everywhere. So where do we begin?

UC Irvine Professor Greg Duncan and Harvard economist Richard Murnane argue in their book Restoring Opportunity: The Crisis of Inequality and the Challenge for American Education,
that the answer actually may be right in our schools. That only education can level the economic playing field.

My conversation with Greg Duncan & Richard Murnane:

The Making of Network

Most of you know that the mad prophet the airwaves was Howard Beale. The very idea that we can listen to a clip from Network, made 38 years ago, and it sounds as relevant as if it were written yesterday, speaks to the genius of Paddy Chayefsky's script, and the serendipity of the movie and its production.

The movie was at once spot on in its portrayal of its moment in time and prescient about something as big and hard to hold on to as the television and the media landscape. It is truly a movie for the ages.

Not to put down other efforts, but look at Network in the context of the simplicity and gloss of contemporary movies, and you begin to understand why we are still talking about Network today.
We’re also talking about it because Dave Itzkoff, culture reporter at the New York Times, has written the definitive behind the scenes story of this iconic film, Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies.

My conversation with Dave Itzkoff

What if the government got really good at technology and felt it had to protect us from ourselves?

When we think about the cutting edge of technology, our thoughts usually turn to Silicon Valley, or to other tech centers around the world. When we think about technology and government, we tend to think about failure. The inability of the government to make a simple website work, or the fact that it was a big deal for the current President to get a Blackberry when he came to office, or that most government agencies, including the IRS, don’t function with email. In a funny kind of way, it should make us feel better about the NSA story. Knowing, that when it comes to technology, the government is usually the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

However, what if all that changed? If the best and the brightest of technology came to Washington with the intent of controlling or subverting technology? With the resources and power that they have, they could do some real damage.

And so begins the world that Daniel Suarez portrays in his new techno thriller Influx.

My conversation with Daniel Suarez:

James Meredith, Civil Rights and the rise of Black Power

The recent debate and court challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reminds us of what was the once and future fragility of registering black voters in the south. Back in 1966, a year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, James Meredith, who became the first African American student at the University of Mississippi, set out on an almost solitary march from Memphis to Jackson Mississippi to register black voters.

At the end of that march, which started on June 5 1966, the civil rights movement would be forever transformed. The movement's twin goals of the dream of integration and of nonviolence, would be replaced by black power and impatience.

It's a story that's not as famous as the Selma to Montgomery march a year earlier, but its impact was everlasting and its tensions still relevant today. This is the story that Aram Goudsouzian tells in Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.

My conversation with Aram Goudsouzian:

Statistics never lie...That's the first lie

Years ago the Wall Street Journal ran an ad campaign referring to itself as the “Daily Diary of the American Dream.” Today, we might say that the barrage of statistical information we get about the economy is that kind of diary. Just this morning, we probably all heard the latest GDP numbers.

But what does it mean and what problem is it solving? Sometimes it seems there is a kind of “uncertainty principle” at work. In that the process of trying to measure every aspect of the economy and even our politics, actually changes those numbers because it changes the way we see the world. And since perception is often reality, the daily recitation of these numbers from Washington and Wall Street actually creates its own unreal reality.

Zachary Karabell in his new book The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World gives us a random walk though these numbers that often rule our lives, but mean very little.

My conversation with Zachery Karabell:

Is Cold War strategy relevant to dealing with Russia today?

Amid the violence and upheaval in the Ukraine, and the Russian response, a debate has broken out in Washington about the relevance of Cold War strategy. Whether it still should be relevant to viewing Russian actions and geopolitics?

It would be interesting to know what George Kennan might think about it. He was after all, the architect of America's cold war policy of containment and perhaps our greatest political and diplomatic strategist with respect to the Russia and the former Soviet Empire.

He was both a man of letters and a man of action. But his views, on domestic politics, and on modernity were far less prescient and far out of step with the changes taking place in America. In short, he was a complex man, the likes of which we seldom see in public life today.

He also kept a diary for almost 90 of this 101 years. University of Connecticut historian Frank Costigliola has edited those diaries into The Kennan Diaries.

My conversation with Frank Costigliola:

Batter Up

As sports stories go, the legendary rivalry between the Giants and Dodgers, is one of the best and most enduring. Yet it’s a rivalry that has had it’s had its dark and ugly moments. One of the those moments came a couple of years ago as Giants fan Bryan Stow was attacked and beaten in the parking lot at Dodger Stadium. A sad incident that perhaps reflects the mean-spiritedness of our times.

Another ugly incident happened back in 1965. It had a better outcome. One where the rivals, Juan Marichal of the SF Giants and John Roseboro of the Dodgers, would turn to violence. A violence that reflected the tensions of that time. Yet it would also turn to forgiveness and redemption.

That’s the story that John Rosengren tell in The Fight of Their Lives: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball's Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption


My conversation with John Rosengren:

In politics, demographics are destiny

We know that there are powerful demographic trends taking place in the US. That the economic divide in America is widening at an almost geometric pace. That certain groups repeatedly, in spite of powerful evidence to the contrary, vote against their own economic self interest.

We’ve seen and continue to see examples of the ways in which Big Data and the vast amount of individual information available today, make it easier to define the electors.

Back in 1964, journalist Eugene Burdick first took up this issue in a seminal novel entitled The 480. A story where computers could slice and dice the electorate to give one candidate an electoral advantage. Today, that’s no longer fiction

Tony Fairfax. a demographic consultant and CEO of CensusChannel LLC, has been looking at these trends for decades and he’s come to some interesting new conclusions in The Presidential Trend.

My conversation with Tony Fairfax:

The Twilight of the American Enlightment

For those that didn’t live through the 50’s and early 60’s, Mad Men has given us a clearer idea of so many of the changes that were impacting the nation and the culture.

The post war period freed up Americans. We were no longer bound by the needs of the war and the depression that preceded it. Television, labor saving appliances, medical breakthroughs and a new sense of tolerance would begin to change America.

George Marsden, in his new work The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief, argues that the 1950’s marked the end of an era. That we became a much more pluralistic culture and that the ways in which the political and social leaders of the time approached these changes, has
given rise to many of the problems and divisions we face today.

My conversation with George Marsden:

Why the collapse of Detroit matters

Jane Jacobs, writing about the life and death of cities, reminds us that people living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. So how and why, she wonders, can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture, so that it becomes virtually lost.

The city of Detroit was such a culture. Once the heartland of industrial America, now it sits as an urban corpse. What does it say about America, about Detroit, but more importantly about the people that built it and watched it crumble?

Few understand Detroit better than reporter Charlie LeDuff, whose Detroit: An American Autopsy is a cautionary tale for cities everywhere.

My conversation with Charlie LeDuff

Still Life with Bread Crumbs

When we hear talk of the reinvention of our lives, I think re reflexively think this is something we do in our 30’s or 40’s or even 50’s. Today though, men and woman are both reinventing themselves into their 60’s and beyond. Sometime it’s to pursue new dimensions of ourselves as we get older and wiser, sometimes, it’s because of death or divorce, and sometimes, as we live longer, its because we face new financial imperatives. That’s the journey for Rebecca Winter in Anna Quindlen's’ new novel Still Life with Bread Crumbs.

Anna Quindlen, in addition to writing seven novels, winning a Pulitzer Prize, being a successful journalist and being only the third woman to write a regular column for the New York Times, has been for the past 30 years a cartographer of our daily life experience, always providing a kind of decatur projection of our contemporary existence.

My conversation with Anna Quindlen:

Hillary

Twenty two years ago a relatively unknown Governor of Arkansas was on the ropes in his presidential campaign. He had been accused of marital infidelity and with his wife by his side, went on 60 Minutes to plead his case to the American people.

His wife, was even less known to the American people, so her comments in that interview with Steve Kroft, had particular resonance.

Today, that woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has served eight years as First Lady, as a United States Senator from New York, in the seat once held by Bobby Kennedy and for four years as Secretary of State. She came just a few cracks in the glass ceiling short of the Democratic presidential nomination.

It’s a remarkable story, by any political standard. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes tell the story of Hillary from the 2008 campaign forward, in their new book HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton.

My conversation with Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes:

Could we have won the space race without the German scientists?

Few questions occupy us more today than what do we need to know and when do we do we need to know it, with respect to what our government is doing. How much should we know, particularly in times of war and what might really jeopardize national security?

These questions haunt us today, but they are nothing new. In the closing days of WWII America recruited scores of German scientists that became the bulwark of our space effort. These scientists had shady pasts and were far more connected to the Third Reich than we were ever told.

If we knew, might the nation have objected, and if so, might the Soviets have beaten us in the space race and to the moon? And what broader implications might that have had for the cold war and for global geopolitics?

Annie Jacobsen is a journalist and author, and uncoverer of secrets. She’s the author the NYT bestseller Area 51 and now she turns her attention to the story of Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America.


My conversation with Annie Jacobsen:

The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine

Years from now, we will look back on the way we treat cancer today, with poisons and chemo and radiation, and we’ll look at it exactly the same way we view leaching and snake oil. Today, many look for alternative cutting edge cures, they may be the precursors of future medicine.

Back in the 19th century as patients looked to avoid leaching and bleeding and things like induced vomiting, their search gave way to a host of alternative practices that have become some of our most fundamental practices of health and medicine today. Erika Janik takes us through the history in Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine.

My conversation with Erika Janik:

Careless People

When we deconstruct the essential elements of our culture today, celebrity culture, the privilege of wealth, the importance of popular culture in shaping the broad national conversation, even our obsession with the automobile, we find it all had its roots in the 1920’s.

Perhaps the endurance of Gatsby, is that it represents a time that was a kind of line of demarcation for the country. One world before the early 1920's and another after.

This is the world that Sarah Churchwell takes us into in her book Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby. A story about a story,  it captures the ethos of the 20’s, the origin of the times and the great American novel that still defines it.

My conversation with Sarah Churchwell:

The Up Side of Down

How many of us have taken great leaps out of fear? How often has a failure, or being fired, or jilted resulted in being forced to take actions that turned out to be positively life changing? Often in our personal journey, when we get lost in the wilderness, that is what finally brings us home.

As Bill Gates, unquestionably one of our most successful entrepreneurs has said, “it’s fine to celebrate success, but more important are the lessons of failure.”

In the startup world, entrepreneurs are taught to fail quickly, learn and move on. We all get advice, but it’s life experience and usually failure that teaches us the bigger lessons.

Journalist Megan McArdle explains in The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.

My conversation with Megan McArdle:

Writers, Musicans and other Fans Remember

We are often quick to use the term “cultural phenomenon.” Through the back lens of history though, few things truly are. Yet fifty years ago we experienced something that lives up to that idea. By now we’ve all been regaled by memories of the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan show fifty year ago last week.

But with that as the backdrop, what is the larger cultural significance? Perhaps it's fair to say that the Beatles transformed music, pop culture, fashion, and movies. They also created something we rarely see today. A cultural experience that brought the entire nation together in one shared set of emotions.

Penelope Rowlands was there, literally on the barricades.  Now in The Beatles Are Here!: 50 Years after the Band Arrived in America, Writers, Musicians & Other Fans Remember, she’s culled some of the most interesting retrospective thoughts of today, trying to examine Beatlemania then, and even what it might mean for us in 2014.

My conversation with Penelope Rowlands: