"To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow creatures..."
John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty"
Day after day people ask “how we got here?” In fact we don’t need a time machine. All we need do is to look back at the political history of the past 50 years and and we can see exactly how we got here.
With the rise of Reagan in the mid 70’s we can see with almost GPS precision, that map that got us to our tribalism that so deeply divides us today.
We see the meanness, the racism, the quest for raw political power, particularly on the right. And while Reagan may have masked it in sunny optimism to make it digestible, it would later become the stuff of talk radio and the exploitation of populist anger.
If you picked up the New York Times one day last week, you would have discovered that about half of the stories on the front page were directly related to science. Think about what we are dealing with; public health, vaccines, climate change, fires and hurricanes, technology, privacy, transportation, artificial Intelligence, medicine, the frontiers of space and of our oceans and this is just some of it.
The future of science is the future of mankind. As a result science journalism has come into its own, as recently we have seen that poor science reporting can lead to dangerous misinformation.
Leading that effort in quality science journalism is Scientific America. It has been the gold standard and is the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States.
Last week, for the first time in its 175 year history, it dipped its toe in political waters making a presidential endorsement for the very first time. Explaining this decision is the Editor and Chief of Scientific America, Laura Helmuth
Back on the 4th of July I saw a hat that said, "Make America Great Britain Again." A good laugh, even more so when superimposed on the current relationship between the two countries.
Certainly there is that much vaunted “special relationship''. Not just between the countries, in an abstract geopolitical way, but between leaders that have been shaping and reacting to the world at similar times and in similar ways for the past seventy-five years.
While Great Britain may have lost its empire, its connection to the US in contemporary times, has kept it relevant and dynamic. But after seventy-five years is that relationship due for a refresh? If so, perhaps it will require a degree of honesty about the relationship that has been heretofore lacking on both sides.
As the late Richard Ben Cramer so brilliantly detailed in his seminal book “What it Takes.” running for president, as a serious candidate, is one of the hardest, most grueling and challenging things one can do. Cramer wrote about the 1988 campaign, before the internet, before 24/7 news and yet he said even then that politics had become a kind of a public utility, with hot-and cold-running politics any time of the day or night.
Today in our hyper politicized non stop news environment it’s even worse.
Now imagine breaking barriers and taboos along the way, as Pete Buttigieg did as the first LGBTQ candidate.
Just as challenging, again as Cramer wrote about, is being the spouse of the candidate. For Chasten Buttigieg, a 31 year old gay man with not political experience, he had only his own personal experience and history from which to draw upon.
Imagine a time when diplomacy mattered. When the arts mattered. And when they could actually work together to project America at its best. Oh how we might long for the days of the Cold War.
Clausewitz said that diplomacy was simply war by other means. During the Cold War, that diplomacy took many forms. From Richard Nixon showing Khrushchev around an American Kitchen, to Ping Pong diplomacy with the Chinese
A little known form of diplomacy was the role that the arts played in the Cold War. Uniquely in the realm of dance in the hands of one of its great practitioners, and leaders, Martha Graham. Although Graham claimed she was not political, her company and her work were a real part of America’s Cold War propaganda apparatus.
Most of you know or have lived in cities with long streets or boulevards and you know that some of the same stores repeat themselves over and over again. Starbucks, CVS, etc. The neighborhoods change, but some of the retail landmarks remain the same.
In a way, history is like that. It goes on and on. And while the neighborhoods often change, there are things along the way that repeat themselves over and over again. In American history, one of them is certainly racism and discrimination, but also our ongoing flirtation with authoritarianism. Our fascination with bullies, the appeal of strength that sometimes proves to be more than just meanness.... it’s really evil.
Whether it was Father Coughlin on radio, Joe Pyne on television, Huey Long in politics, or in the contemporary era, Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump.
The added reality is that each episode pushes the envelope of what’s acceptable. The predicate for new norms is laid out and the next would-be talk show host or political demagogue has to go further.
Perhaps no one pushed the envelope further than Joe McCarthy. So much so that the idea of McCarthyism became baked into our lexicon. Needless to say, now in the midst of one of those flirtations, it seems the perfect time to go back and look at Joe McCarthy with journalist and author Larry Tye, whose new book is Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy My conversation with Larry Tye:
I guess it’s just that we are all getting older, but these In Memoriam programs are coming much too frequently lately…...Over the years I had the opportunity to do five interviews with Gail Sheehy. Beginning in May of 1998 we talked about everything from Men's Passages, to older women, Hillary Clinton, and the changes in middle America. Our last conversation was in the fall of 2014 upon the publication of her memoir Daring: My Passages: A Memoir. Photo: Carolyn Cole/LA Times My conversation with Gail Sheehy from October of 2014:
Donald Trump came to power on a wave of distrust. Americans had lost faith in government, it’s institutions, and the ability of their government to be honest with them.
It’s a through-line that begins perhaps with the assassination of John Kennedy, runs through the endless lies Americans endured about the Vietnam war, and continues through to the Iraq war; the lies about weapons of mass destruction.
And while Americans often want simple answers, the reality of policy, particularly foreign policy is far more nuanced and complex.
I have said over and over again of late, that I wish I could get into the time machine to read, 50 years from now, what historians will say about this period we are living through.
So it’s equally important that now, almost 20 years after 9/11 and 17 years after the start of the Iraq war that we can look with some perspective at the distrust that got us where we are today.
Every generation faces the challenges thrust upon it by the generation that came before. Today the millennials face the challenge of how they pick up the baton and carry it forward Their contribution, their imprimatur is still being written. Will, it simply be too scold those that came before, or as we see millennials doing in silicon valley redefining the very nature of society.
Over the 200 plus year history of political parties in the US, something our founders advised against, the same parties have, at different times, stood for different sets of ideas. The Federalists, the Whigs, the national Republican Party, the Democrats and others all have been made up of different coalitions at different times
We all know for example that Lincoln and his Republicans were once the anti-slavery party. Oh how that’s changed.
The modern Democratic party really emerged with the New Deal coalition beginning with FDR in 1933. It was an amalgam that was considered the core of American liberalism. It was anchored in ethno-religious constituencies (Catholics, Jews, African Americans,) white Southerners, well-organized labor unions, urban machines, progressive intellectuals, and populist farm groups.
However, like all previous party coalitions, it would begin to splinter. Elements of the once liberal base of the new deal coalition would become part of the Republican party of Nixon and Reagan and Trump.
In this podcast, we’re marking the legacy of legendary journalist Pete Hamill. Hamill’s career is synonymous with New York where he became a celebrated reporter, columnist, and an editor at the New York Post, and the New York Daily News. He was also a foreign correspondent for the Post, a writer for New York Newsday and The Village Voice and Esquire, and well as several other publications. He wrote numerous books, mostly novels, but also biographies and collections of short stories.
Over the years, I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with and interviewing Hamill six times since 1997. There was no subject that he could not hold forth on. Our discussions involved subjects ranging from immigration to tabloids, the lexicon of news to urban America and even Frank Sinatra.
This podcast includes some lengthy excerpts from three of those conversations.
First in a conversation from June of 2011, we talked about tabloids, the state of news today, and the way in which tabloids stitch communities together.
Our second conversation in this excerpt is about why Sinatra mattered. Hamill argued that it’s not possible to understand the country without fully understanding the music and personality of Frank Sinatra.
Finally, in what was my very first conversation with Hamill from May of 1997, just after the publication of his book Snow in August. We talked about immigration, the misguided power of television, and the story of a boy growing up in New York in the late 1940s. Jeff Schechtman: I have to tell you that because of the age of this conversation, the audiotape had not held up as well as I might have hoped, and I ask that you bear with 23 years of decay of audio quality. However, I think it’s worth it. I hope you’ll enjoy this reminiscence of the life and words of Pete Hamill.
58 years ago today, the world awoke to the death of Marilyn Monroe. At her death, she was already one of the most well known Americans of the twentieth century. In death she would become even more famous, steeped in mythology and contradiction, she would become a symbol of her times. The lens of her own dysfunction gave her a unique ken on post-war American. Today, looking at her life gives each of us a unique perspective on how far we’ve traveled in those 58 years.
For journalism, it may be the best of times and the worst of times. The national media seems more vibrant than ever. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, as well as the cable news networks are thriving For these outlets the transition to digital was painful, but somewhat successful
For local news, the story of what happing in your neighborhood, your school board, your city council, is a very different story. Thousands of local newspapers and local radio stations have shut down. The economics of the enterprise has proven to be unsustainable, and even large regional papers in places like L.A., Chicago, and Miami, have proven to be problematic at best and striped by hedge funds at worst.
All of this begs the question of whether our political, cultural, and social divide stems from the top, as is assumed, or whether the hollowing out of the news in our communities, something that should be bringing us together, is at the heart of what’s wrong.
It was the great NY Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia who said that there is no Republican or Democratic way to clean the streets. His comments remind us that locally, there is only the common community interest. Take that away and what’s left is all the bad stuff.
It’s rare that the laws of physics and our ideas of race and politics find common ground.
Newton’s third law of motion says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The American story of the struggle for racial equality seems to be subject to that law.
As the Founding gave way to the Civil War, and reconstruction to Jim Crow and segregation, and the civil rights struggle of the ’60s gave way to law and order and Richard Nixon, the election of our first black president would give us Donald Trump and where we are today.
One wonders what it is, particularly around the subject of race and the desire to establish a truly multiracial democracy that drives these contradictory reactions.
Equally, what toll does this whipsawing back and forth take on our democratic experiment, it’s people and those left behind when the moral weather changes. It’s no wonder we are anxious, angry, and exhausted.
Christopher Dickey reported from war zones and published many books, including a powerful memoir about growing up with his father, the poet, and author James Dickey.
I had the opportunity to speak with Dickey several times over the years, usually about geopolitical hotspots around the world. Places where his unique reporting skills enabled him to see not only the politics but the cultural heart of what he was reporting on. His reports and books were more than just words and analyses.
However, our most memorable conversation and one I share here was about his memoir Summer of Deliverance. Memoirs, have over recent years, become a genre onto themselves. What Dickey uniquely does is to turn the tables and actually report on himself.
My conversation from September of 1998 with Christopher Dickey.
We regularly go through paroxysms of demanding law and order. It's a form of political rhetoric that while it has roots all the way back in the 16th century, is with us once again today.
In our contemporary history we watched Nixon in 1968, New York in the 70s and then were was 1994. A time when the law and order obsession seemed to reach some kind of peak
Rudy Giuliani had become Mayor of New York, the Simpson case shined an arc-light on domestic violence, California passed “three strikes,” and Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act.
It was a kind of perfect storm of both enforcing law, protecting women, and injecting steroids into the business of mass incarceration.
Donald Trump’s presidency was not an immaculate conception. Rather, the result of 30 years of increased hyper-partisanship, the reshaping of the Republican party, the rise of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, Robert Ailes and Fox Television, and Newt Gingrich. They all contributed to the pugilistic style of American politics. But perhaps Gingrich did the most damage.
It’s arguable that if Gingrich hadn’t come along, others would have picked up the mantle of this style that lead us directly to where we are today. But Gingrich was uniquely suited to the moment.Julian Zelizer tries to answer in his new book Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party
Understanding him, maybe a big part of that question that gets asked every day, amidst death, unemployment, and anger, how did we get there. That’s what historian and professor
Then, as now, there was pent-up frustration, which boiled over, particularly in many poor black neighborhoods setting off riots that rampaged out of control. At the time, many Americans blamed the riots on what they saw as misplaced black rage and often vague outside agitators.
But in March 1968, the Kerner Commission Report turned those assumptions on their head. It declared that white racism, not black anger, was at the root of American turmoil. It talked about bad policing practices, a flawed justice system, unscrupulous consumer credit practices, poor or inadequate housing, high unemployment, voter suppression and other culturally embedded forms of racial discrimination that all combined to ignite the fuse on the streets of African American neighborhoods.
“White society,” the presidentially-appointed panel reported, “is deeply implicated in the creation of the ghetto.” “The nation,” the Kerner Commission warned, “was so divided that the United States was poised to fracture into two radically unequal societies, one black and one white.”
Today, there is only one living member of that commission, and he also happens to be the oldest living current or former United States senator. He was once a candidate for president to the United States. He served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He served for two terms as a senator from Oklahoma. He is Senator Fred Harris.
Beyond the virus we fear most, we are also surrounded by bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites. But wait, no need to reach for the Purell every time. In fact, these things represent what is called our microbiome. It accounts for as much as 90% of our cells, and its positive impact on our health is immeasurable.
However, as a result of antibiotics, the food we eat, urbanization and other wonders of modern world, we have done things in the name of “do no harm,” which just might be making us sicker.
Today, it’s as if this long-suffering field of research has suddenly been rediscovered. Back in 2016, when we had a White House that still believed in science, the office of science and technology announced a One Hundred and Twenty-One million dollar initiative for research into the microbiome.
In the current pandemic, we have seen men succumb to COVID 19 at far greater rates than women. A lot of theories have been expounded as to why. And many theories have to do with the disease itself and its inherent impact on the human body.
In fact, the reasons may be much more fundamental. They may be reasons that transcend the disease and may be directly related to deeper biological differences between men and women.
Differences that have applications in the treatment of virtually every disease, from colds to cancer. Clearly differences in chromosome may be the ultimate customization of medicine. Understanding this is the work of Dr. Sharon Moalem. He’s an award-winning scientist and physician whose latest book is The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women. My WhoWhatWhy conversation with Dr. Sharon Moalem:
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