The lessons of the last war....

At the moment we are a nation engaged in three wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. We have now been in Iraq and Afghanistan almost twice as long as the American effort in WWII. As we seek an exit strategy, much of the discussion now centers on what might constitute success or victory. In this age of insurgency and counter insurgency, how do we know if we are in fact. winning a war? Since what is past is prologue, it's perhaps noteworthy to look back at America's experience in Vietnam. A war where the wiz kids at the Pentagon quantified everything, but knew the value of nothing, Col. Gregory Daddis gives us an up close and personal look at the lessons of history in No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War.


My conversation with Gregory Daddis:

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It's not your parent's marriage

I've always liked the notion that marriages are like fingerprints. No two are alike. We see the friends who have the prefect marriage, suddenly split asunder. The couple in a high conflict marriage who have been together for years. We seek soul mates, partners, friends and lovers. We go into marriage with the highest expectations and then often stay in them with a kind of low level ambivalence. All of this is accentuated by the needs, pressures, speed and reality of life in the 21st century. Pamela Haag in Marriage Confidential talks about all the permutations of marriage today and why it's not at all like Mad Men.

My conversation with Pamela Haag:

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What if all of our technology turns against us?

Since the dawn of the industrial age, the core of science fiction has been the delicate dance between man and machine. From the primitive fears generated by Frankenstein to the precociousness of HAL to the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 in Terminator, these stories have touched our most primal fears. Today the machines are all around us; our phones, cars, ipods, all ubiquitous, connected, and laden with physics we don’t understand. We talk a great deal about how much information about each of us exists within these machines. What if at a precise moment, all of these machines suddenly turned against us. This is Daniel Wilson's scenario in Robopocalypse: A Novel. Soon to be a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg.

My conversation with Daniel Wilson:

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A fair food system

Our population is growing exponentially. The need to feed that ever growing population has created new pressures on our food system. However the current system, designed to bring abundant food at low cost, is now broken. It’s consequences, in terms of our environment, our health and our economy, needs to be addressed. This is not just a question of eating locally, but requires a redesigning of our entire food system.

Dr. Oran Hesterman takes up the challenge of what this new system might look like in his new book Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All


My conversation with Dr. Oran Hesterman:

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Climate Capitalism

It’s fair to say that the world as we currently know it, is unsustainable: The increasing demand for water, oil and other natural resources will continue to grow. The economics of taking care of aging populations in the US and China, - the two largest economies in the world - the impact of climate change and the unpredictability of geopolitics, are just a few of the reasons to think that The Future is not possible. However, it’s equally fair to say that there may be a way out. Not by trying to predict or presage the future, but by making the business case for inventing it.

No one makes this case better than Hunter Lovins who, in her new book Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change, makes the case for saving the planet while creating jobs and improving the economy. This book needs to be on the reading list of every politician and CEO.

My conversation with H. Hunter Lovins:

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A real sporting life

Long long before Title 9, before Billy Jean King, or Brandi Chastain, at a time during the first half of the 20th century, when women athletes were not expected to achieve much in sports, where woman athletes were even considered unfeminine, one woman, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, was breaking records in golf, basketball and track. Even though her life ended at the young age of 45, she is still considered on of the greatest athletes, male or female, of the 20th century. In our current era, where hype is often more important than talent, New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Don Van Natta Jr. looks back at Wonder Girl: The Magnificent Sporting Life of Babe Didrikson Zaharias.

My conversation with Don Van Natta Jr.

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Mexico and the Mexicans

Regardless of where we are on the issue of immigration, legal or illegal, our relationship with Mexico and our understanding of the Mexican people must be a central pillar of American foreign and domestic policy for decades to come. How we manage that relationship will depend in large measure on the degree to which we understand our southern neighbor. That understanding should include an awareness that is cultural, political and human. Without it, both nations, economically co-dependent, will face tougher times.

No one gets this idea better than one of Mexico's best know public intellectuals, Jorge Castaneda. A former Mexico Foreign Minister under Vincente Fox, now Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at NYU, his new book Manana Forever?: Mexico and the Mexicans lays out the predicate for that future understanding.

My conversation with Jorge Castaneda:

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It's the sex, stupid

As we face bigger and bigger issues in America..a burgeoning deficit, stagnant job growth, eduction falling behind, failing and decaying infrastructure, a shrinking middle class, climate change and a loss of the American proposition. Yet, we still seemed more concerned about the culture wars and more specifically the impact to sex in our culture. Just look at today's headlines. How did we get here, and why has sex and religion subsumed all that it’s important in America and the world today?

Perhaps no one understand this better than Frank Schaeffer. With his father, he was "present at the creation" of the radical religious right. In his new memoir Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, he shows how his mother was ahead of her time in sensing how our personal and public life would be hijacked in the name of the bible, religion and  false, puritanical gods.

My conversation with Frank Schaeffer:

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They Lie!!

From Anthony Weiner to Martha Stewart to Scooter Libby to Barry Bonds...they all lie. Do we have an epidemic of perjury today? Pulitzer Prize winning journalist James B. Stewart thinks we do. Further he thinks that without the truth, and without a mechanism to compel the truth, the links in our judicial chain are fragile indeed. Have we simply lost respect for the public, our courts and our judicial system? Stewart looks at all of this inTangled Webs: How False Statements are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff.

My conversation with James B. Stewart:

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What if your brain was hacked?

Along with all the other social divisions we face today, we live in a bifurcated society with respect to technology. On the one hand, we rightly continue to run headlong into a future where a younger generation finds new ways to use technology, to multitask, and to reshape their brains around that technology. On the other hand we have an aging population, whose memories are often fading, who don't understand, or at least resist all of this technology. What happens when these forces collide is the basis of a new novel, Devil's Plaything, by the NY Times Pulitzer Prize winning technology journalist Matt Richtel.

My conversation with Matt Richtel:

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An Internet Just For You

For a lot of you it may feel very special to know that Amazon, and Netflix and Apple and Gilt and Google tailor their results just for you. The idea and power of customization is currently the holy grail of the web. The reasons these sites tell us they need to aggregate so much information about us, is so that they can better server us. Lucky us! But what happens when the same principals, the same algorithms apply to our searches for information, our news sources? In this way essentially our algorithms shape how we view the world.

This is not science future. This is happening right now. And its net effect is both frightening and corrosive. Rather than expanding our world, which was the original promise of the Internet, it is arguably shrinking our world. MoveOn.org founder Eli Pariser takes us inside this world of The Filter Bubble.

My conversation with Eli Pariser:

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Portraits of Power

                                                     













Scott Fitzgerald said that "the rich are different." So too are those upon whose shoulders rest the powers and responsibilities of global leadership. Different, yes; but also human. It is that human side, that world press photographer of the year and New Yorker staff photographer, Platon, has captured in his collection of portraits of 150 current international leaders; Power: Portraits of World Leaders. They are from across the political spectrum and together create a larger portrait of global power in the early 21st Century.  The introduction for the book is written by New Yorker editor David Remnick.

My conversation with Platon:

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Solving the impossible

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to say that the best solution to an intractable problem, was to create a bigger problem. That didn't work out very well for him, or the Country. In fact, fully 5 percent of all conflicts end in a stalemate - not just the big ones that we read about every day, but also disputes and arguments in our everyday lives. How do we get beyond this, or do we? Dr. Peter Coleman of Columbia University, in his new work The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts argues that there are very real ways to break through even some of the most heated and critical issues of the day.

My conversation with Dr. Peter T. Coleman:

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