My Brother, My Sister

Even though our culture is dripping with sex, topics of sexuality don’t always come easily to our understanding or to our conversation. It has taken generations for gays and lesbians to begin to achieve their full measure of acceptance, and there is still work to be done. Same sex marriage is finally beginning to gather a majority constituency.

But clearly, the transgender world is yet to achieve anything near equality or understanding.

Yet as we understand more about it, as we begin to see it up close and personal, inside our own families and friends, perhaps the understanding and acceptance will evolve.

There is no more powerful example of this than the story that esteemed film critic Molly Haskell tells about the transformation of her own brother, in her memoir My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation.

My conversation with Molly Haskell:

Why we should welcome adversity

We are all familiar with the words of Nietzsche who said, "that which doesn't kill us, makes us stronger." It has become a kind of mantra for a society in which everyone seems under siege, or faces some kind of adversity. But is it true?

We’re told that we learn from our mistakes, but is there an easier way? Does the willingness to lean into to adversity, make it more likely? Do those who deny adversity’s benefits, have less of it? And how does the value of learning from adversity get weaker, often closed down, by the power of positive thinking which is often so much a part of our happy talk culture?

These are some of the ideas dealt with by Dr. Norman Rosenthal in The Gift of Adversity: The Unexpected Benefits of Life's Difficulties, Setbacks, and Imperfections.  Rosenthal is a psychiatrist and the scientist who in the 1980s first described winter depression or seasonal affective disorder (SAD). He spent 20 years as a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) where he studied disorders of mood, sleep, and biological rhythms.

My conversation with Dr. Norman Rosenthal:

A Better Way of Death

When we speak of death and sickness, it is often as if we are engaged in the language of war. We are battling, fighting, staving off. Perhaps we'd be better to think of it in language from the 17th Century poet John Donne, in “Death Be Not Proud.”

That might help us to understand a different language of death, but it was all before the advent of the medical/industrial complex. The ways in which the forces of medicine stand in the way of a “meaningful death.”

That’s the world that journalist Katie Butler writes about in Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death. Her story, in the NY Times Magazine, about her father's death, was one of the most commented upon articles in the history of the Magazine.

My conversation with Katie Butler:

9/11/2012 - Benghazi, Libya...just the facts

On 9/11 of last year the US Mission in Benghazi, Libya, an isolated ad hoc outpost, was attacked. The small security team from the Diplomatic Security Service, was no match for the large numbers of jihadist forces that would attack, in what has been called “a perfect worst case scenario.”

This was the first time that a US diplomat had been killed since 1988, in Pakistan. Perhaps in another time it would have brought respect for the heroics of the men who valiantly fought back to save the mission and the Ambassador. Perhaps it would have brought a legitimate investigation of what happened and how we might learn from such attacks.

Instead, like almost everything else today, it’s simply been a catalyst for bitter partisanship, for political opportunism and the continuing efforts of some, to find anything to attack the President and the administration.

In that haze we’ve lost sight of what really happened and why it still matters. Now, two national security experts, Fred Burton and Samuel Katz, provide the first full scale account in their book Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi.


My conversation with Burton and Katz:

Masters and Johnson

Today we are a society steeped in Sex. It’s part of almost every aspect of our politics, our culture, and our economy. It’s about selling cars, and also the dispensing of medical care.

But just 60 years ago, it was a subject that was all but taboo. We not only didn’t speak its name in polite company, but we knew very little about it and how it worked, both physiologically and psychologically.

Then William Masters came along and with his partner Virginia Johnson, changed all that. They not only medicalized the discussion and understanding of sex, but unleashed the power of female sexuality in ways that would forever change society.

Few have studied and understood their work better than Thomas Maier. His book Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love has just been
re released and a Showtime original series, based on the book, premiers later this month.


My conversation with Thomas Maier:

Working Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty

It used to be that we had a somewhat standard expectations as to what it means to be a grown up. It they weren’t norms really, at least they were a general set of expectations: College, marriage, a house, a car, kids...all the accouterments of the American dream.

It’s interesting, that even amid the turmoil and social and cultural transitions of the 60’s and 70’s, these stars remained pretty fixed in our imagination.

Yet the broader economic transitions of globalization, economic disparity and deindustrialization, have had a far greater impact. One that has tilted these expectation off their axis and may be creating a generation where coming of age, where adulthood, means something entirely different. In fact, it may be the entirety of the reason for the stagnation of the middle-class.

Jennifer Silva, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School, take a look at what's happening in Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty.

My conversation with Jennifer Silva:

Back to School

Few subjects get as much attention as education. Yet in many ways it’s like the weather. We talk a lot about it, but sometimes it seems we can do very little.

Perhaps the most important thing we can do is focus on teachers. For they are at the ramparts of the battle. They are not just a piece of the puzzle, arguably they are the largest piece. Yet how many of us, even the most active parents, really understand what it’s like in the classroom, day after day. What it really means to be a teacher.

Few are more distinguished or more successful than Rafe Esquith. He has taught at Hobart Elementary School in Los Angeles for twenty-four years. He is the only teacher to have been awarded the president's National Medal of the Arts and his new book is  Real Talk for Real Teachers: Advice for Teachers from Rookies to Veterans: "No Retreat, No Surrender!"

My conversation with Rafe Esquith:

The Man Who Designed the New Span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge

The Bay Area is, in many ways, defined by its bridges. Once famous for their architectural beauty and cutting edge design, the new span of the Bay Bridge may be equally famous for its faulty construction, inflated costs and mismanagement.

While its engineering, politics and construction may have many issues,  few can quarrel with it's design. That design is the work of Donald McDonald, an icon of bridge building throughout the world.  McDonald has over 30 years experience in architectural design, historic rehabilitation, planning, contract administration, and construction management of complex projects. He and his firm are responsible for the design of the just opened Eastern Span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge.

My conversation with Donald McDonald:

The End of Night, or Why We Shouldn't be Afraid of the Dark!

Whenever there are lists of the greatest and most profound inventions of all time, we almost always hear, among other things, about air conditioning, the internal combustion engine and electric light. This last one, electric light, has seen to it that vast tracts of human population have never had to experience anything like total darkness. What impact has that had.

As technology moves so much more rapidly than evolutionary biology, how has that impacted our species. We’ve all seen the aerial views of the world at at night. Vast population centers stretching for hundreds of miles, all brightly lit. At the same time, our migration to cities continues to create a nighttime culture that is very different than what our ancestors experienced.

That's the world that Paul Bogard takes us to in The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light.

My conversation with Paul Bogard:

The Distraction Addiction

Throughout history we have always looked at technology as a tool to make life easier. Whether it was a wheel, a shovel, a pencil or today, our smartphones. Our current technology was in many ways designed and sold to make us more creative. Instead, in many ways it has made us more fractured and distracted. But the fault is not in the zeros and ones, but in ourselves.

Dr. Alex Pang, a futurist and thought leader in the field of contemplative computing, believes we have the power to change our relationship to our technology. He’s written about it in The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul.

My conversation with Alex Pang:

T.E. Lawrence and the Making of the Modern Middle East

History and great historical sweeps are generally not just a series of unfortunate events. Rather, they are part of long connected progression of events, that circle around and become knotted in each other and that have far reaching consequences that last years, decades and sometimes centuries. It often seems that, because we seldom learn from such events, that these historical events don’t have a normal half life.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in today’s Middle East. A place where today's troubles are often the result of yesterday folly.

Might it have been different, if a century ago the British had listened to T.E. Lawrence, the man popularized in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia.

Journalist and author Scott Anderson, lays out the reality of those events that might have changed the world in his book Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East.

My conversation with Scott Anderson:

The City that punches above its weight class

Given all the accolades that come to San Francisco, from its role in shaping our culture, and its inspiration for Tony Bennett, it’s often hard to believe that there are conflicting views. Recently, the co-founder of a start-up, credit card processing company, who was forced to move to San Francisco by his financiers, took to Medium with a different view.

He said, “San Francisco! It's the worst. The weather, the people, the cyclists, the dreary architecture and glum landscape... just ugh--why would any sane person want to live in this urine-scented homeless wasteland? Without the skrillions of available venture funding dollar and generous tech tax breaks, it's obvious San Franawful would drift off into an ocean of irrelevance.”

This is not the view held by Gary Kamiya, a Bay Area native, and a founder of Salon, who has just written Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco.

My conversation with Gary Kamiya:

Religion and mass incarceration

It has been said, although the origin is uncertain, that there are no atheists in foxholes. The same might be said of prisons. Particularly prisons in America; a country that has both a high regard for religion and and an even higher regard for mass incarceration.

Joshua Dubler, in his new book Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison, takes a look at how these ideas might be related and what his microcosm of prison and religion might say, not only about the men he talks to, but about our society at large.

My conversation with Joshua Dubler: