How Digital Memory May Change What Makes Us Human

Back in 320 BC Socrates worried about how written language would impact our ability to remember. This was long, long before moveable type, the computer, the pda or any form of digital technology.

Socrates worried that reliance on simply writing would erode memory. But also and maybe more importantly, that reading would mislead students to think that they had knowledge, when they only had data.

Today, similar debates are going on with respect to the digital world. Leading a great deal of this discussion and giving us much insight is Abby Smith Rumsey in her book When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future

My conversation with Abby Smith Rumsey:

Making Sense of the Meaning of Life

In this age of consumerism, instant gratification and information, it’s often hard to think about something as abstract as the “meaning of life.” The ideas of birth, death, and infinity, which used to introduce a popular television show of the early 60’s, are ideas seldom thought about today.

Yet these are questions that human beings have been asking since the beginning of time. Lee Eisenberg, who previously looked at our relationship to money in The Number, now takes on these questions with even more enthusiasm than Monty Python did, in his new book The Point Is: Making Sense of Birth, Death, and Everything in Between

My conversation with Lee Eisenberg:

Obama and the Black Community - Seven Years Later

Last week Elizabeth Warren gave a scathing speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, about the seven year efforts, on the part of Republicans, to delegitimize the Obama Presidency. From the birther efforts to Mitch McConnell, saying that his goal, from day one, was to defeat Obama.

It’s not possible to carry on this discussion without accepting and understanding race as a part of it.The burden of being America's first black President, can’t even be imagined.

We know from the way this current campaign is playing out, how a large swath of white America has responded. But how has the black community viewed Obama? Long time journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan takes a look in I Heart Obama

My conversation with Erin Kaplan:

The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

Today, globalization faces a crisis of its own success. The international movement of goods, money, communications and ideas has been going on since even before the 12th Century. However, today the context of that globalization has changed.

Where once driven individuals could change the world, today the very complexity of the world that globalization has created means that it can no longer exist in an economic vacuum, free from the drag of domestic and geopolitics.

But to fully understand what we might need to do, we have to understand how we got here. That’s the story that Jeffrey Garten tells in his new book From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives.  Garten looks at ten people who have single handedly changed the world during the last 800 years.  It’s a kind of biography of globalization.

My conversation with Jeffrey Garten:

Nation on the Take

Money and politics have become synonymous. Politicians spend that majority of their time raising money, (which they claim they hate) while the cost of campaigns escalates and more money is needed and more money needs to be raised. And where does that money come from….not usually from small contributions, but from large and vested special interests.

The result is a system that is inherently corrupt and tilted toward big money. Even when it is practiced by the most sincere and dedicated elected officials.

We all seem to know this...what we don't see as clearly is the way in which this simple, fundamental and relatively recent development is responsible for so much that’s wrong with our democracy. Our wealth gap, political gridlock, inaction on some of our most pressing environmental issues,

For focusing on this core idea, Bernie Sanders has been accused of being a single issues candidate. But no matter where you stand on Sanders, it’s increasingly clear that this single issues is the foundational idea underlying the paralysis of 21st century America.

This is the issue that Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman take head on in Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It

My conversation with Potter and Penniman:

Immigration Creates Heros

It’s funny how history repeats itself. In the mid 19th Century, partly in response to the Great Famine, waves of Irish immigrants came to America. Most landed in New York, to seek a new and better life. Then as now, questions of immigration, assimilation and criminal behavior filled the air. The appropriately named Know Nothing Party grew up in opposition to these waves of immigration and filled the political dialogue with fear and hatred.

But fortunately leaders emerged in the Irish community that showed them how to be Americas. One of those was Thomas Francis Meaghar. He would become not just an Irish hero, but an American hero. Sometimes forgotten he is given new life by Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist Timothy Egan in The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero

My conversation with Timothy Egan:

Why the Contextual aspect of Health Care can Save Lives and Money

With all the technology around today, doctors still often fail to make the right diagnosis. Usually not due to any failure of knowledge or smarts, but because diagnostics is often as much art as science.

As such, it requires an almost intuitive and/or subtle understanding of the patient, his or her circumstances and sometimes it’s as much about what is not said by the patient, as that which is voiced.

Drs. Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz have taken these ideas to the next step in their research about art of context and diagnostics.  Their work is revealed in Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care.

My conversation with Dr. Saul Weiner and Dr. Alan Schwartz

Imagine if Bernie Sanders became a right wing intellectual? Stranger things have happened.

Although, incorrectly attributed to Churchill, most of you have heard the quote that "if you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 40, you have no brain." While it’s a little silly, it does go to the core fact that personal beliefs can change as we grow, as we evolve and as context changes. And while people like Jonathan Haidt have made the case that political belief is in some ways tied to evolutionary psychology and biology, we know from the lives of prominent Americans who have changed their beliefs, that this has it’s limits.

Writer and filmmaker Daniel Oppenheimer in Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century looks at the lives of six prominent figures, not just whose politics have changed, but wholes ideas, and intellectual core beliefs shifted over time from left to right. In the process, they all
profoundly impacted our political dialogue.

He Used Journalism as a Way to Understand the World

It always amazing with famous people, particularly those that sit atop the world stage, to find out things, even after decades, that we didn't know. It’s interesting information. But most of all it reshapes how we understand them and the how these new surprises might have shaped the world they touched.

Such is the case with Winston Churchill and his underreported years as a journalist and war correspondent. This is the world that Simon Read takes us into in Winston Churchill Reporting: Adventures of a Young War Correspondent.

My conversation with Simon Read:

A Look at America at its Best

Say the word immigration today, and the political implications are both ugly and controversial. On the plus side a survey out just this week shows that a significant majority of young people in the US see themselves as citizens of the world, and not just citizens of America. A full 58% feel that the US is no better than many other countries in the world.

It is against this backdrop of hope and acceptance, that Susan Eaton (Integration Nation: Immigrants, Refugees, and America at Its Best)explores real people doing real work, to fully realize the power of immigration and integration and to make us stronger in what certainly right now seems like our broken places.

My conversation with Susan Eaton:

Teens that Read....Imagine

While I have not seen the movie, I do know from talking to some teens that the new film Pride and Prejudice Zombies has actually inspired kids to ask questions about Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austin.

It's a surprise that in our media saturated culture, at a time when texting seems like long form communications, compared to Instagram, many kids are still interested in reading.

How is this possible? Long time New Yorker staff writer and film critic David Denby went back to High School to find out how students begin to appreciate reading and to see if screen obsessed teens can actually be inculcated in the pleasures of reading. The result is Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives. 

My conversation with David Denby:

Artist, Critic, Beauty and Truth

How many times have you gone to the movies, or to an art exhibit or read a book and not really felt that you’ve completed the experience until you’ve talked about the movie or show or exhibit with someone else? Either the person you went with, or somebody who read or saw the same thing.

This is at once both the most primal of social media and also emphasizes the importance of opinion and criticism. Both give art context and, through the process of discussion or even argument, the ability to sort out, to understand and process what we saw.

This is and has been the job of critics and criticism in our society. In this why criticism is like legal thinking. It marshals and structures ideas, in ways that give art its power and forward thrust.

But in today's society, where everyone can have a platform, where our respect for expertise seems fragile at best, where the long tail of confirmation bias seems to drive everything from our politics, to musical and artistic taste, what role is there for the critic. This is what NY Times film critic A.O. Scott writes about in Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

My conversation with A.O. Scott:

With every song in our pocket, why do we listen to the same stuff over and over and over again?

This year, in a very tired and traditional way, the Grammy’s focused on the world of Pop music. But the fact is, no matter how traditional the show, what’s undeniable is that the world of music is nothing like it was twenty years ago. Today, in your pocket is virtually all of the world's music. The long tail of music has never been longer. And yet in our music, not unlike our politics, our confirmation bias leads us over and over and over again to that with which we are familiar, which makes us comfortable and safe. Couple this with streaming algorithms that lead us back, over and over, to where we started.

Yet with so much opportunity, with so many options, how do we expand our tastes and our music imagination in ways consistent with all of this new technology?

One way is to start with a new book by long time NY Times jazz and music critic Ben Ratlif, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty.

My conversation with Ben Ratliff:

The New World of Medical Tourism

We are all driving cars with parts made all other the world. Our phones, our appliances, our banking is either made, touched and/or connected to every part of the world. Globalization is not going away. In fact, it expanding to now include even our health care.

Where once the rich might engage in medical tourism for cosmetic or exotic procedures, today medical tourism is an international businesses taking place all other the globe.

Like the free flow of money and ideas, the free flow of treatment could soon become the future of health care. Sasha Issenberg reports from the front lines in Outpatients: The Astonishing New World of Medical Tourism.

My conversation with Sasha Issenberg:

The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X

I suppose it's the historian's curse that sometimes the people they are writing about become such icons, that getting to the truth becomes impossible. Certainly two such icons of our time, of the civil right era, are Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali.

Both have become larger than life characters, whose actions and whose longtime friendship and then estrangement shaped not one, but several areas of our cultural landscape

In their new book Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X,  historians Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith attempt to capture the real men behind the myths, and look deeply into their intense two-year friendship and a bond that altered both lives and affected those of millions of others

My conversation with Randy Roberts:

We had all been warned!

Millions of words have been written about Donald Trump. But one thing always seem to be certain with Trump. Unlike the warnings in the security industry, past performance is absolutely an indication for future returns.

So what exactly do those past performances look like. Long before Campaign 2016 started, Trump telegraphed pretty much everything we are seeing today. Even 10 years ago my guest, journalist Timothy O’Brien was granted unfettered access to Trump, wrote TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald, only to wind up in court.

Timothy L. O'Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg View. He was previously the executive editor of the Huffington Post, Prior to that he was the Sunday Business editor and a reporter at the New York Times.

My conversation with Timothy O'Brien:

Why we always fall for the con

Paper Moon, The Sting, American Hustle, The Grifters, House of Games, The Matchstick Men; just a few of the movies we love about con men and hustlers. Yet in real life, we don’t love the likes of Bernie Madoff, or Barry Minkow, or Steven Kunes or Charles Ponzi.

So why the disconnect? Why do we feel joy in being taken in by movie con men, but not so much by the real thing?  The answer may very well lie in what a con man does and what he or she is. How they appear and how they try and manipulate us. Unfortunately the line between con men and salesmen and politicians is fine one. Maria Konnikova shows us the tricks in The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time.

My conversation with Maria Konnikova:

The Future We Want

Think about how much the world has changed in just the past 25 years and then think about how little our politics has changed. Not just that we’re still talking about Clinton and Bush, but that the issues, the ideas and the ways in which they are discussed has not changed. One does not have to throw out the principles of our Founders to retool the political process. In fact, it is precisely those tools that should be used to reshape everything about our politics.

The good news is that this effort is being midwifed by young people with new values, who believe in transparency and honesty as opposed to duplicity. Who believe in fairness not obfuscation. Who see that the future is not about fixing the old car, but blowing it up and taking Tesla or Uber.

We are at what some have called the millennial moment. When power shifts from parents to children. When adults brought up in a different era realize they've lost touch with what's going on.

Clearly, "there's something happening here" and few understand it better than journalists Sarah Leonard (The Nation) and Bhaskar Sunkara (Jacobin,) author of The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century.

My conversation with Sarah Leonard and Bhaskar Sunkara:

The GOP end game

This year's GOP primary race, perhaps more than others, does not exist in a vacuum. When Barry Goldwater accepted the GOP nomination in the SF Cow Palace in 1964, he spoke of extremism in the defense liberty and eschewed moderation. Ever since that moment, so called conservatives have been falling all over themselves trying to live up to those words. Words that had very little to do with the true conservatism of Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott and words that were later called into question by Goldwater himself.

But the attempt to elevate their mythology, as Ted Cruz is trying to do, particularly in a rapidly evolving world, may be the final nail in the Republican coffin

This is the context of E.J. Dionne’s insightful new book Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond.

My conversation with E.J. Dionne:

Why Congress needs creative destruction

There must be a dozen books out right now talking about the disfunction in our politics. Every day pundits, commentators and journalists analyze why our political system doesn’t work.

Most all of them don’t see the forest from the trees. What they miss, and what Harvard Professor and onetime Presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig understands, is that the central institution, at the core of our democracy is broken.

Not broken in a way that’s easily fixable by a single election or by a new Speaker of the House. But that the institution itself has been so infected by things like big money, gerrymandering and our modern day methods of campaigning, that just maybe the whole things has to be pulled up by its roots and reimagined and rebuilt.

In fact, that’s why Lawrence Lessig briefly ran for President of the United States and wrote about his ideas in Republic, Lost: Version 2.0

Listen to my conversation for Radio WhoWhatWhy with Professor Lawrence Lessig: