Barack Obama: The Story

George Bernard Shaw once observed “that life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." For many people that is undoubtedly true. Bill Clinton might be the penultimate example of that. But for Barack Obama, it has always been about both. About understanding the world that created him, and then using that raw material to reassemble the pieces, to create himself anew. This journey is at the core of David Maraniss's sweeping historical biography,  Barack Obama: The Story.

My conversation with David Maraniss:

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Death by a thousand puffs

We all know cigarettes are bad for us. We know they are the only legal product that, if used as directed, will kill us. What we don't know is the degree to which tobacco companies manipulate their product. The way they add hundreds of harmful chemicals and compounds, of which we are mostly unaware, and which make them the world's largest cause of death.

Given these facts, shouldn't they be outlawed? Not banned, but outlawed! Stanford Professor Robert Proctor thinks so and he make a powerful case in the 700+ pages of Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition 

My conversation with Robert Proctor:

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Escaping life on the streets

Human resilience and the instinct for survival is an amazing thing. The question has always been, is this something inherent only in certain individuals, or can others learn the skills and abilities needed to pull oneself out of difficult and in some cases impossible situations? Carissa Phelps survived the horrors of mean urban streets, while now working even harder to help others rise above their circumstances.

Turned out into the streets of Fresno at age 12, today she has a law degree and an MBA from UCLA and walked away from a career in private equity so she could model and teach survival to others and change the circumstances that lead her to an abusive life on the streets. It's a remarkable story told in her new book Runaway Girl: Escaping Life on the Streets, One Helping Hand at a Time.

My conversation with Carissa Phelps:

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The Locavore Dilemma

"Eat Local" has become the mantra of a new generation of food activists. Implicit in the locavore argument is the belief that it combines healthy eating and a high standard of environmental stewardship, while delivering important economic benefits and increasing food security within local economies. University of Toronto Professor Pierre Desrochers seriously questions the locavore perspective. Desrochers, in his new book, The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet concludes that "eating local" actually delivers increased social and economic misery, environmental degradation, greater food insecurity, and poorer nutrition. How is this possible?

Here's my conversation with Pierre Dersochers:

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Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

It has not been a good decade. Since the dawn of the 21st century, almost all of our ideas of community, culture, even our notions of what constitutes a country; not to mention how we communicate, do business, read, think and see are being transformed and are cascading in upon us.

Since the turn of the century we've experienced Bush v. Gore, 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, the housing bubble, bank collapses, the implosion of traditional media and Wall Street, the foibles of baseball and the Catholic Church, the collapse of the auto industry and the impotence of Washington. Now Chris Hayes, of The Nation and MSNBC, connects the dots among these seemingly disparate events and finds some very common threads. He lays our the arguments in his book Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy.

My conversation with Christopher Hayes:

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The war within the war for Afghanistan

There is an old saying that goes, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." When we look at US foreign and military policy since Vietnam, it's shame on us. Buy why? In Vietnam, the best and the brightest lead us into disaster. In Iraq, the mistakes of the last administration cost us dearly in lives and treasure. In the early days of the Obama administration, the decision to surge troops into Afghanistan was equally ill timed, ill conceived and once again showed how intelligent people and politics, even when linked with good intentions, can lead us into a disasters situation.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, senior correspondent and Associate Editor of the Washington Post, brilliantly showed us how this happened in Iraq, in his award winning Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Now, in his new work Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, he takes us deep inside the military and civilian decisions and actions that negatively impacted our Afghan policy.

My conversation with Rajiv Chandrasekaran:

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Everything you always wanted to know about the Higgs Boson and the Large Hadron Collider

Fascinated but confused about the Higgs Boson and the work at the Large Hadron Collider? Over the past year and a half, I've had several conversations with some of the world's top scientists and science writers explaining what's going on. Here is a collection of those conversations, that I think constitute everything you always wanted to know about the physics of the Higgs Boson.


Amir Aczel is one of our most popular science writers. He explains what the Large Hadron Collider, the most complex machine ever built by man, is all about.

Frank Close talks about who should be acknowledged and explains what's at stake. Frank and I spoke six months ago when the first hints of the Higgs Boson appeared in CERN.

Fred Alan Wolf, one of our most distinguished science writers, talks to me in March of 2011 about the relationship between time and space and and why the Higgs field is called the “god particle.”

Brian Greene, a Guggenheim fellow and distinguished Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia, is one of the most imaginative physicists of our age. He gives the overview of what we'd really like to learn about the cosmos and how we got here.

Exit

Why do we fear change so much? Is it just change, or is there something else? We love the new, yet part of what goes with that, with change, is ending something before we can begin anew. And this, the business of endings and exits, we are not very good at. Ending a relationship, a job, saying goodbye, entering a new chapter in our lives...all involve endings and exists. Harvard professor and MacArthur prize winning Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot argues in her new work Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free, that we need to master the farewells in order to accommodate the new.

My conversation with Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot:

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Nora Ephron

In an era in which Hollywood still deals with the lack of woman as writers, producers and directors, Nora Ephron was a triple threat. Her loss will be felt profoundly, not only by her family, but to her industry. Several years ago I had the chance to talk with her about Hollywood, about aging, illness and the need to live life fully.

Here is that conversation:

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There must be better way to do this...

Modern life has seen to it that almost everything has been subject to a kind of creative destruction. We've talked many times about the impact of technology and science in traditional medicine. But what about psychoanalysis. Up until now, the traditional methods have taken a long time. Regardless if it was Woody Alan or Tony Soprano on the couch, there seemed to be no quick fix.

Now all of that may be changing. Phil Stutz and Barry Michels have a very different approach, one designed around the idea of instant results!  It’s no wonder that they have become the "go to therapists" for Hollywood. Their office is a kind of denizen of  top actors, directors, agents, writers and other creative professionals.  Now they have codified their particularly unique approach in a new book entitled The Tools: Transform Your Problems into Courage, Confidence, and Creativity.

My conversation with Phil Stutz and Barry Michels:

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It's a bird...It's a plane, It's.......

The character of Superman made his first appearance in June of 1938, some 75 years ago. The character touched a nerve in the hunger for heroism in the run up to WWII. But what has allowed this character to evolve and endure for almost eight decades? During a time when virtually everything about our society, our values and our ideas have changed, Superman and what he represents has been a kind of true north for many. What did his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, understand about America that would allow them to create the touchstone for truth, justice and the American way? Journalist Larry Tye in Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero takes us inside the Superman legacy.

My conversation with Larry Tye:

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The truth about lying

When congressman Joe Wilson stood up during a speech by President Obama and said, “you lie,” he could have been talking to all of us. While we are told to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we seldom do. From corruption in our government, to test-score scandals, from elected leaders’ extramarital affairs to the Ponzi schemes of Wall Street, cheating and dishonesty are significant parts of our culture—and inescapable parts of the human condition.

That's the findings of Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and the author of The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves. He's run experiments with some 30,000 people and found that very few people lie a lot, but almost everyone lies a little.

My conversation with Dan Ariely:

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Sam the banana man

Balzac said that "behind every great fortune, there is a great crime." For some fortunes, there is more than one. Little have we known that behind every humble banana, there is a great story, some great crimes, and certainly some great characters. Sam Zemurry, the man who brought the banana to America, was a shadowy figure whose presence impacted the creation of the State of Israel, The Cold War, and the rise of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara...all from the simple banana. Best selling author Rich Cohen tells the story in The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King


My conversation with Rich Cohen:

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The Man Who Changed The Way We Eat

Restaurant reviews, foodies and food criticism have all become a major part of the culture. I sit here writing this, at the epicenter of American Food, Wine and Celebrity Chiefs. But this wasn't always the case. There was a time before food critics, before the rise of quality ethnic food, before celebrity, before Craig Claiborne came to the New York Times.

Craig Claiborne invented professional restaurant criticism, and was also the man who introduced the American palate to arugula, balsamic vinegar and chef's knives; leading us out of a vast culinary wasteland. Thomas McNamee, who previously wrote about Alice Waters, takes us inside The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance

My conversation with Thomas McNamee:

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America the Philosophical???

Judging by most of the political discourse, reality television, TMZ, tabloids newspapers and magazine and some social networking, it might be safe to argue that we are a nation of philistines. Yet long time social critic Carlin Romano, in his new work America the Philosophical, argues just the opposite; that we are perhaps the most philosophical nation in history.

My conversation with Carlin Romano:

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An Extraordinary Father and Son

There is a wonderful quote about travel from TS Eliot who said that "we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." The same might also be said of understanding the people we travel with, even if they are our own family. After all, how much have each of us learned about members of our family on those family vacations? Esteemed journalist and writer Buzz Bissinger took a journey with his son that would indeed land him back where he started, but it was truly as if he knew his son for the very first time. His new book Father's Day: A Journey into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son is a memoir of that trip.

My conversation with Buzz Bissinger:

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The real digital divide

If you watch movies or read novels or simply understand the drama that is the human condition, you know that human behavior is often shrouded in mystery. Why we do what we do, how we act and what we think about at four AM, are at the heart of what make us who we are, and in fact what makes us interesting. On the other hand, if we reveal everything about ourselves; if Facebook, and LinkedIn and social networks in general track our every move, our every action, where is the mystery? If every thought is posted, or tweeted, or shared, then where is the human discovery? If we forget that we are more than the sum total of our data points, then Andrew Keene is here to remind us. Keen argues in his new work Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, that the social network may be weakening, not building up our relationships.

My conversation with Andrew Keen:

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