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:

The last 100 days

Because there is no preparation for the burdens and responsibilities of the Presidency, it would take JFK, almost nine-hundred of his thousand days to reach his apogee. With the death of his infant son Patrick, as a catalyst, the final 100 days of the Kennedy Presidency, which began 50 years ago this month, would become the capstone of Camelot and the defining time of a promised unfulfilled.

Kennedy historian Thurston Clark, in JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, takes us deep inside those final 100 days.

My conversation with Thurston Clarke:

Elmore Leonard 1925 - 2013 - "Be Cool"

From the police logs in local newspapers to the Metro sections of major metropolitan dailies, from the pablum of TV drama, to pulp fiction, crime always sells. But few dramatized it better than Elmore Leonard.

He was the author of 45 crime novels including Cat Chaser, Fifty Two Pickup, Be Cool, Get Shorty, Maximum Bob, Rum Punch, Cuba Libre, Glitz and Tishomingo Blues. He was an American original, who was one of the earliest to understand the heroes needn't be perfect. Long before Breaking Bad, or Tony Soprano, he created a series of stories and characters, that blurred the lines between “good” and “bad.”

I had the privilege of talking to Leonard several times over the years, the last time in 2004.  Here is compendium of some of those conversations:

Why Brainstorming Doesn't Work - The case for thinking Inside the Box

Who hasn’t sat in endless brainstorming sessions, trying to be creative. We’re told to think outside the box, to magically conjure up new and different ways of doing things. Often without structure. Yet when we look at the history of innovation, we find that there are clearly patterns and techniques that do make a difference. We find that product after product, innovation after innovation shows very clear methods as to how they were developed.

Marketing and innovation professor Drew Boyd has broken these down in a way that essentially enables us to think Inside the Box, to develop a Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results.

My conversation with Drew Boyd:

This Cheese Does Not Stand Alone.....

A magical cave, a piece a cheese, a 260 lb man, a modern journey into a time past, and a new, old understanding of food and life. Just a few of the elements of Michael Paterniti's new literary work of nonfiction, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

Beginning in 1991 in a famed deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it’s a story, that like Robert Louis Stevensons’ s definition of wine as “bottled poetry,” resonates with the history and passion that some foods carries with them.

My conversation with Michael Paterniti:

The Life and Times of Charles Manson

Often times through fictional characters, we are able to capture an entire ethos. Certainly Jay Gatsby defines a certain era, as does Don Draper, as does Woody Allen’s Zelig. It’s a rare thing when a real life character does this. But such is the case with Charles Manson.

The Tate/LaBianca murders took place 48 years ago, and still Charles Manson resonates with us. The media has often defined him as a product of the 60’s, but in many ways he also defines the 40’s and 50’s. He was, according to award winning investigative journalist Jeff Guinn, the wrong person in the right place at the right time.

With all that has been written about Manson, Guinn’s book, Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, is the first full account of who Charles Manson really is.

My conversation with Jeff Guinn:

One continent, indivisible...

We are coming up next year, on the 20th anniversary of NAFTA. It has created tens of millions jobs, more integrated a continent, and dramatically increased trade. Yet, for politically expedient reasons, we constantly seem to be re litigating these issues.

Arguably we should be looking at the success of NAFTA as a jumping off point for greater geopolitical and economic integration of the North American continent.

The World is changing. With technology growing and business becoming ever more global, the future economic and national security of the US will be dependent on cooperation with our neighbors to the North and South.

National security and Latin American expert, Dr. Robert Pastor makes the case for this future in his new book, The North American Idea: A Vision of a Continental Future.  The world is changing he argues and we can't go forward and make progress as human beings, while being held back by arbitrary political borders and nostalgia for archaic ideas such as isolationism and opposition to globalization.

My conversation with Dr. Robert Pastor: