An American Family in Iran

Thirty-four years ago the Iran hostage crisis forever transformed our view of that nation. For many of us, our memories of and attitude towards Iran and the Middle East, were frozen in place at that moment in time. Until recently very little has happened to change those views. In fact, the hard line views of the former Iranian President Ahmadinejad, only further reinforced them.

Today as change seems to be in the air, as a new regime takes over in Iran, as new overtures are made, Iran is still, as Winston Churchill once described the former Soviet Union, " a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Few understand this dynamic better than Hooman Majd. Born in Iran, educated in the US, he was an American music executive before becoming a journalist. In 2008 he was the formal translator at the UN, for a speech given by former Iranian president Ahmadinejad.

Hooman Majd has now written about taking his family for a year of living differently,  in The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran

My conversation with Hooman Majd:

Dallas 1963 = America 2013

We have this very understandable habit of always thinking our era is unique. Even that our current period of political extremism is unparalleled. We think that the Tea Party rallies that called for the impeachment of the President, that engaged in racial animus, and accused the President of foreign allegiance and treason are unique events. They are not.

In the early 1960’s Dallas, Texas was a seething cauldron of similar feelings about another President, who came to office promising change and hope. It was another time when the world seemed to be shifting on its axis. It reached its apogee 50 years ago with the assassination of John Kennedy.

Regardless of where you stand on the theories about the assassination, there is no questions that Dallas was a character in the story. It was ground zero for the perfect storm of rage that Kennedy knew he was walking into.  Longtime Dallas based journalist and author Bill Minutaglio captures it all in Dallas 1963

My conversation with Bill Minutaglio

Amsterdam: The World's Most Liberal City

With the election of Bill de Blasio as its Mayor, New York seems to want to recapture its Liberal roots. For some that may mean simply thinking about some of the last Democratic Mayors.

In fact those Liberal roots go much, much deeper. They go all the way back to the Dutch founding and Dutch influence on New York. All of which has its antecedents in the birth of Amsterdam itself, and the way in which the evolution of that city, particularly in the seventeenth century, would come to define the very ideas of classical Liberalism.

That idea of Liberalism is deeply entwined with the city of Amsterdam. Not just its permissive culture, about which we are familiar. But as a city that defines the most fundamental ideas of individual freedom.

Russell Shorto has looked as this from many angles. From the New York perspective, in his wonderful book, The Island at the Center of the World, and from a philosophical perspective in Descartes Bones. Now he goes into the belly of the beast to give us Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

My conversation with Russell Shorto:

Crime and Funishment

To date, Patricia Cornwell’s books have sold some 100 million copies in thirty-six languages in over 120 countries.  She’s authored twenty-six New York Times best sellers. She has just published her 21st Kay Scarpetta book, Dust 

However those numbers only tell a part of the story. Because if you had lived in a bubble for the past 23 years and only read Kay Scarpetta books, you would be completely up date on the state of law enforcement technology, and the changing mores and language of the time. In short, Patricia Cornwell's books are a kind of contemporary time machine from which we can have the pleasure of transporting ourselves to another world and at the same time stay grounded in the every changing world around us. A kind of crime and funisment.

My conversation with Patricia Cornwell:

Moral Tribes: The Gap Between Us and Them

There is a current fad in the diet world known as the paleo diet. The idea is that we should eat what paleolithic man ate, in order to be protected from the scourge of modern processed food. While harkening back to our hunter gather ancestors may be good nutrition, it’s not necessarily good thinking.

Harvard cognitive neuroscientist and philosophy Professor Joshua Greene argues, in Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them that some our biggest problems, arise from our habit of using paleolithic moral thinking to the problems of 21st Century life.

Our moral instincts, he argues, turn Me into Us, but then turns Us against Them. The only way to do better, is to get beyond how our brains have evolved by using both efficient, “point and shoot” gut reactions, side by side with our “manual mode” reasoning, to solve the modern moral problems that divide Us v. Them.

My conversation with Joshua Greene:

The Last Word on the 2012 Campaign

Ever since 1960, the campaign memoir has become almost a genre unto itself.  Over the years many of these books have shaped our view of politics. Theodore White’s, Making of the President, F. Clifton White’s Suite 3505, Joe McGinniss’ Selling of the President 1968, Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the 1972 Campaign and Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes.

In each of these stories men have competed for the Presidency with the strongest of passions, with the proverbial fire in the belly. In many cases that ambition drove the narrative.

Now Mark Halperin and John Heilemann reprise their 2008 campaign memoir Game Change with their 2012 account Double Down.   Except, they faced a unique aspect to this story….two contenders, one the President of the United States, both of whom seemed almost ambivalent and reluctant to take on the fight.  This was a major game change along with the changing face of the electorate and of the country.

My conversation with Mark Halperin:

Murdoch's World

Just as Charles Foster Kane, thought it would be fun to run a newspaper, and was always torn between being rich, a pillar of the establishment, and being the owner of a populist , anti elitist, publication, so to his real life scion Rupert Murdoch.

It's a complicated story as Murdoch begins, from his father's modest company in Australia, to build a business spanning 50 countries, a powerhouse of influential TV and movie production companies, newspapers and book publishers. Now it all could come chasing down in a London courtroom. Admired, loathed and feared, Murdoch is hard to size up neatly.

But NPR media reporter David Folkenflick takes on the job in Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires.

My conversation with David Folkenflick:

The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East

35 years ago we witnessed the Iran Hostage crisis. Israel was at war with all of its neighbors in the region and fundamentalist revolutions were rampant.

For many of us, our images of and attitude towards the Middle East, were frozen in place at that moment in time. The events of 9/11 and the wars that followed, further hardened those preconceived views.

But since 1978 a whole new generation has grown up in the region. Tahrir square was merely the most outward personification of that. These young people want to solve problems, they want technology and they want a better life. And like the forward march of creative destruction everywhere on the planet, the Middle East is no exception.

The world of startups and brain power in the Middle East is not limited to Israel. In fact, the whole of the Middle East has the potential to be as powerful a force as Silicon Valley.  So says venture capitalist and entrepreneur Christopher Schroeder in Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East.

My conversation with Chris Schroeder:

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

For those of us that grew up in the 60’s, space was the final frontier. It was the most future oriented thing one could do. JFK found no better way to project into the future than to promise to put men on the Moon by the end of the decade.

Today, as a society, we seem to have lost that wonder. Instead, the future consists of the latest social media; Twitter, Facebook, youtube. Perhaps they all portend to a future we can’t yet imagine?

Few people have understood or been part of both of these worlds...The world of space travel and all that it represents, and the contemporary world of social media.

Veteran astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield has straddled both.  And he’s done it in ways that inspire all of us to fearlessly grasp the future.

My conversation with Col. Chris Hadfield about his memoir An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything.

You're Fired !

In the private sector, when corporations get into trouble they replace the CEO. When sports teams repeatedly have a losing season, invariably they replace the coach. If sales are down, managers are replaced.  Yet in the military today, it's very rare that Generals are replaced. Even in the wake of catastrophic failure.

Esteemed military journalist Thomas Ricks argues in The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today, that failures in America's recent wars can be directly traced to failures of those in command. Ricks examines U.S. military leadership from World War Two to the present day, and concludes that the mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced to the Army's inability to come to terms with all the lessons of Vietnam and how that continued lack of accountability has shaped the military.

My conversation with Tom Ricks:

The resilience of the human spirit

Woody Allen, in Annie Hall, said that he felt that life was divided into the horrible and the miserable. The horrible he thought were terminal cases, and blind people, and those with severe disabilities. He said, “I don't know how they get through life.”

Yet many don't have that choice. Particularly for parents of children with severe disabilities. It appears on the surface that horrible is what they have to deal with every day. However for many of them, it’s not horrible at all. It is difficult, it’s often painful, but it’s also a powerful lesson about unconditional love, about finding strength in broken places and about redefining one's identity. Often by entering an alien world, that sometimes turns out to be a place of love, and safety and enrichment.

This is the world that National Book Award winner Andrew Solomon lays out for us in Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.

My conversation with Andrew Solomon:

# Tweet Tweet

For years people have referred to Hollywood, as being like High school with money. Well, Hollywood has matured a lot. But today the same might be said about the tech world.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the story of the rise and rise of Twitter. Started by four young guys looking to change the world, the drama of their story would rival anything in the world of high school mean girls.

Now, coinciding with the Twitter IPO, NY Times reporter Nick Bilton gives us Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal. It takes us inside the remarkable story of the company and the four men who stated it. It’s a story of money, loneliness, bitterness, technology and personal growth; all driven by a grand vision to change how we communicate.

My conversation with Nick Bilton:

The Psychopath Inside

Even if you are not a football fan, you’ve all seen the diagrams of plays with all those X’s and O’s. It makes you think, and even sometimes makes the players and coaches think, that they have it all figured out. If you just follow the pattern, you will have success and that it will be a winning play.

Problem is, it’s not true. There are dozens of factors that enter into the equation. The weather, the turf, memory, mental ability, the agility to pull it off and of course the plans and mindset of the opposing team.

In many ways the same is true for the human brain and human behavior. We might have brain patterns, genetics and chemistry that tells us that we should or will develop a certain way. The problem is there is also environment, parents, and many other factors that make us who we are.

That's the backdrop for neuroscientist Dr. James Fallon’s look at psychopathology in his book The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain

My conversation with James Fallon:

One family's life defines the 20th Century

When we look at the emergence of the diaspora of any ethnic group, we realize how important immigration is. To the Jews of the 20th century it was everything. Some would migrate to America and become pillars of both capitalism and communism. Some would migrate to Palestine and birth the state of Israel out of the desert. Others would be left behind in Europe and suffer the last full measures of the holocaust. They to would impact history, both by their courage and even by what they might have accomplished.

David Laskin, has written The Family: Three Journeys into the Heart of the Twentieth Century. It'sabout his own family, but it's also a history that incorporates all the strands of the journey and the history of the Jewish diaspora in the 20th Century.

My conversation with David Laskin:

What it means to be human

We know that genes help make us who and what we are. But, of the 25,000 genes we possess, a relatively few are significantly different from person to person. Some of those genes are often referred to as the Compatibility Genes. Genes that both impact our relationships and determine how we responded to infection and disease.

Daniel Davis, in his new book, The Compatibility Gene: How Our Bodies Fight Disease, Attract Others, and Define Our Selves, cuts through the complexities of modern genetics to reveal much about the most important selection of genes, the ones that define what it means to be human.

My conversation with Daniel Davis:

Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them

Imagine if decisions in Washington, or at any level of government for that matter, were really made on the basis of policy. If careful analysis could win out over politics. Certainly the current health care debate would be very different. But so would our discussions about economic policy. If our discussion of the 2008 financial meltdown had been about analysis of what happened, as opposed to who's to blame, perhaps we’ve have learned a lot more from it.

Wesleyan Professor of Economics, Richard Grossman takes a long view of several economic crises and what we got WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them.

My conversation with Richard Grossman:

A beacon of democracy or an apartheid state?

If I said that this conversation was about authoritarian politics, the religious right, a demographic crisis facing one political party, and the continued rise of military power, you would easily assume we would be talking about the US. In fact, these same forces are at play in greater Israel, and they are constantly reinforced here, by perhaps the most powerful political lobby in the United States.

The complexity of Israeli politics, its relationship with the US, and its impact on our own politics are all issues that exist not just in the abstract world of policy wonks. Each and every day they impact the lives of thousands of people on the ground in Israel, Gaza and the Middle East.

Max Blumenthal takes a brave and controversial look at this in Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.

My conversation with Max Blumenthal: