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PODCAST

Talk Cocktail

Jeff Schechtman

Jeff Schechtman talks with authors, journalists, newsmakers and opinion shapers, and sheds light on the issues of the day, from local stories to national and international headlines and ideas. jeffschechtman.substack.com

news & politics

All Episodes

23:53

In Defense of Liberal Education

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/04/07

The rate of voter participation in America continues to decline. Yes, some of it is our politics today. But another part of it just may be a failure to embrace the true education for citizenship. And it’s no wonder. Some of the fundamental ideas of what it means to be a citizen; the ability to reason, to analyze, and to articulate those views, has gone into remission. In our education today, we are obsessed with what is call STEM. Science Technology, Engineering and Math. All very important. But

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23:43

RoadTrip Nation's ROADMAP

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/04/07

Everyday we hear and read more about how life is changing. Probably while we were sleeping last night, someone came up with an app that will alter the way we work or play or interact. It’s not surprising then that all of this profoundly impacts the careers we choose, the work we do and and what that work might look like in five, ten or fifteen years. So where to begin. If you are a young person starting out, or a making a mid career change, where is that Roadmap to that future. Roadmap: The

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30:23

The real evolution of Steve Jobs

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/04/03

One of the dangers of our celebrity culture today, is that we tend to look at those who've attained that status, regardless of their field of endeavor, as fully formed human beings, whose life began and ended with the achieve that catapulted them into iconic status. Nothing can be further from the truth. In looking at the stories or biographies of these celebrities, on the one hand we have case studies that zero in a particular moment in time, or hagiographies that only heighten

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28:31

Creative Destruction comes to Warfare

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/04/02

Technological change and creative destruction is everywhere. It’s changed the way we work, the way we interact with each other, the foundation of education, and not surprisingly the nature of warfare. We’ve all seen the media images of drones giving us perfect images; the perfect eye in the sky for perfectly targeted air strikes. As least that’s how it looks on Homeland, and 24 and the images for Abbottabad. The reality however is somewhat different. Less than clear images, imperfect targeting

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02:13

Editing life code

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/31

Conventional wisdom has long held that evolution is something that takes place slowly and over centuries. Concurrently we know that technological changes, and changes in the human condition have speeded up at a hyper multiple pace. We have often thought that much of our anxiety and even some fundamental social problems stem from that dissonance, from that disconnect between our external and our internal change. However, what if we ourselves, as a species, as generic templates, were really

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23:11

The Myth of America as a "Christian Nation"

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/30

It was Churchill who reminded us that history is written by the victors. Well this is as true of religious history as it is of military, political and geopolitical history. We’ve all been been told since childhood of the Christian foundation of America. That the history of America is John Winthrop's "Shining City on a Hill." That the Christian Village Green represented the apotheosis of America. The fact is, since before the time of Columbus, America has been a pluralistic society. An idea

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26:42

Boston's other unsolved crime

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/23

Art theft is always a funny thing. The public is usually fascinated by the story, but can seldom feel the kind of empathy with the theft, they feel if their neighbors car were broken into. Art theft, at the highest level is a very special an almost elite kind of crime. Like reading the pages of Rob Report, it fascinates, but never engages. Perhaps that's why so many art thefts are never solved. Including the recent grandaddy of them all, the the theft of priceless painting from the Isabella

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21:11

Eating Viet Nam

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/20

Historians and journalists have devoted millions of pages to trying to understand the world. In fact, it may be a lot simpler than that. Just maybe it can be done by eating. We’ve all seen politicians in America, campaigning by eating the local foods and imitating local eating customs. Why isn’t the same true for geopolitics? If we can understand the culture of another country through its food, perhaps we’d better understand its people, its culture and its ideas. In so doing, the world just might

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19:51

Space is a family business

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/18

Even back in the tumultuous 60’s we were enamored with the space program. The idea of man “slipping the surly bonds of earth,” captured the nation's attention at a time when so much other news was negative. Kids everywhere wanted to be astronaut. There even was an airline at the time that referred to itself as “the wings of man.” Our landing on the moon, in 1969, instead of being the beginning of a renewed interest to take us to the planets and beyond, was simply the capstone of our national

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26:18

Gary Wills on The Future of the Catholic Church

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/16

If there is a single point of cognitive dissonance in our world today, it revolves around change. We love change. We think we like to embrace the new, and yet we fear change. We hang on to a the past, forgetting that the past, that feels oh so comfortable, is but a floating endpoint of much previous change. So to the Catholic Church. For the Church, constant change has been one of its most basic things. Most everything catholics think about dogma and doctrine in the church today, was once

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28:26

The End of College

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/12

Our College and University system in America grew up in opposition to the old European model. Americans didn’t want to be locked in to specific training or apprenticeships. We believed that the goal of education was to engage the mind in the realities of the world and so liberal arts education grew up. It emphasized writing and speaking and creative endeavors in the pursuit of interests beyond the classroom. Out of this came our great research Universities and things like the California Master

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22:50

Suicide is not Painless

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/10

Most of us remember the theme song from Mash, “Suicide is Painless:” Through early morning fog I seevisions of the things to bethe pains that are withheld for meI realize and I can see… Philip Connors, through the suicide of his brother, would come to see many things. About his brother, about his own life and about the pain of loneliness and of childhood trauma. And most of all, about the need to connect with each other and the lifetime power of those connections. Connors, the acclaimed author

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20:34

How the Constitution Invented Hollywood and Silicon...

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/09

Few classes in law school are drier and more arcane than courses on patents and copyrights. And while the debate about intellectual property includes the worlds of entertainment, literature and technology, we don’t often make the connections between those arcane laws, the Constitution that laid down their predicate and the creativity that they seek to protect. But that is exactly what Elizabeth Wurtzel does in her new book Creatocracy: How the Constitution Invented Hollywood. My conversation with

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26:59

LBJ, Selma and the Great Society

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/07

Our mission statement as a country tells us we are a government of laws, and not of men. Yet without great men, including Adams, who said this, we would not have the laws that have provided the framework for our greatness. Today, the laws that shape our contemporary society, civil rights, the environment, the social safety net, head start, and college loans, were in large measure the result of the Great Society and Lyndon Johnson. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about Johnson

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26:47

Lies, Damned Lies and Love

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/05

As novels and movies have repeatedly shown us, when both partners in a relationship tell the story of that relationship, the images, the memories, the experience is generally profoundly different. Even in good or strong relationships, the perception is shaped by the stories and yes, even the lies we tell each other and ourselves, as a kind of lubrication for intimate interaction. Over time, the stories and lies build up, until truth is almost indistinguishable, from perception. Even the most

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28:36

The Federalist Society and the conservative Revolution

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/04

As we watch presidential candidates, on both sides, putting together their respective teams for 2016, it reminds us that politics and public policy is indeed a team sport. Both sides draw from a deep bench of those that served in previous administrations and also bring up young and upcoming rookies, that then go on, if they win, to be the future veterans. Just as it’s true in campaigns and policy, it’s equally true in the legal world. Both parties have their farm teams from which to draw legal

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28:36

This is your Brain on Food

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/03

We’ve all heard the expression, “you are what you eat.” Yet when we think about some of the things we consume, the fast food, the junk food, the endless meals out, assembled with unknown ingredients, perhaps it’s no surprise that we have an obesity epidemic and that so many public health issues can be traced back to what we eat. On the other side of the table is a vast food/industrial complex, that understands food addiction, the impact of sugars and fats, and spends billions of dollars each years

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16:46

What we don't see about the Middle East

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/02

To the extent that we are all the sum total of our wider experience and our private moments, imagine how that might be magnified amidst the terror, turmoil, and violence of Middle East. A place where even the quiet moments of love, life and even pain are amplified by events in the present and memories of the past. Mai Al-Nakib’s stories in her collection The Hidden Light of Objects, takes us into the lives of people in the crucible of conflict who hang on to extraordinary memories. My conversation

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10:06

Lemony Snicket vs. The Pirates

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/03/02

It was Thoreau who said that “the masses of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The characters at the center of Daniel Handler’s new adult novel We Are Pirates want very badly to avoid that fate. And yet, they find that sometimes the alternative is even more desperation. My conversation with Daniel Handler:

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26:30

Chuck Todd captures the Catch 22 of the Obama Presidency

Talk Cocktail ·

2015/02/27

Fifty-five years ago Joseph Heller gave us the paradox of Catch 22. It came to mean a set of contradictory ideas and rules that conflicted with themselves. And while Catch 22 remains a cornerstone of American literature, it also just might be a cornerstone of the Obama Presidency. Barack Obama came to office on a wave of hope and change. He came to Washington to change it. Only to realize, that if you want to get stuff done to change Washington, you can’t change it, unless you work within it

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