Without comparing one historical era to another, suffice it to say that we live in a nation filled with anger, despair and at best anxiety. Our ideological, economic and cultural divisions have infected every fiber of the public square. And all of this is happening amidst loss of faith in our once valued institutions, both public and private. A loss of faith in facts and truth, and in the fundamentals founding principles of self governance of fairness and selflessness. But we didn’t get here overnight, nor did some external forces (no not even Donald Trump) create this environment. NY staff writer Evan Osnos went, like Simon and Garfunkel, looking for America. He looked in the mix of places he knew best, Greenwich, Connecticut where he grew up, Clarksburg West Virginia where he worked as a young reporter, and Chicago, the very definition of urban America. The result of that effort is his new book Wildland: The Making of America's Fury  My conversation with Evan Osnos:

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Looking for America: My Conversation with Evan Osnos

A recent survey showed that the reason people are reluctant to go back to the office has nothing to do with COVID, but with their commute. It’s not the office they object to, it’s getting there. Particularly in places like New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington DC, commute times have exploded in recent years. Perhaps when the dust settles, perhaps what we will have changed as a result of a year at home, is less how we work, and more how we move about. But will we ever give up our love affair with the automobile? Will new generations approach transportation in a new way? Are flying cars ever going to be a thing? And what can we learn from the last great inflection point as we went from the horse to the car? All of this is part of Tom Standage’s new book, A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next.   My conversation with Tom Standage:  

What Is The Future of Transportation? Hint...It‘s Not A Better Car

I suppose even the most ardent technologists have at times wanted to get off the grid...usually that urge doesn't last long. But for the people of Green Bank, West Virginia, it’s an ongoing state of affairs.  The only town that is designated as a national radio quiet zone, is actually not all that quiet. It seems that just as before technology subsumed us, people do find other ways to communicate, and to get into all sorts of trouble.    The story of Green Bank and its people is where my guest Stephen Kurczy takes us in The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence    My conversation with Stephen Kurczy:

No Cell Service, No Technology and Electrosensitives Everywhere: Stephen Kurczy Talks about ”The Quiet Zone”

While the issue of systemic racism, along with a long history racial conflict occupies a large portion of our social and political landscape, the issue of racial influence in law enforcement and the problem of police violence directed at people of color, holds a unique place in our history.   The idea of equal justice under the law is a unique pillar in the American experience. It is, arguably, one of the weight-bearing pillars upon which our entire system of law and justice is based. And yet for years this idea has been under siege. Not just on the streets, or in squad rooms, but in the courts rooms of our states and even in the Supreme Court. How the courts have undermined a foundational tenant of their very existence tells us a lot about how we got where we are today. Erwin Chemerinsky, the Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law expands on this idea in Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights.   My conversation with Erwin Chemerinsky: 

Police, The Courts and the Subversion of Civil Rights: A Conversation with Erwin Chemerinsky

It wasn’t very long ago that to see a foreign language film, you wound up in the smallest theater in the multiplex or a little art theater somewhere in a college town...or you lived in New York or San Francisco or Boston. But like everything else, creative destruction has done its job. Streaming and the long tail of the internet has moved to supplant cable, movie theaters, broadcast television, and even the English language as the talisman of all of our entertainment.  Even amidst the bifurcation and division in both the US and the world, filmed entertainment seems to be one of the few things bringing the world together. Suddenly at our fingertips is programming made everywhere. And rather than looking at it as an oddity reserved only for a few cinephiles, it’s now working its way into the mainstream of all of our living rooms. Is this just a temporary blip due to COVID and the pandemic, or has global entertainment undergone a tectonic shift that both reflects and might reshape our culture? We’re going to talk about this with Scott Roxborough.    Scott is an international reporter covering film and television and music. He reports on entertainment from Europe for the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and German TV, and wrote a seminal article for the Hollywood Reporter dealing with this subject.    My conversation with Scott Roxborough: 

As You Look At The Emmys, Remember That It Is Only Streaming and Entertainment That is Bringing the World Together

For journalism, it may be the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, the national media is more vibrant than ever. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as broadcast and cable news networks are thriving. For these outlets, the transition to digital has been painful, but successful and is still ongoing.  It was recently announced by CNN and NBC News that they would be moving to a streaming model.   Today, The New York Times derives more than sixty percent of its revenue from digital subscriptions. Recurring revenue models are driving the success of independent and specific news outlets and individual journalists on Substack and similar platforms that are thriving. While romantics rap quixotic about the 23 newspapers that once were available in New York City, websites and Twitter have now subsumed that. New sites start up regularly with lower barriers to entry and what some argue is a greater democratization of information. For local news, however, the story is different. For what’s happening in your neighborhood, your school board, your city council, is a very different story. Thousands of local newspapers and local radio stations have shut down. The economics of the enterprise has proven to be unsustainable, and even large regional papers in places like LA, Chicago, and Miami have proven to be problematic. While many of the best of these papers have been stripped and plundered by hedge funds, let’s also remember that many were acquired by the hedge funds out of bankruptcy. All of this begs the question as to whether our political, cultural, and social divide stems from the top as is assumed, or whether the hollowing out of news in our communities, something that should be bringing us together, is at the heart of what’s wrong? If so, does the government have a role to play in fixing that effort? Is the problem with the product, with the public, or as it is often so easy to do, should we just blame social media?  Understanding this is the work that Martha Minow takes on in Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech.   My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Martha Minow:

The News About the News: A conversation with Martha Minow

The more we know about disasters, the more we realize that most were preordained. Covid 19 or Katrina, the current fires in California or the deep freeze this past winter in Texas. None of them were what we would call Black Swan events. We are certainly, because of climate change, complexity and complacency, going to be experiencing more such events, we had better become much better at disaster preparedness. If we know these disaster events are coming, how can we get better at dealing with the consequences? Fire season is yet to reach its peak this year, hurricanes are starting early and we know that more infrastructure and buildings will collapse. Therefore, the area of disaster management should be one of our number one priority, just as it has been for my guest Dr. Samantha Montano, the author of Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis    My conversation with Samantha Montano:

The Myth of ”Nobody Saw it Coming”

Survey after survey shows that trust in the news media is at an all time low. And it’s not just the left/right divide. A recent study by the American Press Association reveals that not all Americans universally embrace core journalistic values, and that the trust crisis might best be understood through people’s moral values even more than their politics. When journalists say they are” just doing their jobs,” the problem is many people harbor doubts about what that job should be. Couple this with an ever changing media landscape driven by economics, the political bifurcation of news via the long tail of the internet, the news/entertainment nexus, celebrity culture, and now cancel culture, and it makes for an environment that has very little to do with getting at the truth. Maybe democracy dies not in darkness, but in the chaos of competing truths. This is the world that long time journalist Robert M. Smith explores in Suppressed: Confessions of a Former New York Times Washington Correspondent.   My conversation with Robert M Smith:  

Democracy Dies In The Chaos of Competing Truths: A Conversation with Robert M. Smith

Almost everywhere in the world, liberal democracy is, if not under siege, or at least being tested. Only in rare historical times have would-be autocrats found such fertile ground. But why?    The world's and yes, America’s standard of living is rising overall. As Steven Pinker has pointed out, crime and violence is down. The census tells us that diversity is naturally occurring and technology has made life easier. While we are not perfect, the arc of history is bending towards justice. And yet we’re angrier, more frustrated, and more willing to buy snake oil than ever before.    We’re quick to cast blame. Quick to believe anything that fits our preconceived narrative, and each side has its Boogeyman and Straw-man. But what if the answer to these problems is not out there? What if Cassius was right? — that the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.    This is what Tom Nichols explores in his new work Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy    My WhoWhatWhy conversation with Tom Nichols:

America Is No Longer A Serious Nation: My conversation with Tom Nichols:

From Alexis de Tocqueville, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn to John Lennon, it has often taken those born outside of America to help us understand and define America back to those of us that have grown up here. Those of us long engulfed in both the popular culture and political noise inherent in our society, often can’t see the proverbial forest from the trees. Today British/American broadcaster Roger Bennett has taken up that mantle. The impresario of the Men in Blazers media empire not only explains soccer to its burgeoning American audience, he also explains America in his new book Reborn in the USA: An Englishman's Love Letter to His Chosen Home.   My conversation with Roger Bennett: 

Roger Bennett Teaches Us About Soccer AND About America

In the 1960s and early 1970s political and social battles were fought by people who were trying to reshape America. Sixty years later, we are still at war. My guests on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, David and Margaret Talbot, label that war the Second American Revolution. The issues revolved around armed conflict abroad (Vietnam), civil rights, feminism, gay rights, Native American rights, workers rights, and the role of celebrities in the political process. One of the Talbots’ conclusions is that the past is not just prologue — It’s not even the past. They argue — in this conversation and in their new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams — that the ’60s were a time when every cultural and political progressive action was met with an equal reaction. A time when the FBI engaged in the kind of widespread, invasive surveillance that makes even today’s Pegasus project seem like child’s play. The Talbots remind us that charismatic leadership, not just grassroots efforts, catalyzed the political and social activism of the ’60s. Leaders had to put their bodies on the line in the streets, not on social media. Discussing how these efforts morphed from the optimism of the early ’60s to the weary cynicism of today, the Talbots draw a sobering lesson in By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution.   My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with David and Margaret Talbot: 

The Second American Revolution - Will it Ever Be Won?

If someone pitched the story idea of a guy who was a former baby clothes salesman who then started a company that sublet co-working office space to millennials, and that that company would then become the most well financed startup ever, and that the story of its eventual rise and fall would give birth to an Apple tv series, a Hulu documentary, an HBO movie, several books, and two podcast series, the pitch would be rejected immediately. And yet this is the story of Adam Neumann and WeWork. But it’s also a story of Silicon Valley, of Wall Street, of international investors, of obsessions with millennials, of portfolio theory taken too far, and it all comes together to create the perfect corporate storm. While there are some bad and greedy actors in this story, I would argue it's one with no heroes, and no real villains….because it exists, like many of our greatest corporate dramas, inside the protective bubble of a unique moment in place and time. - Telling this story, as more than just the story of Adam Neumann and a failed business model, but telling it in the context of all of the aforementioned moving parts, is WSJ reporter Maureen Farrell in The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion.    My conversation with Maureen Farrell:

The Ultimate Corporate Delusion: The Story of WeWork

If daily news reporting is the first draft of history, books that come out almost contemporaneously to events are I suppose the second draft. But today the world is speeded up. Today, especially in the wake of Trump, we need the facts much sooner. We need to learn not just how to escape the mistakes of history but to escape their repetition and to learn quickly from the actions of recent times. Pulitzer prize winning Washington Post reporters Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig have become the modern masters of this genre. With their first book A Very Stable Genius, early in the Trump presidency, they telegraphed what was ahead. No one that read their book could have been surprised at what happened next. And now with their latest, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year they have given us a narrative history of the troubled final days of the Trump presidency, and maybe the final days of democracy as we've come to know it. My conversation with Carol Leonnig:

Trump's Final Days: My conversation with Carol Leonnig

While everyone has their own personal list, we could all maybe agree on some of the most iconic cars ever made. The VW Beetle, the 1968 Ford Mustang, the 1960 Corvette, the 57 Chevy, the Porsche 911, The 1955 Mercedes gull-wing, the DeLorean, and just for good measure, the 1963 Aston Martin. But equally important is a vehicle that gets little attention, All of its models together only traveled under 100 miles. When it was built it was over budget, over schedule, and was only a two-seater. It was the lunar rover vehicle that was a part of Apollo 15, 16, and 17. Without it, we’d know a lot less about the moon, about our own planet, and even the solar system. Not bad for a car that was bare bones and electrified, long before Elon Musk was born. That’s the story that Earl Swift tell in his new book Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings.   My conversation with Earl Swift: 

A Car for the Ages: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings - A conversation with Earl Swift

Two years ago if you convened a focus group to give an opinion on Bill Gates and his foundation, the response would have been overwhelmingly positive. Today, not so much.  The divorce, the behavior with respect to female employees, and violation of rules that any employee would know much less the company’s founder, former CEO, and chairman, and his condoning of poor behavior by his associates would be enough in and of itself to change public opinion. Add to this his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and the picture gets darker. Investigative journalist Tim Schwab, argues that none of this is as bad or as global as some of the actions of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Tim and all of this out in his recent articles in The Nation and in a book he's working on about Gates and his foundation.    My WhoWhatWhy conversation with Tim Schwab:   

Bill Gates Has Always Shown Us Who He Is: A Conversation with Tim Schwab

Jeff Schechtman talks with authors, journalists, and thought leaders.

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