America Trends

The other day I called a company and was told by the attendant, powered by artificial intelligence(AI), that she could understand full sentences and many commands and prompts previously decipherable only by another human being.  Thanks for the warning!  Artificial intelligence is ramping up quickly.  In fact, sixty nine percent of senior executives expect the … Continue reading EP 321 Alexa is Stealing Your Job

  One man’s junk is another mean’s treasure.  How that item gets from the person who doesn’t want it anymore to the person who needs it is a global phenomenon.  No one can tell the tale and explain this multi-billion dollar business better than Adam Minter, author of ‘Secondhand’ and his previous book, ‘Junkyard Planet’.  … Continue reading EP 320 Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

Our guest, Jonathan Rothwell, is the principal economist at Gallup, so he’s crunched all the numbers and is prepared on this podcast to debunk a lot of the conventional thinking about the real causes of income inequality in America. And the reasons may not sound like the usual suspects trotted out by political leaders in … Continue reading EP 319 Income Inequality is Real, But What’s the Real Cause?

  The numbers are eye-popping.  In the last 10 years, the number of Americans who identify as Christian has fallen 13 percent, while those who are not affiliated with any religion grew by 30 million, according to data from the Pew Research Center.  And if you’re skeptical of Pew’s numbers, just look at those occupying … Continue reading EP 318 Why Are Americans Losing Faith?

  Hotel home has become synonymous with the brand, Airbnb, as it fashions new ways to connect travelers with experiences that are more than a room that looks just like the next.  The company’s success in a decade’s time has been remarkable and disruptive in the hospitality game. Longstanding brands like Marriott, Hilton and Sheraton … Continue reading EP 317 Airbnb: The Sharing Economy’s Star Performer

  Did you feel imprisoned as a student in K-12?  Was the experience one that caused you harm and that you would like to see your child avoid?  Cevin Soling, the l’enfant terrible of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who writes and directs films about this topic, has a very dark vision of what … Continue reading EP 316 Should Compulsory Schooling Be Abolished?

The perception of the diplomatic corps for many is a well connected person who takes on a plush assignment overseas with all the trappings of privilege.  Yet throughout the impeachment hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives, the public was introduced to career diplomats whose love of country, precision in the use of language, meticulous … Continue reading EP 315 The Ambassadors: America’s Diplomats on the Front Lines

  Medicine’s advances are happening so quickly can the ethics and laws surrounding these changes keep up?  In the new book, ‘Who Says You’re Dead'(yes there are different definitions for that, too), Dr. Jacob Appel, an attending psychiatrist ay Mount Sinai and celebrated bioethicist, serves up provocative scenarios which demonstrate how complicated this all can … Continue reading EP 314 Can Medical Ethics Keep Up With Medical Advances?

  America seems to be hanging together by a thread these days.  In some ways the only normalcy seems to be between the lines when we see our professional sports teams come together to compete.  We get lost in it for a few hours and put aside all else in the world.  And yet in … Continue reading EP 313 Sports Free Agency Has Been a True Game Changer

Donald Trump has a unique leadership style, to say the least.  In this episode, we explore his impact on the notion of what a leader should, or should not, be doing going forward. Thanks to the expertise of Dr. Joshua Weiss, Director of the MS program in leadership and negotiation at Bay Path University in … Continue reading EP 312 Leadership in the Age of Trump

While we have professionalized the rituals of dying, from our care in the final days of life to the processes of interment with funeral home directors, it is fair to say that a trend in our society is that Americans are taking back control of the process.  People seem to be craving a more humane … Continue reading EP 311 Is the Cemetery Dead?

: Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist and public intellectual, has been working on the sources and dangers of inhuman zealotry for decades.  The conditions and individuals he studies involve brainwashing, religious extremists, political cultists and mass murderers.  In the process he examines totalitarian politics from the left and right, disinformation and social media impacts.  In … Continue reading EP 310 The Common Wellspring of Religious and Political Zealots

On February 18, 1965 a packed hall at Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England came to see a historic, televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley, Jr., a relentless critic of the movement and America’s most influential conservative intellectual.  The topic was ‘the American dream … Continue reading EP 309 Baldwin vs. Buckley: The Fire is Still Upon Us

  Candidate one has good grades, great SAT scores, and a boatload of extracurricular activities.  Candidate two has OK grades, average SATs and his parents donated $1 million to the school’s capital campaign.  Who gets in?  Take a guess.  In America’s most elite colleges only 40 percent of the students enrolled are strictly there based … Continue reading EP 308 College Admissions and the Tilted Playing Field

How do you imagine most bills are constructed in state legislatures in America?  Is it by one aggressive lawmaker having a novel idea and drafting the bill from scratch for their fellow legislators to review and vote on?  That’s one way, but increasingly there is a trend of policy plagiarism or cut and paste legislation … Continue reading EP 307 How a Bill Doesn’t Become a Law

  Stanley Greenberg, the respected Democratic pollster, has seen enough in the data to suggest that the revenge of the ‘New America’ is just around the corner.  And the evidence is in the blue wave of 2018 and the growing intensity of those who feel scorned, demoralized and bitter about the Trump era.  His book … Continue reading EP 306 R.I.P. G.O.P.

 The military has a recruitment problem that it doesn’t want to talk about.  It’s an open secret that may be one of the nation’s great defense vulnerabilities going forward.  Yet those who attribute it to long deployments, pay issues, methods of marketing to young people may all mask an even greater problem in society which … Continue reading EP 305 Why is the U.S. Military Having Trouble Recruiting?

  Coming of age can be a trying time both for those going through it and those trying to help adolescents make the journey into adulthood as safe and satisfying as possible.  In the animal kingdom, it turns out, there are many commonalities among species in that regard.  In the book ‘Wildhood’, Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz … Continue reading EP 304 Understanding the Lives of Teens in the Period of Wildhood

  In recent years, the calls for the National Collegiate Athletic Association(NCAA) to relax its rules prohibiting athlete pay have grown louder and louder.  The argument is that student-athletes should share in revenues of college sports because they are a ‘product’ that so many others, like coaches, television networks and advertisers, are benefiting from directly.  … Continue reading EP 303 Should College Athletes Be Paid?

Starving children on street corners,  Slums without adequate clean water and sanitation.  A sense of hopelessness in the air that is almost palpable. We, Americans, are moved by these scenes and should be.  The question is whether traditional anti-poverty programs and foreign aid can really ameliorate these conditions over the long term.  Or whether they … Continue reading EP 302 Is There A Difference Between Fighting Poverty and Promoting Prosperity Around the Globe?