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In a recent decision, The United States Supreme Court struck down limits on coordinated spending between candidates and political parties. While some see this as a win for Republicans, our guest, Brody Mullins, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of “The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took over Big Government,” thinks in contrast to the ascendant position of Super PACS since the Citizens’ United decision back in 2010, where the money and transparency are truly dark, this may prove to be a better, more sunlit, method of campaign finance.  He’s assuming in his analysis that Congress has no appetite for true campaign finance reform.  It all gets a bit complicated so try to focus on this podcast without distraction.

Fixing our fragmented mental health care system is a key priority in dealing with the crisis we have today regarding Americans’ mental well-being.  The services are not uniformly available, often late in getting to the people who need them and all of this has a profoundly negative impact on both the patients and the providers.  Dealing with the physical side of the medical community is difficult enough. Imagine being in emotional distress and the crisis building up to a point where an emergency exists or the stigma you feel is traumatizing. On top of that having to tell your story six different times to get to the right person. Such is often the case in the provision of mental health services.  We are talking about issues involving mental health counselors, psychiatrists, addiction professionals and others.  To discuss what she’s hoping can be done, and the signs that progress is being made, is Mohini Venkatesh, chief of staff for the National Council for Mental Wellbeing (TheNationalCouncil.org). It’s an extremely challenging and crucial topic is a moment of great anxiety in our country.

Underground movements and subcultures are not a recent phenomenon.  Throughout modern history these bohemian movements, often marginalized in their time, have brought us our greatest creative minds by virtue of their unwillingness to accept the norms of the day.  Great art, poetry music and thought have derived from these freethinkers.  In recent American history, we can go from the beatnik era of the 1950’s to the hippies of the 1960’s and to the punks of the 1980’s to find the Kerouac’s, Dylan’s, Ginsberg’s, Garcia’s and others who have left an indelible imprint on society.  In his book, Alan Bisbort, a scholar of bohemian history, takes us from Paris in the 1830’s tracing the evolution and stages of the movement in his new book, “Hip, Bohemian, and Counterculture: History and Legacies from 1830 to the Present.” The book is worth reading for its history, context and vivid illustrations of the major forces in the movement over time and certainly for his comparison of Socrates, who in his day must have seemed ‘hip’, to Wavy Gravy.  It’s great stuff.

You will find that out early in the discussion that awaits you just ahead.  Our guest provides a thumbnail of modern Iranian history and in the process makes us realize that Western meddling in the mid-20th century, provides a throughline to where we are today.  And where we are today in this American misadventure reminds us why Western short-term thinking is overmatched by the long game the Iranian leadership, admittedly a ‘thugocracy’, employs when it considers its actions.  And while we see their actions as the rantings of madmen in Tehran our guest quotes and seconds a former Israeli Mossad leader’s assessment of the regime atop Iran as being ‘rational’ in their quest to do one thing–stay in power and maintain their perks and privileges.  In that process, they fear, exploit and have most aggressively killed their own people.  Jonathan Hackett is a retired U.S. Marine with two decades of experience at the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Special Operations Command and Marine Corps operating forces prior to attending Yale Law School.  He is the author of “Iran’s Shadow Weapons:  Covert Action, Intelligence Operations and Unconventional Warfare.”  You will learn a lot as I did.

There has been an association between cats and women throughout history.  It’s not always been a positive one as so many histories have been dominated by the male perspective.  Even in our era, as cats have taken their place alongside dogs, as popular home companions, they were derisively referenced in the 2024 campaign, as their guardians were referred to as ‘childless cats ladies.’  It has been a long and difficult history for the cats that we now embrace in our society.  This phenomenon is only about a half century old and still the behavior of what are referred to as street or feral cats, two different categories, are maligned for the environmental damage they do to birds, small mammals and reptiles.  Yet, the evolution of the cat itself, from the wildcat, can be directly traced to their value in protecting granaries from vermin, like mice and rats. It’s a fascinating story told brilliantly by Professor Rod Phillips, of Carleton University, in Canada, in his new book, “Cats: A History.”  He is our guest today.

What comes to mind if I say San Francisco–the hippies and Grateful Dead of the 1960’s, the locus of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s, the Internet revolution of the 1990’s, the urban decay of the pandemic era or the AI revolution that is clearly upon us?  Well, I think the best answer is all of the above.  The city is a complicated mix of culture, technology, business and a growing class divide.  There may be no better chronicler of the city than Jonathan Weber who has been covering this beat for different media outlets since the early 1990’s.  All of his knowledge and sense of place are married in his great new book, “City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco.”  He dispels the notion that many of us have had that San Francisco and Silicon Valley are interchangeable.  They are very different places. Both have been crucial to modern-day America.  When you think San Francisco remember that e-publishing, social media, video streaming, cloud software and the sharing economy really came to life there. Enjoy this fascinating conversation.

We are far from the days when Phyllis Schlafly led the Eagle Forum pushing back on the feminist leaders of the Left in the 1970’s.  However, she gave voice to issues like the pro-life movement, opposition to gay rights, and others that animated the first wave of pushback.  Today, with many conservative Christian women speaking out loudly and proclaiming their concern about traditional values slipping away in America, the success of their movement in self-evident by looking at who has the levers of power in Washington, D.C. today.  Our guest, Katie Gaddini, author of “Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right”, formerly an adherent to the cause, steps back to provide an honest and nuanced look at the various types of women who now make up a real power center for the Right in America.  You will hear about the Influencers, the Black conservatives, the Make America Healthy Again stalwarts and many others on today’s podcast.  Caricatures and stereotypes will be broken.

We know we are going to die, as difficult as that concept is to get our arms around, but we may imagine that our life’s work, our stuff, must be preserved because it will live on forever, particularly as we can now capture it in digital form.  Some might say that we are living in an era of permanent memory: everything is stored, searchable, and retrievable, especially now as AI systems ingest vast archives of human speech, images and text.  But our guest on this podcast, noted Professor of History at Stanford University, Thomas Mullaney, author of “How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information” provides us with a more unsettling truth: information doesn’t naturally endure.  It breaks down, scatters, becomes unaffordable to recover, and far more than we would like to admit, simply vanishes.  As you’ll discover the forces of entropy (he’ll define it in this context) are more powerful and natural than the order we try to create and sustain.  It just is.  He’s a fascinating man and it’s a topic I was privileged to explore with him.

The term ‘grey divorce’ referring to the increasing trend of couples over the age of 50 ending long-term marriages, often for reasons driven by personal growth, financial independence, and growing apart, after spending much time together during the pandemic, is one of several topics we discuss on today’s podcast.  Divorce, by the numbers, is actually below the often-cited threshold of fifty percent dissolution of marriages in this country, but then again far fewer people, as a percentage of the population, actually live in households with two married adults.  Given that I wondered about a number of issues, like the true meaning of no-fault divorces, whether infidelity is a leading cause of divorce and how second and third marriages fare in our society, Attorney Melissa Needle of Needle/Cuda Family Law practice in Connecticut, was a great resource as she delved into each topic.  She gave me a new trend to consider: GLP-1 divorces.  Curious?  Listen in.

In a moment of crisis for American democracy and liberalism, antisemitism has become a point of ideological obsession.  Now we’re questioning where free speech ends and hateful discrimination begins.  Is it possible that law can check antisemitic impulses which have generally been below the surface, yet never extinguished, while avoiding the tendency to censor political speech? History should remind us of the trapdoor we’re opening unless we find the balance.  In his brilliant book, ‘Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America,” Johns Hopkins Professor Jewish Studies, James Loeffler, unpacks the historical precedents and contemporary dangers as both the right and the left test those boundaries.  In all of this can we dissent from policies in Israel at the hands of the Netanyahu government and still want the best for two ‘righteous victims, as Golda Meir once called the Jews and Palestinians.  Our own delicate political moment in America creates many fault lines.  Antisemitism certainly seems to be one of them in this moment.