On March 27 at the Y, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, currently serving his second term, sat down with WNYC's Leonard Lopate to talk about his new book, America: Our Next Chapter: Tough Questions, Straight Answers. In the audio clip above, Senator Hagel discusses the great transformation of an American populace disconnected with its politicians, the rise of Independents and the self-correcting mechanism of democracy.
You can also download the MP3. [2.6 MB]
[Right-click and select "Save Target As:" or equivalent to download.]
Related: A Conversation with Ted Sorensen on the Legacy of JFK and Politics Today (May 6), Senator Harry Reid in Conversation with Jeff Greenfield (May 8) and Andy Borowitz, Jonathan Alter, Susie Essman, Calvin Trillin & More: Countdown to the Election (May 13)
Subscribe with iTunes or add our podcast feed to your RSS news reader and have future 92nd Street Y podcasts delivered automatically.
Although America observes its Labor Day on the first Monday in September, most other nations honor their working men and women on May 1. In the former Soviet Union it became a national festival of communist kitsch as the Red Army preened on parade and the party faithful proclaimed the new order.
Ted Sorensen at the White House during the Kennedy Administration
Ted Sorensen was John F. Kennedy’s special counsel, speechwriter and close advisor, and his new memoir, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, explores this part of his life in intimate detail. Today, at almost 80 years of age, Sorensen is still living “at the edge of history” as an advisor to Barack Obama. He discussed both in a Q&A with Deborah Solomon in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine:
What do you make of Hillary’s comment that Obama’s promises and speeches are “just words”?
Kennedy’s rhetoric when he was president turned out to be a key to his success. His mere words about Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba helped resolve the worst crisis the world has ever known without the U.S. having to fire a shot.
Isn’t it melodramatic to call the Cuban missile crisis the worst crisis ever? What about, say, World War I?
With all due respect, with World War I the survival of the earth was not at stake.
When will the contest for a Democratic candidate end?
I think it’s likely to be almost as close as it was for Kennedy at the Democratic convention in 1960. We felt that he had to be nominated by the first ballot because if it ever went to a backroom he wouldn’t emerge. Probably the same is true of Obama.
Video: Senator Harry Reid on Iraq, President Bush and General Petraeus
When President Bush gave a speech on April 10 declaring a “major strategic shift” in Iraq following the U.S. troop surge, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it “can only be described as one step forward and two steps back.” The video above has more of his reaction.
A former boxer raised in the small desert mining town of Searchlight, Nevada, Senator Reid has earned his “Give ‘Em Hell Harry” reputation. His autobiography, The Good Fight, hits bookstores on May 1 (read more in the Las Vegas Sun) and he’ll be making a rare New York appearance at the 92nd Street Y with Jeff Greenfield on May 8 to talk about his personal journey, tireless work in the Senate and the upcoming election.
The Arc: A Formal Structure for a Palestinian State
Figure 42. Danish Rail System as a Linking Infrastructure. Comparable to a prospective Palestinian state, Denmark is composed of separate land areas—primarily a peninsula and two islands. These are now linked by a high-speed rail line between Copenhagen and the other major cities (the trip from Copenhagen airport to Odense is 115 miles—almost identical to the distance from Rafah Airport to Nablus—and takes only 72 minutes). The final link across the Great Belt was accomplished by the engineering feat of building a rail tunnel and vehicular bridge.
Creating a successful Palestinian state poses a wide range of political, economic, social and environmental challenges. The RAND Corporation took the task of creating a study, The Arc: A Formal Structure for a Palestinian State, which has won prestigious architecture awards and the praise of leading experts. From the research abstract:
An exploration of options for strengthening the physical infrastructure for a new Palestinian state, this study builds on analyses that RAND conducted between 2002 and 2004 to identify the requirements for a successful Palestinian state. That work, Building a Successful Palestinian State, surveyed a broad array of political, economic, social, resource, and environmental challenges that a new Palestinian state would face. This study, The Arc: A Formal Structure for a Palestinian State, examined a range of approaches to siting and constructing the backbone of infrastructure that all states need, in the context of a large and rapidly growing Palestinian population. The research team develop a detailed vision for a modern, high-speed transportation infrastructure, referred to as the Arc. This transportation backbone accommodates substantial population growth in Palestine by linking current urban centers to new neighborhoods via new linear transportation arteries that support both commercial and residential development. The Arc avoids the environmental costs and economic inefficiencies of unplanned, unregulated urban development that might otherwise accompany Palestine’s rapid population growth. Constructing the key elements of the Arc will require very substantial investment of economic resources. It will also employ substantial numbers of Palestinian construction workers. It seems plausible that key aspects of the Arc design can be pursued, with great benefit, even before an independent Palestinian state is established.
You can download the full report here. Two of its authors, Michael Schoenbaum—Senior Economist at the RAND Corporation—and Doug Suisman, an award-winning architect and urban planner, will present their plan at the Y on April 29.
Last night, a packed Kaufmann Concert Hall at the 92nd Street Y hosted the first lady and her daughter Jenna to discuss the children’s book, Read All About It!, on which the two collaborated. Eric Konigsberg of the New York Times was in attendance and he wrote:
The Bushes — fresh off an extended appearance Tuesday morning on NBC’s “Today” show, in which the first lady served as co-host for one hour — took the stage to a standing ovation and read from the new book. A talk followed, moderated by Julia Reed, a journalist who grew up in Texas and has written about the Bushes for Vogue and Newsweek.
The Bush women discussed their teaching experiences. Mrs. Bush, who has worked as a public school teacher and a librarian, said that she had taught grades 2, 3 and 4 in Houston, Dallas, and Austin, and that —not unlike an episode in the book — children in one of her classes had pretended that Charlotte, from “Charlotte’s Web,” was living in a classroom closet.
Donny Deutsch, host of the CNBC talk show The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, appeared at the Y with Adweek editor-in-chief Alison Fahey on January 17, 2006 to share the story behind his success and offer guidance about thinking boldly and innovatively in business. He built Deutsch Inc. from a boutique shop into the nation’s ninth largest advertising agency, a $2.7 billion marketing and communications company. In the clip above, he discusses the self-esteem of ad agencies, the service element of the business and spending the night in a Speed Racer bed for a client.
You can also download the MP3 [2 MB]
[Right-click and select "Save Target As:" or equivalent to download.]
Dr. Atul Gawande: Complex Medical Care, For Better or Worse
Atul Gawande, MD, a general surgeon at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and School of Public Health, wrote an exhaustive essay about intensive care for his widely referenced Annals of Medicine column in The New Yorker this past December.
For every drowned and pulseless child rescued by intensive care, there are many more who don’t make it—and not just because their bodies are too far gone. Machines break down; a team can’t get moving fast enough; a simple step is forgotten. Such cases don’t get written up in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, but they are the norm. Intensive-care medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered.
On any given day in the United States, some ninety thousand people are in intensive care. Over a year, an estimated five million Americans will be, and over a normal lifetime nearly all of us will come to know the glassed bay of an I.C.U. from the inside. Wide swaths of medicine now depend on the lifesupport systems that I.C.U.s provide: care for premature infants; victims of trauma, strokes, and heart attacks; patients who have had surgery on their brain, heart, lungs, or major blood vessels. Critical care has become an increasingly large portion of what hospitals do. Fifty years ago, I.C.U.s barely existed. Today, in my hospital, a hundred and fifty-five of our almost seven hundred patients are, as I write this, in intensive care. The average stay of an I.C.U. patient is four days, and the survival rate is eighty-six per cent. Going into an I.C.U., being put on a mechanical ventilator, having tubes and wires run into and out of you, is not a sentence of death. But the days will be the most precarious of your life.
On April 24, Gawande comes to the Y to discuss his bestselling new book, BETTER: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. With riveting accounts of medical failure and triumph, he provides keen insight into how success is achieved in the complex and risk-filled medical profession.
Mrs. Bush will guest host the 9 am hour of Today next Tuesday, April 22nd (that also happens to be the day of the Pennsylvania primary). That later part of the show is usually quite a bit softer, with less political talk and more topics aimed at women. Laura Bush will also appear earlier in the broadcast with daughter Jenna to talk about their children’s book, Read All About It!. And she will give Ann Curry a tour of the family’s Crawford, TX ranch.
At the Y, the Bushes will be joined by Vogue magazine writer Julia Reed for a more in-depth conversation on literacy and learning.
It may be the Year of the Rat in the Chinese zodiac, but the Association of Zoos and Aquariums is highlighting 2008 as the Year of the Frog. Why? Because frogs around the world are disappearing at an alarming rate, and as frogs are unusally sensitive to changes in the environment, it doesn’t bode well for any of us. Toads, salamanders and newts are dying out as well and the World Conservation Union estimates that one-third of known amphibian species are now threatened with extinction.
What is going on exactly? A rapidly spreading disease called chytridiomycosis, combined with the effects of habitat destruction, climate change and pollution, has been having a dramatic impact. Cathy Eser and Matt Lanier, herpetologists at the Staten Island Zoo, will be here next Wednesday to discuss in detail why frogs are dying and what it all means.
Just Announced: Katie Couric with Jeff Greenfield on Sunday, April 6
Beamed into America’s living rooms and now on stage at the Y: It was just announced that CBS News anchor Katie Couric is replacing Congressman Charles Rangel as the guest for Jeff Greenfield’s third and final talk in his popular “In The News” series of the season on Sunday, April 6. The two media veterans will talk candidly about the election, world politics and broadcast news journalism.
The New York Times published a comprehensive review of the book yesterday as well:
“The Bin Ladens” uses the prism of one family to examine the mind-boggling, culture-rocking effects that sudden oil wealth had on Saudi Arabia, while shedding new light on the “troubled, compulsive, greed-inflected, secret-burdened” relationship that developed between that desert nation and the United States, and the conflicts many Saudis felt, pulled between the traditional pieties of their ancestors and the glittering temptations of the West.
It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.”
The Amygdaloids: A Better Band Name Than The Stained Neurons
Video: The Amygdaloids at Madison Square Garden, May 2007
A rock band of neuroscientists? The drummer is an ex-Israeli soldier? Reading, seeing and hearing is believing.
In May at Madison Square Garden, an unknown, unsigned rock band began to play. It was only its fourth show since forming in the fall of 2006. Granted, its last show had sold out, but that was in the basement of the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York, which holds about 30 people. The Amygdaloids were staring at a crowd of 10,000, a big leap for a band that had yet to release, well, anything. Then something phenomenal happened. In the midst of its signature song, “All in a Nut,” an inspired kid in the audience began leaping out of his seat, igniting a wave that went around the entire 200,000-square-foot arena. The band members were stunned; they had never seen anything like it.
All right, the occasion wasn’t a concert but a graduation ceremony for 10,000 students in the New York University College of Arts and Science. Still, this was no ordinary club band hired to entertain the students. The Amygdaloids are made up of four scientists from NYU whose chief singer and songwriter is Joseph LeDoux. Earlier in the evening, LeDoux had given the faculty address. Although one must ask what kind of neuroscience professor invokes Tennessee Williams and surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel to send a graduating class out into the world, then picks up his white Stratocaster and launches into a rock ballad about the amygdala, that almond-shaped “nut” in the brain that processes primitive emotions like fear, love, hate and anger: “Why do we feel so afraid/ Don’t have to look very far/ Don’t get stuck in a rut/ Don’t have to look very hard/ It’s all in a nut, in your brain.”
Joseph LeDoux, the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and a professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University, brings his band to the Y on April 3.
After Esquire contributing editor A.J. Jacobs completed The Know-It-All, the story of one man’s quest to learn everything in the world by reading the Encyclopedia from A to Z, he set his sights higher—to the heavens, if you will—when he decided to follow every single rule in the Bible as literally as possible for a year. The results are not just the before and after photos shown here, but a hilarious and reverential account called The Year of Living Biblically.
You followed the Bible literally for an entire year. If you had to do it again for one month, which month would you choose and why?
Can I make my own month? And choose to do 31 Saturdays in a row? Is that allowed? The Sabbath was one of the most life-altering parts of my year. As a workaholic, the line between weekend and weekday didn’t exist for me. But here was a mandated day of rest and joy, a “sanctuary in time,” as Rabbi Heschel called it. When I first tried Shabbat, I got the shakes, but by the end of the year, I had come to love the ritual.
You came out of your experiment with a deeper sense of transcendence and sacredness in life. Have you been able to maintain that now that you are no longer doing your biblical study and practice?
To some extent, yes. I started the year as an agnostic and I ended the year as what a minister friend of mine calls a ‘reverent agnostic.’ Which is a phrase I love, however oxymoronic it may seem. Whether or not there’s a God, I believe in the idea of sacredness, and that rituals or the Sabbath or prayer can be sacred. I still observe the Sabbath – in the sense that I try not to email or make phone calls or write on Saturdays. I still pray, even though I’m not sure what I’m praying to. And I try to maintain a sense of wonderment, which is something I gained in my biblical year (I also gained it sophomore year of high school after a night with an apple bong, but the feeling from my biblical year was more lasting).
Read the full Q&A and join A.J. at the Y on April 1 for an eye-opening lesson in the wisdom of rabbis, religion in America today, Bible history and the dangers of literal interpretation. Thou shalt not miss it!
Beamed into America’s living rooms and now on stage at the Y: It was just announced that CBS News anchor Katie Couric is replacing Congressman Charles Rangel as the guest for Jeff Greenfield’s third and final talk in his popular 
After Esquire contributing editor A.J. Jacobs completed 
