Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, reflects on his own crisis of purpose in the wake of his book's wild success. He explains his belief that God's intention is for each of us to use our talents and influence to do good.
CHARLIE ROSE: Felix Rohatyn is here. He is the legendary investment
banker who was pivotal in saving New York City from financial ruin more
than 30 years ago. These days, he’s focused on a much different problem --
revitalizing the nation’s once great infrastructure, which he says is
literally falling apart. He writes about that in “Bold Endeavors: How Our
Government Built America and Why It Must Rebuild Now.” In it, he reviews
10 great public investments and how they can be used as a model today. I’m
pleased to have Felix Rohatyn back at this table. Welcome.
FELIX ROHATYN: Thank you, Charlie.
CHARLIE ROSE: You know, I want to talk about what happened 30 years
ago. You know, let’s talk about it now.
FELIX ROHATYN: Sure.
CHARLIE ROSE: What was it and what are the lessons from the near
financial collapse of New York City that you and Hugh Carey, the governor,
were able to do that might be instructive about what government can do
today.
, Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now
, Dealings
CHARLIE ROSE: Rashid Khalidi is here. He is the Edward Said professor of modern
Arab studies at Columbia University. No historian has explored the history
of Palestinian nationalism as deeply and passionately as he has. His new
book is called "Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the
Middle East." I’m pleased to have him back at this table.
We have much to do here, so let’s get with it. This book was informed
by your experience in Beirut in the ‘70s?
RASHID KHALIDI: That is correct.
CHARLIE ROSE: How so?
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, I was living in a capital that was one of the
cockpits of the Cold War in the Middle East. I was living in Beirut, and
the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in this fierce rivalry.
And people take it for granted. They think of the Cold War as
something that took place in Berlin or something that had to do with the
Korean War, but the Middle East was one of the major arenas of American-
Soviet competition, and it was getting hotter and hotter in the time I was
there. And I realized this as I was working on this book, that this was
the angle that I wanted to take.
, Charlie Rose - Rashid Khalidi & Martin Indyk / Ken Mehlman (January 16, 2008)
, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness
, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East
[Revised entry by Stephen Thornton on February 9, 2009. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Karl Popper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century. He was also a social and political philosopher of considerable stature, a self-professed 'critical-rationalist', a dedicated opponent of all forms of scepticism, conventionalism, and relativism in science and in human affairs generally, a committed advocate and staunch defender of the...See the Stanford U Plato entry here.
Against these reductionist claims, the Jesuit philosopher Andrew Gluck attempts a spirited, but to my mind ultimately unsuccessful, rebuttal. His title makes reference to the neurologist Antonio Damasio, whose major book Descartes' Error and its succeeding volumes laid two charges against Cartesian philosophy. The first, the one that concerns Gluck, is Descartes's dualism, in which an immaterial soul interacts with a material brain through the pineal gland. Not so, says Damasio, and neuroscientists overwhelmingly agree: we are, and have to be, materialists. The world is made of one stuff, not two. Gluck demurs, accepting materialism for the physical sciences, idealism for the mind. Damasio's second charge is perhaps more interesting - if not to Gluck, then to cognitive neuroscientists who see the brain as a problem-solving machine. On the contrary, brains are not primarily cognitive devices designed to solve chess problems, but evolved organs adapted to enhance the survival chances of the organisms they inhabit. Their primary role is to respond to the challenges the environment presents by providing the cellular apparatus enabling the brain's owner to assess current situations, compare them with past experience, and generate the appropriate emotions and hence actions. It is this evolutionary imperative within the particular line of descent leading to Homo sapiens that has resulted in our large and complex brains. As feminist sociologist Hilary Rose points out, Descartes's famous "cogito ergo sum" should be replaced by "amo, ergo sum."Read the rest of the Guardian review, here.
Writing a book about the Beatles is to enter a crowded market. But Philip Norman’s new 851-page biography, “John Lennon: The Life” is getting much buzz this fall for the unprecedented access provided by Lennon’s friends and relatives, including Yoko Ono. We talk with Norman about why Lennon remains such a fascinating and troubled figure.Download the podcast here. See also: John Lennon: Life is What Happens
LAST WEEK, the telly chefs began their annual assault on the Christmas best-seller charts. Rick Stein, Gary Rhodes and Nigella Lawson all launched their latest recipe books – but the one to watch remains Jamie Oliver, because he at least is doing something different to the rest. Naturally, it ties into a new TV show. In 2006, the Jamie's School Dinners campaign to improve the school meals system resulted in angry parents in Rawmarsh, near Rotherham, in South Yorkshire, supplying their children with contraband burgers and chips over the school wall. "Children are locked up like caged animals inside there, starving all day," complained one mum, Julie Critchlow, furiously blaming Jamie Oliver. "It's him that started it."Check the full story out here.
International policy expert Kishore Mahbubani discusses the growing influence of China and India, along with the implications for the rest of Asia and the United States. His new book is "The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East." Mahbubani is a dean and professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.
Story: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind says that the war in Iraq was based not simply on blunders but on lies. His book, The Way of the World, accuses the Bush administration of burying critical information and forging a letter that linked Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks.
