The Friday, March 13, 2009 Charlie Rose Greenroom Conversation with author Richard Price

See the entire interview here. See also: Bloodbrothers: A Novel, Lush Life: A Novel, The Wanderers, Samaritan

James Fallows on China's Economy from KQED's Forum by forum@kqed.org (KQED Public Radio)

Does the global economic crisis spell doom for China? Not according to James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic. Fallows joins us to discuss China's current economic situation, and how Chinese entrepreneurs are turning hard times into opportunities. Fallows wrote the cover story for the April 2009 issue of The Atlantic, an article entitled "China's Way Forward." His latest book is "Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China."

Listen to the podcast here.

"Suburban Suffering" from NYT by GEOFFREY WOLFF

And here comes Blake Bailey’s stunningly detailed biography, exploring step by stumbling step the crooked path that Cheever followed, disclosing the addicted urges and bawling self-pity (“What did I ever do to deserve this”) to which he submitted himself and those within his household. Following a prologue, Bailey’s account is chronological, beginning in the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony. To be descended from American settlers was not necessarily to be from a distinguished family, and by the time Cheever was born (to the manner but not to the manor) in 1912 on Boston’s South Shore in Quincy, the “accursed” Cheever history was already one of financial ruin, fecklessness, alcoholism, solitude, madness and suicide. John’s father, a traveling shoe salesman, liked to remind his sons to remember, “at all times, that I was a CHEEVAH.” Literary grandiosity was a family indulgence: Cheevah’s “despised” Uncle Hamlet was named in deference to Grandfather Aaron’s well-thumbed set of Shakespeare, with, Cheever said, “most of the speeches on human ingratitude . . . underscored.” Cheever’s grandfather died of “alcohol & opium” delirium tremens, alone in “squalid lodgings” in a Boston neighborhood of “shabby immigrant” tenements.

Read the full NYT piece here. See also: The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America, No. 188), Falconer, The Wapshot Chronicle (Perennial Classics)

TEDTalks : Living a life of purpose - Rick Warren (2006) from TEDTalks (audio)

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.

Listen to the podcast, TED Talk here.

Charlie Rose's Wednesday, March 4, 2009 conversation with Felix Rohatyn - Business, Books part of The Financial Crisis

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.

Read the full transcript here. And view the entire interview here. See also: Dealings: A Political and Financial Life, Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now, Dealings

Charlie Rose's Tuesday, March 3, 2009 conversation with Rashid Khalidi - Current Affairs, Books

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.

Read the full transcript here. View the entire interview here. See also: The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, 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

Charlie Rose's Thursday, February 26, 2009 conversation with Jeff Bezos

These are highlights; and there aren't really any transcripts available for this particular segment of highlights. But you can definitely check the montage out here, on CharlieRose.com. He's basically making a push for the Kindle, as Amazon's future basically rests on this thing; it's foundation. Remember that Amazon got its start in the book business, and it doesn't intend on losing its online foothold here, on this market. See this web search.

Karl Popper from Game Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) by Stephen Thornton

[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.

Review: Books about the human brain from Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk by Steven Rose

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.

Behind the public face of John Lennon (Soundcheck: Monday, 17 November 2008) from WNYC's Soundcheck by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

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