EP 991 The Beatles and Bob Dylan: What Relationship Did They Have?
Individually and collectively, the Beatles and Bob Dylan were the pulse, the heartbeat, and the cultural pacesetters of the 1960’s. They each influenced the course of popular music for generations, but until now, there hasn’t been a serious investigation into the ways their rivalry and collaboration affected the other. In his new book, “Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other–and the World,” Jim Windolf, features editor at the New York Times, does a deep dive into the personal and musical cross-pollination between the two. Would Dylan have gone electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 if he didn’t want to cross over from folk to rock and roll because of the wild success of the Beatles? Would the Beatles, particularly the edgy John have begun writing lyrics for songs like “Nowhere Man” and “Norwegian Wood” if not for the lyrical genius he aspired to in Dylan’s works? Windolf chases down every encounter, influence and collaboration between the two most dominant change agents of a rapidly transforming world. It’s a great read and a fun interview with Jim.
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Carole King was always a great writer of pop melodies from the early days of Teen Pan Alley, at the Brill Building, in the heart of midtown Manhattan, when she and her then husband, Gerry Goffin, a lyricist, gave us classics like “Up on the Roof”, “Natural Woman,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “The Locomotion” and hundreds more. Her transformation in 1971 to a recording artist giving us one of the most successful albums in history, “Tapestry,” was something many who knew her might not have anticipated. She was shy and not confident about her vocal abilities and star power. And, yet, the authenticity of that album, as she found her voice, both in the lyrics and melodies, in many of the songs, made her name synonymous with the singer-songwriter era, of the early 1970’s. And her musical soulmate, James Taylor, is largely responsible for the confidence she gained in becoming an artist, as well as a writer. Jane Eisner captures her life and career in the book, “Carole King: She Made the Earth Move.” Her impact today? Well, Taylor Swift inducted her into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for the second time, first as a songwriter and then as an artist, and said she was the greatest pop songwriter of all time. High praise, indeed. Her legacy lives on.
We are all in the doom loop of what has become known as the ‘annoyance economy’. You know the drill–long hold times on calls and the ‘friendly’ AI assistant unwilling to get you to a human, hidden junk fees, voluminous spam offers, health insurance wrangling that pits you against health care giants, corporate-friendly cancellation processes that are designed to make you throw up your hands and pay the damn bill regardless of the validity of your claim, airline policies from ‘budget’ carriers that are anything but (and it’s impossible to navigate their websites or talk to a human) and subscriptions that seemingly never end. While it may be a source of amusement in conversations with friends, the projected costs to us in time and money are projected to be $165 billion a year. The frustrations are becoming so universal, based on the polling, that some politician who wants to run on these issues would have a powerful platform. Joining us today to discuss the ever- growing annoyance economy is Juliana Kaplan, a senior labor and inequality reporter at BUSINESS INSIDER. You’ll serve as an amen choir once we point out the abuses that create frustrations beyond measure in today’s fast digitizing economy. By the way the term itself annoyance economy, was coined by Neale Mahoney, a Stanford economist, and Chad Maisel, a policy fellow at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive research organization.
Our guest has resurrected the word ‘instigators’ and given it a powerful and positive connotation. In this case, she is bringing attention the historical importance of Black women, ages 18 to 45, whose role continues to be that of pushing our society forward for social justice and historic reforms of all kinds. Atima Omara, author of “The Instigators: How Black Women Have Been Essential to American Democracy and What We Can Learn from Them”, challenges us to consider any progressive movement–be it abolition, voting rights, labor justice, the environment, the rights for LGBTQ and those advances relating to persons with disability–to recognize the central role the ‘instigators’ have played throughout our history. Even the Flint, Michigan water crises and the attention and action brought to it came about because of these brave young Black women. We revisit some of the history and current day impacts that these women have had and continue to on our society as they resist being pushed to the margins with a range of creative efforts to bend the nation’s moral compass toward justice.
Google Trends reported a 2,400 percent increase in searches for “AI girlfriends” recently. Millions of people are currently in what they consider to be serious relationships with AI. Thousands have engaged in ceremonial weddings with their AI companions and stay as faithful to them as they would a human partner. Could legal marriage to AI be far off? To many of us such concepts are unusual to say the least. However, it’s hard not to see how so many in our society could take their screen addiction to another level as they seek some form of connectedness. While in sci-fi we have imagined most of our encounters with such AI beings might be as enemies, what’s to say it couldn’t also be as ‘friends’? In her new book, “The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship,” our guest, Victoria Hetherington, takes a deep dive into something many of us have a hard time contemplating.
Most success stories start with an unimaginable backstory. Larry Bird’s journey to NBA immortality involved one of the most hardscrabble roads to success. In the fall of 1974, Bird-one of the greatest players ever to pick up a basketball-was lost and in danger of slipping away. This self-proclaimed ‘hick from French Link’ was recruited to play for Bobby Knight’s vaunted Indiana University Hoosiers’ team, but his discomfort with the fit at the University saw Bird never play a minute for the team. It all could have ended right there, but for the determination of Bob King and Bill Hodges to bring him to Indiana State University in Terre Haute, a school whose basketball team couldn’t even fill its arena. I’m old enough to recall the March 1979 NCAA Tournament finals game that pitted Larry Bird against Magic Johnson. The rest of the story involved these two men, very different in so many ways, bringing the NBA back from a perilous moment when the league was at risk of never achieving comparability with football and baseball. Keith O’Brien, author of “Heartland: A Forgotten Place, An Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird,” is a great storyteller and he joined us recently for a virtual book talk for my town’s library, which is now available as a podcast.
You’ve heard the phrase ‘horse sense’ which generally means the ability to make good judgments or decisions. In other words, common sense, about which we have often been told isn’t all that common. Our guest today, Patrick Dorinson, has a lot of what I described earlier, and he lays it all out in his new book, “The Common Sense Cowboy’s Guide to Life: Stories from the Old Guy at the End of the Bar.” The book is a spirited read full of life lessons, based on his years working on ranch crews, winning buckles in cow work competitions and as a campfire teller of tales both tall and small alike. In the book, he and his contributor Mathew Klickstein, lay out the common sense cowboy’s 12 rules for life. Number one on the list is “the secret to a long life is getting up every day with a purpose. Young or old, working or retired, everyone needs a purpose so find yours.” There so much more to benefit from in this podcast. He’s also got a great voice and graces the book cover with his elegant handlebar mustache. He’s the real deal.
There was a time when scientists could only read our biology, then came an advance with their ability to edit it and now it’s a moment to write a whole new chapter in evolution through synthetic biology, made possible in large part, you guessed it by artificial intelligence. Breakthroughs in AI, gene editing and synthetic biology are coming together to make this an unprecedented time in the history of life. Evolution, and its randomness, have left us with bodies that could benefit from our ability to make adjustments–like repairing faulty genes and having the ability to intervene in the complex systems that drive disease. Sounds futuristic? And a bit scary? The technology is neutral. It’s how it is applied. In benevolent hands, and with regulatory safeguards, it may make possible advances unimaginable just decades ago. Our guest, Dr. Adrian Woolfson is the author of “On the Future of the Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence.” This is probably your first time diving into this fascinating topic. Advances suggest it will become part of the scientific lexicon before you know it.
Recently, noted author Walter Isaacson devoted a whole book to what he called “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written”, you know, the one that reads ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” While the beauty of the prose in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence is most often quoted, our guest historian and Professor of History, Robert Parkinson, tells us in his new book that what follows in the form of 27 grievances against the King and his enforcers, represents the real crux of the reason we declared our independence in the first place. In “Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence,” Parkinson details the reasons we decided we must break away from England at the time. It is the first book in 120 years devoted to the meat of the Declaration of Independence. On the 250th anniversary of this world changing event, we thought we’d have him get to the heart, rather than the spirit, of the matter. He makes a bold case and by listening, you’ll have a great conversation piece for your 4th of July celebration.
In an unprecedented compilation, half of the faculty at Harvard Law School contributed essays, short and readable, about the work America has to do to build on the dreams and aspirations of our Founders as set out in our seminal documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Both of them commit our nation to shared governance, shared rights and shared accountability under the law for ‘one people’, as diverse as we were then and even more so today. Joining us on this podcast is Guy-Uriel E. Charles, the Charles J.Ogletree, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard. He, along with Alexandra Natapoff, the Lee S. Kriendler Professor of Law, at the same venerated institution, edited a first of a kind book, “America Unfinished: An Essay Collection from Harvard Law School Faculty.” Some of America’s most brilliant legal minds weigh in on the moment and give their reasoned consideration to issues like the many failures of the Article 1 branch, the Congress, where war powers reside in the Constitution, the pros and cons of our decentralized electoral system and the role of the judiciary–especially the Supreme Court—in keeping the constitutional order functioning. It is an important book and a great conversation.