Podcast appearances and mentions of Gail Collins

Eric and Eliot try to parse the fire hose of news emanating from the Trump Administration. They discuss Eliot's Atlantic article on the American antecedents and causes of Trump's ascendancy and whether there is still some point in looking at the European autocrats like Viktor Orban on whom some Trumpists model themselves, as well as Ruy Texeira's article in the Free Press arguing that defending USAID is not the hill to die on for Democrats. They also discuss Richard Danzig's Washington Post article on how Elon Musk's DOGE might constructively help reform DoD's broken and dysfunctional acquisition process. They discuss the problems with Trump's Gaza proposal as well as the fact that it highlights how all other approaches to the issue of Gaza's relations with Israel have heretofore failed. They discuss Trump's executive order on Iran as well as General Keith Kellogg's preparations for negotiations to end the war in Ukraine and Trump's offer to resettle White Afrikaaners who have been disadvantaged by majority rule in South Africa. Eliot's Latest in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/trump-historical-analogies/681561/ Ruy Texeira on USAID https://www.thefp.com/p/defending-usaid-is-political-suicide Richard Danzig on Pentagon Reform https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/06/doge-pentagon-tech-innovation/ Bret Stephens & Gail Collins on Trump's Second Term So Far https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/opinion/trump-musk-cabinet-education.html Steven Levitsky on The New Authoritarianism https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/trump-competitive-authoritarian/681609/ Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Kamala has been showing up: from "Call Her Daddy" – a podcast popular among young woman, to "The Howard Stern Show" – popular among young men; to "The View" and "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" – Harold Meyerson comments on Kamala's media blitz.Also: The polls have had disastrous failures for decades, but people continue to focus on them; Rick Perlstein has a better idea: ‘don't follow polls—organize.'Plus: From the archives: The great Gail Collins of The New York Times op-ed page talks about the adventures of older women – and her book, “No Stopping Us Now” (first recorded in ​November 2019).

01:00 Biden WEEK FROM HELL: Dems Plot REVOLT, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyyUYn5ot1k 04:00 Democrats care more about their jobs than telling the truth, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/do-democrats-care-more-about-their-jobs-than-beating-trump.html 17:20 Joe Biden's losing the media 34:20 Is Biden's team deceiving the American public about his competence, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9fu-F3dm8E 38:10 A Biden - Trump Update | Mark Halperin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cuOomgaguA 41:00 Gail Collins talks to Bret Stephens about the 2024 election, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/opinion/biden-harris-trump.html 44:00 Ross Douthat: So, You Think the Republican Party No Longer Represents the People, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/opinion/liberals-conservatives-democracy.html 50:00 NYT: Biden's Strategy to Make the Race About Trump Is Suddenly in Doubt, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/us/politics/biden-trump-strategy.html 52:20 Biden's press secretary KJP has to deal with a pissed off press corp 55:20 The candidate that gets the softer press treatment wins 1:04:50 Joe Biden is the first president who's had a face lift 1:08:00 Liberals Were Blinded To Biden's Senility By Their Own Speech Codes, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156125 1:11:30 Biden Runs to Morning Joe to Try to Clean Up Democratic Crisis, with Stu Burguiere and Dave Marcus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLMc_EHvOlM 1:16:00 Joe Scarborough licked Donald Trump's shoes at one point 1:21:20 Elliott Blatt calls in to talk Biden, macro-biotics, Biden debate worse than Trump's Access Hollywood tape? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/biden-survive-trump-access-hollywood.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/us/politics/biden-trump-strategy.html Liberals Were Blinded To Biden's Senility By Their Own Speech Codes, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156125 The Joe Biden Decline Story Is Taking On Watergate Dimensions, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156226 Few People Can Handle Unlimited Amounts Of Humiliation, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156219 Prior To The Recent Supreme Court Ruling On Presidential Immunity, The Presidency Already Had All The Foreign Policy Power Of King George III, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156212 Conservatives saw Joe Biden's decline before liberals did, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156067 DB: White House Reporters: Biden Handlers' ‘Credibility' Is Shot, https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-reporters-biden-handlers-credibility-is-shot Joe Biden and the tragedy of liberal denialism, https://www.ft.com/content/d431b97f-7431-4066-bd80-9dab3b215fea https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/07/02/2024/mixed-signals-special-blame-the-media https://www.stevesailer.net/p/the-biden-crisis-deep-state-theory https://www.yahoo.com/news/jill-biden-encourages-husband-stay-114018139.html Who Determines The Winning Narrative? https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=155583 https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-27/more-details-emerge-protest-outside-la-synagogue https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/27/bill-clinton-oj-simpson-trump-hunter-biden/ https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-27/more-details-emerge-protest-outside-la-synagogue https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/07/18/reading-against-the-novel-james-fitzjames-stephen/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/21/writing-under-fire-politics-and-literature-at-the-dawn-of-world-war-ii/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/27/bill-clinton-oj-simpson-trump-hunter-biden/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/americas-sweethearts-dallas-cowboys-cheerleaders-netflix/678779/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/21/an-unhealthy-definition-of-rights-constitutional-contagion-parmet/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/mob-targets-synagogue-as-lapd-stands-by-los-angeles-jews-anti-israel-protesters-d4c2c681?mod=opinion_lead_pos8 Revolutionary War and the Development of International Humanitarian Law, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=155888

Alex is on today as we catch up with the weekend's drama over the 2024 Eurovision song contest and ask which is more real, twitter or Eurovision (those are the only two options). Then, some disastrous new polls for the Biden campaign, Trump searches for a VP and praises Hannibal Lecter, and Bret Stephens & Gail Collins search for the true value of a commencement speech and decide it's about telling kids to get off their damn phones. Check out WFYM radio: https://chapofym.podbean.com/

Knock, knock. It's another episode about a book Joel and Naomi hate and aren't giving up on because we think flaking on things is uncool despite the impact discussing this is having on our sibling relationship and mental health. Only positive impacts, we swear. In the second part of chapter 5 we explore Aaron/Myron's weird attempts to prove women have less romantic interest in men than men have in women. We look at his compelling evidence, which ranges from outdated data analyses without methodologies or sample sizes to...also outdated data analyses that disprove the very assertions he's trying to make. We also discuss the research behind what men and women look for on dating apps, his idea that women have uniquely unrealistic standards (something, he, as a 30-something man only pursuing 20-something women who will put up with his schtick would know nothing about), and his weird belief that tattoos make women less attractive. We guess we can add tattoos and piercing to the other 50 things women can't do if they want to uphold the so-called "Old Contract." Joel cites a book about women's history in the US around the 45 minute mark and gets the title wrong. It is "America"s Women" by Gail Collins. Great read and something we may talk about on a later episode. Find a copy here. We're not linking to places you can buy this book. Go support your local library.This month we made a donation to a trans rights org supporting trans individuals fleeing states where their existence is being outlawed. There are a lot of groups doing good work like this: take a look at your community. Support the show

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads", Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips" by Tiny Tim. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I talk about an interview with Clapton from 1967, I meant 1968. I mention a Graham Bond live recording from 1953, and of course meant 1963. I say Paul Jones was on vocals in the Powerhouse sessions. Steve Winwood was on vocals, and Jones was on harmonica. Resources As I say at the end, the main resource you need to get if you enjoyed this episode is Brother Robert by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Cream, Robert Johnson, John Mayall, and Graham Bond excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here -- one, two, three. This article on Mack McCormick gives a fuller explanation of the problems with his research and behaviour. The other books I used for the Robert Johnson sections were McCormick's Biography of a Phantom; Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow; Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick; and Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. I can recommend all of these subject to the caveats at the end of the episode. The information on the history and prehistory of the Delta blues mostly comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, with some coming from Charley Patton by John Fahey. The information on Cream comes mostly from Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm by Dave Thompson. I also used Ginger Baker: Hellraiser by Ginger Baker and Ginette Baker, Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins, Motherless Child by Paul Scott, and  Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. The best collection of Cream's work is the four-CD set Those Were the Days, which contains every track the group ever released while they were together (though only the stereo mixes of the albums, and a couple of tracks are in slightly different edits from the originals). You can get Johnson's music on many budget compilation records, as it's in the public domain in the EU, but the double CD collection produced by Steve LaVere for Sony in 2011 is, despite the problems that come from it being associated with LaVere, far and away the best option -- the remasters have a clarity that's worlds ahead of even the 1990s CD version it replaced. And for a good single-CD introduction to the Delta blues musicians and songsters who were Johnson's peers and inspirations, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson, compiled by Elijah Wald as a companion to his book on Johnson, can't be beaten, and contains many of the tracks excerpted in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick note that this episode contains discussion of racism, drug addiction, and early death. There's also a brief mention of death in childbirth and infant mortality. It's been a while since we looked at the British blues movement, and at the blues in general, so some of you may find some of what follows familiar, as we're going to look at some things we've talked about previously, but from a different angle. In 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy musical band that have been described as the missing link between the Beatles and the Monty Python team, released a track called "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?": [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?"] That track was mocking a discussion that was very prominent in Britain's music magazines around that time. 1968 saw the rise of a *lot* of British bands who started out as blues bands, though many of them went on to different styles of music -- Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and others were all becoming popular among the kind of people who read the music magazines, and so the question was being asked -- can white men sing the blues? Of course, the answer to that question was obvious. After all, white men *invented* the blues. Before we get any further at all, I have to make clear that I do *not* mean that white people created blues music. But "the blues" as a category, and particularly the idea of it as a music made largely by solo male performers playing guitar... that was created and shaped by the actions of white male record executives. There is no consensus as to when or how the blues as a genre started -- as we often say in this podcast "there is no first anything", but like every genre it seems to have come from multiple sources. In the case of the blues, there's probably some influence from African music by way of field chants sung by enslaved people, possibly some influence from Arabic music as well, definitely some influence from the Irish and British folk songs that by the late nineteenth century were developing into what we now call country music, a lot from ragtime, and a lot of influence from vaudeville and minstrel songs -- which in turn themselves were all very influenced by all those other things. Probably the first published composition to show any real influence of the blues is from 1904, a ragtime piano piece by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, "One O' Them Things": [Excerpt: "One O' Them Things"] That's not very recognisable as a blues piece yet, but it is more-or-less a twelve-bar blues. But the blues developed, and it developed as a result of a series of commercial waves. The first of these came in 1914, with the success of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", which when it was recorded by the Victor Military Band for a phonograph cylinder became what is generally considered the first blues record proper: [Excerpt: The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues"] The famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle came up with a dance, the foxtrot -- which Vernon Castle later admitted was largely inspired by Black dancers -- to be danced to the "Memphis Blues", and the foxtrot soon overtook the tango, which the Castles had introduced to the US the previous year, to become the most popular dance in America for the best part of three decades. And with that came an explosion in blues in the Handy style, cranked out by every music publisher. While the blues was a style largely created by Black performers and writers, the segregated nature of the American music industry at the time meant that most vocal performances of these early blues that were captured on record were by white performers, Black vocalists at this time only rarely getting the chance to record. The first blues record with a Black vocalist is also technically the first British blues record. A group of Black musicians, apparently mostly American but led by a Jamaican pianist, played at Ciro's Club in London, and recorded many tracks in Britain, under a name which I'm not going to say in full -- it started with Ciro's Club, and continued alliteratively with another word starting with C, a slur for Black people. In 1917 they recorded a vocal version of "St. Louis Blues", another W.C. Handy composition: [Excerpt: Ciro's Club C**n Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues"] The first American Black blues vocal didn't come until two years later, when Bert Williams, a Black minstrel-show performer who like many Black performers of his era performed in blackface even though he was Black, recorded “I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” [Excerpt: Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,”] But it wasn't until 1920 that the second, bigger, wave of popularity started for the blues, and this time it started with the first record of a Black *woman* singing the blues -- Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] You can hear the difference between that and anything we've heard up to that point -- that's the first record that anyone from our perspective, a hundred and three years later, would listen to and say that it bore any resemblance to what we think of as the blues -- so much so that many places still credit it as the first ever blues record. And there's a reason for that. "Crazy Blues" was one of those records that separates the music industry into before and after, like "Rock Around the Clock", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Sgt Pepper, or "Rapper's Delight". It sold seventy-five thousand copies in its first month -- a massive number by the standards of 1920 -- and purportedly went on to sell over a million copies. Sales figures and market analysis weren't really a thing in the same way in 1920, but even so it became very obvious that "Crazy Blues" was a big hit, and that unlike pretty much any other previous records, it was a big hit among Black listeners, which meant that there was a market for music aimed at Black people that was going untapped. Soon all the major record labels were setting up subsidiaries devoted to what they called "race music", music made by and for Black people. And this sees the birth of what is now known as "classic blues", but at the time (and for decades after) was just what people thought of when they thought of "the blues" as a genre. This was music primarily sung by female vaudeville artists backed by jazz bands, people like Ma Rainey (whose earliest recordings featured Louis Armstrong in her backing band): [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues"] And Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues", who had a massive career in the 1920s before the Great Depression caused many of these "race record" labels to fold, but who carried on performing well into the 1930s -- her last recording was in 1933, produced by John Hammond, with a backing band including Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer"] It wouldn't be until several years after the boom started by Mamie Smith that any record companies turned to recording Black men singing the blues accompanied by guitar or banjo. The first record of this type is probably "Norfolk Blues" by Reese DuPree from 1924: [Excerpt: Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues"] And there were occasional other records of this type, like "Airy Man Blues" by Papa Charlie Jackson, who was advertised as the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” [Excerpt: Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues"] But contrary to the way these are seen today, at the time they weren't seen as being in some way "authentic", or "folk music". Indeed, there are many quotes from folk-music collectors of the time (sadly all of them using so many slurs that it's impossible for me to accurately quote them) saying that when people sang the blues, that wasn't authentic Black folk music at all but an adulteration from commercial music -- they'd clearly, according to these folk-music scholars, learned the blues style from records and sheet music rather than as part of an oral tradition. Most of these performers were people who recorded blues as part of a wider range of material, like Blind Blake, who recorded some blues music but whose best work was his ragtime guitar instrumentals: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Southern Rag"] But it was when Blind Lemon Jefferson started recording for Paramount records in 1926 that the image of the blues as we now think of it took shape. His first record, "Got the Blues", was a massive success: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] And this resulted in many labels, especially Paramount, signing up pretty much every Black man with a guitar they could find in the hopes of finding another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn't think of themselves as "blues singers" or "bluesmen". They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included... well, every song anyone would want to hear.  They'd perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they'd heard on the radio or the jukebox -- whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included "Home on the Range", Gene Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle", and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". We have few recordings of these people performing this kind of song though. One of the few we have is Big Bill Broonzy, who was just about the only artist of this type not to get pigeonholed as just a blues singer, even though blues is what made him famous, and who later in his career managed to record songs like the Tin Pan Alley standard "The Glory of Love": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love"] But for the most part, the image we have of the blues comes down to one man, Arthur Laibley, a sales manager for the Wisconsin Chair Company. The Wisconsin Chair Company was, as the name would suggest, a company that started out making wooden chairs, but it had branched out into other forms of wooden furniture -- including, for a brief time, large wooden phonographs. And, like several other manufacturers, like the Radio Corporation of America -- RCA -- and the Gramophone Company, which became EMI, they realised that if they were going to sell the hardware it made sense to sell the software as well, and had started up Paramount Records, which bought up a small label, Black Swan, and soon became the biggest manufacturer of records for the Black market, putting out roughly a quarter of all "race records" released between 1922 and 1932. At first, most of these were produced by a Black talent scout, J. Mayo Williams, who had been the first person to record Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but in 1927 Williams left Paramount, and the job of supervising sessions went to Arthur Laibley, though according to some sources a lot of the actual production work was done by Aletha Dickerson, Williams' former assistant, who was almost certainly the first Black woman to be what we would now think of as a record producer. Williams had been interested in recording all kinds of music by Black performers, but when Laibley got a solo Black man into the studio, what he wanted more than anything was for him to record the blues, ideally in a style as close as possible to that of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Laibley didn't have a very hands-on approach to recording -- indeed Paramount had very little concern about the quality of their product anyway, and Paramount's records are notorious for having been put out on poor-quality shellac and recorded badly -- and he only occasionally made actual suggestions as to what kind of songs his performers should write -- for example he asked Son House to write something that sounded like Blind Lemon Jefferson, which led to House writing and recording "Mississippi County Farm Blues", which steals the tune of Jefferson's "See That My Grave is Kept Clean": [Excerpt: Son House, "Mississippi County Farm Blues"] When Skip James wanted to record a cover of James Wiggins' "Forty-Four Blues", Laibley suggested that instead he should do a song about a different gun, and so James recorded "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues"] And Laibley also suggested that James write a song about the Depression, which led to one of the greatest blues records ever, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"] These musicians knew that they were getting paid only for issued sides, and that Laibley wanted only blues from them, and so that's what they gave him. Even when it was a performer like Charlie Patton. (Incidentally, for those reading this as a transcript rather than listening to it, Patton's name is more usually spelled ending in ey, but as far as I can tell ie was his preferred spelling and that's what I'm using). Charlie Patton was best known as an entertainer, first and foremost -- someone who would do song-and-dance routines, joke around, play guitar behind his head. He was a clown on stage, so much so that when Son House finally heard some of Patton's records, in the mid-sixties, decades after the fact, he was astonished that Patton could actually play well. Even though House had been in the room when some of the records were made, his memory of Patton was of someone who acted the fool on stage. That's definitely not the impression you get from the Charlie Patton on record: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "Poor Me"] Patton is, as far as can be discerned, the person who was most influential in creating the music that became called the "Delta blues". Not a lot is known about Patton's life, but he was almost certainly the half-brother of the Chatmon brothers, who made hundreds of records, most notably as members of the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World"] In the 1890s, Patton's family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and he lived in and around that county until his death in 1934. Patton learned to play guitar from a musician called Henry Sloan, and then Patton became a mentor figure to a *lot* of other musicians in and around the plantation on which his family lived. Some of the musicians who grew up in the immediate area around Patton included Tommy Johnson: [Excerpt: Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues"] Pops Staples: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"] Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads"] Willie Brown, a musician who didn't record much, but who played a lot with Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson and who we just heard Johnson sing about: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] And Chester Burnett, who went on to become known as Howlin' Wolf, and whose vocal style was equally inspired by Patton and by the country star Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] Once Patton started his own recording career for Paramount, he also started working as a talent scout for them, and it was him who brought Son House to Paramount. Soon after the Depression hit, Paramount stopped recording, and so from 1930 through 1934 Patton didn't make any records. He was tracked down by an A&R man in January 1934 and recorded one final session: [Excerpt, Charlie Patton, "34 Blues"] But he died of heart failure two months later. But his influence spread through his proteges, and they themselves influenced other musicians from the area who came along a little after, like Robert Lockwood and Muddy Waters. This music -- or that portion of it that was considered worth recording by white record producers, only a tiny, unrepresentative, portion of their vast performing repertoires -- became known as the Delta Blues, and when some of these musicians moved to Chicago and started performing with electric instruments, it became Chicago Blues. And as far as people like John Mayall in Britain were concerned, Delta and Chicago Blues *were* the blues: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right"] John Mayall was one of the first of the British blues obsessives, and for a long time thought of himself as the only one. While we've looked before at the growth of the London blues scene, Mayall wasn't from London -- he was born in Macclesfield and grew up in Cheadle Hulme, both relatively well-off suburbs of Manchester, and after being conscripted and doing two years in the Army, he had become an art student at Manchester College of Art, what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Mayall had been a blues fan from the late 1940s, writing off to the US to order records that hadn't been released in the UK, and by most accounts by the late fifties he'd put together the biggest blues collection in Britain by quite some way. Not only that, but he had one of the earliest home tape recorders, and every night he would record radio stations from Continental Europe which were broadcasting for American service personnel, so he'd amassed mountains of recordings, often unlabelled, of obscure blues records that nobody else in the UK knew about. He was also an accomplished pianist and guitar player, and in 1956 he and his drummer friend Peter Ward had put together a band called the Powerhouse Four (the other two members rotated on a regular basis) mostly to play lunchtime jazz sessions at the art college. Mayall also started putting on jam sessions at a youth club in Wythenshawe, where he met another drummer named Hughie Flint. Over the late fifties and into the early sixties, Mayall more or less by himself built up a small blues scene in Manchester. The Manchester blues scene was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when the American Folk Blues Festival, an annual European tour which initially featured Willie Dixon, Memhis Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker, first toured Europe, the only UK date it played was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and people like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page had to travel up from London to see it. But still, the number of blues fans in Manchester, while proportionally large, was objectively small enough that Mayall was captivated by an article in Melody Maker which talked about Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies' new band Blues Incorporated and how it was playing electric blues, the same music he was making in Manchester. He later talked about how the article had made him think that maybe now people would know what he was talking about. He started travelling down to London to play gigs for the London blues scene, and inviting Korner up to Manchester to play shows there. Soon Mayall had moved down to London. Korner introduced Mayall to Davey Graham, the great folk guitarist, with whom Korner had recently recorded as a duo: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] Mayall and Graham performed together as a duo for a while, but Graham was a natural solo artist if ever there was one. Slowly Mayall put a band together in London. On drums was his old friend Peter Ward, who'd moved down from Manchester with him. On bass was John McVie, who at the time knew nothing about blues -- he'd been playing in a Shadows-style instrumental group -- but Mayall gave him a stack of blues records to listen to to get the feeling. And on guitar was Bernie Watson, who had previously played with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. In late 1963, Mike Vernon, a blues fan who had previously published a Yardbirds fanzine, got a job working for Decca records, and immediately started signing his favourite acts from the London blues circuit. The first act he signed was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and they recorded a single, "Crawling up a Hill": [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)"] Mayall later called that a "clumsy, half-witted attempt at autobiographical comment", and it sold only five hundred copies. It would be the only record the Bluesbreakers would make with Watson, who soon left the band to be replaced by Roger Dean (not the same Roger Dean who later went on to design prog rock album covers). The second group to be signed by Mike Vernon to Decca was the Graham Bond Organisation. We've talked about the Graham Bond Organisation in passing several times, but not for a while and not in any great detail, so it's worth pulling everything we've said about them so far together and going through it in a little more detail. The Graham Bond Organisation, like the Rolling Stones, grew out of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. As we heard in the episode on "I Wanna Be Your Man" a couple of years ago, Blues Incorporated had been started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at the time we're joining them in 1962 featured a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Dave Stevens, and saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, as well as frequent guest performers like a singer who called himself Mike Jagger, and another one, Roderick Stewart. That group finally found themselves the perfect bass player when Dick Heckstall-Smith put together a one-off group of jazz players to play an event at Cambridge University. At the gig, a little Scottish man came up to the group and told them he played bass and asked if he could sit in. They told him to bring along his instrument to their second set, that night, and he did actually bring along a double bass. Their bluff having been called, they decided to play the most complicated, difficult, piece they knew in order to throw the kid off -- the drummer, a trad jazz player named Ginger Baker, didn't like performing with random sit-in guests -- but astonishingly he turned out to be really good. Heckstall-Smith took down the bass player's name and phone number and invited him to a jam session with Blues Incorporated. After that jam session, Jack Bruce quickly became the group's full-time bass player. Bruce had started out as a classical cellist, but had switched to the double bass inspired by Bach, who he referred to as "the guv'nor of all bass players". His playing up to this point had mostly been in trad jazz bands, and he knew nothing of the blues, but he quickly got the hang of the genre. Bruce's first show with Blues Incorporated was a BBC recording: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)"] According to at least one source it was not being asked to take part in that session that made young Mike Jagger decide there was no future for him with Blues Incorporated and to spend more time with his other group, the Rollin' Stones. Soon after, Charlie Watts would join him, for almost the opposite reason -- Watts didn't want to be in a band that was getting as big as Blues Incorporated were. They were starting to do more BBC sessions and get more gigs, and having to join the Musicians' Union. That seemed like a lot of work. Far better to join a band like the Rollin' Stones that wasn't going anywhere. Because of Watts' decision to give up on potential stardom to become a Rollin' Stone, they needed a new drummer, and luckily the best drummer on the scene was available. But then the best drummer on the scene was *always* available. Ginger Baker had first played with Dick Heckstall-Smith several years earlier, in a trad group called the Storyville Jazzmen. There Baker had become obsessed with the New Orleans jazz drummer Baby Dodds, who had played with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Sadly because of 1920s recording technology, he hadn't been able to play a full kit on the recordings with Armstrong, being limited to percussion on just a woodblock, but you can hear his drumming style much better in this version of "At the Jazz Band Ball" from 1947, with Mugsy Spanier, Jack Teagarden, Cyrus St. Clair and Hank Duncan: [Excerpt: "At the Jazz Band Ball"] Baker had taken Dobbs' style and run with it, and had quickly become known as the single best player, bar none, on the London jazz scene -- he'd become an accomplished player in multiple styles, and was also fluent in reading music and arranging. He'd also, though, become known as the single person on the entire scene who was most difficult to get along with. He resigned from his first band onstage, shouting "You can stick your band up your arse", after the band's leader had had enough of him incorporating bebop influences into their trad style. Another time, when touring with Diz Disley's band, he was dumped in Germany with no money and no way to get home, because the band were so sick of him. Sometimes this was because of his temper and his unwillingness to suffer fools -- and he saw everyone else he ever met as a fool -- and sometimes it was because of his own rigorous musical ideas. He wanted to play music *his* way, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him different. Both of these things got worse after he fell under the influence of a man named Phil Seaman, one of the only drummers that Baker respected at all. Seaman introduced Baker to African drumming, and Baker started incorporating complex polyrhythms into his playing as a result. Seaman also though introduced Baker to heroin, and while being a heroin addict in the UK in the 1960s was not as difficult as it later became -- both heroin and cocaine were available on prescription to registered addicts, and Baker got both, which meant that many of the problems that come from criminalisation of these drugs didn't affect addicts in the same way -- but it still did not, by all accounts, make him an easier person to get along with. But he *was* a fantastic drummer. As Dick Heckstall-Smith said "With the advent of Ginger, the classic Blues Incorporated line-up, one which I think could not be bettered, was set" But Alexis Korner decided that the group could be bettered, and he had some backers within the band. One of the other bands on the scene was the Don Rendell Quintet, a group that played soul jazz -- that style of jazz that bridged modern jazz and R&B, the kind of music that Ray Charles and Herbie Hancock played: [Excerpt: The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission"] The Don Rendell Quintet included a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, Graham Bond, who doubled on keyboards and saxophone, and Bond had been playing occasional experimental gigs with the Johnny Burch Octet -- a group led by another member of the Rendell Quartet featuring Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, Baker, and a few other musicians, doing wholly-improvised music. Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, and Baker all enjoyed playing with Bond, and when Korner decided to bring him into the band, they were all very keen. But Cyril Davies, the co-leader of the band with Korner, was furious at the idea. Davies wanted to play strict Chicago and Delta blues, and had no truck with other forms of music like R&B and jazz. To his mind it was bad enough that they had a sax player. But the idea that they would bring in Bond, who played sax and... *Hammond* organ? Well, that was practically blasphemy. Davies quit the group at the mere suggestion. Bond was soon in the band, and he, Bruce, and Baker were playing together a *lot*. As well as performing with Blues Incorporated, they continued playing in the Johnny Burch Octet, and they also started performing as the Graham Bond Trio. Sometimes the Graham Bond Trio would be Blues Incorporated's opening act, and on more than one occasion the Graham Bond Trio, Blues Incorporated, and the Johnny Burch Octet all had gigs in different parts of London on the same night and they'd have to frantically get from one to the other. The Graham Bond Trio also had fans in Manchester, thanks to the local blues scene there and their connection with Blues Incorporated, and one night in February 1963 the trio played a gig there. They realised afterwards that by playing as a trio they'd made £70, when they were lucky to make £20 from a gig with Blues Incorporated or the Octet, because there were so many members in those bands. Bond wanted to make real money, and at the next rehearsal of Blues Incorporated he announced to Korner that he, Bruce, and Baker were quitting the band -- which was news to Bruce and Baker, who he hadn't bothered consulting. Baker, indeed, was in the toilet when the announcement was made and came out to find it a done deal. He was going to kick up a fuss and say he hadn't been consulted, but Korner's reaction sealed the deal. As Baker later said "‘he said “it's really good you're doing this thing with Graham, and I wish you the best of luck” and all that. And it was a bit difficult to turn round and say, “Well, I don't really want to leave the band, you know.”'" The Graham Bond Trio struggled at first to get the gigs they were expecting, but that started to change when in April 1963 they became the Graham Bond Quartet, with the addition of virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin. The Quartet soon became one of the hottest bands on the London R&B scene, and when Duffy Power, a Larry Parnes teen idol who wanted to move into R&B, asked his record label to get him a good R&B band to back him on a Beatles cover, it was the Graham Bond Quartet who obliged: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There"] The Quartet also backed Power on a package tour with other Parnes acts, but they were also still performing their own blend of hard jazz and blues, as can be heard in this recording of the group live in June 1953: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)"] But that lineup of the group didn't last very long. According to the way Baker told the story, he fired McLaughlin from the group, after being irritated by McLaughlin complaining about something on a day when Baker was out of cocaine and in no mood to hear anyone else's complaints. As Baker said "We lost a great guitar player and I lost a good friend." But the Trio soon became a Quartet again, as Dick Heckstall-Smith, who Baker had wanted in the band from the start, joined on saxophone to replace McLaughlin's guitar. But they were no longer called the Graham Bond Quartet. Partly because Heckstall-Smith joining allowed Bond to concentrate just on his keyboard playing, but one suspects partly to protect against any future lineup changes, the group were now The Graham Bond ORGANisation -- emphasis on the organ. The new lineup of the group got signed to Decca by Vernon, and were soon recording their first single, "Long Tall Shorty": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty"] They recorded a few other songs which made their way onto an EP and an R&B compilation, and toured intensively in early 1964, as well as backing up Power on his follow-up to "I Saw Her Standing There", his version of "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm"] They also appeared in a film, just like the Beatles, though it was possibly not quite as artistically successful as "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat trailer] Gonks Go Beat is one of the most bizarre films of the sixties. It's a far-future remake of Romeo and Juliet. where the two star-crossed lovers are from opposing countries -- Beatland and Ballad Isle -- who only communicate once a year in an annual song contest which acts as their version of a war, and is overseen by "Mr. A&R", played by Frank Thornton, who would later star in Are You Being Served? Carry On star Kenneth Connor is sent by aliens to try to bring peace to the two warring countries, on pain of exile to Planet Gonk, a planet inhabited solely by Gonks (a kind of novelty toy for which there was a short-lived craze then). Along the way Connor encounters such luminaries of British light entertainment as Terry Scott and Arthur Mullard, as well as musical performances by Lulu, the Nashville Teens, and of course the Graham Bond Organisation, whose performance gets them a telling-off from a teacher: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat!] The group as a group only performed one song in this cinematic masterpiece, but Baker also made an appearance in a "drum battle" sequence where eight drummers played together: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat drum battle] The other drummers in that scene included, as well as some lesser-known players, Andy White who had played on the single version of "Love Me Do", Bobby Graham, who played on hits by the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five, and Ronnie Verrell, who did the drumming for Animal in the Muppet Show. Also in summer 1964, the group performed at the Fourth National Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond -- the festival co-founded by Chris Barber that would evolve into the Reading Festival. The Yardbirds were on the bill, and at the end of their set they invited Bond, Baker, Bruce, Georgie Fame, and Mike Vernon onto the stage with them, making that the first time that Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce were all on stage together. Soon after that, the Graham Bond Organisation got a new manager, Robert Stigwood. Things hadn't been working out for them at Decca, and Stigwood soon got the group signed to EMI, and became their producer as well. Their first single under Stigwood's management was a cover version of the theme tune to the Debbie Reynolds film "Tammy". While that film had given Tamla records its name, the song was hardly an R&B classic: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"] That record didn't chart, but Stigwood put the group out on the road as part of the disastrous Chuck Berry tour we heard about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", which led to the bankruptcy of  Robert Stigwood Associates. The Organisation moved over to Stigwood's new company, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and Stigwood continued to be the credited producer of their records, though after the "Tammy" disaster they decided they were going to take charge themselves of the actual music. Their first album, The Sound of 65, was recorded in a single three-hour session, and they mostly ran through their standard set -- a mixture of the same songs everyone else on the circuit was playing, like "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Working", and "Wade in the Water", and originals like Bruce's "Train Time": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"] Through 1965 they kept working. They released a non-album single, "Lease on Love", which is generally considered to be the first pop record to feature a Mellotron: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"] and Bond and Baker also backed another Stigwood act, Winston G, on his debut single: [Excerpt: Winston G, "Please Don't Say"] But the group were developing severe tensions. Bruce and Baker had started out friendly, but by this time they hated each other. Bruce said he couldn't hear his own playing over Baker's loud drumming, Baker thought that Bruce was far too fussy a player and should try to play simpler lines. They'd both try to throw each other during performances, altering arrangements on the fly and playing things that would trip the other player up. And *neither* of them were particularly keen on Bond's new love of the Mellotron, which was all over their second album, giving it a distinctly proto-prog feel at times: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Baby Can it Be True?"] Eventually at a gig in Golders Green, Baker started throwing drumsticks at Bruce's head while Bruce was trying to play a bass solo. Bruce retaliated by throwing his bass at Baker, and then jumping on him and starting a fistfight which had to be broken up by the venue security. Baker fired Bruce from the band, but Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, arguing that Baker had no right to sack him as it was a democracy. Baker always claimed that in fact Bond had wanted to sack Bruce but hadn't wanted to get his hands dirty, and insisted that Baker do it, but neither Bond nor Heckstall-Smith objected when Bruce turned up for the next couple of gigs. So Baker took matters into his own hands, He pulled out a knife and told Bruce "If you show up at one more gig, this is going in you." Within days, Bruce was playing with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers had gone through some lineup changes by this point. Roger Dean had only played with the Bluesbreakers for a short time before Mayall had replaced him. Mayall had not been impressed with Eric Clapton's playing with the Yardbirds at first -- even though graffiti saying "Clapton is God" was already starting to appear around London -- but he had been *very* impressed with Clapton's playing on "Got to Hurry", the B-side to "For Your Love": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"] When he discovered that Clapton had quit the band, he sprang into action and quickly recruited him to replace Dean. Clapton knew he had made the right choice when a month after he'd joined, the group got the word that Bob Dylan had been so impressed with Mayall's single "Crawling up a Hill" -- the one that nobody liked, not even Mayall himself -- that he wanted to jam with Mayall and his band in the studio. Clapton of course went along: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] That was, of course, the session we've talked about in the Velvet Underground episode and elsewhere of which little other than that survives, and which Nico attended. At this point, Mayall didn't have a record contract, his experience recording with Mike Vernon having been no more successful than the Bond group's had been. But soon he got a one-off deal -- as a solo artist, not with the Bluesbreakers -- with Immediate Records. Clapton was the only member of the group to play on the single, which was produced by Immediate's house producer Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"] Page was impressed enough with Clapton's playing that he invited him round to Page's house to jam together. But what Clapton didn't know was that Page was taping their jam sessions, and that he handed those tapes over to Immediate Records -- whether he was forced to by his contract with the label or whether that had been his plan all along depends on whose story you believe, but Clapton never truly forgave him. Page and Clapton's guitar-only jams had overdubs by Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart, and drummer Chris Winter, and have been endlessly repackaged on blues compilations ever since: [Excerpt: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"] But Mayall was having problems with John McVie, who had started to drink too much, and as soon as he found out that Jack Bruce was sacked by the Graham Bond Organisation, Mayall got in touch with Bruce and got him to join the band in McVie's place. Everyone was agreed that this lineup of the band -- Mayall, Clapton, Bruce, and Hughie Flint -- was going places: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Unfortunately, it wasn't going to last long. Clapton, while he thought that Bruce was the greatest bass player he'd ever worked with, had other plans. He was going to leave the country and travel the world as a peripatetic busker. He was off on his travels, never to return. Luckily, Mayall had someone even better waiting in the wings. A young man had, according to Mayall, "kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him?” – referring to whichever guitarist was onstage that night – “I'm much better than he is. Why don't you let me play guitar for you?” He got really quite nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. And he was brilliant." Peter Green was probably the best blues guitarist in London at that time, but this lineup of the Bluesbreakers only lasted a handful of gigs -- Clapton discovered that busking in Greece wasn't as much fun as being called God in London, and came back very soon after he'd left. Mayall had told him that he could have his old job back when he got back, and so Green was out and Clapton was back in. And soon the Bluesbreakers' revolving door revolved again. Manfred Mann had just had a big hit with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", the same song we heard Dylan playing earlier: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] But their guitarist, Mike Vickers, had quit. Tom McGuinness, their bass player, had taken the opportunity to switch back to guitar -- the instrument he'd played in his first band with his friend Eric Clapton -- but that left them short a bass player. Manfred Mann were essentially the same kind of band as the Graham Bond Organisation -- a Hammond-led group of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists who played everything from hardcore Delta blues to complex modern jazz -- but unlike the Bond group they also had a string of massive pop hits, and so made a lot more money. The combination was irresistible to Bruce, and he joined the band just before they recorded an EP of jazz instrumental versions of recent hits: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Bruce had also been encouraged by Robert Stigwood to do a solo project, and so at the same time as he joined Manfred Mann, he also put out a solo single, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'" [Excerpt: Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"] But of course, the reason Bruce had joined Manfred Mann was that they were having pop hits as well as playing jazz, and soon they did just that, with Bruce playing on their number one hit "Pretty Flamingo": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] So John McVie was back in the Bluesbreakers, promising to keep his drinking under control. Mike Vernon still thought that Mayall had potential, but the people at Decca didn't agree, so Vernon got Mayall and Clapton -- but not the other band members -- to record a single for a small indie label he ran as a side project: [Excerpt: John Mayall and Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"] That label normally only released records in print runs of ninety-nine copies, because once you hit a hundred copies you had to pay tax on them, but there was so much demand for that single that they ended up pressing up five hundred copies, making it the label's biggest seller ever. Vernon eventually convinced the heads at Decca that the Bluesbreakers could be truly big, and so he got the OK to record the album that would generally be considered the greatest British blues album of all time -- Blues Breakers, also known as the Beano album because of Clapton reading a copy of the British kids' comic The Beano in the group photo on the front. [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"] The album was a mixture of originals by Mayall and the standard repertoire of every blues or R&B band on the circuit -- songs like "Parchman Farm" and "What'd I Say" -- but what made the album unique was Clapton's guitar tone. Much to the chagrin of Vernon, and of engineer Gus Dudgeon, Clapton insisted on playing at the same volume that he would on stage. Vernon later said of Dudgeon "I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus's eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all. But after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked." [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"] But by the time the album cane out. Clapton was no longer with the Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation had struggled on for a while after Bruce's departure. They brought in a trumpet player, Mike Falana, and even had a hit record -- or at least, the B-side of a hit record. The Who had just put out a hit single, "Substitute", on Robert Stigwood's record label, Reaction: [Excerpt: The Who, "Substitute"] But, as you'll hear in episode 183, they had moved to Reaction Records after a falling out with their previous label, and with Shel Talmy their previous producer. The problem was, when "Substitute" was released, it had as its B-side a song called "Circles" (also known as "Instant Party -- it's been released under both names). They'd recorded an earlier version of the song for Talmy, and just as "Substitute" was starting to chart, Talmy got an injunction against the record and it had to be pulled. Reaction couldn't afford to lose the big hit record they'd spent money promoting, so they needed to put it out with a new B-side. But the Who hadn't got any unreleased recordings. But the Graham Bond Organisation had, and indeed they had an unreleased *instrumental*. So "Waltz For a Pig" became the B-side to a top-five single, credited to The Who Orchestra: [Excerpt: The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"] That record provided the catalyst for the formation of Cream, because Ginger Baker had written the song, and got £1,350 for it, which he used to buy a new car. Baker had, for some time, been wanting to get out of the Graham Bond Organisation. He was trying to get off heroin -- though he would make many efforts to get clean over the decades, with little success -- while Bond was starting to use it far more heavily, and was also using acid and getting heavily into mysticism, which Baker despised. Baker may have had the idea for what he did next from an article in one of the music papers. John Entwistle of the Who would often tell a story about an article in Melody Maker -- though I've not been able to track down the article itself to get the full details -- in which musicians were asked to name which of their peers they'd put into a "super-group". He didn't remember the full details, but he did remember that the consensus choice had had Eric Clapton on lead guitar, himself on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. As he said later "I don't remember who else was voted in, but a few months later, the Cream came along, and I did wonder if somebody was maybe believing too much of their own press". Incidentally, like The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd, Cream, the band we are about to meet, had releases both with and without the definite article, and Eric Clapton at least seems always to talk about them as "the Cream" even decades later, but they're primarily known as just Cream these days. Baker, having had enough of the Bond group, decided to drive up to Oxford to see Clapton playing with the Bluesbreakers. Clapton invited him to sit in for a couple of songs, and by all accounts the band sounded far better than they had previously. Clapton and Baker could obviously play well together, and Baker offered Clapton a lift back to London in his new car, and on the drive back asked Clapton if he wanted to form a new band. Clapton was as impressed by Baker's financial skills as he was by his musicianship. He said later "Musicians didn't have cars. You all got in a van." Clearly a musician who was *actually driving a new car he owned* was going places. He agreed to Baker's plan. But of course they needed a bass player, and Clapton thought he had the perfect solution -- "What about Jack?" Clapton knew that Bruce had been a member of the Graham Bond Organisation, but didn't know why he'd left the band -- he wasn't particularly clued in to what the wider music scene was doing, and all he knew was that Bruce had played with both him and Baker, and that he was the best bass player he'd ever played with. And Bruce *was* arguably the best bass player in London at that point, and he was starting to pick up session work as well as his work with Manfred Mann. For example it's him playing on the theme tune to "After The Fox" with Peter Sellers, the Hollies, and the song's composer Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: The Hollies with Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"] Clapton was insistent. Baker's idea was that the band should be the best musicians around. That meant they needed the *best* musicians around, not the second best. If Jack Bruce wasn't joining, Eric Clapton wasn't joining either. Baker very reluctantly agreed, and went round to see Bruce the next day -- according to Baker it was in a spirit of generosity and giving Bruce one more chance, while according to Bruce he came round to eat humble pie and beg for forgiveness. Either way, Bruce agreed to join the band. The three met up for a rehearsal at Baker's home, and immediately Bruce and Baker started fighting, but also immediately they realised that they were great at playing together -- so great that they named themselves the Cream, as they were the cream of musicians on the scene. They knew they had something, but they didn't know what. At first they considered making their performances into Dada projects, inspired by the early-twentieth-century art movement. They liked a band that had just started to make waves, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band -- who had originally been called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band -- and they bought some props with the vague idea of using them on stage in the same way the Bonzos did. But as they played together they realised that they needed to do something different from that. At first, they thought they needed a fourth member -- a keyboard player. Graham Bond's name was brought up, but Clapton vetoed him. Clapton wanted Steve Winwood, the keyboard player and vocalist with the Spencer Davis Group. Indeed, Winwood was present at what was originally intended to be the first recording session the trio would play. Joe Boyd had asked Eric Clapton to round up a bunch of players to record some filler tracks for an Elektra blues compilation, and Clapton had asked Bruce and Baker to join him, Paul Jones on vocals, Winwood on Hammond and Clapton's friend Ben Palmer on piano for the session. Indeed, given that none of the original trio were keen on singing, that Paul Jones was just about to leave Manfred Mann, and that we know Clapton wanted Winwood in the band, one has to wonder if Clapton at least half-intended for this to be the eventual lineup of the band. If he did, that plan was foiled by Baker's refusal to take part in the session. Instead, this one-off band, named The Powerhouse, featured Pete York, the drummer from the Spencer Davis Group, on the session, which produced the first recording of Clapton playing on the Robert Johnson song originally titled "Cross Road Blues" but now generally better known just as "Crossroads": [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] We talked about Robert Johnson a little back in episode ninety-seven, but other than Bob Dylan, who was inspired by his lyrics, we had seen very little influence from Johnson up to this point, but he's going to be a major influence on rock guitar for the next few years, so we should talk about him a little here. It's often said that nobody knew anything about Robert Johnson, that he was almost a phantom other than his records which existed outside of any context as artefacts of their own. That's... not really the case. Johnson had died a little less than thirty years earlier, at only twenty-seven years old. Most of his half-siblings and step-siblings were alive, as were his son, his stepson, and dozens of musicians he'd played with over the years, women he'd had affairs with, and other assorted friends and relatives. What people mean is that information about Johnson's life was not yet known by people they consider important -- which is to say white blues scholars and musicians. Indeed, almost everything people like that -- people like *me* -- know of the facts of Johnson's life has only become known to us in the last four years. If, as some people had expected, I'd started this series with an episode on Johnson, I'd have had to redo the whole thing because of the information that's made its way to the public since then. But here's what was known -- or thought -- by white blues scholars in 1966. Johnson was, according to them, a field hand from somewhere in Mississippi, who played the guitar in between working on the cotton fields. He had done two recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937. One song from his first session, "Terraplane Blues", had been a very minor hit by blues standards: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"] That had sold well -- nobody knows how well, but maybe as many as ten thousand copies, and it was certainly a record people knew in 1937 if they liked the Delta blues, but ten thousand copies total is nowhere near the sales of really successful records, and none of the follow-ups had sold anything like that much -- many of them had sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As Elijah Wald, one of Johnson's biographers put it "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington was like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles" -- though *I* would add that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much bigger during the sixties than Johnson was during his lifetime. One of the few white people who had noticed Johnson's existence at all was John Hammond, and he'd written a brief review of Johnson's first two singles under a pseudonym in a Communist newspaper. I'm going to quote it here, but the word he used to talk about Black people was considered correct then but isn't now, so I'll substitute Black for that word: "Before closing we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest [Black] blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us and by the tunes "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Terraplane Blues", to name only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur" Hammond had tried to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts we talked about in the very first episodes of the podcast, but he'd discovered that he'd died shortly before. He got Big Bill Broonzy instead, and played a couple of Johnson's records from a record player on the stage. Hammond introduced those recordings with a speech: "It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player America ever knew, would still have been around to play obbligatos for her...dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi plantation. Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I know him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don't believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. We will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old "Walkin' Blues" and the new, unreleased, "Preachin' Blues", because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death." And that was, for the most part, the end of Robert Johnson's impact on the culture for a generation. The Lomaxes went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi a couple of years later -- reports vary as to whether this was to see if they could find Johnson, who they were unaware was dead, or to find information out about him, and they did end up recording a young singer named Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress, including Waters' rendition of "32-20 Blues", Johnson's reworking of Skip James' "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"] But Johnson's records remained unavailable after their initial release until 1959, when the blues scholar Samuel Charters published the book The Country Blues, which was the first book-length treatment ever of Delta blues. Sixteen years later Charters said "I shouldn't have written The Country Blues when I did; since I really didn't know enough, but I felt I couldn't afford to wait. So The Country Blues was two things. It was a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help. I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their environment, and their music, not only so that their story would be preserved but also so they'd get a little money and a little recognition in their last years." Charters talked about Johnson in the book, as one of the performers who played "minor roles in the story of the blues", and said that almost nothing was known about his life. He talked about how he had been poisoned by his common-law wife, about how his records were recorded in a pool hall, and said "The finest of Robert Johnson's blues have a brooding sense of torment and despair. The blues has become a personified figure of despondency." Along with Charters' book came a compilation album of the same name, and that included the first ever reissue of one of Johnson's tracks, "Preaching Blues": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"] Two years later, John Hammond, who had remained an ardent fan of Johnson, had Columbia put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album. At the time no white blues scholars knew what Johnson looked like and they had no photos of him, so a generic painting of a poor-looking Black man with a guitar was used for the cover. The liner note to King of the Delta Blues Singers talked about how Johnson was seventeen or eighteen when he made his recordings, how he was "dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend", how he had "seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsville, Mississippi, where he was born and raised", and how he had had such stage fright that when he was asked to play in front of other musicians, he'd turned to face a wall so he couldn't see them. And that would be all that any of the members of the Powerhouse would know about Johnson. Maybe they'd also heard the rumours that were starting to spread that Johnson had got his guitar-playing skills by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, but that would have been all they knew when they recorded their filler track for Elektra: [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] Either way, the Powerhouse lineup only lasted for that one session -- the group eventually decided that a simple trio would be best for the music they wanted to play. Clapton had seen Buddy Guy touring with just a bass player and drummer a year earlier, and had liked the idea of the freedom that gave him as a guitarist. The group soon took on Robert Stigwood as a manager, which caused more arguments between Bruce and Baker. Bruce was convinced that if they were doing an all-for-one one-for-all thing they should also manage themselves, but Baker pointed out that that was a daft idea when they could get one of the biggest managers in the country to look after them. A bigger argument, which almost killed the group before it started, happened when Baker told journalist Chris Welch of the Melody Maker about their plans. In an echo of the way that he and Bruce had been resigned from Blues Incorporated without being consulted, now with no discussion Manfred Mann and John Mayall were reading in the papers that their band members were quitting before those members had bothered to mention it. Mayall was furious, especially since the album Clapton had played on hadn't yet come out. Clapton was supposed to work a month's notice while Mayall found another guitarist, but Mayall spent two weeks begging Peter Green to rejoin the band. Green was less than eager -- after all, he'd been fired pretty much straight away earlier -- but Mayall eventually persuaded him. The second he did, Mayall turned round to Clapton and told him he didn't have to work the rest of his notice -- he'd found another guitar player and Clapton was fired: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"] Manfred Mann meanwhile took on the Beatles' friend Klaus Voorman to replace Bruce. Voorman would remain with the band until the end, and like Green was for Mayall, Voorman was in some ways a better fit for Manfred Mann than Bruce was. In particular he could double on flute, as he did for example on their hit version of Bob Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"] The new group, The Cream, were of course signed in the UK to Stigwood's Reaction label. Other than the Who, who only stuck around for one album, Reaction was not a very successful label. Its biggest signing was a former keyboard player for Screaming Lord Sutch, who recorded for them under the names Paul Dean and Oscar, but who later became known as Paul Nicholas and had a successful career in musical theatre and sitcom. Nicholas never had any hits for Reaction, but he did release one interesting record, in 1967: [Excerpt: Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"] That was one of the earliest songwriting attempts by a young man who had recently named himself David Bowie. Now the group were public, they started inviting journalists to their rehearsals, which were mostly spent trying to combine their disparate musical influences --

S2E05 - William Henry Harrison is the record holder for the teensiest-weensiest-ittiest-bittiest presidential term at just 31 days. And in this episode, he must face the seering judgements of Marissa and Trent! He was a follower, father of ten children, stealer of lands, and a man who, despite never having lived in a log cabin, was the face of a very log-cabin-heavy political campaign. Although he's the most mediocre guy we've seen in the office so far, his presidential campaign and untimely death had huge repercussions on the course of United States History!  Email pardonme.presidentialpod@gmail.com to contact us or issue corrections (with sources, please)!   Produced and Edited by Trent Thomson and Marissa Macy Original music by Noise of Approval Graphic design by Darcey Mckinney   Sources:  Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy by Robert M. Owens William Henry Harrison by Gail Collins

It's A Crime Mr. Collins - The Green Eyed Dragon From-1957 Stars-Gail Collins, Mandell Kramer & Richard Denning                                                                          An escaped convict holds Mr. and Mrs. Collins hostage. A sleuth in San Francisco, Greg Collins. Gail Collins, wife of the famous detective, tells the crime fighting tales from her perspective, offering feminine insights. “After all, my interest in criminals is purely professional, just like Greg's – but how would you like it if your private detective husband accused you of taking an interest in one?”.

Gail Collins, columnist for the New York Times, writes that if you don't like the choice of Biden or Trump TOUGH! Don't you dare vote for a third party! American Editorial Cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) strongly disagree with her and make the case for voting and supporting third party candidates. Next, NPR and other news organizations are reporting that trial by jury is becoming less and less common. This is bad for you and bad for a justice system that gets worse and worse every year. Lastly, Ted and Scott celebrate their 100th episode of the DMZ America Podcast by discussing why they do it, and announce plans for future podcasts  they know will interest you. You really should listen.

Gail Collins, columnist for the New York Times, writes that if you don't like the choice of Biden or Trump TOUGH! Don't you dare vote for a third party! American Editorial Cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) strongly disagree with her and make the case for voting and supporting third party candidates. Next, NPR and other news organizations are reporting that trial by jury is becoming less and less common. This is bad for you and bad for a justice system that gets worse and worse every year. Lastly, Ted and Scott celebrate their 100th episode of the DMZ America Podcast by discussing why they do it, and announce plans for future podcasts  they know will interest you. You really should listen.

Richland Source is expanding to full-time coverage of Shelby and the North County: https://www.richlandsource.com/news/richland-source-to-expand-to-full-time-coverage-of-shelby-and-the-north-county/article_cf0a1c06-c761-11ed-bd5f-5774fa4ce751.html?block_id=1098581 Today - Richland Source is headed north! That's right - we're excited to announce we're growing our team and bringing on a full-time staff reporter who will concentrate on Shelby and northern Richland County.  Support the show: https://www.sourcemembers.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this Wednesday episode of THE POLITICRAT daily podcast Omar Moore on Senator Elizabeth Warren's snipe at Vice President Kamala Harris. Is it a story? Answer: It isn't but it is. And: What is the matter with Gail Collins? And much more. March 15, 2023. New podcast: TÁR Talk (https://bit.ly/3QXRkcF) The new POLITICRAT newsletter is here! Subscribe for free: https://politicrat.substack.com. Social media: Spoutible - https://spoutible.com/popcornreel Mastodon - https://mas.to/@popcornreel Post: https://post.news/popcornreel Twitter: https://twitter.com/popcornreel Black Voters Matter: https://blackvotersmatterfund.org. Vote 411: https://vote411.org. The AUTONOMY t-shirt series—buy yours here: https://bit.ly/3yD89AL Planned Parenthood: https://plannedparenthood.org Register to vote NOW: https://vote.org The ENOUGH/END GUN VIOLENCE t-shirts on sale here: https://bit.ly/3zsVDFU Donate to the Man Up Organization: https://manupinc.org FREE: SUBSCRIBE NOW TO THE BRAND NEW POLITICRAT DAILY PODCAST NEWSLETTER!! Extra content, audio, analysis, exclusive essays for subscribers only, plus special offers and discounts on merchandise at The Politicrat Daily Podcast online store. Something new and informative EVERY DAY!! Subscribe FREE at https://politicrat.substack.com Buy podcast merchandise (all designed by Omar Moore) and lots more at The Politicrat Daily Podcast Store: https://the-politicrat.myshopify.com The Politicrat YouTube page: bit.ly/3bfWk6V The Politicrat Facebook page: bit.ly/3bU1O7c The Politicrat blog: https://politicrat.politics.blog Join Omar on Fanbase NOW! Download the Fanbase social media app today. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE to this to this podcast! Follow/tweet Omar at: https://twitter.com/thepopcornreel.

In this episode, Niki, Neil, and Natalia discuss the history of menopause.  Support Past Present on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pastpresentpodcast Here are some links and references mentioned during this week's show:   ·         A New York Times magazine article about menopause recently went viral. Natalia drew from this Next Avenue review of Gail Collins' book. Neil referenced Menopause: The Musical, and Niki drew on this Public Books essay about women's ways of aging.     In our regular closing feature, What's Making History: ·         Natalia recommended the Netflix series Killer Sally. ·         Neil discussed Thomas Fuller's New York Times article, “Never Mind Your Wallet. Armed Robbers Want Your French Bulldog”. ·         Niki shared historian Rick Perlstein's Forum essay, “They Want Your Child!”

I love that old song by Player: “Baby Come Back” — especially when the singer says: “I was wrong…” It is not that easy to say. But, we do. Because we must. In late July, the Sunday New York Times devoted an entire section to that topic – “I Was Wrong.” The editors of the New York Times invited a cadre of their op-ed writers – among them, as pictured above, Farhad Manjoo, Paul Krugman, Bret Stephens, and Gail Collins – to describe how they had been wrong about what they had once thought, and about what they had once written. It was dazzling — an evocation of one of the themes of the High Holy Day season. “I was wrong.” I asked several of my friends and colleagues — all of them, veteran thought leaders in the American Jewish community — to describe those moments in their careers when they were wrong, didn't get it, or didn't see something coming. My guests: Rabbi Dan Freelander, one of the senior leaders of the Reform movement – who has held many positions within the Reform Jewish world, and is retired from his position as president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, and is a popular singer of Jewish music, with Kol B'Seder.  Rabbi Laura Geller, one of the first woman rabbis in North America; former Hillel director, director of Los Angeles office of the American Jewish Congress, and rabbi emerita of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills. She, along with her late husband Richard Siegel, is the author of Getting Good at Getting Older.  Rabbi Sherre Hirsch, a rabbi and author who currently serves as the Chief Innovation Officer for American Jewish University. Rabbi Karyn Kedar, rabbi emerita of Congregation B'nai Joshua Beth Elohim in Deerfield, Illinois, and author

Jim and Greg comment briefly on the news that President Biden tested positive for COVID Thursday morning. Then they dive into the New York Times series on columnists admitting things they got wrong. They welcome the admission from Bret Stephens that he was very wrong about Trump voters and they had many, many good reasons to be thoroughly fed up with politicians who stiffed them culturally, economically, and otherwise for decades. They also slam Gail Collins for her self-serving column about writing too much about Mitt Romney's dog during the 2012 campaign. And they hammer Paul Krugman for saying he was wrong about inflation but then spending the rest of the column trying to explain how he really wasn't.Please visit our great sponsors:NetChoicehttps://NetChoice.org/2992Join us in telling Congress to stop rising prices and reject progressive tech regulations like S.2992XChairhttps://xchairmartini.com

Johan Leijonhufvud Trio – Harlem Nocturne (LEIONJIUVED) Heartcore Records | Sept 10, 2021 1. The Song My Lady Sings (Charles Lloyd) 4:40 2. The Marten (Johan Leijonhufvud) 3:19 3. There’s a Boat That’s Leavin’ Soon for New York (George Gershwin) 4:16 4. Harlem Nocturne (Earle Hagen) 4:22 5. Strange Brew (Eric Clapton, Gail Collins, Felix Pappalardi) 3:37 6. Welcome (Johan Leijonhufvud) 6:23 7. Shoulders (Cedar Walton) 3:42 8. Three Views of a Secret (Jaco Pastorius) 5:16 9. A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing (Billy Strayhorn) 4:32 10. Canção Do Sal (Milton Nascimento) 4:36 Johan Leijonhufvud – guitar Johnny Åman – acoustic bass Niclas Campagnol – drums Produced by Kurt Rosenwinkel Recorded at Lowswing Studio, Berlin 2020 Recording engineer Guy Sternberg Recording Assistant Benedikt Vogt Mixed by Charis Karantzas, Berlin 2021 Mastered by Douglas Henderson at Micro-Moose-Berlin 2021 Production coordination and Artwork by Michaela Bóková, Heartcore Records 2021 Released on Heartcore Records, Berlin 2021 (HCR12) Follow Johan Leijonhufvud on: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johan.leijonhufvud.mmm Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jleijonhufvud/ WEB: https://www.johanleijonhufvud.com/ Heartcore Records: https://heartcore-records.com/artists/johan-leijonhufvud-trio /////////////////////////////////// CORTINA FINAL Eurolines Eurolines Johan Leijonhufvud Sittel Records | Enero 1, 2011 ////////////////////////////////////////

It's A Crime, Mr. & Mrs. Collins-The Murder Of The Fabulous RedheadFrom-1957Stars-Mandel Cramer & Gail Collins and Richard Denning Mr. Collins is hired to find a beautiful woman who's been missing for six months.When she's found dead, it's Mrs. Collins who goes to jail for the crime!A distinctive show about a sleuth in San Francisco, Greg Collins. Gail Collins, wife of the famous detective, tells the crime fighting tales from her perspective, offering feminine insights. “After all, suppose you were arrested on suspicion of murder, and your husband was out chasing a beautiful redhead with a $100,000, and you think you've got troubles.

Daym Drops & Danielle Chylinski talk about when Daym's YouTube days started, to marketing "extreme foods" at Hartford Yard Goats' Dunkin' Donuts Park Daym Drops Food Cart. Hosted by Central Connecticut State University, Daym & Danielle talk to students, faculty, staff, & now YOU about how marketing & personal branding goes A LONG WAY... by simply just being you.Carolyn Lumsden from Central Connecticut State University's Department of Communication shared, "This was the best talk yet. And I've had Soledad O'Brien and Gail Collins and Ben Smith as guests. Really, that was WONDERFUL for the kids. And for me. Thank you both SO MUCH."instagram.com/daniellechylinskiinstagram.com/officialdaymdropsinstagram.com/ccsu_official

New York Times columnist Gail Collins is deeply unhappy over the defeat of David Chipman and Joe Biden's inability to ram his anti-gun agenda through Congress, but as Cam points out, there are good reasons why the kinds of policies Collins supports aren't being enacted.

Bishop Anthony “Tony” Collins was born in 1957 in Orlando, Florida to a Christian father and mother – Emmett and Annie Collins. He has been married to his only wife Gail since 1981 and has only two children both from this union – daughters Erica and Lauren. He is also the grandfather of five handsome boys and two lovely daughters, by the grace of Jesus Christ. At the age of 23 he surrendered his life to Jesus. He has held positions of Christian authority in several denominational churches. He as served as the leader of several ministries including men's ministry, taught Sunday Morning Bible Study, Teen Ministry, Trustee Ministry, and served as a Deacon prior to being called into the ministry to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ in April of 2000. After having been an associate pastor for several years, on July 4, 2004. Bishop Anthony Collins answered the call of The Lord to start an intentionally multicultural, non-denominational Christian church in Knoxville, TN and The House of Worship was born. God has given him a clear vision of Black, White, Hispanic and Asians worshiping together. It is a vision of the rich, poor, morally good and morally struggling, hand in hand in pursuit of a closer relationship with Christ Jesus. His vision is of a church open to all people regardless of background, ethnicity, socio-economic status or class. Currently The House of Worship has a diverse congregation along with a diverse spiritual leadership team. By God's grace, the result of his obedience and spiritual tenacity has been a long list of miracles and changed lives. The House of Worship meets each Sunday at our church located at 190 Manhattan Avenue, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We are conveniently located and there is plenty of parking and we are handicap accessible. Bishop Collins was consecrated as a Bishop, in Apostolic Succession, in August of 2018. Bishop Collins is President of Houses of Worship International Christian Partnership that is working in conjunction with The House of Worship to build an orphanage and school in Mexico. Jesus is using Bishop Collins, The House of Worship, and HOWICP to positively impact the world for Christ.

We wonder aloud whether God hates us, and then talk about the weather, the grid, and Joe Biden's Town Hall. Finally we end with a rousing conversation from everybody's favorite New York Times column, The Conversation, featuring Gail Collins and Bret Stephens. Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Optagelserne til en ny, fjerde sæson "Borgen" er i gang, og når den rammer tv-skærmene næste år, er den resultat af et samarbejde mellem DR og Netflix. En aftale mellem de to skaffer penge til serien - men også kunder til den amerikanske streaminggigant. Interview med DR's mediedirektør Henriette Marienlund om perspektiver, konsekvenser og politisk kritik af Netflix-samarbejdet. Svær coronadækning: Hvornår er forskning god nok til en stor overskrift? Dét er ét af mange spørgsmål, som journalister igen og igen er blevet konfronteret med det sidste års tid. Lektor Kresten Roland Johansen har på Journalisthøjskolen i Aarhus kortlagt nogle af coronadækningens udfordringer. Diskussion med ham og Politikens sundhedsredaktør Lars Igum Rasmussen og videnskab.dk-journalist Anne Ringgaard. Mainstreammedier uden Trump: USA's 45. præsident - i denne uge i sin anden rigsretssag - har været en god forretning for de medier, han kalder "folkets fjende". Men Donald Trump har også fået en del medier til tydeligt at vælge side. Så hvad nu, når han er væk? Det diskuterer New York Times-klummeskriverne Gail Collins og Bret Stevens akkompagneret af klip fra Trump-årene. Sneflokke kommer vrimlende: Det er efterhånden sjældent, det er "rigtig" vinter i Danmark, så da en snestorm ramte i denne uge, fik medierne travlt med at sende reportere ud i snemasserne. Som viste sig at være lidt større i vejrudsigterne end ude i virkeligheden. Skriv til menneskerogmedier@dr.dk. Vært og producent: Kurt Strand.

Harold Meyerson reports that Republicans in the Senate voted against expanded unemployment benefits almost unanimously. And the bailout support for big banks and corporations has many fewer restrictions than the small business funding support. But moments of crisis are also moments of opportunity, and number one on the Dem's list should be Medicare for All. Also: E. J. Dionne, the Washington Post columnist, talks about what it's going to take to beat Trump in the Age of the Coronavirus – his new book is called “Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country.” Also, Katha Pollitt has some advice about how to spend all those hours at home – watching movies on TV -- and reading the classics. And finally, the great Gail Gollins of the New York Times op-ed page talks about the adventures of older women. Her book, “No Stopping us Now,” is out in paperback.

Harold Meyerson reports that Republicans in the Senate voted against expanded unemployment benefits almost unanimously. And the bailout support for big banks and corporations has many fewer restrictions than the small business funding support. But moments of crisis are also moments of opportunity, and number one on the Dem's list should be Medicare for All. Also: E. J. Dionne, the Washington Post columnist, talks about what it’s going to take to beat Trump in the Age of the Coronavirus – his new book is called “Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country.” Also, Katha Pollitt has some advice about how to spend all those hours at home – watching movies on TV -- and reading the classics. And finally, the great Gail Gollins of the New York Times op-ed page talks about the adventures of older women. Her book, “No Stopping us Now,” is out in paperback.

This episode's alright. Your intrepid hosts chatted on Super Tuesday about the Democratic primaries. Also on the docket: why the right can't make art, why Christopher Nolan is going to the gulag, and Austin's dogs weigh in with their thoughts on the Democratic candidates. The whole episode is conducted with the high degree of professionalism long-time listeners have come to expect. So, sit back, relax, and don't forget to vote no matter what day it is.Links to topics discussed this episode:Gail Collins and Bret Stephens' column: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/opinion/super-tuesday-2020.htmlThe making of Casablanca: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_(film)The Nazis' "Degenerate Art Exhibition": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_Art_ExhibitionGeralt's wang in the Witcher: https://www.vulture.com/2019/12/the-witcher-bathtub-geralt-meme.html

Coronavirus, Mike Pence, Gail Collins and more. Ben Shapiro is wrong about all of it.

PODCAST SUMMARY HOUR 1: Coronavirus will end and economy will rebound. Apple TV app. Democrat primary operating outside of coronavirus panic. NYT Gail Collins: Call it the Trumpvirus. Will coronavirus shut down Trump rallies? Eight people show up for Bloomberg event. Apple stock buybacks. Donald Trump believes nothing is inevitable. Trump is a doer, a problem solver, not apocalyptic. Corona beer boycott. People adapt, we’re not going to be wiped out. Everything the left does is inevitable doom and gloom. Dr. Drew praises Pence’s record in Indiana, blasts press for creating hysteria. PODCAST SUMMARY HOUR 2: Mick Mulvaney: Turn off the television for 24 hours. Donald Trump Jr. on Gail Collins column in NYT. Thomas Friedman: Coronavirus could be Katrina times ten, hurt Crazy Bernie. Operation Chaos in South Carolina. Biden tells others to quit. Biden admits he didn’t get arrested in South Africa. Brian Williams Virus? Dems plot to stop Bernie. Why media zeroes in on Rush. Market recovered while Rush is on the air. Hate-Trump opportunists looking to coronavirus. Tim Cook not panicked over threat to Apple supply chain. PODCAST SUMMARY HOUR 3: Vice President Pence joins Rush in the studio to discuss response to coronavirus. Ted Lieu asks snarky question to Secretary of State Pompeo. Democrats politicize everything. Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker. Drive-By headlines criticizing Trump travel ban as overreaction, xenophobic, nationalistic. Grandmother reading her grandchildren's Rush Revere books. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Robin on impeachment, Harvey Weinstein, endangered women mayors, wrestling, how things are getting better, and days-long orgies of same-sex box crabs. Guest: NY Times columnist Gail Collins on her new book about older women, No Stopping Us Now.

From colonial times when qualities valued for sought-after wives were that she should be civil and up to fifty, to proposed legislation in 1915 that would have made it illegal for a woman over forty-four to wear cosmetics for the purpose of making a false impression, to today when we celebrate Ruth Bader Ginsburg lifting weights and issuing wise Supreme Court decisions, we are reminded that the stature of older women has been a roller coaster rides over U.S. history. These tidbits are a smidgen are what we learn in Gail Collins’s new book, No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History, out now from Little, Brown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jane Fonda. Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Nancy Pelosi. Elizabeth Warren. Maxine Waters. Are "older" women taking over? By 2034 there will be more people 65 and older than there are people under 18. And by and large, women are outliving men. So what might all these older women mean in terms of a possible power shift, historically speaking? Listen to my conversation with Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and the author of the new book, “No Stopping Us Now. The Adventures of Older Women in American History” We explore how attitudes toward older women have shifted in America over the centuries – from the Plymouth Colony view that women were marriageable if "civil and under fifty years of age," to quiet dismissal of post-reproductive females, to women’s role as perpetual caretaker (even when she might need caretaking herself), to the first female nominee for president. Lauren spoke with Gail on stage for the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco in October of 2019. Support our production with a tax deductible contribution at inflectionpointradio.org/contribute. Thank you!

She’s written 9 books and she loves digging up facts like these. Mamie Eisenhower, wife of the 34th President, wore a pink inaugural gown that had more than 2,000 hand-sewn rhinestones in it. And New York Times Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins also says Mamie liked pink toilet seats. In addition to Collins, we also hear from Betty Friedan about the people who used to be called stewardesses, writer Nora Ephron about how she got her skin to clear up, Bella Abzug on the elusive idea of equality and Shirley Maclaine on why she’d never want to be 20 again.  That’s all on this episode of “Now What?” produced with help from Steve Zimmer, Gabe Zimmer and Stephanie Hou. Audio production is by Nick Ciavatta.  

New York Times columnist Gail Collins has written a new book on a subject that is timelier than ever: women and aging in America. Author of the acclaimed New York Times bestsellers “When Everything Changed” and “America's Women,” Collins was the first woman to serve as the editorial page editor of the New York Times. […]

New York Times columnist Gail Collins has written a new book on a subject that is timelier than ever: women and aging in America. Author of the acclaimed New York Times bestsellers “When Everything Changed” and “America's Women,” Collins was the first woman to serve as the editorial page editor of the New York Times. […]

This week we huff a whole bunch of whiteout and get totally psychedelic. We talk about selling out to the mainstream media and then take a look at the political scene. Then we take a trip to an oil rig with Bret Stephens and Gail Collins. That's right, it's Act 2 of the political thriller gripping the nation: The Conversation. You don't want to miss it. Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Gail Collins is a legend in journalism, working in the industry since the 70s and is currently an op-ed columnist at The New York Times. She joins Errol to share stories from her time covering Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump, stresses the importance of local news and holding state elected officials accountable and talks about how the city’s economic prospects have changed over the decades. She also discusses her newest book, “No Stopping Us Now: A History of Older Women in America,” which shines a spotlight on the achievements of women in American history. Join the conversation using the hashtag #NY1YouDecide or give us a call at 212-379-3440 and leave a message. MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE “No Stopping Us Now: A History of Older Women in America”

Gail Collins' wedding night is ruined when a man dies on the front door of her honeymoon suite. Original Air Date: March 4, 1957 Support the show monthly at patreon.greatdetectives.net Support the show on a one-time basis at http://support.greatdetectives.net. Mail a donation to: Adam Graham, PO Box 15913, Boise, Idaho 83715 Read more ...

Gail Collins’ wedding night is ruined when a man dies on the front door of her honeymoon suite. Original Air Date: March 4, 1957 Support the show monthly at patreon.greatdetectives.net Support... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Friends, in this episode we meet Rana Lee. Based in Chicago, she is a principal director of business development with the SmithGroup and is a self-described curious leader, mentor, and disruptor. This is an amazing conversation -- don’t listen to this one while you’re driving because you’re going to need your pen and paper to take notes. We talk about developing yourself as a leader, doing so with great intention and purpose, really identifying the season that you’re in, and having focus and dedication to it. And, finally, we get into the very specific work of making jam. You wouldn’t think that this all ties together, but it is so sticky and delicious that it does. I am so excited to share Rana with you today.Where you can find Rana:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ranalee/Twitter: https://twitter.com/totallyranaInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/totallyrana References mentioned:How Women Rise Sally Someone: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise, Promotion, or Job by Sally HegelsenWhen Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins

New York Times Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins explores how attitudes toward older women have shifted in America over the centuries. Hear why women can, and should, expect the best of their golden years.

The adventures of older women in America: Ruth Bader Ginsburg for example is 86,and Nancy Pelosi just turned 80. But where are the prominent Republican women in politics today who are older?  Gail Collins has been thinking about that; of course she’s the New York Times op-ed columnist.  Her new book is No Stopping Us Now.  Also: Rick Perlstein says the Nixon impeachment limited the charges against the president in order to win a Republican majority in the Senate; since that’s not going to happen with Trump, the Democrats might as well include all his high crimes in their articles of impeachment.  And historian Eric Foner talks about the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which argues that the legacy of slavery is central to all of the American past and present. Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: http://thenation.com/podcastsubscribe

Andrew Marantz talks about “Antisocial,” and Gail Collins discusses “No Stopping Us Now.”

A columnist for the New York Times and a member of its editorial board since 1995, Gail Collins was the Gray Lady's editorial page editor from 2001 to 2007, the first woman to hold that position. Her books include America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines; Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics; and As Texas Goes ... : How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda. In her new book, Collins offers a history of American women and aging, drawing a bead on our evolving attitudes on the matter while proposing that for ladies of a certain age, the best is yet to come. (recorded 10/29/2019)

In her new book, New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins goes back centuries to find out how and why our views of older women have changed.

In 1972, the year I was born, there was apparently a famous TV ad for Geritol. My guest today describes it thus: “…a husband spoke to the camera while his wife draped herself over his shoulder, smiling like something between a model and the brainwashed resident of a creepy commune…”My wife’s incredible. She took care of the baby all day, cooked a great dinner and even went to a school meeting—and look at her!” Her potion of eternal youth, of course, is Geritol. It’s got all the vitamins and iron she needs. This perfect woman grins silently at the camera as her husband concludes: “My wife: I think I’ll keep her.”  Though what constitutes “getting old” for women in America has been a moving target throughout US history, it has rarely been a picnic. But our history’s also full of women who have raised hell and pushed back in a hundred different ways against the cultural and literal corsets America keeps trying to stuff them into.  My guest today is New York Times columnist and celebrated author Gail Collins. Her new book is No Stopping Us Now: the Adventures of Older Women in American History. It’s a bumpy, often exhilarating ride through the lives of older women in America from colonial times up to the present day. And Gail’s good company as our wise, wisecracking stagecoach driver. We’re headed West, and there’s hope on the horizon. Conversation starter clips in this episode:  Liz Plank on masculinity, from episode 214 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've got a live one here folks. We cover everything from gun control to Jonathan Franzen to Chris Paul Hayes. Then we do a Tony award-winning dramatic reading, wherein Tanya plays Gail Collins and Tom plays Bret Stephens. Support the Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Lawrence joins author and New York Times columnist Gail Collins to discuss her book When Everything Changed, which chronicles the progress of women’s rights in America from 1960 through today.  Gail Collins was the first woman to hold the position of Editorial Page Editor for the New York Times (from 2001 to 2007), where she currently provides a semi-weekly op-ed column. See the exclusive, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release. Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com

HEADLINES   01:13 Comedian Michelle Wolf’s “Smokey Eye” joke offends journalist at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner   02:33 Baseless outrage by media after Michelle Wolf roasts Sarah Huckabee Sanders brings to light the effects of contagious false narratives   15:10 President Trump poised to scrap Iran nuclear deal   19:13 Trump delays steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada, E.U., and Mexico for one month   20:02 Gail Collins op-ed on worst cabinet member: Scott Pruitt of EPA   22:53 Missouri Governor Eric Greitens’ (the man who threatened to blackmail former mistress over scandalous photos) trial has begun and his use of the reasoning fallacy: equivocation   24:53 Another climate change denier, Jim Bridenstine, becomes new NASA administrator   25:54 Rand Paul changes his position on Secretary of State pick, Mike Pompeo, after Trump convinces him   26:47 Latest developments on Russia investigation   27:30 Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani joins Trump’s legal team     *FORWARD NATION RADIO featuring David Leventhal  RAW   l   INFORMATIVE   l   ACCURATE Also available on our YouTube channel -Please SUBSCRIBE Visit forwardnationradio.com for the videocast, all shows, fun toons, stats, and more. If you love what you heard, Like Us and share on Facebook - Instagram - Twitter

HEADLINES   00:26 Emmanuel Macron visits Trump after fervent speech warning the world of totalitarianism     01:03 Diminished funds for public schools result in the Donors Choose organization   01:39 Celebrating Earth Day: Scott Pruitt   02:37 Supreme Court hears oral arguments about Trump’s travel ban   03:48 Wendy Vitter won’t say if she supports landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Ed   04:55 Liberal judge Stephen Reinhardt of the 9th Circuit passed at 87   06:54 The fight for DACA: District court rules against Trump’s decision as “virtually unexplained” and “unlawful”   07:48 A reminder of the importance of Lily Ledbetter’s case and promoting equal pay for women   09:34 MAIN SEGMENT Exclusive FNR Interview with Legendary New York Times Op-Ed Columnist and Pulitzer Prize Board member, Gail Collins, as she shares fun and insightful thoughts on today’s entertainment news media, journalism, Trump, the Me Too movement, and more     *FORWARD NATION RADIO featuring David Leventhal  RAW   l   INFORMATIVE   l   ACCURATE Also available on our YouTube channel -Please SUBSCRIBE Visit forwardnationradio.com for the videocast, all shows, fun toons, stats, and more. If you love what you heard, Like Us and share on Facebook - Instagram - Twitter

The Trump administration has rolled back two of President Barack Obama’s signature achievements. The repeal of the Clean Power Plan was billed as the end of a “war on coal.” And the end of a federal requirement that employers include birth control coverage in their health plans followed up on President Trump’s promise that “we will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied or silenced anymore.” Guests: Lisa Friedman, who covers climate and environmental policy for The Times; Gail Collins, a Times Op-Ed columnist. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

We talk to New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins about the Department of Health and Human Services decision Friday to give employers and corporations a reason to deny contraception coverage to their female employees. All they need is to hold a "sincerely held" religious or moral objection to birth control. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At a Times Insider event on Thursday, Jan. 12, Gail Collins and Frank Bruni discussed what to expect from the next four years under President Trump.

It’s a rare Saturday Gist, as the show’s post-election interview blitz continues: New York Times columnist Gail Collins explains what we tend to forget about the way women vote, and NPR’s David Folkenflik ponders the media problems exposed by the presidential race and its surprise outcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What just-right combination of factors is required for a country to embrace a woman as its leader for the first time, and was it inevitable that Hillary Clinton, or someone like her, would be the first in America to make it this far? We explore with Claire McCaskill, the senior United States Senator from Missouri, and Gail Collins, a New York Times columnist who has written several books on women’s history.

What just-right combination of factors is required for a country to embrace a woman as its leader for the first time, and was it inevitable that Hillary Clinton, or someone like her, would be the first in America to make it this far? We explore with Claire McCaskill, the senior United States Senator from Missouri, and Gail Collins, a New York Times columnist who has written several books on women's history.

When you think of masculine and feminine, do you naturally think "man" and "woman" respectively?Our guest today believes everyone can harness both masculine and feminine energy to achieve greater success in business and, ultimately, life.In this episode, Jess Lively unpacks how masculine and feminine, intuition and ego play together effectively. She explains why Oprah is the quintessential example of a woman who's exploited both the masculine and feminine energy and how we can replicate that approach.Jess now helps people live from values-based intentions through LifeWithIntentionOnline.com and The Lively Show podcast. She began her entrepreneurial journey making jewelry at the side of the pool at the age of 15. Jess JC was born and cemented the notion that a business at its core is a process of creating something from nothing and finding customers who will buy it.After completing her MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business in 2007, Jess grew her accessory business into a successful full-time career in Chicago. Later, she transitioned into business coaching.Knowing that her mission is to help people become more peacefully fulfilled by shifting their approach to life, she started her blog in 2009 to share that message and eventually a popular podcast, The Lively Show.Jess Lively shares a simple process for liberating an astonishing source of guidance available to us all - our intuition. According to Jess, when we listen to and allow that intuition to guide our decisions, we'll experience opportunities for growth and adventure others will ignore. In This Episode, You'll Learn:What the basics of building a business entail.How Jess’s “mess becomes your message” experience led to her current business success.Societal changes that impact how women relate in the marketplace.How entrepreneurs exist in a state of high ego and high intuition to create success in business.How we can liberate and tap into our intuition to make better business decisions.Jess’s step-by-step process for having a conversation between your ego and intuition.Mentioned in This Episode:Connect with Jess: LifeWithIntentionOnline.com | The Lively Show | TwitterWhen Everything changed by Gail Collins

The opinion columnist Gail Collins reflects on the Republican convention, Donald Trump and the goings-on in Cleveland.

The opinion columnist Gail Collins reflects on the Republican convention, Donald Trump and the goings-on in Cleveland.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead! In this week's episode of NBC's Parks & Recreation, Leslie Knopes' hopes of preserving public land rests on US President William Henry Harrison, who has the distinction of dying on his 32nd day in office.  Turns out, New York Times columnist Gail Collins happens to be an expert on Harrison. She's the author of William Henry Harrison: The American Presidents Series: The 9th President, 1841 (Times Books, 2012).  She joins Brian and NPR's Linda Holmes for this weekly chat about the final season of the series, known for finding humor in policy wonkiness. Holmes is host of NPR's entertainment and pop culture blog, Monkey See.   

Slate's Political Gabfest, featuring David Plotz, Jacob Weisberg, and New York Times columnist Gail Collins. This week: Hobby Lobby challenges Obamacare, the Age Question haunts Hillary, and Dems attack Nate Silver's Big Data journalism. Show notes at www.slate.com/gabfest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

GAIL COLLINS is a revered columnist at The New York Times, best known for her accessibility, wit, and passion for politics and cultural affairs. She previously served as the Editor of The New York Times Editorial Board, and was the first female to do so. In her spare time, she's written five books. EMPLOYEE of the MONTH is a talk show about jobs, work, and labor. Catie Lazarus converses with people who created riveting careers. So if you've ever wondered what it's like to be a novelist, social activist or be a Muppet, subscribe to the podcast. This show may inspire you to write a screenplay, dust off your tap shoes, quit your day job or get one. www.employeeofthemonthshow.com

Robin celebrates Women's History Month with New York Times columnist Gail Collins; Julie Burkhart, who dares to reopen Dr. Tiller's clinic; and Debra Winger on fighting fracking—plus Robin on the Pope.

Not until she visited Texas, did Gail Collins, the bestselling author and columnist for the New York Times, realize that she had missed the one place that mattered most in America's political landscape: Texas, where Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Perry created a conservative political agenda that is shaping our political landscape. "Like it or not," she says, "as Texas goes, so goes the nation."

Not until she visited Texas, did Gail Collins, the bestselling author and columnist for the New York Times, realize that she had missed the one place that mattered most in America's political landscape: Texas, where Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Perry created a conservative political agenda that is shaping our political landscape. "Like it or not," she says, "as Texas goes, so goes the nation."

Ronnie welcomes frequent CUNY TV guest Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist for “The New York Times.” They discuss Collins’s latest book “When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.”

With the results of the mid-term election still fresh in our minds, the question needs to be asked again. That being, is Barack Obama the Messiah? Or, more to the point, do a number of delusional liberals and far-left radicals still truly believe him to be a deity or their deity? Uber-liberal New York Times columnist Gail Collins just seemed to confirm that dangerous possibility.

With the results of the mid-term election still fresh in our minds, the question needs to be asked again. That being, is Barack Obama the Messiah? Or, more to the point, do a number of delusional liberals and far-left radicals still truly believe him to be a deity or their deity? Uber-liberal New York Times columnist Gail Collins just seemed to confirm that dangerous possibility.

This week Jesse, Jon, and Arturo (on location at the Denver airport) talk about What the Tea Party Really Wants by David Brooks and Gail Collins. Topics include: the success of Glenn Beck; morality and the market; the idea that “everybody’s to blame” for the sad state of the economy; and the power of catchy […]

2010 Commencement, Gail Collins

It's A Crime Mr. Collins. 1956. Mutual net origination, syndicated. "The Case Of The Pink Elephant". Commercials added locally. A racketeer just out of jail threatens the crusading newspaperman who "sent him up the river." But then, the racketeer is shot in, "The Pink Elephant" (that must have hurt). The date is approximate. Mandel Kramer, Gail Collins, Richard Denning. 25:32.

Gail Collins, brilliant New York Times columnist and bestselling author, recounts the astounding revolution in women's lives over the past 50 years.

On the evening of November 5, Gail Collins, author, journalist, and first woman editor of the New York Times editorial page, delivered a talk titled "Observations on American Women's History, Politics, and the New York Times--from Jamestown to Hillary Clinton's Bid for the White House."

On the evening of November 5, Gail Collins, author, journalist, and first woman editor of the New York Times editorial page, delivered a talk titled "Observations on American Women's History, Politics, and the New York Times--from Jamestown to Hillary Clinton's Bid for the White House."

It's A Crime Mr. Collins. 1956. Mutual network origination, syndicated. "The Brown Alligator Briefcase". Commercials added locally. Not auditioned. "Any girl would want to be alone in the Mediterranean moonlight, with a very handsome man...unless he were a murderer!" The accent of the Italian police chief sounds Transylvanian. The date is approximate. Mandel Kramer, Gail Collins, Richard Denning. 23:25.

It's A Crime Mr. Collins. 1956. Mutual net origination, syndicated. "Rockabye Murder". Commercials added locally. Mr. Collins finds himself Mayor-for-a-day in a small town out west...and he finds murder too! The date is approximate. Mandel Kramer, Gail Collins, Richard Denning. 25 minutes.

It's A Crime Mr. Collins. 1956. Mutual net origination, syndicated. "The Lost Film". Commercials added locally. A vacation in New York leads to a mysterious traffic homicide and the kidnapping of Mrs. Collins! The date is approximate. Mandel Kramer, Gail Collins, Richard Denning. 26:07.

Gail Collins, New York Times editorial page editor, discusses the role of the editorial pages in turbulent times for the nation. (Apr 21, 2003)

Original Show Notes: Become Richer with Matt Lane   Matt Lane is a the author of the blog, Optimize Your Life. As a part time blogger, and full time attorney, husband and new father, Matt’s goal is to help people learn that the purpose of money is to allow us to live a happier life, so we need to focus on the big picture of how to build that happy life rather than just focusing on the money and fun fact- we randomly found out we’re neighbors! Welcome! [2:48] Hi. Hi how are you. Good. [2:52] So you’re also a neighbor and local to D.C.. What do you like to do when people come to visit you from out of town. [3:2] Yeah. Well I think it depends on whether they’re new to D.C. whether they’ve been here a bunch of times. The first Go2 is always the monuments and museums which seems to be pretty obvious for D.C. locals. Free and amazing for people that haven’t been there before. It’s really like the essence of D.C. For folks that have been there before and have done all the museums. There’s really a great restaurant scene here now which is pretty interesting and there’s a lot of good breweries and wineries in the area. So depending on what people’s interests are like to hit those up. [3:47] So let’s chat about your blog a little bit, so your blog optimize your life. You had a popular post that was titled Hard work doesn’t pay. Can you tell us a little bit about it. [3:57] Sure. So the idea behind it is that there are there’s a large change going on in the economy and we are not really adjusting to meet that change. [4:13] So as basic as background it’s dealing with the value of capital versus the value of labor. [4:22] Any money changes hands is either going to capital or to labor. So if I make money you make money by working which is Labor or by making money off of my investments which is capital in the same way if I buy something from Wal-Mart. Part of that money goes to the shareholders which is the capital and then part of that money is paid to the workers whether they’re the folks working the floor are the cashier the manufacturer and the truck driver that delivers it. That’s all labor so what we’ve seen from the data is that from at least the 1400’s through around 1970 the share of money going to capital and the share of money going to Labor has been relatively consistent. There’s been some ups and downs there’s been some times when capital makes a bit more sometimes when labor makes a bit more but it’s relatively consistent since 1970 that has been off the charts. The value of labor has been going down down down the value of capital has been going up up up. And this is a huge change that we’re not really addressing at all. And it’s one of the drivers of inequality that we see right now in that the people with the most stock are generally the people with the most money and the people that rely the most on work are the people that are the poorest. So as it gets easier to make money off of stock the rich are getting richer and as it’s harder to make money off of your labor the poor are struggling more and more. [6:14] Yeah and I think artificial intelligence is definitely one of the. One of the drivers behind this globalism as well in the U.S. it’s going faster than in the rest of the world. So we’re seeing it’s also the decline of unions and deregulate it de regularisation deregulation deregulation early don’t. Yes. So deregulation and the decline of unions are sort of speeding right along. But I don’t see any real way to change this trend. I’m sure there must be one but with a eye in globalization kind of just pushing relentlessly. You know it seems like we may need to go to something like a universal basic income or you know some other method of redistribution to address the trend. So where did the idea for your blog come from so I get sort of obsessive about learning different things. And I’ve gone through a lot of different phases of that happiness in psychology economics and economic policy personal finance financial independence and I hit a point where enough people were asking me for advice on all of those different topics that I thought it might make sense to to write about it publicly that there may be some value there for people that I know that were not in my friend circle. So I decided to start working on that. [7:49] And I felt like they could all be sort of drawn together by the idea that they all contribute towards living a better life fantastics. [7:58] What would you say some of your goals are for Optimized Your Life? [8:2] I think for the most part I want to help people look at the bigger picture. I consider myself in the personal finance space even though I spend maybe a third of my time talking about personal finance. But I think one of the issues with a lot of personal finance writing is that you get bogged down in the details. You know how can I save more money. How can I invest more. How can I make more. And that’s all good. That all helps. [8:35] But if you get too lost in the numbers then you forget why you need more money why you want more money. [8:42] And it’s important to remember that it’s all for a greater purpose that you need to be able to step back be able to work towards that happier life and not just more money. [8:53] So talking about money you have had quite a few side hustles in your day. Have you had a favorite or least favorite? [9:4] Sure. And I think I don’t know most of these I don’t know that I’ve considered them really side hustles. I just kind of take on work that I find interesting. So my you know my version of the side hustle is not really you know driving for Uber or Airbnb and that sort of thing. Although I had a few conversations with Kevin from Financial Panther and he is the master of all of that. So to that end I think the most fun that I’ve ever had on a sort of side job was I played trumpet for the U.S. national tennis teams. So I would fly around to different stadiums in the country and play in basically a pep band for you know sold out stadiums and it was super fun. [10:3] A lot of really cool and met a lot of you know great people and had a lot of fun. [10:9] Oh that’s really cool yeah. Have you had one of those. Not so great? [10:17] Between law school and my current job I had about six months where I was studying for the bar and then applying for government jobs and government hires much later than private sector jobs. So I was trying to make enough money to pay rent. And at that time I was doing three separate part time jobs 30 hours a week sort of a legal temp job. [10:46] But one of the other jobs was I counting passengers on the metro. So I was trained to look at the number on each metro car on each subway car. And from that know how many seats were in it. And then as it rolled into the station and out of the station I was supposed to count the number of passengers in my assigned car write it down and then wait for the next train. [11:14] That’s not a very long time to count all those people that have been kind of hard. [11:20] It’s surprisingly hard but you kind of pick up the tricks and get good at sort of quickly eyeballing how many empty seats there are versus how many people are standing. And it’s hard to estimate based on that. I didn’t even know those a thing. [11:40] Yeah I actually had a random train job as well, where I had to count the coaches because the company that I was well the company also contracted to. They don’t know how many trains they had so we were counting out the units of each coach and each locomotive and each actual train. It was quite an education I must say. [12:4] It’s interesting it’s always bizarre seeing sort of what jobs exist that you would never have thought could exist. [12:11] Yeah I don’t mean like it doesn’t sound like a glorious job but at the end of the day each one of these trains a scrap value of about $5000. So even if you find one, then it’s worthwhile. [12:24] Yeah yeah sure. Wow.  [12:31] Ok. Well you’re also a new dad? Congratulations. [12:37] Thank you very much. [12:38] So what is the biggest shock when it comes to the parenting I know you can’t like really be prepared and you probably didn’t actually know what you were doing. [12:52] So I will start this by saying I’m seven weeks in and things can change a lot. But at this point I think I’ve been surprised that the actual caring for a tiny human. Not part of the job has been easier than I expected. But the lack of sleep has been so much harder to deal with. You know everyone tells you you’re not going to get sleep and you know you’re prepared not to sleep as much.  [13:27] I was not fully prepared for that. I can certainly imagine I’ll become a different person when I’m tired. [13:37] Yeah yeah. [13:38] And I actually I recently published an article on how important sleep is to productivity. And I had planned the article before the baby was born. [13:49] And I had done and I had done all the research and then I went I actually wrote it a couple of weeks ago. [13:56] I wrote it with the research and then saying OK yeah this is true. Here’s how this has affected my mood. Here’s how this has affected my health. Here’s one this has affected my productivity and it’s it’s pretty intense. [14:10] Awesome! Do you have any subsequent tips when it comes to paying for day care since it’s such a big expense. [14:17] Yeah. Daycare is insane especially especially in this area where we live so we my wife and I looked at a lot of different daycares in the area and for sort of the certified safety certified daycares you’re looking at between 20 and 30 thousand a year. [14:44] Wow. [14:47] Yeah. The median individual income in the United States is thirty thousand dollars. So I it’s just bonkers and I don’t understand how people without sort of being lucky enough to have our paychecks manage it. That’s insane. Well yeah but it’s I think really the best advice is just sort of plan for it as best you can. You know we we picked our favorites and we looked towards the lower end of that spectrum and we got on wait lists and it turns out we’re almost to the point where we need to put them into daycare where my wife and I are both going to be working. [15:29] And the only daycare and it looks like we’re going to get off the waitlist is the most expensive of course because people who are taking their kid out can’t afford it right. [15:44] So where you know as much as I would love to be able to say you know here’s a hack to getting cheaper daycare I think the best approach is just plan ahead of time try to get your expenses down so that you can handle it and you know figure out what works best for you and your family. Sponsors [16:3] Chain of Wealth – If you need some freelance reader work Katie is available for hire! Check out our contact page to get in touch. Value Link Round (VLR) [16:30] All right. So why do you think people struggle to achieve their dreams? [16:34] Well that’s a very tough question. [16:37] I think there are two types of parallel answers here. I think the first is that some people just don’t have the opportunity and that’s tough to hear. [16:53] But you know if you’re working three minimum wage jobs to be able to feed your family you don’t really have the time to go after your goals. It’s you know there’s we live in a pretty unequal society and you know there’s two that’s just sort of a tough reality that we that we face. [17:18] And that’s not actionable either. But it’s important to remember that that you know if you have the opportunity to pursue goals then you are already sort of in the privileged few. And that’s something that you know we should all be grateful for and something that we should remember. But for more actionable information that’s actually useful for your listeners. I think that we tend to approach big goals as you know dreams that we hope come to us rather than problems that we need to solve. For 2018 on my blog I’m doing each month I’m focusing on a different area of life and sort of working on how to improve that. And I started in January with wife planning which was not something I ever really spent any time on or done any research on. So I read a ton of books took you know some of the online courses read as much as I could and everyone has their own spin but it really breaks down to three steps. You pick an area of your life and then you figure out where you are where you want to go and then a plan to get from A to B. Right. And I think that’s what we need to be doing with our goals. We need to figure out what we really want we need to figure out where we are relative to that and we need to make a plan a solid plan to get from where we are to where we want to be. And I think most people just don’t actually break it down like that. [18:50] That is definitely actionable. So could you recommend any other books will put cost formlessness. [18:58] Sure. I’m sure that others because you have a lot of personal finance so I’m sure that others have recommended Your Money or Your Life. I think that’s sort of the most game changing book in the finance. But as to sort of success generally I’d say Cal Newport has a couple of really good books deep work and so good they can’t ignore you. And then on happiness I think the how of happiness by Sonia Eliava Moreschi. It’s just google happiness. That’s I think the best book in the space. It’s very much research based. So it’s a bit drier but it really is sort of most books and unhappiness are sort of here’s what makes me happy. [19:48] This book is Here’s what I study after study after study has shown works on the majority of people and gives you really actionable ways to make your life happier right now which I think is is great and really useful and so many people need that kind of like jumpstart. [20:8] Yeah. Yeah for sure. Yes. Do you have a favorite quote. [20:12] I kind of go through quotes depending on where I am in life. I think last year my my quote was the way you do anything is the way you do everything. Which the sort of ideas. There’s no there’s no small. There are no small things right. You’re constantly creating who you are and you can’t take shortcuts to that you know. Are you someone that has says things. Are you someone that takes take shortcuts. Because if you do that on things that you feel like don’t matter. It becomes easier to fall into the habit of doing them on things that do matter and it’s not always easy to delineate and to avoid that slippery slope. As of right now I don’t know that there are necessarily quotes but I have to post it notes on my desk. One is one says Where is the resistance on which is this idea that there’s always something that you’re instinctively avoiding. And I’ve found that if you figure out what that is and go that first thing in the day the rest of the day will go so much smoother. And it’s it’s tough to do. [21:30] You know it’s it’s hard to sort of feel like okay whereas a big hurdle let me jump that. But if you do that early in the day everything else becomes easier. And so I’ve found that having that quote by my computer is really useful. The other one is I it just says progress. Which is a reminder that even when something feels overwhelming I need to just keep moving forward a little bit of progress every day will eventually add up to something big. I don’t need to knock it out of the park every day. I just need to move forward. [22:0] That’s definitely true. It’s easy to lose track of where you’re going to if you get stuck in the rat race for sure. [22:9] Awesome. Matt we loved hanging out today. What is the best advice someone has ever given you. And then we’ll say goodbye. [22:17] Sure. So I think I don’t know that I would call it necessarily advice given to me but I think that the the most impactful advice that I’ve read was from Gail Collins who is sort of one of the fathers of the financial independence movement. [22:36] He was one of the early bloggers there and his he really sold the idea of what he calls a few money which is basically saving up enough money that it doesn’t matter what people think of you. So that if someone tells you to do something you can say F you I’m not do and I found that once I had a bit saved up I could be more open in disagreeing with my boss or with upper management at work. Because I wasn’t afraid of losing my job I didn’t have to worry about paying rent next month if I lost my job today. And that really made me a lot better at my job. It made my boss it made upper management respect me more. It made me they gave me more authority. They gave me more room to do what I thought was right. [23:33] And this in turn led to raises promotions awards and commendations that really never would have happened if I hadn’t had that money saved up to be able to feel confident in and you know challenging the system. You know you’re much better at anything when you aren’t overly attached to it. And I think that has been really powerful I think in passing that on. I don’t know that I would necessarily call that a few money for that particular approach but I think maybe just saving up enough to buy yourself some confidence. Has been a really powerful [24:14] Chainers we’ve been hanging out with Matt Lane. [24:17] You can check out his Web site at optimize your life. [24:20] See this some great educational articles there. I highly recommend you check it out. And we’ve enjoyed todays chat. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/chain-of-wealth-debt-investing-entrepreneurship-wealth-and-more/donationsWant to advertise on this podcast? Go to https://redcircle.com/brands and sign up.