Talk/Talk: Making (Non) Sense of an Irrational World

For many years, Fred Newman and Jacqueline Salit-two leading activists and intellectuals within the independent political movement-have met on the weekends to have coffee and watch political talk and interview shows. They watch Charlie Rose, Chris Matthews, Meet the Press, This Week with George Stephanopoulos (now Christiane Amanpour), The McLaughlin Group, Hardball, and other shows. After they watch them, they have a conversation. In early 2005, they began transcribing these conversations and distributing them to their friends and followers. Over the years, their "talk about the talk"-hence the name Talk/Talk-developed into a popular weekly missive that is presently distributed via e-mail to tens of thousands of readers worldwide. Making (Non) Sense of an Irrational World is a compilation of some of their most popular and thought provoking discussions from the last five years.

Fred Newman is a Stanford-trained philosopher, playwright, theatre director, and therapist. Regarded internationally as a leading postmodern innovator and thinker, Newman is the co-author, with Dr. Lois Holzman, of numerous books on psychology, politics, and culture, including The End of Knowing and Unscientific Psychology. He has authored two self-help books, Let's Develop and Performance of a Lifetime, and more than 20 plays. He was an early pioneer of the independent political movement, in which he is a strategist and controversial power broker. Jacqueline Salit is the country's leading on-the-ground expert in independent politics. She is the President of IndependentVoting.org, a national organizing hub for independent voters and the editor of The Neo-Independent. She produced and directed the documentary film, How the Independent Movement went Left by going Right, which traces the roots of the coalition of black and independent voters that elected Barack Obama. She ran Michael Bloomberg's three mayoral campaigns on the Independence Party line.