Episodes

On this special episode of Keen On, presented by the Bertelsmann Foundation and Humanity in Action, Anne Applebaum and Michael Ignatieff discuss the decline of liberal democracy and the rise of authoritarianism around the wor...

Carl Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest, which was a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” a NY Ti...

Kurt Andersen is the bestselling author of the novels Heyday, Turn of the Century, and True Believers. He contributes to Vanity Fair and The New York Times and was the host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award-winn...

On today's episode, Kai Strittmatter, foreign correspondent and author of We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State , discusses a return of totalitarianism and digital self-policing as the new panopticon. Ka...

Jill Filipovic is a Brooklyn-based journalist, lawyer, and author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness . A weekly columnist for CNN and a 2019 New America Future of War fellow, she is also a contributing opinion w...

Ian Buruma teaches at Bard College. His books include A Tokyo Romance , Their Promised Land , Year Zero , The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam , Occidentalism , God's Dust , Behind the Mask , The Wages of Guilt , Bad Elements...

Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal, Pity the Billionaire, The Wrecking Crew, and What's the Matter with Kansas? A former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and Harper's, Frank is the founding editor of The Baffl...

Harold James is the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies and Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Eric Alterman is a distinguished professor of English at CUNY Brooklyn College and holds a PhD in history from Stanford University. A columnist for the Nation , he is the author of ten previous titles, including the New York ...

Victoria de Grazia is Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University and a founding editor of Radical History Review . Her widely translated, prizewinning books include Irresistible Empire: America's Advance thr...

William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, frequent speaker at colleges and other venues, and former professor of English at Yale. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic , the New York Times , Harper’s , T...

David Gessner is the author of ten books, including the New York Times bestseller All the Wild That Remains . He has taught environmental writing as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard and is currently a professor and depar...

Robert Draper is a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing writer to National Geographic. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller Dead Certain: The Presidency of G...

Richard Kreitner is a contributing writer to The Nation . He is the author of Booked: A Traveler's Guide to Literary Locations Around the World.

Jean Guerrero , winner of the PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize, is the Fronteras reporter for KPBS, the NPR and PBS affiliate in San Diego, reporting on cross-border issues for radio and television. She has also worked for t...

Jim Tankersley , a tax and economics reporter for the New York Times , has written extensively about the stagnation of the American middle class, the decline of economic opportunity in wide swaths of the country and how polic...

Nicholas Nehamas is an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald . He was part of a team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting on the Panama Papers.

Norman Eisen was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020, including for the impeachment and trial of President Donald Trump. He previously served as ethics czar for President Barack Obama and then a...

Donald Hoffman is professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. His writing has appeared in Scientific American and Edge , and his work has been featured in the Atlantic , Wired , and Quanta . He res...

Denise Young Smith is of the most prominent African-American female executives in Silicon Valley, Smith’s 20-year career at Apple includes leading human resources and most recently overseeing the company’s global effort for a...

David Dayen writes regularly for The Intercept and The Nation and has just been appointed the editor of the American Prospect . He is the author of Chain of Title , winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize for a first book in...

John W. Compton is Associate Professor of Political Science at Chapman University and the author of The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution .

David Runciman is a professor of politics at Cambridge University. The author of five previous books and a contributing editor to the London Review of Books , he hosts the widely-acclaimed podcast Talking Politics . Runciman ...

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian at the New School for Social Research. She is executive editor of Public Seminar and was the author of the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. She lives in New York...