Episodes

On today's episode, Robert Kolker discusses his latest book, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family. ROBERT KOLKER is the New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls, named one of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books and one of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Books of 2013. As a journalist, his work has appeared in New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, O magazine, and Men's Journal. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a r...

On Keen On, Andrew talks with Paul Jankowski about his latest book, All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War. Paul Jankowski is the Raymond Ginger Professor of History at Brandeis University. His many publications include Stavinksy: A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue, Shades of Indignation: Political Scandals in France, Past and Present, and most recently, Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War.

On today's episode, Andrew talks with Kim Ghattas about her new book, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East. Kim Ghattas is an Emmy-award winning journalist and writer who covered the Middle East for twenty years for the BBC and the Financial Times. She has also reported on the U.S State Department and American politics, and is the author of The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut t...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with K. Sabeel Rahman, president of Demos, about why we need to challenge the privatization in America of the last 30 years. K. Sabeel Rahman is an Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School and President of Demos. He previously has been a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (2017), and a Fellow at New America. Rahman has worked extensively with policymakers, funders, and advocacy groups in developing strate...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with Talia Stroud, co-director of Civic Signals, about rebuilding and re-stimulating public digital spaces -- and whether it's possible to make digital spaces feel like community or civic initiatives. Talia Stroud is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the School of Journalism, as well as the founding and current Director of the Center for Media Engagement in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. The Cent...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with Lucas Chancel about his new book, Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment, and the inequalities that become apparent during moments of crisis. Lucas Chancel is co-director of the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics and coeditor of the World Inequality Report 2018. A lecturer at Sciences Po, he is also Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations.

On today's episode, Andrew talks with Carl Safina, author of the new book, Becoming Wild, and our values that are destructive and dehumanizing to the earth and our own species. Carl Safina's work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards as well as the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Safina is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part ...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with Julian E. Zelizer about his new book, Burning Down the House, and how Newt Gingrich launched our current era of partisan warfare -- and why Trump is the culmination of this. Julian E. Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN Political Analyst. His most recent books are Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (co-authored with Kevin Kruse) and The Fierce Ur...

On today's episode, Rick Perlstein discusses his new book, Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980, and how the birth of modern American conservatism happened before Ronald Reagan. Rick Perlstein is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan; Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by over a dozen publications; and Before the ...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with professor and thinker Mauro F. Guillen about his new book, 2030, global trends to keep an eye on, and what the future holds after the pandemic. Mauro F. Guillén is one of the most original thinkers at the Wharton School, where he holds the Zandman Professorship in International Management and teaches in its flagship Advanced Management Program and many other courses for executives, MBAs, and undergraduates. An expert on global market trends, he is a sought-...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with Edmund Fawcett, author of the new book Conservatism, about the fight for a tradition of order and stability and for who is the true conservative, which continues today. Edmund Fawcett worked at The Economist for more than three decades, serving as its chief correspondent in Washington, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels, as well as its European and literary editor. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the New Statesm...

On today's episode, Andrew Keen talks with Peter Osnos, founder of PublicAffairs, about the recent news that Bertelsmann, the parent of Penguin Random House, will purchase Simon & Schuster and why this does not mean the Amazonization of the publishing industry. Between 1966-1984 Peter Osnos was a reporter and foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and served as the newspaper's foreign and national editor. From 1984-1996 he was Vice President, Associate Publisher and senior editor at Rand...

On todays episode, Andrew Keen talks with Brian Christian about his new book, The Alignment Problem, and the question at the intersection of computer science, ethics, and the law that determines whether a statistical tool can be fair. Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human, which was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a New Yorker favorite book of the year. He is the author, with Tom Griffiths, of Algorithms to Live By, a #1 Audible best...

On today's episode, Andrew Keen talks with Steve Coll about what Donald Trump gets from contesting Joe Biden's presidential victory and the damage to foreign policy Trump's administration has caused. Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and reports on issues of politics, intelligence, and national security in the United States and abroad. For the magazine, he has written about the education of Osama bin Laden, secret negotiations be...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with Tom Zoellner about his new book, The National Road: Dispatches from a Changing America, and reporting from the America today, full of divide and anger -- but, also, hope. TOM ZOELLNER is the author and co-author of eight previous nonfiction books, the politics editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books, an associate professor of English at Chapman University and a visiting professor of English at Dartmouth College. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Ha...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with professor Charles A. Kupchan about his new book, Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World, and what lies ahead for the Biden administration. Charles A. Kupchan is Professor of International Affairs in the School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University, and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2014 to 2017, Kupchan served in the Obama administration as Special Assistant to th...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat about her new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, and the history of "strongmen" like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is an internationally acclaimed historian, speaker, and political commentator for the Atlantic, CNN, the Washington Post, and other publications. She is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and lives in New York City.

On today's episode, Andrew talks with Alan Hirsch, professor and author of A Short History of Presidential Election Crises, about why this current moment is not the fifth presidential election crisis. Alan Hirsch, Instructor in the Humanities and Chair of the Justice and Law Studies program at Williams College, is the author of a number of books including Impeaching the President: Past, Present, and Future (City Lights) and For the People: What the Constitution Really Says About Your Rights (Fr...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, discusses his life in film and why Trump is trying to replace reality. David Thomson has taught film studies at Dartmouth College, has served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, and has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times, The Nation, Movieline, The New Republic, and Salon. His other books include “Have You Seen . . . ?”: A Pe...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with Kermit Pattison, author of Fossil Men, on answering the ultimate question: Where did we humans come from? Kermit Pattison is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Fast Company, and Inc., among many other publications. He spent more a decade doing research for Fossil Men, a large portion of which was spent in the field in Ethiopia with the team that discovered Ardi. This is his first book. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

On today's episode, Frank "Gus Biggio, author of The Wolves of Helmand: A View from Inside the Den of Modern War, discusses modern warfare and his own experience in Afghanistan. Frank ("Gus") Biggio served on active duty in the United States Marine Corps from mid-1993 until December 1997 after graduating from Denison University. After his initial service, he returned to his native Ohio to attend law school at Case Western Reserve University. Biggio then lived and worked in New York City and Was...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with satirist PJ O'Rourke about his new book, A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land. P. J. O'Rourke has written nineteen books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance both reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. He is a regular panelist on NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me, a contributing writer for the Washington Post editorial page, and the editor in chief of...

On today's episode, Andrew talks with Erin Brockovich about her new book, Superman's Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis and What We the People Can Do about It, and our current climate crisis. ERIN BROCKOVICH is the president of Brockovich Research & Consulting and the founder of the Erin Brockovich Foundation, a nonprofit organization created to educate and empower communities in their fight for clean water. She is the coauthor of Take It from Me: Life's a Struggle but You Can Win and has her...

In a special episode from the REGENERATE series, Andrew Keen talks to Scott Russell Sanders about his new essay collection, The Way of Imagination. SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS has won more than a dozen major honors, including the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award twice, the Lannan Literary Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His more than twenty books include novels, stories, and essays. He is a distinguished professor emeritus of English at ...