Episodes

On today's episode, Eleanor Herman,, author of the upcoming book Sex With Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House, discusses the scandals of our recent presidents and why this historically has not affected the public's viewpoints. The author of Sex with Kings and Sex with the Queen, New York Times bestselling historian Eleanor Herman has hosted episodes for the National Geographic Channel and the History Channel's Lost Worlds. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, she is married...

Martin Sandbu has been writing about economics for the Financial Times since 2009. Having started out as the newspaper's economics leader writer, he is currently FT's European economics commentator and writes its Free Lunch premium economics newsletter. Previously, he was a senior research fellow at the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Just Business and Europe's Orphan (Princeton).

Kerri Arsenault is the Book Review Editor at Orion magazine, and Contributing Editor at Lithub. Arsenault received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and studied in Malmö University's Communication for Development master's programme. Her writing has appeared in Freeman's, Lithub, Oprah.com, and The Minneapolis Star Tribune, among other publications. She lives in New England. Mill Town is her first book.

On today's episode, Thom Hartmann, author of The Hidden History of Monopolies, discusses the history of monopolies and why this is a "cancer on America." Thom Hartmann is the four-time winner of the Project Censored Award, New York Times bestselling author of thirty-two books, and America's #1 progressive talk radio show host. His show is syndicated on local for-profit and nonprofit stations and broadcasts nationwide on Sirius XM and worldwide through the US American Forces Network, the Thom Ha...

On today's episode, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, journalist and author of A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, discusses what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a freelance journalist specializing in narrative features and investigative reporting. He has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and been voted Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press association, among numerous other honors. His work has appeared in Foreign Po...

On today's episode, Tom Burgis, Financial Times investigations correspondent and author of Kleptopia, discusses breaking the code of secrecy of money. Tom Burgis is an investigations correspondent at the Financial Times. He has reported from more than forty countries, won major journalism awards in the US and Asia and been shortlisted for eight others, including twice at the British Press Awards. His critically acclaimed book The Looting Machine, about the modern plundering of Africa, won an Ov...

On today's episode, Vicky Osterweil, author of In Defense of Looting, discusses the controversy of her new book and a real desire for change in the liberation movements. Vicky Osterweil is a writer, editor, and agitator and a regular contributor to The New Inquiry. Her writing has also appeared in The Baffler, The Nation, The Rumpus, Real Life, and Al Jazeera America.

On today's episode, David Nasaw, author of The Last Million, discusses his eight-year project researching the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII. David Nasaw is the author of The Patriarch, selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year and a 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; Andrew Carnegie, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, the recipient of the New-York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize, and a 2007 Pulitzer Prize Fin...

On today's episode, Sinan Aral, head of MIT's Social Analytics Lab and author of The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt, discusses Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT, and Data Science at MIT; director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy; and head of MIT's Social Analytics Lab. He is an active entrepreneur and venture capitalist who served as chief scientist at several startups; co-...

David Goodhart, author of Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect, discusses the narrowing concept of a good life, how pushing higher education led to Trump and Brexit, and the future of AI within white-collar jobs. David Goodhart is one of the most distinctive and influential contemporary political analysts. He worked for the Financial Times for twelve years before founding Prospect magazine in 1995. He now leads the demo...

Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House and ZYZZYVA, and her nonfiction in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Atavist, and was included in Best American Essays and the anthology Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex worker, a union organizer, an independent record label owner, a train hopper, a waitress, and a mother. She lives in Portla...

Sir Martin Sorrell is Executive Chairman of S⁴Capital, a new London listed vehicle with the objective of building a new age, new era, digital advertising and marketing services platform for clients. S4Capital has completed the acquisition of MightyHive in December 2018 for a total consideration of USD 150 million. MightyHive is a San Francisco based market-leading programmatic solutions provider. This transaction followed the acquisition of MediaMonks for €300 million in July 2018 and furthered ...

JOHN W. DEAN served as White House counsel for President Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1973. During the Watergate scandal, his Congressional testimony helped lead to Nixon's resignation. Dean has written about Watergate in his New York Times bestsellers Blind Ambition and The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It. Among his other books are the national bestsellers Worse Than Watergate and Conservatives Without Conscience. He is a regular political and legal commentator on CNN.

Jonathan Karl is the chief White House correspondent and chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association (2019-2020). He has reported from the White House during the administrations of four presidents and thirteen press secretaries and covered every major beat in Washington, including Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the State Department. Karl also has a long history of reporting on Donald Trump, beginning in the early 1990s, when he wa...

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 world. Anne Applebaum's 2018 Atlantic article "A Warning from Europe" inspired this book and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. After seventeen years as a columnist at The Washington Post, Applebaum became a staff writer at The Atlantic in 2020. She is the author of...

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 Times best seller, one of the Washington Post’s 50 notable books of 2014, a Kirkus best book of 2014 and the number one non-fiction book of 2014 on Amazon.com. The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes, was one of the Wa...

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-winning public radio show and podcast. He also writes for television, film, and the stage. Andersen co-founded Spy magazine, served as editor in chief of New York, and was a cultural columnist and critic for Time and The New Yorker. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Coll...

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. Kai Strittmatter was for more than a decade the China correspondent for Germany's national newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Fluent in Mandarin, he has studied China for more than 30 years, including extensive stints in Xi'an and Taipei. He is now a fellow at the Mercator Instit...

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 writer to The New York Times and a former columnist for The Guardian. Her work has appeared in Time, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and the anthologies Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance and Revolution in Trump's America and Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power a...

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, and Taming the Gods.

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 Baffler and writes regularly for The Guardian. He lives outside Washington, D.C. This episode is brought to you by Ground News. Just head to https://ground.news/keenon and enter code KEENON to get 1 month FREE of Ground News Pro. As an exclusive limited-time offer, listeners of ...

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 Times bestseller What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News. He lives in 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 through Twentieth-Century Europe and How Fascism Ruled Women. She has received the Woodrow Wilson, Jean Monnet, and Guggenheim fellowships and the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome.