Episodes

A new book by the acclaimed neuroscientist Lisa Genova is always a big event. Genova, best known for her best-selling 2007 novel, Still Alice , has a new novel out this week, More or Less Maddy , which follows a 20-year-old ...

The world is shutting its borders to immigrants. Yesterday , we featured a conversation with Laurie Trautman who dates the Covid crisis of 2020 as the tragic moment when the entire world closed its doors to immigrants. But ev...

From MAGA and the UK’s Reform Party to the German AfD, aggressively nationalist borders controls are back in political fashion. According to Laurie Trautman , an expert on immigration at Western Washington University, we can ...

Nicholas Carr has been amongst the most persistently prescient observers of the digital revolution over the last quarter century. Take, for example, his 2012 essay "The Arc of Innovation Bends Towards Decadence," which, in m...

Is there really a data-driven science that enables us to predict and change human behavior? Mind Masters author and Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz certainly is a believer. But I wonder whether Matz’s observati...

Everything old is new again in international politics. According to Jill Kastner , co-author of A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion , today's international tensions over Ukraine, Taiwan and Green...

What’s wrong with the U.S. economy? Not much according to Wall Street. But according to Adam Chandler , author of 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life , there’s a fundamental contradiction at th...

This is a good one. Former mobster Louis Ferrante discusses the second volume of his history of the American mafia, Borgata: Clash of Titans , covering the critical period between 1960 and 1985 when the mob was at its height ...

Addiction specialist and former meth addict Dr. Adi Jaffe challenges everything we take for granted about addiction and recovery. Opening our KEEN ON conversation with his own dramatic story of a SWAT team arrest that turned ...

Paula Whyman 's journey from bug-obsessed city kid to mountaintop conservationist is an inspiring environmental tale. Now the owner of a 200-acre Virginia mountaintop, she's traded her childhood fascination with cicadas for a...

It’s not just the MAGA crowd who are concerned with government waste and inefficiency. In a convincing Wall Street Journal op-ed, best-selling tech author Larry Downes questions the need for a thousand Social Security offices...

Remember that time in 1977 when Jesse Jackson debated KKK grand wizard David Duke on national tv? As David Masciotra reminds us , it was one of those now forgotten moments from the recent past that can help bring some clarity...

Avid reader, global investor and German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder , who devoured around 150 books in 2024, engages in a spirited New Year discussion about literacy, geopolitics, and the power of deep reading. Despit...

While most of us can at least hope for a happy new year in 2025, the same can’t be true for the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. That, at least, is the view of Michael Scott-Baumann , author of The Shortest History of ...

Marshall Poe runs the New Books Network , a podcasting platform incorporating over 25,000 individual podcasts from thousands of podcasters and many millions of downloads. 2024, he acknowledges, was a bad year for podcasting b...

Gary Marcus is amongst the world’s leading skeptics on the AI revolution. So it’s worth taking note when Marcus admits that “of course we are getting to AGI eventually”. No, he says, artificial general intelligence (AGI) won’...

Is it entirely coincidental that some of the leading figures in the MAGA movement - including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks - all grew up in Apartheid South Africa? Not according to Simon Kuper who raised the alarm a...

Our job is to make Trump fail. That, at least, is the view of the writer Joseph O’Neill , whose essays in the New York Review of Books offer not just a powerful critique of Trump but also of the contemporary Democratic party...

As the author of the well-received Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet, Seth Rogovoy knows his Dylan. So his critical review of the A Complete Unknown , the much hyped new movie featuring Timothee Chamalat as a young Dylan, is wor...

The Artificial Intelligence revolution has dwarfed everything else in tech during 2024. But according to Toby Walsh , author of the upcoming The Shortest History of AI , 2025 also promises to be a revolutionary year in the hi...

So what’s it to be in the Middle East in 2025: Mad Max style anarchy or a "Pax Hebraica" orchestrated from Israel? According to regional expert Soli Ozel , the Mad Max scenario is more likely - although, as he notes, many of ...

Time waits for no one. As 2024 winds down, what are the key moments of a year that perhaps overpromised and underdelivered? According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch , six events in 2024 captured the year’s zeitgeist....

As both a much published poet and cultural critic, Adam Kirsch brings an etymological sensibility to the great issues of our day. In his new book, On Settler Colonialism , Kirsch excavates the nonsense now taken for granted b...

Bloomberg columnist, Parmy Olson , won the FT Business Book of 2024 for Supremacy , her story of the race between Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Demis Hassabis’ Google DeepMind for control of the AI ecosystem. Given that Parmy Olson...