Episodes

I have to admit that I’m always a little uncomfortable with non-Jews fetishizing the supposedly unique gifts & accomplishments of the Jewish people. A century ago, Winston Churchill did it. And now George Gilder , the influen...

How to fix American democracy? It’s a question that, over the last couple of years, we’ve been addressing in my Bertelsmann Foundation supported How To Fix Democracy show, now its fifth year. And it is, of course, also a subj...

Andrew C.M. Cooper is the author of the new book, The Ethical Imperative: Leading with Conscience to Shape the Future of Business . He is also an Associate General Counsel and Head of Patent Acquisitions at Meta. While he did...

It’s ironic that Keith Teare, editor of That Was The Week newsletter, just spent two idyllic weeks in Europe, enjoying the Paris Olympics and London theater. Because his first newsletter on his return to the United States ask...

We are living in interesting political times. A month ago, the Presidential election appeared over. Today, however, it appears as if it’s barely begun. So in my conversation today with the prolific columnist David Masciotra ,...

What do Hum , Hitler’s People and The Hypocrite have in common? They are all recommended new books from KEEN ON’s best read regular guest, Los Angeles Times book critic Bethanne Patrick . As usual, she recommends six books, b...

Last month, we were in western Virginia talking to the pioneering regenerative farmer Joel Salatin about how American can fix itself one bite at a time . Today we are on the other coast, in western Oregon, talking to another ...

In Nineteen Eighty-Four , which he wrote in 1948,George Orwell imagined the “Ministry of Truth” to be the central institution that Big Brother used to reinvent reality and make war on the recent past. Three quarters of a cen...

As author of the authoritative three volume Third Reich Trilogy , Richard J. Evans is probably the most respected scholar of Hitler’s Third Reich in the world today. And his latest book, Hitler’s People, is an attempt to make...

In her new book, Freeman’s Challenge , the Harvard historian Robin Bernstein reveals the early 19th century origins of America’s for profit prisons. Telling the tragic story of William Freeman, an Afro-Native teenager guilty ...

In an America riven with both civic discord and ignorance, how can we nurture a next generation of responsibly informed citizens? That’s the all important question Lindsey Cormack addresses in her new book, How to Raise a Cit...

There are two core critiques of AI. The first is that it is an existential threat because it replaces humans with algorithms. The second is that AI is a mirror that only compounds preexisting injustices. James Muldoon , an as...

How democratic is American “democracy”. Dramatically less so that it was. That’s at least the rather worrying conclusion of David Daley , the author of ANTIDEMOCRATIC , a new book which exposes what he says is “the far right’...

Shad White has an uncanny resemblance to J.D. Vance. Born in a tiny town in Mississippi, White went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then Harvard Law School and is now the State Auditor of Mississippi. Like Vance, the lifelong...

If it’s lunchtime, it must be KEEN ON time. At least that’s what it seems, given the long menu of food guests recently on the show. First there was the lunatic regenerative farmer, Joel Salatin, fixing America one bite at a t...

Peter Wehner is the conscience of American conservatism. Having worked in three Republican administrations, the ex Republican is now a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Atlantic , writing compelling moral crit...

Were politics chess, liberals had white; they moved first. Conservatives had black; they countered liberalism’s opening moves. In time, the initiative changed hands. Conservatives, who began as anti-moderns, came to master mo...

So what’s exceptional about America? According to the writer, film producer and scholar Jonathan Taplin, American exceptionalism lies its uniquely global cultural influence. For Taplin - the tour manager for Bob Dylan & produ...

Much of the critical writing about authoritarianism warns that contemporary populism threatens democracy. But as Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein argue in their interesting new book, T he Assault on the State , this global...

In the 1970’s, J. Doyne Farmer built the first wearable computer which he used to predict the game of roulette. While this didn’t make him particularly popular in casinos, it did mark the beginning of a glittering scientific ...

According to the historian Matthew Warshauer, there was no giant conspiracy on 9/11. The real story about September 11, 2001, he argues in his provocative new book Creating and Failing the 9/11 Generation , is its impact on G...

Earlier this year, the prolific American political journalist Sasha Issenberg came on the show to offer a playbook for winning elections in our disinformation age. And, on a recent trip to Los Angeles, I sat down with Issenbe...

Many are called, but few are chosen. In her late twenties, Deesha Dyer was still in community college. By the age of 31, however, she had become Michelle Obama’s social secretary in the White House. So how did this self-style...

What’s it like to discover a Klansman in one’s own family? A few weeks ago, R. Derek Black , the son of a KKK Grand Wizard and an intimate family friend of David Duke, came on the show to confess the exceptional nature of his...