Episodes

In his early opposition to the Iraq war and other overseas misadventures in Bosnia, Haiti and El Salvador, Mark Danner is one of the most respected observers of American foreign policy. So it was a real honor to sit down with...

Harper’s has a great cover story this month entitled “The Life and Death of Hollywood” by the intellectual historian, podcast and general muckraker Daniel Bessner. Film & tv writers face an existential threat, Bessner told me...

Elliot Ackerman has an intriguing essay in this issue of Liberties Quarterly on the use and abuse of mercenaries throughout history. Linking the history of the British in India, the US in Afghanistan and Russia in contemporar...

I have to admit I absolutely HATED Alex Garland’s new movie Civil War . I found it annoyingly trite, self-evidently packaged for an ahistorical cinematic audience addicted to the amnesia of mindless violence. That’s fine, of ...

Part of the purpose of our new KEEN ON AMERICA series is to (re)discover what it means to be an American. Many of the wisest observers of American life - from De Tocqueville in the 19th Century to Max Weber and Alistair Cooke...

Like yesterday’s KEEN ON guest, Batya Ungar-Sargon , Dale Maharidge believes that liberals are “equally to blame” for what he calls, in his new collection of essays, America’s Doom Loop . Maharidge, whose Pulitzer prize winni...

Behind all the partisan hysteria, a dramatic political realignment is taking place in America. As SECOND CLASS author Batya Ungar-Sargon told me, the Democrats have become the party of a mostly coastal global knowledge elite ...

Finally some good news for progressive Americans. According to Natalie Foster, whose new book The Guarantee is out on April 23, Americans are about to get the economy they deserve. In The Guarantee , Foster gets inside the wh...

I do enjoy our regular new books show with Bethanne Patrick , the astonishingly widely read book critic of Los Angeles Times . For April, she recommends freshly published books by Salman Rushdie, Erik Larsen, Amor Towles, Moh...

So what does it mean to be an American? Previous guests on KEEN ON AMERICA like Arlie Russell Hochschild and Thelton Henderson told me that they learnt to be an American during the civil rights unrest of the Sixties. Sara Par...

How to deal the American crisis of homelessness? Late last year, Kevin Adler, the San Francisco based homeless activist and author of When We Walk By , came on the show to argue that we should all personally interact with the...

Few Americans of any color or creed have had a legal career as historically rich or significant as Thelton Henderson . One of the earliest African-American graduates of Boult law school at UC Berkeley, Henderson was the first...

Everyone deserves a second chance. The former Harvard professor of psychology Marc D Hauser has had a controversial academic career, having been investigated in a high profile case in 2010 by Harvard for supposedly falsifying...

According to Dr Damon Tweedy there a connection between the historic struggle for civil rights and today’s struggle for more mainstream mental healthcare. In 2016, Tweedy wrote Black Man in a White Coat , his bestselling refl...

Today, on the eve of the total lunar eclipse of the sun, the media is full of practical guides about how to tilt our heads at this once-in-a-lifetime celestial event. But what about the metaphysical questions about the eclips...

In this KEEN ON show, the music historian Sheryl Kaskowitz, author of A CHANCE TO HARMONIZE , narrates how FDR and his team of New Dealers saved America from the Great Depression - one folk song at a time. And she explains th...

Is there such a thing as an economic bubble? Not according to That Was The Week author Keith Teare who argues that all bubbles reflect innovation and promise (even if you lose your shirt by investing in tulips or dotcoms). Wh...

Is Trump really like Hitler? Last month, we did a show with the Hitler scholar, Peter Range, who argued that the Adolf Hitler of 1924 had much in common with the Donald Trump of 2024. And now we are back on the Trump-Hitler c...

In TRIPPED , his intriguing new history of drugs and postwar America, the German writer Norman Ohler makes LSD both a symbol and a metaphor for the history of the Cold War. Linking Nazi Germany, the CIA with what he calls “th...

How to put America back together? Few people have thought more about this Humpty Dumpty style challenge than Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the 2016 classic Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American...

Like all immigrants who fled to the U.S. to escape civil war, Ismar Volic has a deep personal appreciation for American democracy. And Volic - a Bosnian refugee from the Yugoslavian civil war who is now director of the Instit...

Becca Rothfeld’s much heralded new collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess , challenges the American Puritan values of self-control and abstinence. Why have one meal when you can three, she asks, prai...

According to David Masciotra, the real battleground for the future of American democracy lies in that no-man’s land between suburban and rural America - what he calls the “exurb”. It’s here, Masciotra argues in his new book E...

The Daily Mail called him the “Sith Lord” of the art world, the New York Times annointed him a s the art world’s Patron Satan”, while the Wall Street Journal described him as the dealer the art world “loves to hate”. Californ...