Episodes

Given the industry of Holocaust remembering, do we really need another book about the Nazis and their industrial death camps? Yes, according to Tobias Buck, author of the much acclaimed A Final Verdict: the Holocaust on Trial...

The Harvard academic Elisa New is host of the much acclaimed PBS series POETRY IN AMERICA . Now in Season Four, the show has featured conversations about American poetry with Joe Biden, Herbie Hancock, Gloria Estefan, Shaquil...

In November of this year, two particularly out of touch eighty-year old men will contest the US Presidential election. America, in other words, has an age problem. According to David Faris, author of THE KIDS ARE ALL LEFT , ...

As founding director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute and author of the new ALIEN EARTHS: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos , Lisa Kaltenegger is one of the world’s most respected cosmologists. She believes that, with ...

In a “post-truth” world, who should we trust? According to Alex Edmans, one of the UK’s hottest business school professors, you should trust him enough to read his new book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics and Studi...

Museums, the distinguished anthropologist Adam Kuper argues in his new book Museums of Other People , are actually mirrors of ourselves. Rather than revealing curiosities about cultures of antiquity, they are actually living ...

There are few people more adept at navigating America’s labyrinthine medical system than Robert Pearl . Yale medical degree, Stanford University professor, best-selling author, former CEO of the Californian insurance network ...

Dr Judy Ho has a new book entitled The New Rules of Attachment: How to Heal Your Relationships, Reparent Your Inner Child, and Secure Your Life Vision . It’s one of those books which explain to us, in our therapeutic age of i...

The suburbs haven’t got a great press recently on KEEN ON. First there was Benjamin Herold , author of Disillusioned, who found the dead body of the American Dream in the American suburb. And then David Masciotra , author of ...

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...