Episodes

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...

Is it really conceivable that Apple will withdraw its products and services from the entire European Union? What might sound absurd is actually conceivable, That Was the Week ’s Keith Teare says, because of what he sees as th...

On the front page of her website , the family therapist and psychologist B. Janet Hibbs quotes Kierkegaard’s observation that “we live our lives forward, but understand them backwards.” But her coauthored You’re Not Done Yet:...

In his 1887 polemic, On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche suggested that the idea of good and evil, of morality itself, might have been born by slaves. Candida Moss, who holds the Edward Cadbury Chair of Theology at the Un...

Surveillance capitalism is ubiquitous. If we’re not being watched by Google or Facebook, then we are watching movies warning about how these digital platforms are watching us. David Donnelly’s new documentary, COST OF CONVENI...

Few conservatives or Christians have stood up to Donald Trump with the coherence and bravery of The New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner. “I think morality is to Trump what color is to a person who is colorblin...

Do we really need more jeremiads exposing the Randian greed of Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg & Travis Kalanick? Rob Lalka’s THE VENTURE ALCHEMISTS is about how big tech turned profits into power. but this has been the alchemy...

All the tech news this week seems to be about how Big Tech is, for better or worse, getting BIGGER. There’s the Department of Justice anti-trust case against Apple, a hail-Mary attempt by Biden’s DOJ to transform to the high-...

As we approach Easter and Passover, it’s worth noting that our mainstream monotheistic creeds are based on a belief in what Professor Chris French, the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Depart...

We would all be way more ignorant without omnivorous book critic and regular KEEN ON guest Bethanne Patrick. This month she recommends six new books by Russell Banks, Adam Philips, Percival Everett, Andrew Dubus III, Marie Mu...

Warning: this is an adults-only show. David Baker, the Australian based author of The Shortest History of Sex , takes us through two billion years of sexual evolution. And, from the first microbial exchanges of DNA to Darwin ...

Even if it isn’t quite Spring, the professional baseball season begins today in, of all places, Korea. And to celebrate this premature rite, I spoke with Keith O’Brien, the author of CHARLIE HUSTLE , the new Pete Rose biograp...

In his new book AMERICA LAST: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators , Jacob Heilbrunn argues that American conservatives have always had the hots for foreign dictators like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Mussolini, Fran...

Did history ever go away? For the former BBC Russia correspondent, Martin Sixsmith, there was a few euphoric years, in the early 1990’s, when history promised to end. That time, of course, was the post-Soviet Russia of Boris ...

Once-upon-a-time, there was the “ Silent Generation ” - the self-sacrificing generation of WW2 vets who won the war and built America into a Cold War superpower. But Elaine Lin Hering, the author of UNLEARNING SILENCE , isn’t...

To celebrate over two thousand episodes of the show, we are launching KEEN ON AMERICA - a special series of personal conversations with prominent Americans about their now almost 250 year-old Republic. First up is Adam Hochsc...