Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Neill Lochery, author of Cashing Out: The Flight of Nazi Treasure, 1945-1948, about the flight of Nazi treasure through “neutral” countries after the Second World War.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

________________________

Professor Neill Lochery Ph.D., is the Catherine Lewis Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Mediterranean Studies at University College London. He has served as an adviser to political and economic leaders from both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is the author of nine books including The View from the Fence: The Arab-Israeli Conflict from the Present to its Roots (Continuum) and Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light 1939-1945.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Anna Pitoniak, author of The Helsinki Affair, about the art of espionage and the tradecraft of the spy novelist.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

________________________

Anna Pitoniak is the author of The Futures, Necessary People, Our American Friend, and The Helsinki Affair. She graduated from Yale, where she majored in English and was an editor at the Yale Daily News. She worked for many years in book publishing, most recently as a Senior Editor at Random House. Anna grew up in Whistler, British Columbia, and now lives in New York City and East Hampton. You can find her newsletter about writing, publishing, and creativity on Substack.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Rob Copeland, author of The Fund, about Ray Dalio, the billionaire Big Brother of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund on the planet.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

________________________

Rob Copeland is a finance reporter for the New York Times. He was previously the longtime hedge-fund beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and has also covered Silicon Valley and the hidden worlds of the wealthy and powerful. His front-page investigations into Bridgewater Associates won a New York Press Club award; he was also awarded an honorable mention twice by the Society of American Business Writers (SABEW) and was named a News Media Alliance “Rising Star” (formerly Top 30 Under 30). He has appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” NPR and other major news networks.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Juliet Hooker, author of Black Grief/White Grievance, about why American democracy is in desperate need of an radical expansion of its political imagination.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

________________________

Juliet Hooker is Professor of Political Science at Brown University. She is a political theorist specializing in racial justice, Latin American political thought, Black political thought, and Afro-descendant and indigenous politics in Latin America. Before coming to Brown, she was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009); Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford, 2017); and editor of Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash (Lexington Books, 2020). Theorizing Race in the Americas was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Her current book, Black Grief/White Grievance: Democracy and the Problem of Political Loss, is forthcoming in 2023 from Princeton University Press. Prof. Hooker served as co-Chair of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on Racial and Social Class Inequalities in the Americas (2014-2015), and as Associate Director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (2009-2014). She has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard, and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Ben Austen, author of Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change, about the state of the American carceral system and the difficulty of imagining a brighter future.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

________________________

Ben Austen is a writer from Chicago. He is the co-host of the podcast Some of My Best Friends Are and the author of High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing. High-Risers was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction, shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice, and named one of the best books of 2018 by Booklist, Mother Jones and the public libraries of Chicago and St. Louis. A former editor at Harper’s Magazine, he is a story consultant on the podcast The City and a senior fellow at the Invisible Institute. His feature writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, The Best American Travel Writing, and many other publications.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks with Lisa Gornick, author of Ana Turns, about writing a New York City novel in the age of the Taliban and Donald Trump.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

________________________

Lisa Gornick has been hailed by NPR as “one of the most perceptive, compassionate writers of fiction in America…immensely talented and brave.” She is the author of four previous novels—most recently The Peacock Feast and Louisa Meets Bear, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as Picador—and an upcoming novel, Ana Turns, to be published by Keylight Books in November, 2023. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, the Wall Street Journal, and Real Simple, and have received many honors, including Distinguished Story by the Best American Short Stories. With the publication of her first novel, A Private Sorcery, Lisa Gornick was described by National Book Award Winner Colum McCann as “a new voice…that makes sense of our deep need for stories and their tellers.” Her second novel, Tinderbox, was awarded Four out of Four Stars from People and deemed “an extraordinary book, written for adults” by National Book Critics Circle Winner Joan Silber. Louisa Meets Bear received Starred Reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist and an “A” from Entertainment Weekly, and was chosen as a “Fresh Pick” for book clubs by Oprah.com, the Long List for The Story Prize, and a Finalist for The 2016 Paterson Fiction Prize. The Peacock Feast was proclaimed “truly mighty” by Newsday, a “glorious chronicle” by the BBC, a “perfect novel” by the New Jersey Star-Ledger, and a “masterpiece” by Writers on Writing. Lauded by Rebecca Makkai as “Exactly the book I needed,” Meg Wolitzer described it as “One of those rare books that feel both grand and intimate.” Lisa Gornick earned a doctorate in clinical psychology at Yale and is a graduate of the writing program at NYU and the psychoanalytic training program at Columbia, where she is on the faculty. For many years, she worked in clinics, hospitals, and private practice as a psychotherapist, a profession she has depicted in various essays as based on “sacred trust.” She lives in New York City with her family.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Daniel Finkelstein, author of Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family, about the extraordinary coincidences enabling the survival of his family in World War Two

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

________________________

Daniel Finkelstein is a weekly political columnist at The Times of London. Formerly an adviser to Prime Minister John Major, he was appointed to the House of Lords in 2013. He recently became a director of Chelsea Football Club. He is married with three children and lives in Pinner, a suburb of London. He is grandson of Dr. Alfred Wiener, founder of the Wiener Library, the world’s oldest Holocaust archive, where he is a patron.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to David J. Helfand, author of The Universal Timekeepers, about the power of atomic science to unveil the mysteries of unreachably remote time and space.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

________________________

David J. Helfand has served on the Columbia faculty for forty-five years, nearly half that time as Chair of the Department of Astronomy. He has also spent three years at the University of Cambridge, most recently as the Sackler Distinguished Visiting Astronomer, and earlier was a visiting scientist at the Danish Space Research Institute. He has mentored 22 PhD students in high energy astrophysics projects ranging from supernova remnants and neutron stars to the cosmic X-ray background and various areas of radio astronomy. He was a principal in two large radio surveys using the VLA, the FIRST survey of the 10,000-square-degree Sloan Digital Sky Survey footprint, and the MAGPIS survey of the Galactic plane that complements the Spitzer GLIMPSE IR survey. Most of his pedagogical efforts have been aimed at teaching science to non-science majors; in 2004, Columbia’s 250th year, he finally succeeded in implementing a vision he began working on in 1982 that has all Columbia first-year students taking his science course, Frontiers of Science, as part of the University’s famed Core Curriculum. He received the University’s 2001 Presidential Teaching Award and the 2002 Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates.In 2005, he became involved in the effort to create Canada’s first independent, non-profit university, Quest University Canada. He was a Visiting Tutor in the University’s inaugural semester and served as President & Vice-Chancellor from the Fall of 2008 through 2015. From 2011-2014, Prof. Helfand served as President of the American Astronomical Society and was named a Society Legacy Fellow in 2020. His is currently Chair of the Boards of the American Institute of Physics and of AIP Publishing. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Science Counts, an organization formed to communicate with the public about the importance and impact of publicly funded fundamental research. His first book, entitled “A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age”, provides essential tools any informed citizen must have to combat the tsunami of mis- and dis-information that threatens to drown all rational approaches to personal decision-making and the formation of good public policy.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Ed Conway, author of Material World, about the six physical commodities that represent the plumbing of our global extractive economy.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

________________________

Ed Conway is a writer and broadcaster. He is the Economics and Data Editor of Sky News and a regular columnist for The Times and Sunday Times. He has written two critically acclaimed and bestselling books and has won numerous awards for his journalism. He lives in London.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Lisa M.P. Munoz, author of Women in Science Now, about implicit bias, leaky pipelines, tokenization and other explanations for the persistent gender gap in science.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

________________________

As president of SciComm Services, Inc., Lisa Munoz develops, leads, and executes communication strategies for science groups, including VC funds, sci-tech startups, scientific societies and academic research groups, international organizations, and other institutions. She has more than 20 years of experience translating complex science into digestible stories for broad audiences. Lisa started her career in radio and then print journalism, as a reporter and then managing editor of Geotimes, a geoscience magazine. She is a former Press Officer for the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and former Chief of Staff and Communications Director for the OS Fund. Lisa has an engineering degree from Cornell University with a specialty in science writing. Lisa’s expertise spans cognitive neuroscience and the behavioral sciences, synthetic biology, climate and energy, and the geosciences. She has extensive experience developing, writing, editing, and placing Op-eds and articles in high-profile publications, such as the New York Times, USA Today, Huffington Post, and Scientific American. Lisa has created videos showcasing cutting-edge science, and has developed content for a European royal, a UN secretary general, and others. Lisa was publicist and outreach producer for the independent documentary film Picture a Scientist and has written a book about gender equity in science, to be published by Columbia University Press in October 2023. Lisa lives in the Washington, D.C., area with her husband and two daughters. She loves exploring new places, listening to radio in all forms, and consuming sci-fi/fantasy books and movies.