Today Jen’s guest is her long-time friend and Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist David L. Marcus. They talk about Dave’s latest book Acceptance: A Legendary Guidance Counselor Helps Seven Kids Find the Right Colleges –– and Find Themselves. Dave also happens to be the cousin of Roy Cohn the disgraced and disbarred attorney who represented the late Senator Joe “Have you No Sense of Decency” McCarthy and more recently Fred and Donald Trump. Dave wears many hats. He’s a writing coach, career counsel...
Jun 11, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 29
Jen’s guest is David de Jong, the author of a mindblowing new narrative nonfiction book called Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties . Before he began researching for this book, David covered banking, finance, and hidden wealth for Bloomberg News. This book puts the lie to the often-heard claims by descendants and apologists for the industrialists who collaborated for profit with Hilter. You’ve heard them too. That these business leaders did not know what was goin...
Jun 04, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 28
This week for the book club, we have poet Maggie Smith talking about her tell-most own new bestselling memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful. You know Maggie from a poem she wrote in an Ohio coffee shop in 2015. That poem “Good Bones” was so deeply true and beautiful that readers passed it around. And it went viral a year or two later. Poems don’t go viral, but this one did, so much so that the unimaginable happened. First. In April of 2017, Meryl Streep read that poem, “Good Bones” at a Li...
May 28, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 27
This week Jen’s guest is Professor Steve Vladeck, author of the sensational new book: The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic . The Shadow Docket is a must-read book, not just for court-watchers and garden-variety nerds, but also for anyone and everyone who wants to sound smarter on Twitter. Okay, maybe that’s a low bar. But, you get the drift. Don’t just trust me. Publisher’s Weekly said “This insightful and accessible account rais...
May 21, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 26
This week, Jen’s guest is Ben Smith, author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral . This hot new book takes a close look at the people and the patterns behind the click-bait-journalism-world that helped inflate Donald Trump but also gave us a renewed faith in humanity with an endless supply of baby-animal rescue videos. You know Ben from his role as the founding editor-in-chief for BuzzFeed News where he released the Steele Dossier to the world. Today, ...
May 14, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 25
This week, Jen’s guest on Booked Up is Anastasia Curwood. They discuss her insightful new biography Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics . As you likely know, in 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress and in 1972, the first Black major party presidential candidate. Anastasia Curwood is a beloved and brilliant professor at University of Kentucky and Interim Chair of the History Department. She also serves as director of the Commonwealth Inst...
May 07, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 24
Booked Up with Jen Taub has a special episode for April’s book club. The topic is your book.” You’re the author, it’s you. Today we are talking about how books get proposed, sold, written, edited, published and promoted. It’s kind of like back in 2006 when TIME magazine announced their person of the year. On the cover of that issue of TIME was a drawing of a large desktop computer. In the center of the monitor was a reflective surface that functioned as a mirror. If you picked up the magazine in...
Apr 30, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 23
In his written work and public persona, Wajahat Ali is known for his quick wit. Humor seems to come naturally to him, and yet, he has turned his gift into a craft deployed deliberately. In Go Back to Where You Came From , he notes, “Humor, both sublime and silly, sophmoric and sophisticated, unleashed with purpose, can often help communicate very real, hard truths about American society.” At times this book is laugh-out-loud funny. Consider Waj’s comment about his mother after she told him that ...
Apr 23, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 22
Jen speaks with Professor Carissa Byrne Hessick about her remarkable book, Punishment without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining is a Bad Deal . Her book goes beyond just showing why plea bargaining is a bad deal. She also shines a light on several other types of punishments without trial. These are pre-trial detention, civil forfeiture, and assorted fees from pre-trial, booking and diversion programs. Punishment without Trial shares the stories of heroes trying to address the inequities in the system a...
Apr 16, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 21
This week, Jen’s guest is her good friend Elie Honig. Elie is a former prosecutor and currently a Senior Legal Analyst at CNN. At the Southern District of New York Elie prosecuted federal cases involving organized crime, human trafficking, public corruption, and violent crime. Among his successes were prosecutions of 100 members and associates of La Cosa Nostra, including Bosses and other high-ranking members of the Gambino and Genovese Organized Crime Families. But this program is called Booked...
Apr 09, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 20
This week, Jen’s guest is Leta McCollough Seletzky. Leta is a former litigator who left the law to become a literary sensation. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. If you don’t already know her name, you will soon. Leta is the author of a beautiful new memoir that will be published this coming Tuesday, April 4th. It’s called The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Get comfortable, because when you s...
Apr 02, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 19
This family has more money than God. Why in the world can’t they get some therapy? A Grandmother who never hugs her grandchildren? A father who does not hug his son after telling him his mother was killed? No, our book is not a soap opera, it’s SPARE by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex is our Booked Up book club selection this month. Jen’s three special guests in alphabetical order are Christopher Bouzy, Linda Charnes, and Melissa Murray. You know Christopher from his big splash of a social media si...
Mar 26, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 18
Heather McGhee joins Jen this week to talk about the newly released, young reader edition of her best-selling book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together . Heather’s book helps show how racism affects and harms all of us and how we need to face it head-on, together. An expert in economic and social policy. Heather is also the former president of the inequality-focused think tank Demos and now chairs the board of Color of Change, the nation’s largest online raci...
Mar 19, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 17
This week, my guest Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert in authoritarianism, democracy protection, and propaganda and author of the bestelling book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. Ruth is both a professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. Outside of the classroom, Ruth frequently appears on cable news to discuss the frightening similarities between early fascism in Europe and current movements here in the United States within the Republican party and abroad. On today’s...
Mar 12, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 16
You may think that Mary Trump needs no introduction, because you believe you know who she is in relation to a certain distasteful someone who shares her surname. Or you have read her first bestselling book: Too much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man . Or her equally stellar second, The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal . But what an author produces or shares with the public, as well as the degrees they collect (in Mary’s case a BA and M...
Mar 05, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 15
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” To help honor Black History Month at Booked Up, for our February book club we are discussing the letter Martin Luther King Jr. composed in April of 1963 from his jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama. Joining me are two regulars and two special guests. We have book club regulars, conservative attorney ...
Feb 26, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 14
This week best-selling author Steve Phillips opens up about the very recent loss of his remarkable wife Susan Sandler and their shared goals on how to move America toward a multi-racial democracy. In the dedication to her of his new book, How We Win the Civil War , Steve writes, “The reality of cancer forces one to a more spirtual place of contemplating life, meaning, and legacy. That reflection has fueled my work on this book to try to make it a lasting legacy for both of us.” Steve notes that ...
Feb 19, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 13
This week Jen speaks with David Enrich about his nationwide bestseller, Servants of the Damned, praised by David Cay Johnston in the Washington Post as “A powerful and important picture of how mega law firms distort justice." While other large corporate law firms appear in Servants of the Damned , David explains why he made one firm in particular the centerpiece. He views Jones Day as one of the chief enablers of the most corrupt actors over recent decades. Clients include Big Tobacco whom the f...
Feb 12, 2023•58 min•Ep. 12
This week, Jen’s guest is the award-winning journalist Lisa Gurrero, on to talk about her new book Warrior: My Path to Being Brave . Lisa is a pioneer in the field of sportsbroadcasting enduring verbal abuse and sexual harrassment. She began her sports career in the 1980s as an NFL cheerleader, then directed entertainment including the cheerleading squads for the Atlanta Falcons and New England Patriots. At the Patriots, the boss’s son told her to remove all of the “Black music” from the playlis...
Feb 05, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 11
Who knows? One day perhaps we will look back on this episode of Booked Up to find out that Donald Trump has faced a different kind of booking. Or at least an indictment. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Today for our January book club meeting we are following the facts by discussing the content and implications of the Final Report of the Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the US. Capitol.. We have two special guests. Andrew Weissman, lead prosecutor in the Robert Muel...
Jan 29, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 10
Dr. Linda Charnes –– Professor of English, European Studies and Gender Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington where she has taught since 1989–– joined Jen to talk about Hamlet, Talionic Law (aka retributive eye-for-an-eye justice), and America’s revenge fantasies. She is the author of several books about Shakespeare, contemporary politics, and political psychology. Her first book was Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare published in 1993 by Harvard University Press, f...
Jan 22, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 9
Lauren Hough is the author of the New York Times bestseller, LEAVING ISN’T THE HARDEST THING, a collection of essays about growing up in the abusive Children of God cult, coming out in the military, and piecing a life together, as Roxane Gay put it, “on the margins as a working class woman and what it’s like to grow into the person you are might to be.” Jen caught up with Lauren before she headed out on the road with her dog, Woody to research her next book MONSTER OF A LAND. Though she pressed,...
Jan 15, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 8
Nearly a year into Russia’s Febuary 2022 invasion of Ukraine, journalist and author Luke Harding reflects on the people he met in the war zone while researching for his new book INVASION: THE INSIDE STORY OF RUSSIA’S BLOODY WAR AND UKRAINE’S FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL. Some of these brave sources are survivors of the Bucha massacre, who shared with him the trauma of losing loved ones and direct experiences of the violent atrocities. Others include a once optimistic contact from Mariupol who turned despe...
Jan 08, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 7
A.M Homes is an award-winning nonfiction author, novelist, short-storry writer, playwright, and librettist. This is the first time she and Jen speak together, having been introduced virtually by a mutual friend. In this conversation, AMH lives her axiom that, “People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but no one wants to give attention.” In fact, she even commandeers the interview for a bit, getting Jen to talk about her past and future own writing projects. A love of history p...
Jan 01, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 6
We kvetched, we laughed, we cried. Never-Trumper George Conway and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll puzzled over Jen’s selection for this month’s book, but were quickly won over by THE LIGHT WE CARRY after just a few pages. In fact, George now plans to read BECOMING. Ivan Lett encouraged us all to share the light we carry and appreciated the message about being yourself. In the words of First Lady Michelle Obama, “We only hurt ourselves when we hide our realness away." Lisa Birnbach helped us se...
Dec 25, 2022•55 min•Ep. 5
Journalist and author of several books including indentured and All the Devils are Here, Joe Nocera talks with Jen about the crooked psychiatrist Isaac (“Ike”) Herschkopf and his guileless patients behind the Wondery Podcast he created with Bloomberg called “The Shrink Next Door.” They recorded the conversation a few days before the arrest and indictment of Sam Bankman-Fried (“SBF”), majority owner and leader of FTX, the collapse crypto trading platform. Joe also revealed details about the new b...
Dec 18, 2022•56 min•Ep. 4
Michael Cohen was the personal lawyer and fixer for Donald J. Trump for more than a decade. He is now a top-selling author and host of the popular Mea Culpa podcast which, as of our Booked Up interview, had 65 million downloads. His new book, REVENGE, a New York Times bestseller, published in October 2022, reveals the high price Cohen paid for telling the truth about Trump. In early 2019, Cohen testified under oath before a Congessional Committee, describing in detail the corrupt manner in which...
Dec 11, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 3
Dahlia Lithwick –– senior editor at Slate and author of the instant New York Times bestseller, LADY JUSTICE –– joined Jen for the inaugural episode of Booked Up. Fresh off her book tour, Dahlia shared her writing secrets, tough love for the Supreme Court, and how she met (and almost scared away) her future husband. Dahlia is the host of Amicus, Slate’s award-winning biweekly podcast about the law and the Supreme Court. She is a praise and prize magnet. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg avidly read Dah...
Dec 04, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 2
Jen’s guests include writers of current bestsellers and beloved backlist books. Conversations cover love, money, politics, early dreams, writing habits, reading tastes, procrastination techniques, self-doubt, and news of the day. Creator and host, Jen Taub is a law professor, advocate, and author. Her nonfiction books include BIG DIRTY MONEY (Viking 2020) and OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES (Yale Press 2014). She focuses on “follow the money” matters— promoting transparency and opposing corruption. Jen’s ...
Oct 27, 2022•6 min•Ep. 1
