Jen’s guest today is Ben McKenzie, author of the new book EASY MONEY: CRYPTOCURRENCY, CASINO CAPITALISM, AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF FRAUD. In this incredibly fast-paced, relatable book, Ben, joined by journalist Jacob Silverman,  takes us on a journey into the dark side of crypto. You don’t need any kind of expertise to follow along.  Plus, even if you’ve been around the bitcoin block before, you will appreciate the jaw-dropping encounters with the key players including  FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried...

Jen’s guest today is Professor Scott J. Shapiro, author of the new book FANCY BEAR GOES PHISHING. That’s phishing with a PH. But Fancy with an F, as in Fancy Bear, the Russian hack. Subtitled THE DARK HISTORY OF THE INFORMATION AGE, IN FIVE EXTRAORDINARY HACKS. With this book, Scott hopes “that these true-crime stories – some accidental, some not – will engage readers who have little or not prior interest in technology and equip them to read beyond the headlines.” You know Scott from his...

Kathy Griffin is Jen’s guest today. They cover everything from her life on the D-List to her cameo in Pulp Fiction (while she was dating Quentin Tarantino) to how Donald Trump tried to destroy her, to her SOLD OUT show in Vegas at the Mirage. Plus a chills and ugly cry-induscing story about Stevie Nicks. No spoilers. You’ll have to listen. Kathy is “The Gays” favorite two-time-Emmy and Grammy award winning comedian. (Half-way to an EGOT). And, Kathy made the Guiness Book of World Records....

This week Jen’s guest is Adam Benforado, author of the compelling new book A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All.  The Atlantic said A Minor Revolution is “An extremely sympathetic and worthy attempt to protect kids…. [this is] a book that reads like a manifesto. His ideas are bold, to the point, and ambitious.” Salon praised Adam’s work as “Ambitious . . . His unifying argument is anti-inertial. . . . The book blew my mind.”  And friend of the podcast, Heather McGhee...

As featured in The New York Times, Mary Trump and E. Jean Carroll are collaborating with Jen on a serialized romance novel called THE ITALIAN LESSON. Mary is writing the novel, Jen is editing, and E. Jean is advising and responding to readers’ questions. The trio is releasing Mary’s novel in segments on backstoryserial.com (which is on Substack). You can read everything in one place through chapter two by linking: https://www.backstoryserial.com/p/the-italian-lesson. Get a taste of the...

They kvetched, they kvelled, they talked about Hitler. Naturally. What did you expect? This week Jen’s guest is two-time Emmy-Award winning comedian Judy Gold. Judy fit Booked Up into her busy schedule. This spring she finished her one-woman show called, “Yes, I can Say That”, based on her similarly titled book Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble.  The New York Times called Judy’s show “A deliberately uncomfortable, laugh-packed show seeded with...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

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...

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...

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...