CUNY Graduate Center

In philosophy on the other end, they are likely to laugh at you and say, what the heck are you talking about? That I think is the problem.

And it's a problem that fortunately, I think is getting better because the new generation of philosophers, the young people that I teach at the Graduate Center here at City University in New York, which is who are doing their master's and PhD in philosophy, they are actually much more open to the possibility that philosophy is also a practical thing, not only a practical thing, but also a practical thing.

A lot of them have their own podcasts and blogs and, you know, they publish on Substack and stuff like that, which is all very good to see because until recently, all of that stuff was frowned upon.

You know, if you were wasting your time, if you were addressing the general public, because that's all time that it's taken away from your dissertation, from publishing technical works and stuff like that.

She also wrote for the 69th Emmy Awards.

She holds an MA in theater history and criticism from Brooklyn College and a third of a PhD, so just the P, in theater from CUNY Graduate Center.

She's also an alum of the NBC Late Night Writers Workshop, Baldwin Wallace University, and a co-founder of CT Improv in Hartford, Connecticut, and a proud returned Peace Corps volunteer.

Kate, welcome to the show.

Maybe I'll go back someday.

But yeah.

I was pursuing a PhD, uh, at CUNY graduate center.

Uh, and you know, I would, I would go to school during the day.

How long have you been working on this project?

Well, I've been working in this project for seven years, exactly since 2012, when I moved to Berlin to start my PhD and finished here last year in New York at the Graduate Center.

It has a postdoctoral at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center.

But it's also like seven years.

What is a militant, interdisciplinary militant historian, Sonia? What is that?

Um, and, uh, I have been there for, I don't know, since 2019, however long that is.

Um, Before that, I went to grad school at the CUNY Graduate Center, which is in New York City.

And I got my PhD there in sociology.

And that's actually where the book project started, was way back in grad school.

Kai is an acclaimed biographer and journalist who, with Martin J. Sherwin, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which was the inspiration for Christopher Nolan's Academy Award winning Best Picture, Oppenheimer.

He is the executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at City University of New York's Graduate Center in New York City.

And his new book, co-authored with his wife, Susan Goldmark, is American Scoundrel, Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump.

Then finally we'll speak with Eric Schlosser, who has written for The Atlantic since 1994, and he has received a National Magazine Award and a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for reporting.

He's shared a Pulitzer Prize for biography.

with American Prometheus, The Triumphant Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which was the inspiration for Christopher Nolan's Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Oppenheimer.

He's executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York's Graduate Center in New York City, and his works included critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, Nuclear Weapons and the Cold War, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and the CIA.

His new book, co-authored with his wife Susan Goldmark, is American Scoundrel, Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump.