Booked Up with Jen Taub Politicon

Today Jen’s guest is Orly Lobel, author of the recent book THE EQUALITY MACHINE: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future. Orly just sold the film rights to her book on Barbie to CBS Studios. The book is called YOU DON’T OWN ME: How Mattel v. MGA Entertainment Exposed Barbie's Dark Side. The book and the CBS production will follow the parallel journeys of Barbie inventor Ruth Handler and Bratz creator Carter Bryant.

“Inspiration exists; it must find you working.” Picasso. You can find this gem and other fascinating details in Orly Lobel’s new book, THE EQUALITY MACHINE. She’s got it covered from virtual reality to sex robots.

If you don’t know Orly, you should. Beyond being an award-winning author she is the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego. Professor Lobel  is the Director of the Program of Employment and Labor Law as well as the founding faculty of the Center for Intellectual Property and Markets. In addition to the Equality Machine and You Don’t Own Me, Orly also authored Talent Wants to Be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding. Orly’s work has been covered in The Economist, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, Globe and Mail, NPR’s “Marketplace,” CNBC, and CNN Money.


Contact Booked Up:
You can email Jen & the Booked Up team at: BOOKEDUP@POLITICON.COM or by writing to: 

BOOKED UP 
P.O. BOX 147
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061



Get More from Orly Lobel
Twitter | Website | Author of THE EQUALITY MACHINE and YOU DON’T OWN ME


More from Jen Taub:
Twitter | Money & Gossip  Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY 

For our special book club episode today, we are discussing the new bestselling memoir – THE WOMAN IN ME by pop icon Britney Spears. As you know, Britney is a multiplatinum, Grammy-Award winning entertainer. She has sold an incredible 100 million records worldwide. She released her new book THE WOMAN IN ME around two years after she got free from the abusive and legally questionable 13 year long conservatorship during which her father and his team controlled her every move, every morsel, and every dollar, paying themselves handsomely, and more than she earned off the product that this one-time child star had become.

Joining Jen to discuss this book are two legends in their own fields. 

Lisa Birnbach my long time idol, new time dear friend. Lisa is an award-winning journalist, cultural commentator and bestselling author. She also served as a witness at the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault trial against Donald Trump. If you are Gen X, you know Lisa from her runaway New York Times bestsellers: The Official Preppy Handbook and True Prep. Lis has published 20 other books, which have been translated into a dozen languages. I did not know The Preppy Handbook was a satire. It was my guide to life as a teenager.

Victoria Haneman is my brilliant legal academy colleague. She has a very fancy title: the Frank J. Kellegher Professor of Trusts & Estates at Creighton University School of Law. Victoria is the real nerdy deal.  She has authored four books related to estate planning and taxation, and also published more than twenty other works including among them law review articles, essays, and peer-reviewed book chapters. Victoria is a sought after expert, appearing on television, radio, and in print. 




Contact Booked Up:
You can email Jen & the Booked Up team at: BOOKEDUP@POLITICON.COM or by writing to: 

BOOKED UP 
P.O. BOX 147
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061



Get More from Victoria Haneman
Twitter | Website | Author of MAKING TAX LAW

Get More from Lisa Birnbach
Twitter | Website | Author of THE OFFICIAL PREPPY HANDBOOK and TRUE PREP


More from Jen Taub:
Twitter | Money & Gossip  Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY 

Today Jen’s guest is Taylor Lorenz, author of the new book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. Together they discussed many topics including the controversy around mommy bloggers and the credit due to Julia Allison and other women social media pioneers.

Taylor Lorenz is the sometimes controvesial, never boring  technology columnist for the business section of the Washington Post, covering online culture and the content creator industry. She was previously a reporter for the New York Times and has written for numerous other publications including New York magazine and Rolling Stone. Taylor frequently appears on NBC, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and the BBC. She was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. 

In 2020, Taylor helped adapt a feature she wrote for the New York Times into the documentary Who Gets To Be An Influencer?, which ran on FX and Hulu. 

The New York Times said Extremely Online “aims to tell a sociological story, not a psychological one, and in its breadth it demonstrates a new cultural logic emerging out of 21st-century media chaos.”  The Washington Post said Taylor is  “Infectious in celebrating the tsunami of creative youth culture ... Lorenz gives us a clear and compelling history of how the money came to flow into amateur-made short video content.


Contact Booked Up:
You can email Jen & the Booked Up team at: BOOKEDUP@POLITICON.COM or by writing to: 

BOOKED UP 
P.O. BOX 147
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061



Get More from Taylor Lorenz
Website | Author of EXTREMELY ONLINE

More from Jen Taub:
Money & Gossip  Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY 

Today Jen’s guest is journalist, filmmaker, author, and activist Andrea Chalupa. You know Andrea from her award-winning podcast Gaslit Nation that she founded with Sarah Kendzior. Fake populism. Demonizing the press. Scapegoating. Propaganda. Personal militia. All ingredients for a successful dictatorship and topics of their conversation.

Andrea and Sarah collaborated on the book we are discussing today called DICTATORSHIP: IT’S EASIER THAN YOU THINK. They describe DICTATORSHIP  as “a wild ride showing the perks and pitfalls of becoming a dictator, and how to overthrow one.”

Part of the book focuses on Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s genocidal famine in Ukraine in 1933. Andrea is also the writer and producer of the award-winning journalistic thriller that was produced by MGM called Mr. Jones that came out in 2019. Mr. Jones was directed by three-time Academy Award-nominee Agnieszka Holland (known for her work on Europa Europa; The Secret Garden; House of Cards; The Wire) and starring James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, and Peter Sarsgaard.

Contact Booked Up:
You can email Jen & the Booked Up team at: BOOKEDUP@POLITICON.COM or by writing to: 

BOOKED UP 
P.O. BOX 147
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061

Get More from Jen Taub:
Twitter| Money & Gossip  Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY 

Film star Illeana Douglas is Jen’s guest today. Ileana is the author of the gorgeous new book: Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia. This spans around 100 years from the silent film era up through the early 21st Century. This beautiful coffee table book is filled with delicious never-before-seen movie stills and back lot stories.

Illeana  has starred in too many films to mention. You know her from the movies including Cape Fear, Ghost of My Heart, Good Fellas, and To Die For, plus the many television shows like Entourage, Seinfeld, and Six Feet Under. Her first book, I Blame Dennis Hopper: And Other Stories from a Life Lived In and Out of the Movies was named Best Pop Culture book of the year in 2015 by Entertainment Weekly.

With Connecticut in the Movies, readers revisit classic films and are introduced to deep cuts. Illeana also places more contemporary films in context. My favorite chapter is Dark Suburbia Redux which focuses on more contemporary films like The Ice Storm 1997, directed by Ang Lee and starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver.  

I love it, but so do so many others. Here’s what Pulitizer-Prize winning investigative journalist Ronan Farrow had to say: “In Connecticut in the Movies, Illeana Douglas puts on her historian’s hat and takes readers on a compelling tour of her adopted state’s surprising, colorful, and sometimes dark history in cinema. Her adoration of the state, and the movies, leaps off of these pages—and it’s infectious.”



Contact Booked Up:
You can email Jen & the Booked Up team at: BOOKEDUP@POLITICON.COM or by writing to: 

BOOKED UP 
P.O. BOX 147
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061



Get More from Jen Taub:
Twitter| Money & Gossip  Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY 

Get More from Iliana Douglas:
Twitter| Website  | Author of CONNECTICUT IN THE MOVIES

Today for the October book club, Jen Taub’s friends, authors Jennifer Rubin and Brian Karem discuss Cassidy Hutchinson’s new best-selling memoir, ENOUGH. 

Is Cassidy Hutchinson a heroic champion of the truth or just another Trump Administration insider who could have spoken sooner when it really mattered? Does the story she tells in ENOUGH make readers more empathic or more resentful? These questions and more are the focus of Jen’s conversation today with Jen and Brian.

Unless you have been living under a rock (which actually sounds kind of pleasant given the current overwhelm), you know Cassidy Hutchinson is a former special assistant to President Donald Trump and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Cassidy became a public figure when she appeared as a key witness in June of 2022 before the House Select Comittee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol. The world watched her testify under oath that Donald Trump knew his supporters were armed and angry and that he physically assaulted  his own driver in a failed attempt to force him to drive from the eclipse to the Capitol where the violent mob would gather. 

Cassidy’s bombshell testimony last June took place during the “before times,” meaning this was just before the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in August, before a special counsel was appointed in November to investigate her former boss for the national security document hoarding and for the insurrection. This was before Trump was indicted by a New York grand jury in Manhattan, a federal grand jury in Flordia, a federal grand jury in Washington D.C. and a Georgia grand jury in Fulton County. 

With ENOUGH, we learn so much more from Cassidy about her painful family history and the adults around her who supported her so that she could find the strength to tell the truth and stand up to one of the world's biggest bullies.

Guest Jennifer Rubin writes a column for The Washington Post where she covers politics and policy, foreign and domestic, and provides insight into the conservative movement, the Republican and Democratic parties, and threats to Western democracies. Prior to her career in journalism, Jen Rubin practiced labor law for two decades, an experience that informs and enriches her work. She is the author of “Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump” and is host of the podcast Jen Rubin's "Green Room."

And Brian Karem is an award-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated reporter and author of seven books including Free the Press: The Death of American Journalism and How to Revive It. Brian is a veteran White House correspondent and former senior correspondent for Playboy Magazine. He currently writes a weekly column on the White House for Salon.com.  He is also a frequent guest on numerous radio shows throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe. ​Brian also hosts the  podcast, “Just Ask the Question.”


Contact Booked Up:
You can email Jen & the Booked Up team at: BOOKEDUP@POLITICON.COM or by writing to: 

BOOKED UP 
P.O. BOX 147
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061



Get More from Jen Taub:
Twitter| Money & Gossip  Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY