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Here novelist James Scott speaks with KGNU's Claudia Cragg about 'The Kept'.

"In the winter of 1897, Elspeth Howell treks across miles of snow and ice to the isolated farmstead in upstate New York where she and her husband have raised their five children. Her midwife's salary is tucked into the toes of her boots, and her pack is full of gifts for her family. But as she crests the final hill, and sees her darkened house and a smokeless chimney, immediately she knows that an unthinkable crime has destroyed the life she so carefully built."

"Her lone comfort is her twelve-year-old son, Caleb, who joins her in mourning the tragedy and planning its reprisal. Their long journey leads them to a rough-hewn lake town, defined by the violence both of its landscape and of its inhabitants. There Caleb is forced into a brutal adulthood, as he slowly discovers truths about his family he never suspected, and Elspeth must confront the terrible urges and unceasing temptations that have haunted her for years. Throughout it all, the love between mother and son serves as the only shield against a merciless world."

"A scorching portrait of guilt and lost innocence, atonement and retribution, resilience and sacrifice, pregnant obsession and primal adolescence, The Kept is told with deep compassion and startling originality, and introduces James Scott as a major new literary voice."

More about James Scott at Grub St. 

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For KGNU's 'It's The Economy', Claudia Cragg speaks here with MIT's Ofer Sharone about latest work. In this, he discussed that today 4.7 million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months. In France more than ten percent of the working population is without work. In Israel it’s above seven percent. And in Greece and Spain, that number approaches thirty percent. Across the developed world, the experience of unemployment has become frighteningly common—and so are the seemingly endless tactics that job seekers employ in their quest for new work.

Flawed System/Flawed Self delves beneath these staggering numbers to explore the world of job searching and unemployment across class and nation. Through in-depth interviews and observations at job-search support organizations, Ofer Sharone reveals how different labor-market institutions give rise to job-search games like Israel’s résumé-based “spec games”—which are focused on presenting one’s skills to fit the job—and the “chemistry games” more common in the United States in which job seekers concentrate on presenting the person behind the résumé. By closely examining the specific day-to-day activities and strategies of searching for a job, Sharone develops a theory of the mechanisms that connect objective social structures and subjective experiences in this challenging environment and shows how these different structures can lead to very different experiences of unemployment.

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with the delightfully husky-voiced Angelica Cheung, editor-in-chief of Vogue China and, before that, editorial director of the Chinese edition of Elle and the editor-in-chief of Marie Claire Hong Kong where she also co-published several other fashion magazines.

Cheung says that in the early days of fashion shoots for Vogue China, Westerners thought only of “'cheongsams, opium beds and 'In the Mood for Love'”, but she had to let them know that was very patronising. She is not interested, she says, in being told what Chinese women should or should not do or wear. Through her work, she is trying she says to create an energy among her readers and while she is not what she terms a 'fashion feminist', she does cares about how her Chinese readers feel about their lives and being happy because “life is short”.

Born in 1966 Cheung recently took part in the International New York Times S.E.A. Of Luxury conference, @INYTLuxury, hosted by Suzy Menkes, designed the organizers say to “bring South East Asia out of the shadows with an agenda that looked at Asia both as as a luxury goods supplier, as well as a powerful consumer base”.

The daughter of a Chinese diplomat, Cheung graduated from Peking University in 1990 where she obtained degrees in law and English language and literature. She subsequently received an MBA degree from University of South Australia and then in 1993 took a position as a writer at 'Eastern Express', an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, She covered all aspects of life there in the run-up to the handover to China in 1997 and then, in 2001, was named editor-in-chief of Marie Claire Hong Kong and, in 2003,editorial director at Elle China in Shanghai. When publisher Conde Nast wanted to launch Vogue in China, the company asked Cheung to take the lead and since 2005 she has been editorial director.

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Speaking to KGNU's Claudia Cragg in person @INYTLuxury held recently in Singapore Livia Firth (yes, Colin IS her husband) says that girls or young women should wear their clothes thoughtfully, each piece at least 30 times, in the name of 'Sustainability'.

Because of her work with the GCC, Livia Firth was awarded in November 2012 the title of UN Leader of Change Award.

Firth is the brains behind the 'Green Carpet Challenge, a fast moving, dynamic project working to unlock “Sustainable Style” in the fashion industry. Since its creation in 2009, she and the GCC have blazed a trail working with A-list designers pioneering sustainability in brands at the world’s most high profile events. From the Golden Globes and Academy Awards to the Met Ball and Cannes Film Festival, the GCC has collaborated with all the iconic design houses in the world winning widespread critical acclaim and international media attention.

Most recently, with Chopard – one of the world’s largest privately owned luxury jewellery and accessory companies – we launched its journey to sustainable luxury by forging a philanthropic relationship with South America’s most influential mining NGO: the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM). 

Previously in September 2012, the GCC created ‘The Green Cut’ – a unique exhibition pairing eight seminal fashion designers with eight iconic films to create a collection of striking gowns. The exhibition, which saw the British Fashion Council (BFC) and the British Film Institute (BFI) worked together for the first time, opened London Fashion Week and was celebrated at the London Film Festival, before being shown in Harrods. Read more here.

In March 2013, the GCC created the GCC Brand Mark and launched with Gucci a new frontier for sustainable style: the world’s first zero deforestation certified handbag collection from Amazon leather. Read more here.

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In this interview with Claudia Cragg for KGNU's 'It's The Economy' @INYTLuxury 2013 the focus is on China, with a review of the Plenum late last year, and the opportunities for US and others. Amidst a barrage of criticism and fiscal negativity directed towards that country, we talk with a native-born woman, US-educated Jing Ulrich, Managing Director and Vice Chairman of J P Morgan. She is in a unique position to discuss what to expect economically from the new leader Xi Jing Ping, from her ringside seat as a significant very high-level financial advisor both to China on the US and also to the US on China. 

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An interview with The International New York Times (formerly International Herald Tribune) Suzy Menkes, @INYTLuxury 2013. She is the woman who has long unearthed every new fashion trend for The International Herald Tribune (now the Intl. N Y Times) believes that not only are the Chinese coming (leaping forward where Japan once did) but that sustainability will be part of their, and all our, fashion futures.

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KGNU "It's The Economy' host, Claudia Cragg, speaks here with Sam Daley-Harris who has been called “one of the certified great social entrepreneurs of the last decades” by Ashoka founder Bill Drayton. Daley-Harris founded RESULTS  in 1980, the Microcredit summit in 1995, the Center for Citizen Empowerment and Transformation in 2012, and mentored the founder of  Citizens Climate Lobby prior to its launch in 2007. For many years now, Sam has committed himself to bridging the gap between citizens and their government.

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Hustlers, strivers, dealers and call girls are the subject of discussion by KGNU's Claudia Cragg (for 'It's The Economy') with Sudhir Venkatesh about his latest book, 'Floating City. The work is a study both of a changing aspect of New York and its economy but also, some say, a changing aspect of the author (a Columubia sociologist) himself.

Here Venkatesh seems to propose that, unlike in other cities, immigrants wanting to make it big in New York – to transcend traditional barriers and improve their lot, licitly or otherwise – need to learn to “float”. The drug-dealer who wants to graduate to selling cocaine to wealthy upper-middle class clients needs to find a way to “float” into that milieu, via contacts, brokers, connections in new worlds. Those who cannot work their way through, past, over these barriers will fail; a would-be high class escort unable to “appreciate good food [or] discuss politics and the opera” with clients will never achieve her aim.

Venkatesh believes too, though, that there are lessons from New York's less orthodox financial world that others in cities around the States and elsewhere would also do well to learn. 

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks her with Alan Blinder about his book, whose title refers to an infamous remark made in July 2007 by Charles O. Prince III, then the chief executive of Citigroup. “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity,” he said, “things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” His book, he explains, relates, the sorry tale of fiscal irresponsibility and chaos as well as the ways the Bush and Obama administrations grappled with the unspooling crises,

Furthermore, Blinder believes that that the disaster was years in the making. Starting in the late 1990s and continuing through 2007, he says that, Americans had “built a fragile house of financial cards” that was just waiting to be toppled and that the the “intricate but precarious construction was based on asset-price bubbles, exaggerated by irresponsible leverage, encouraged by crazy compensation schemes and excessive complexity, and aided and abetted by embarrassingly bad underwriting standards, dismal performances by the statistical rating agencies and lax financial regulation.”

A Princeton professor, in 2009 Blinder was inducted into the American Academy of Political and Social Science, "for his distinguished scholarship on fiscal policy, monetary policy and the distribution of income, and for consistently bringing that knowledge to bear on the public arena." He is a strong proponent of free trade and Blinder also has been critical of the public discussion of the US national debt, describing it as generally ranging from "ludicrous to horrific"

Blinder served as the Deputy Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office (1975), on President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers (January 1993 - June 1994) and as the Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from June 1994 to January 1996. As Vice Chairman, he cautioned against raising interest rates too quickly to slow inflation because of the lags in earlier rises feeding through into the economy. He also warned against ignoring the short term costs in terms of unemployment that inflation-fighting could cause. Many have argued that Blinder's stint at the Fed was cut short because of his tendency to challenge chairman Alan Greenspan