>> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> sunday night on "after words". nebraska senator bennett sass explores how to encourage adolescents and young adults to become independent active and engaged citizens in his book, the vanishing american adults. our coming-of-age crisis and how to rebuild a culture of self-reliance. he's interviewed by steven founder and president of the millennial action project. >> by and large students that will graduate in the spring and summer from college are going to change jobs three times, not just jobs, industries in the

first decade, postcollege. that's new. all the unsettling, scary stuff that produce progressivism during the industrialization. was about the idea that job disruption created all this unsettling ripples into neighborliness and social networks. a lot of what people panicked about then is actually what we will experience at warp speed forever more. we will have 40-45-50 -year-old disrupted and not out of only out of jobs but out of whole industries. we'll have to create a civilization of lifelong learners and no civilization has ever done that. >> watch "after words" on 9:00 p.m. and is dispensed to his book tv. >> when i first started writing i was 17 years old and i was living in the armpit of france. a part of france that is in no way french or interesting. it was a terrible terrible that

is nowhere france. it didn't even have a. [inaudible] it was something that was decades-old in terms of french commerce. anyway, i started reading there and i had the blanket book and i started writing down the author and title and i underlined it and i looked at them and didn't even write numbers. i didn't keep track. funny, it wasn't until i was criticized by a boyfriend, much later, that i was just writing these things down in order to take things off my list and to show off about how much i had read and then i started putting the numbers and. i went back and i thought i never thought of it that way. but i personally took the criticism in a constructive way

or deconstructive way because the thing about when you do put numbers is that you can then make all kinds of mathematical calculations and back to your point about the amount of reading you get done when you have kids and jobs and that kind of thing and you can see that your annual average declines. so, i remember when i was unemployed or very marginally employed, living in northern thailand after college and i basically had no friends and there was no internet and i didn't have a telephone. i read 76 books that year which, for me, was a lot. it included moby and anna karina. they were in short little box. i think after my third child was born and i was working pretty full-time it was 34. the numbering was a mixed blessing. then i have annotations that i started off writing inc. in

parentheses when i didn't finish something. the first book i didn't finish in the book of books was interview with the vampire which i wanted to like that book, i really really didn't like it. i found it in the bathroom at one of my stepbrothers and hit a bunch of cheap paperbacks and i picked it up. i didn't finish it. that eventually involved into an empty square to signify when i don't finish reading something. i try to finish everything. >> is there a certain threshold like if you start reading and read 75 pages. >> it gets it in there. thirty page doesn't go in. sometimes i pick up a book and it talks about books being mood -based, i recently for the first time asked two of my kids, my older kids, what book i should relax. i had just finished reading a number of separate novels and i felt like i needed they were

humorous and light and i needed something where i felt like there were higher and i wanted to have some kind of real emotional engagement in what i was reading. the two books -- i picked up the box. one was scoop which i never read and always meant to read and i picked up recently in portland oregon at a bookstore. that was not deeply engaging so that didn't make the cut. the other two books i picked up work constellation of vital phenomenon by anthony mara and elliot to paris and i read the back of the cover and asked them to vote. of course, being contrary each one poked the each other one. i've got to be fair to the other child and i picked up the mara and i wasn't going on my own, need at that moment. when i started to read it i realized that it wasn't what i needed at the moment while i

liked it and i'll go back to it i read 15 pages about this is really good but it's not filling that gut need. i put it down and i realize there was a reason that i picked up scoop which was i had wanted to engage with something a little bit relative that it was an escape but also relatively i rented ben bradley's 95 memoir, a good life and other adventures. relevance to me, working at the new york times but also working there a million years ago in technology times back when the newspaper was a word. that's what i ended up reading. >> you can watch this and other programs online @booktv .org. >> sunday on q&a. >> there's a political structure that was crafted in the 1927 radioactive and herbert hoover and those rules, 90 years ago

still governed the way we actually allow resources to be used in our economy today. >> clemson university professor and former chief economist at the sec thomas hazlett talks about his book the political spectrum which looks at the history and politics of the us munication policy. >> when we went to this political system for allocating spectrum lights in 1927, within a couple of years, the regulators at the commission are renewing licenses but very carefully noting that propaganda stations will not be allowed to in fact, early on in 1929 and after you had left wing stations, if i can use that political term, owned by the wc fo in chicago, labor union, socialist had bought a station in new york city, they wanted

for political purposes, free speech, that you might say. they wanted to spout their opinions. these were immediately dubbed propaganda stations by the regulators and when they were renewed they were told to be very careful about expressing their opinions. >> sunday night at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span's q&a. [inaudible conversations] we will get started. welcome. good afternoon, everyone. welcome to the porter wilson national center for scholars and welcome to this national history