It's the Brian Lairn on WNYC.

Good morning, everyone, in our spring membership drive, trying to reach our goal of 10,000 donors by the end of the drive on Thursday.

Two more days.

Thank you for being one if you can.

We're going to do something different now.

You know how we like to talk about history on the show and relate it to the present?

Well, we have a special guest who will take us on a 500-year ride through major social changes, he calls them

revolutions, that have led us to the America of today. This will begin in the Netherlands,

in the 1600s, believe it or not, and it will end with our social media habits, our relationship

to our identities, even the possible end to the left versus right model that

has so defined our politics and how we think about our politics for generations.

Who can lead a 500-year history tour in one book and try to convey the arc of all that

social change in one radio segment?

It's Farid Zakaria, the Washington Post Foreign Affairs

columnist and host of GPS, the Sunday Global Affairs Show on CNN. His new book is called

Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. We'll do this in two parts

to follow the framing of the book,

three revolutions from the past that helped set up today's world, and then four

revolutions that Farid sees us in in the middle of today, each one in brief, obviously,

to make it work on a radio show timeline. Let's see if we can do it.

Farid, always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

It's a pleasure to be with you, Brian. I'm sorry I got a little delayed for a second or for a

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