The Raffel Ticket: Betting on America

Drawing on the past, outraged by the present and still believing in America’s future, Keith Raffel examines the nation’s challenges with clarity, wit and vision. These sharp, eloquent essays don’t just inform—they provoke and entertain. With insights collected from teaching tech ethics at Harvard, founding a Silicon Valley startup, watching over the CIA, studying history, writing bestselling thrillers and raising a family, Raffel offers his own distinctive views on what’s going on in this country and world of ours. He’ll broaden your horizons, challenge your assumptions and keep you turning the pages.

As senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Keith Raffel worked to monitor the activities of the CIA, NSA and other three-letter agencies. Keith left the Intelligence Committee to return home to California and run for Congress. Although losing that race is still a painful memory, he counts himself lucky for escaping the morass of congressional politics when he did.

With an engineer father and hometown of Palo Alto, Keith then followed the path Fate had laid out and embarked on a tech career. He founded and then sold Silicon Valley’s first cloud-computing company. For the past eight years, he’s been a lecturer and resident scholar at Harvard. While there, he developed and co-taught a course on technology, ethics and society.

Keith writes a weekly column for Creators Syndicate that appears in newspapers and on websites across the country. In addition, he has established a career as a bestselling novelist. The New York Times deemed his first work of fiction, Dot Dead, “worthy of a Steve Jobs keynote presentation.” All told, he has five published novels: two Silicon Valley mysteries, an archeological thriller, a spy story and a historical thriller.

A long-time denizen of Palo Alto in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, Keith now spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard where he lives in an apartment in the same 400-student dorm as he did when an undergraduate himself.

“Keith Raffel is a writer of wide range and deep insights whose topics resonate with the authority of his diverse life experiences and strong, uncompromising voice. His engaging, thought-provoking commentary has become a critical component in the Daily Herald's diverse lineup of syndicated columnists.”
Jim Slusher
Managing Editor, Daily Herald (Suburban Chicago)

“Stop. Read. Think. How fortunate we are to have Keith Raffel to provide context, both historical and political, on the vital issues of the day. His thoughts spur us to formulate our own opinions, a much-needed effort in the fraught world that we live in.”
Judy Perry Martinez
President of the American Bar Association 2019-20

"This collection of Keith Raffel’s columns is a must-read and will be something you can go back to often for insight and reflection. His achievements aside, his writing is very accessible and reflects a palpable curiosity along with humor, candor, love of country and effective translation of complex current events through unpretentious observation, historical parallels, anecdotes and salient quotations from diverse sources including philosophers, historians and the Marx Brothers movie "Duck Soup." Even in the rare instance where one may not agree fully or always with his interesting take on things, his thoughts will stay with you, inform you and may change your mind! Do yourself a favor, read this and follow the work of Mr. Raffel. It is a jewel and packs the punch of art and truth."
Ty Cobb
Prominent Washington, D.C., lawyer and former White House Special Counsel