Keen On America

“My brothers always think: what would Jesus do? And they do that. I think: what would dad do? And I do the opposite.” — Jamison Firestone   What do you do if your dad was a multimillionaire conman, crack addict, and owner of New York’s most expensive brothel? If you’re Jamison Firestone , you transform yourself into his antithesis. You go to law school. You go to post-Soviet Russia and establish t...

“His descent is in a sense our descent.” — Peter Wehner on Trump at 80   Donald Trump turned 80 two weeks ago. But Peter Wehner ’s timely Atlantic piece , “The Apotheosis of Donald Trump,” isn’t much of a birthday present. Wehner even suggests that for all Trump’s madness, mayhem and malevolence, the orange octogenarian eludes Shakespearean tragedy. So no historic hall of infamy for Donald. He’s t...

“The frontier AI companies invited the government into the room. Now the government is beginning to behave as if it owns the door, the guest list, the schedule, and the product roadmap.” — Keith Teare   Last week, I was away in Europe. So Keith Teare ran our That Was The Week show solo — with a chillingly authentic Andrew Keen bot. So realistic, in fact, that the fake version sounds (to me, at lea...

“You cannot expect a society to open its doors if there is no way to close them. You cannot expect a society to open its gates if there is no gate to open.” — Justin Gest   It’s a counterintuitive and deliberately provocative argument. Rather than bolstering open societies, migration actually benefits authoritarianism. And it’s the argument that Justin Gest makes in his new book, Democratic Drain:...

“Narrative remains a pretty unbeatable delivery device for information.” — Patrick Radden Keefe   Has London really fallen? That’s the question Patrick Radden Keefe — staff writer at The New Yorker and bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing — addressed in his new book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth .   One thing for sure is that K...

“The United States and America are not the same thing. The United States is a government, an administration. America is an idea — and that idea is still there, even when the government is not.” — Konstanty Gebert   What is the best thing about America? At least when viewed from Warsaw. For Konstanty Gebert — Polish-Jewish journalist, Solidarity activist, co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza , and one of...

“People in my generation worshipped the United States during communism. Everybody wanted to flee to the US. It was the land of the dream. And now we confront a different type of country, different type of politics — and we don’t dream of the US anymore.” — Bartosz Wieliński   I’m just back from Warsaw where I spent an afternoon at the offices of Gazeta Wyborcza , Poland’s liberal newspaper of reco...

“If your opening position is: your views are beyond the pale, you are deplorable, there is no space for you in democracy — then how on earth do we expect anything other than revolutionary conservatism as a response?” — Maciej Kisilowski   For Americans concerned about the fragility of their democracy, Poland offers some reassuring news. Having experienced its own illiberal blip, democracy in Polan...

“The Gross National Product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” — Robert F. Kennedy, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968   It is June 5, 1968. An eleven-year-old English boy is watching the assassination of Bobby Kennedy on his black and white television. That little boy is Tim Jackson — now one of Britain’s most influential critics of capitalism. He had no idea then tha...

“Just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. The agent is the unacknowledged legislator of the literary field.” — Laura McGrath   We think of publishers and editors as the ultimate tastemakers. As those godlike gatekeepers controlling what we read. But if you’re looking for literary gods, Laura McGrath argues, then you need to look at literar...

“AI companies are taking advantage of our natural tendency to ascribe an inner life to our interlocutors. They profit when you think the chatbot cares.” — Kate O’Neill   If we don’t like someone, we call them a fascist. And if we like them, we say they are a humanist. The F and H words. Both meaningless in our sloppy, bot-infested age. But maybe I’m just a cranky anti-humanist. Even anti-human — w...

“I considered it elder abuse. She put him through the paces, not only before the debate, but after. She should have gotten him out of there immediately.” — Sally Quinn on Jill Biden and the debate   Today’s guest is amongst America’s most verbal octogenarians. No, not you-know-who. Sally Quinn is the illustrious Washington DC hostess, writer and commentator. The almost 85-year-old does improv come...

“Age is the modality in which class is lived in America today.” — Samuel Moyn   Yesterday we had 91-year-old Mordecai Kurz on the show. Tomorrow, it will be 84-year-old Sally Quinn. But today’s guest, the Yale legal historian Samuel Moyn , has a bit of a problem with old people. His new book, Gerontocracy in America , argues that the old folks are hoarding power and wealth in America. For Moyn, Dy...

“Between 1980 and 2019, the billionaires gained $25 trillion. By today it’s probably $35 trillion. The question is who will pay for reform? You go where the money is.” — Mordecai Kurz   Keynes observed that in the long run, we are all dead. The nonagenarian Stanford economist Mordecai Kurz agrees. Which is why he has no patience for the tech utopians’ promise of abundance for all of us in the long...

“Second wave feminism taught women that femininity was weak, masculinity was toxic, marriage was oppressive, the home was a prison, and children are a burden.” — Delano Squires   Sixty years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published The Negro Family: The Case for National Action , which was immediately attacked by the left as victim-blaming and by the right as an admission of state responsibility. In...

“As early as 1805, you had orators getting up there — barely twenty years after American independence was recognised by Great Britain — saying: the Republic is over. We’ve had it. So there is a tradition of calling it the end times.” — Nathan Perl-Rosenthal   It’s less than three weeks until America’s big birthday bash. But what exactly will be celebrated this 250th Independence Day? In The Long R...

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” Oscar Wilde wrote in his 1892 play Lady Windermere’s Fan . This week, Elon Musk managed — not for the first time — to be simultaneously in the stars and the gutter. SpaceX’s IPO valued his rocket company at $2 trillion — making Musk, officially, a trillionaire, the richest person in the world by a very large margin. The space Mus...

“Power trumps money fundamentally. And I think we’ve seen the extent to which these companies are very subservient to the US government. Because the US government can break them in an instant.” — Jack Watling on whether Anthropic and OpenAI can become geopolitical players   In Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men , an ageing Texas sheriff finds himself outmatched by a killer operati...

“That’s not the America that I believed in and that I chose to merge my fate with.” — David Frum on Trump’s predatory foreign policy   What does it mean to be an American? It’s a slippery question — especially for those of us born outside the United States. Take, for example, David Frum , the Toronto-born writer and Presidential speechwriter who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil” in 2002. Back then,...

“The same creative and political forces that gave rise to [San Francisco’s] boom nearly engineered its collapse.” — Jonathan Weber   In Hitchcock’s Vertigo , the quintessential San Francisco movie, the villain points to an old painting of the city and tells Jimmy Stewart that San Francisco has changed. The real city has been lost, he says. Somebody has stolen San Francisco’s soul.   The veteran te...

“I never knew, and I was a bright kid. I didn’t know who the mayor of New York was, but I could tell you the names of all the mafia guys on the corner.” — Vincent Coppola   So we finally found a Coppola for the show. No, not Francis Ford. But somebody just as cool and even more authentic. The longtime Newsweek reporter Vincent Coppola grew up in Brooklyn three subway stops from Manhattan, but neve...

“The hyperreal is the real. The surreal is the real in The United States. We’ve reached that point. The absurd is the real. And so that’s what I was trying to capture in the book.” — Ben Fountain   Our absurdist-in-chief wants a $250 banknote with his face on it. But the satirist Ben Fountain gives the President something even more valuable. In his new novel Rasputin Swims the Potomac , Fountain d...

“The United States has conducted an unusually ideological foreign policy, an unusually economic foreign policy, and an unusually democratic foreign policy. These three features have been present from the eighteenth century to the present.” — Michael Mandelbaum   Is there an “American way” of foreign policy? Does that make the now almost 250 year-old republic unique? Michael Mandelbaum , author of...

“Objects in museums have to come from somewhere. The stories of how they came to be in those collections often involve laws being broken, unethical behaviour, and extreme violence.” — Matthew Campbell   Imagine a gay Jeffrey Epstein who set up shop in Thailand. Only rather than peddling young girls, he traded in bodybuilders and priceless antiquities. That’s the story of the British émigré Douglas...

“AI represents successful capitalism. What we have alongside that is unsuccessful government. Government has no plan — left or right.” — Keith Teare   It’s the 82nd anniversary of D-Day. On June 6, 1944, there was an unambiguous end game — the defeat of Nazi Germany. But today, end games are more controversial, especially in terms of harnessing the AI revolution to benefit everyone.   For Keith Te...