Keen On America

“He didn’t just say it, he meant it, he felt it — and the combination of the power guy, the ruthless power guy, and the profound idealist was fascinating, and also hard for him.” — Evan Thomas on Bobby Kennedy   Who was the greatest riddle in 20th century American political life? Judging from the ever-expanding library of Bobby biographies, Robert Francis Kennedy ranks very high on that list. Inde...

“That kind of put soccer on my radar as a sport. I saw how deeply it meant to people, in a way I didn’t appreciate prior to that. And then I was in London when the World Cup began, and I saw the opening match — Argentina and Cameroon, with Cameroon winning in an upset. Just the whole spectacle of it gave me an appreciation for the game.” — Brian Bunk, on Ireland, Italia ’90, and the moment everyth...

“Get the f*** out of your house and join an organisation. Groups are how we make movements. They’re how we make political and social change. They’re how we transform. Nobody does anything of value alone.” — Yotam Marom   If you’re feeling politically powerless, you’re not alone. Yotam Marom — full-time organiser, facilitator and veteran of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter — has spent his...

“Be optimistic about the boom, but don’t buy the stock.” — Liaquat Ahamed on the AI bubble   Yesterday, Alexander Starritt argued that the 2008 financial crash ruined the lives of his generation. But compared with the great crash of 1873, 2008 looks like a tremor. The Pulitzer Prize-winning economic historian Liaquat Ahamed has a new book out today, 1873 , which presents this 19th century economic...

“To explain the lives of people living in this moment, to look at the historical forces that are shaping all of us, you have to look at business and technology. In our period, what is it that’s shaping us? I would suggest it’s the long fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and the technology revolution that’s been happening in California.” — Alexander Starritt   How to write a novel about our tim...

“When you’re in a world that is careening out of control, where we’ve broken through seven of the nine safe dimensions of safe operating space that scientists have discovered, it’s unrealistic in my view to focus on those little things and think that will lead to a real better outcome. What’s realistic is backcasting.” — Jeremy Lent   There Is An Alternative. That is the central argument of Jeremy...

“I don’t look to companies to be moral guides. I want them to be good companies. When you invest in the stock market, you want them to be growing fast and making profit. That’s it. There’s nothing more to it.” — Keith Teare   If it’s Saturday, it must be our weekly tech show. Before we went live, That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare told me it wasn’t a big news week. He was wrong, of course (as...

“The thirteen colonies that became the United States were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. We need to think about why some colonies rebelled and others did not.” — Sarah Pearsall   Earlier today, the historian Dominic Erdozain came on the show to argue that American patriotism has the same exceptionalist Puritan roots as British imperialism. But not all...

“We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” — Randolph Bourne, via Dominic Erdozain   Should Americans be proud of their country? The Anglo-American historian Dominic Erdozain thinks not. His new book, To Love a Country , argues that there’s a problem with American patriotism. Americans shouldn’t love their country, Erdozain says. It’s not a good place...

  “I deliver it with the credibility of having won a district that Trump carried by 13 points. Not only how to speak to these voters, but how to win them back.” — Joe Cunningham   Yesterday’s guest was Alexandra Natapoff, co-editor of America Unfinished — a collection of essays by illustrious Harvard Law School professors grading the march toward justice in the United States over the last 250 year...

“As long as democracy is a collective endeavour of all the people who belong to it, in some sense it can never be finished — because we are constantly bequeathing to the next generation the opportunity and the freedom to have these conversations over and over again.” — Alexandra Natapoff   It’s less than six weeks until America’s 250th birthday. The official America 250 store is selling T-shirts w...

“I took it for granted that we were trying to make the world a better place. But I think in retrospect that was naïve. What kind of change? For whom? We kind of forgot to specify what the purpose of all this disruption was.” — Eric Ries   In 2011, Eric Ries published The Lean Startup , a book that reflected the optimistic zeitgeist about disruptive Silicon Valley companies. Fifteen years later, in...

“There is a pretty powerful strain in America today in which men feel some need to be violent and domineering to sort of prove their masculinity. And there’s sort of less intense but still prevalent strains that infect many other types of men.” — Jasper Craven   Today is Memorial Day — America’s annual celebration of its warriors and military ethic. But for Jasper Craven , author of God Forgives,...

“We’ve learned how to tolerate acts of violence, acts of widespread death, disease — that other developed nations simply don’t tolerate. And that tolerance manifesting in myriad political failures — all of which go back to our refusal to maturely deal with mortality and issues of grief.” — David Masciotra   Earlier this week, we talked to Ece Temelkuran about her book Nation of Strangers , a manif...

“If you write something you think is really fanciful today, tomorrow’s news headlines might be telling the exact same story. That’s the challenge of writing realism today — when everything feels so sci-fi and so dystopic.” — Fred Lunzer   Boy meets girl meets AI therapist. That is the premise of Sike , the debut novel by Fred Lunzer . Adrian is a rap ghostwriter who has never met any of the rapper...

“Vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression — not as the product of scientific misinformation. These debates have been proxies for existential concerns about justice and morality.” — Kira Ganga Kieffer   Are anti-vaxxers simply bizarre anti-science crazies egged on by conspiracists like RFK Jr? For Kira Ganga Kieffer , author of Unvaccinated Under God , what she cal...

“The rules-based system just hasn’t worked. China’s system is so opaque that you can’t see the subsidies. And when you’ve got China not interested in new rules and the US not interested in a referee, you’ve got two of the world’s biggest actors who aren’t on board.” — Soumaya Keynes   It would have been nice to get John Maynard Keynes on the show to get his critique of Trump’s trade war. But in th...

“The end of labor means the end of paid slavery. And the opening up of freedom — that is to say, choice of how to spend your time. The only question, a big question, is how do you eat?” — Keith Teare   Does capitalism have a future in our AI age? For Musk, Silicon Valley’s baddest bad entrepreneur, the answer might surprise. Musk seems to think that in the long run, money and wealth will disappear...

“Maps are communicating vast quantities of new knowledge that was only estimated. They convey this imaginative energy — an imaginative energy that maps today have lost, because today maps are so functional, so utilitarian.” — Peter Keating   In the sixteenth century, Spanish cartographers represented California as an island. They weren’t being careless. Nor were they drawing New Yorker covers. The...

“Fascism is the term that is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary political discussions. We can talk about right-wing populism — but the type of politics they share with classic fascism is what I call red pill politics.” — David Ost   Please don’t use the F-word. At least to describe the politics of Trump, Orbán, Meloni, Netanyahu, Modi, Farage et al. Rather than fascism, the best way to demysti...

“Retirement is a false construct created a hundred years ago by the government. It was basically created when Social Security was born. Prior to that, people worked until they died — because they didn’t live as long.” — Michael Clinton   At the ripe young age of 70, Michael Clinton hiked nine days to Everest Base Camp and ran the Tenzing-Hillary Marathon down. Now 72, he is president of his own lo...

“Soccer matches are poorly designed experiments — you don’t necessarily find out which team was better. But any soccer fan will tell you that. Oftentimes, the better team does not win.” — Nick Greene, via a NASA scientist   On June 11, the World Cup comes to North America. Fifty-six years ago, I watched the searing injustice of Johann Cruyff’s Holland getting robbed in the 1974 final by Germany. T...

“The dangers are human, not AI. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what the AI does itself. In fact, even the idea that there is such a thing as the AI in itself is a mistake.” — Keith Teare   I’m in Korea this week. So rather than doing a traditional one-on-one That Was the Week tech summary, Keith Teare and I are trying something different. We invited Jonathan Rauch — Brookings I...

“History is really interesting because it’s about people. And people are interesting. So there are plenty of different ways of doing this, and I think there’s room for everybody.” — Adrian Goldsworthy   The greatest rivalry in antiquity is also uncomfortably relevant to us today. In Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece , the classical scholar Adrian Goldsworthy covers the long...

“We need to develop better theories of why the other side believes what they do. Having an accurate theory includes recognizing if somebody is a psychopath — but also recognizing that psychopaths are rarer than we think.” — Audun Dahl   If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no head. While this sounds like an annoying cliché (especiall...