Keen On America

“The burdens of slavery did crush some people. They elicited outright armed rebellion from others. And between those two extremes, there’s all manner of response. But black culture was what most historians say it was: rich, semiautonomous — and yet there is all kinds of cross-fertilization that goes on.” — Melvin Patrick Ely   As we approach the 250th anniversary of the republic, America is still...

“They weren’t interested in being on the side of God so much as they are insistent that God is on their side.” — Peter Wehner on Hegseth and Trump   According to Peter Wehner , something has gone terribly wrong in America. And that something, Wehner has been warning us now for more than ten years, is Donald Trump. In his latest Atlantic piece, “ Hegseth’s Unholy War ,” Wehner aims his moral rifle...

“Liberalism was founded in the middle of the eighteenth century as a revolutionary philosophy — a philosophy that tried to subvert the old world. That set of beliefs has continued to be radical and revolutionary. When liberalism fell into decadence, it examined itself, subverted itself, and became once again a revolutionary faith.” — Adrian Wooldridge   We’ve lost our revolutionary center. At leas...

“Pessimism is not fatalism. Fatalism is the belief that things will always necessarily be worse. Pessimism is the belief that things will probably get worse. Within that ‘probably,’ it opens up space for action.” — Gal Beckerman   In the first months of Trump II, Gal Beckerman watched American society do something that shocked him: comply. In one pathetic example after another, prominent law firms...

“These technologies are morally agnostic. They could be the best things ever and the worst things ever, and the determinant is us.” — Jamie Metzl   Two summers ago, Jamie Metzl gave a talk on AI and spirituality at the Chautauqua Institution in Upstate New York. That same spot where Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage a couple of years earlier. Rather than an assassination attempt, Metzl’s talk tr...

“I felt sad after every interview. Because it’s not real. These AI are able to elicit a very convincing illusion of empathy — even love. But it’s fake. And these people are alone.” — Victoria Hetherington   One night in 2023, the developers at Replika — a so-called AI intimacy company — changed a few lines of code. Thousands of people woke the next morning, kissed (so to speak) their AI partners,...

“Let’s just say it out loud,” Keith Teare , publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, says. “AI is not dangerous.”   Not all of you will agree. I’m certainly not so sure. But the gruff Yorkshireman is convinced that AI can only benefit humanity. For him, with his scientific faith in historical progress, today’s AI revolution is a glorious combination of the Enlightenment and the industrial re...

“A mark of an intelligent person is humility. If you have the right amount of humility, then you’re seeking out knowledge from others rather than thinking you’re going to invent something new. It’s really about executing well on ideas.” — Deborah Kenny   When her husband died of leukemia, leaving her a single mother of three small children, Deborah Kenny read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meani...

“If God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty-first. Could you actually imagine people dying for communism or for liberal democracy? That actually happened. Now you would be considered an idiot or a fool to do that.” — Daniel Bessner   Co-host of the American Prestige podcast Daniel Bessner is a bit of a bomb thrower. Which is why he’s a regular on the show. Today, he has a b...

“Politics is the systematic organisation of hatreds.” — Henry Adams, quoted by Don Watson   America is celebrating its 250th anniversary this July. In The Shortest History of the United States , Australian writer Don Watson has squeezed these 250 years into 60,000 words. Beginning with Mad King George, he ends with Mad King Donald. In between: the Puritan North, the plantation South, the miracle o...

“I find it very odd that agency is being promoted for its own sake rather than being connected to any kind of value system. Because without those things, agency looks pretty scary. Dictators are quite high agency.” — Sophie Haigney   On April Fools’ Day, The New York Times published an op-ed entitled “All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be High Agency.” But it wasn’t a joke. Sophie Haigney — form...

“Globalization has revived tribalism. Instead of destroying local cultures, as the left predicted, it has made them stronger. Far from the triumph of capitalism that the right predicted, it has entrenched corruption.” — Franklin Foer   How do Osama Bin Laden and Barron Trump explain the world? According to Franklin Foer — senior writer at The Atlantic and author of How Soccer Explains the World: A...

“You don’t have enough money to pay all the bills? Well, cut the budget for parks and rec, cut the budget for libraries, cut the budget for fixing potholes — but don’t touch the police budget.” — Stuart Schrader   Fifty years ago, America’s local police still served at the pleasure of democratically elected politicians. Not anymore. Stuart Schrader has spent years in the archives tracing how it ha...

“We keep getting wake-up calls and snoozing the alarm. Now is the time to actually get out of bed and confront this problem before it is too late.” — Eyck Freymann   Forget Iran for a moment. The Hormuz crisis is a template for the bigger crisis of Taiwan. Eyck Freymann — Hoover Fellow at Stanford, author of the brand-new Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China — believes that the f...

“Once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we’re starting to see that now.” — Jacob Mchangama   The Jyllands-Posten editor who published those Mohammed cartoons in 2005 spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He’d commissioned artists to say it with their pens, but the mob came after him with AK-47s. Copenhagen-bo...

“The media has its own agenda, completely separate from anything going on in the real world, creating the story themselves.” — Keith Teare Last night, somebody hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion. I live a couple of hills over, but heard nothing. Meanwhile, the New Yorker hurled its own explosive cocktail at Sam, publishing a 15,000-word hit piece rhetorically entitle...

“It’s ultra stable. Health care doesn’t move. If you biopsied American health care in 2010 and again in 2026, no one could figure out which slide was which.” — Robert Pearl, MD Bad news. The patient, I’m afraid, is ultra-stable. Robert Pearl , former CEO of Kaiser Permanente for eighteen years and author of ChatGPT MD , returns with the bleakest diagnosis we’ve heard all month. American healthcare...

“You can face your history and still love your country. This is my attempt at doing that.” — Beverly Gage When the Yale Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage finished her almost nine-hundred-page biography of J. Edgar Hoover, she needed a little break before starting her next book on Ronald Reagan. So she got in her old Subaru and spent six months on the road driving across America to prep...

“Doing science is like reading the mind of God.” — Demis Hassabis, quoted in The Infinity Machine This week’s New Yorker uncomplimentary profile of OpenAI’s CEO is entitled “The Many Faces of Sam Altman.” But not all AI leaders are quite as many faced as slippery Sam. Take, for example, Demis Hassabis, the North London based co-founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind. In his new biography, The Infini...

“There are parts of the business and finance world that are invested in making these things seem intimidating and scary. We really enjoy making things more approachable.” — Alex Mayyasi What’s the last taboo? The thing that we are totally embarrassed to discuss? No, not sex. It’s money. At least according to Alex Mayyasi — frequent contributor to NPR’s Planet Money — who has just published Planet...

“Historically, when the college-educated become politically radicalised, that does tend to lead to real shifts.” — Noam Scheiber A university degree has always been seen as a passport out of the working class. But according to the New York Times ’ Noam Scheiber , the reverse is now true. In his new book, Mutiny , Scheiber argues that the good white-collar jobs college once promised have been quiet...

“When we trust AI to tell us the truth, we are setting ourselves up to hand over something deeply human to a machine that does not have our best interests at heart.” — Steven Rosenbaum Truth, Steven Rosenbaum cheerfully admits, is a shitty word. It has two ontological realities — one objective, the other subjective — but most of us use the word without much thought. Maybe it’s like pornography. It...

“His ultimate failure is not simply losing. It’s his failure to stop Trumpism from being such a dominant force in America.” — Julian Zelizer On this Easter Sunday, can we resurrect Joe Biden’s reputation? Perhaps not — according to Julian Zelizer , the Princeton historian and editor of The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden , a collection of essays about the historical significance of the Biden Preside...

“We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan (attributed) Who gets to tell the AI story? A movie, a media company or Marshall McLuhan? 1. The movie: the AI doc, How I Became an Apocaloptimist , which That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare dismissed because it failed to define AI. 2. A media company: OpenAI bought the streaming show TBPN for hundreds of millions of dollar...

“Millions of people have gone out and said, ‘Stop, don’t do that.’ And that is a wonderful thing.” — Peter Edelman We are in Washington DC this week, in search of America’s heart. And there may be no better guide than Peter Edelman — one of the few remaining members of the Bobby Kennedy braintrust. Edelman was a close Kennedy aide from just after JFK’s assassination through the 1968 presidential c...