Keen On America

Last October, we featured a conversation with Kian Vesteinsson, co-author of Freedom House ’s 2023 FREEDOM ON THE NET report, about the repressive power of artificial intelligence. A year later, Freedom House’s 2 024 FREEDOM ON THE NET report is entitled “The Struggle for Trust Online”. And as Allie Funk, one of its co-authors, explains, it’s a very mixed report on the state of online trust. In so...

The conventional way of thinking about digital technology revolutions is akin to thinking about how to build a house. First we build the foundation, then we add the frame and finally the cosmetic furnishing. In tech, this is known as the “stack” - and traditionally, each chapter in the narrative involves different companies and technologies. So in the case of the Internet boom, for example, first...

Early today, we posted a conversation with Celeste Marcus, LIBERTIES Quarterly managing editor, about her hard-hitting “Hate Lands” essay in the Fall 2024 issue. In the same issue , there’s an equally hard hitting piece by the Rutgers historian, Katherine C. Epstein . But whereas Marcus goes after Trump and Putin, Epstein’s ire is reserved for her fellow American historians who, she believes, are,...

In the Fall 2024 issue of Liberties Quarterly, managing editor Celeste Marcus writes about the great Polish movie director Agnieszka Holland . Marcus argues that the 75 year-old Holland - best known for her 1990 movie Europa Europa - remains as relevant as ever because of her focus on what she calls the “terrifying contingency” of social breakdown. Linking Holland’s latest film, Green Border , a m...

Do we shape the future or does it shape us? That’s the core question in Brian Solis ’ new book, Mindshift which provides lessons for corporate executives in transforming leadership and driving innovation. Like so many other futurists, Solis’ work focuses on how we can become irreplaceable in the age of AI. Agency still lies with us, he acknowledges. But unless we use that agency to shape the futur...

As a longtime Harvard Business School professor and the former chief marketing officer at Aetna, David C. Edelman is all too familiar with both the dangers and opportunities of personalized technology. In Personalization , his new book, co-authored with Boston Consulting Group managing director Mark Abraham, Edelman focuses on customer strategy in our age of AI. While Edelman acknowledges that the...

Last week, we featured an interview with the leftist American theologian, Jim Wallis, who warned about the false white gospel of contemporary Christian nationalism. And we return to the existential dangers of American religion today with Talia Lavin whose new book, Wild Faith , warns that the Christian right is actually taking over America. In contrast with Wallis, however, Lavin doesn’t offer a m...

The 2024 winners of the Nobel prize for Economics were announced this morning. One of the winners was the MIT economist Simon Johnson , who, as the co-author (with his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu) of Power and Progress , appeared on KEEN ON just over a year ago to talk about technology & prosperity. Given that the prize was given to Johnson (and Acemoglu) for their work on explaining the gaps...

Earlier this week, the prominent African-American broadcaster and writer, Tavis Smiley, came on the show t o voice his support for Reparations to correct the past racial injustices in American history. The Kentucky based historian, Joel Edward Goza , author of Rebirth of a Nation , agrees with Smiley, arguing that Reparations is, in fact, the central civil rights issue of our age. The struggle for...

In her quest for the White House, it seems as if Kamala Harris is doing everything in her power to disassociate herself with liberal ideas. So what, exactly, has happened to liberal politics in the United States today? That’s exactly the question which the excellent young George Washington historian, Timothy Shenk , asks in his new book, Left Adrift . And in tracing the fate of liberal politics in...

It’s been a strange week in tech. The Nobel prizes in both Chemistry and Physics went to prominent former or current Googlers, and yet the tech news cycle has been dominated by the U.S. government’s intent to break up a seemingly prostrate Google. Keith Teare and Andrew, in their regular That Was The Week summary of tech news, discuss Google’s failure to present itself in the United States as the...

As a Harvard trained pediatrician as well as television writer and producer, Neal Baer has particularly interesting take on the moral, policy and ethical challenges of CRISPR gene-editing technology. Baer - He is best known for his work on the television shows Designated Survivor , ER and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - has edited a new collection of essays on The Promise and Peril of CRIS...

Why are black men more likely to vote for Donald Trump than black women? According to Tavis Smiley , the syndicated radio host and best selling author of many books about black America include his latest Covenant with Black America - Twenty Years Later, it’s because some black men, especially younger ones, are attracted to the outlaw in Trump. Black women, in contrast, Smiley suggests, are repelle...

This is an important conversation. Few Americans are better skilled at listening than the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild . The author of the best selling Strangers in Their Own Land , Hochschild’s much anticipated new book, Stolen Pride , takes place in Kentucky, where she examines rural loss, shame and the rise of the American Right. Hochschild’s superpower is her ability to lis...

In December 2008, Lily Bock, the daughter of the novelist Charles Bock , was born. But Bock, the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver, was a reluctant parent, tagging along for the ride of fatherhood, obsessed primarily with his dream of a writing career. However, when Lily was six months old, his wife, Diana, was diagnosed with a complex form o...

American Christianity appears in a state of disrepair, perhaps even imminent civil war. On the one hand, of course, we have the evangelical right who make up much of Trump’s ideological base; on the other hand, there are progressive American theologians like Jim Wallis who argue that this Christian nationalist wing of the Republican party isn’t quite kosher. In his new book, The False White Gospel...

Might future multi-trillion dollar AI platforms like OpenAI represent not just the end of the app age but also of economic competition itself? As That Was The Week’s Keith Teare and Andrew discuss in today’s weekly KEEN ON tech round-up, the news of OpenAI’s $6.5 billion new funding round suggests that big tech is going to get even bigger because these new post-platform AI leviathans will control...

Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley both teach at Stanford’s interdisciplinary d.school . They are also the joint authors of Assembling Tomorrow , an intriguing new book in which, using their D School experience, Carter and Doorley provide a guide to designing a thriving future. They argue that the future, in all its socioeconomic complexity, can de designed so that we can mend the mistakes of our pa...

Yesterday, I interviewed The Financial Times ’ Andrew Hill about the FT’s best six business books of the year. Today, I talk to Michael Morris , the author of one of those books. In Tribal , Morris explains how the cultural instincts that divide us can also help bring us together. Our tribal instincts are humanity’s secret weapon, Morris suggests. Rather than deriding tribal impulses for their irr...

The Financial Times has just announced their short list of the best six business books of 2024. Authors include KEEN ON regulars like Andrew Scott as well as Michael Morris , who will appear on tomorrow’s show. As the competition’s manager, Andrew Hill, told me when I visited him at the FT offices in London last week, a business book is a tricky thing to define. Perhaps, like pornography, you know...

While many fear that Trump offers an existential threat to American democracy, Barry C. Lynn believes that the real danger comes from big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute, is the author of “ Antitrust Revolution ”, Harper’s October cover story. Lynn argues that big tech offers the real threat to American freedom and major...

Finally a tech show not about AI. Martin Schmidt is the President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as well a distinguished technologist in his own right. So rather than having just another conversation about AI, I talked to Schmidt about how he expects quantum computing to change the world. Schmidt, who taught at MIT for many years, has a particularly interesting take on quantum because R...

Dr Josh McConkey ’s new book, Be the Weight Behind the Spear , is about how to fix America. McConkey, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in North Carolina, believes that the strength of America has always been its people. So his focus is on motivating all Americans to be, what he calls, “the weight behind the spears” of the country’s future leaders. For McConkey, an US Air Force Rese...

Is there anyone who still believes in America as a force for good in the world today? There’s that doddery old cold warrior Joe Biden, of course, and his younger globalizing sidekick, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. And then there’s Edward Goldberg , the author of The United States as Global Liberal Hegemon , who is still hawking the idea that the world needs America as the global policeman fo...

Instagram superstar and “Here’s Where It Gets Interesting” podcast host S haron McMahon has been dubbed America’s government teacher. In her first book, The Small and the Mighty , McMahon writes about twelve unsung Americans who changed the course of history. Some of her heroes are more unsung than others, but as she explains, they all - like Sharon McMahon herself - capture the moral agency &...