Keen On America

“It’s like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.” — Ricardo Semler on why bosses won’t let their workers vote on them   Ricardo Semler might be the most anti-boss boss in the history of corporate bosses. Thrown into his Austrian immigrant father’s São Paulo manufacturing firm at seventeen, the young Brazilian ripped up the rulebook — no dress codes, no time clocks, a ten-page cartoon manual instea...

“I could not get under oath and swear that I know exactly how Kennedy died in Dallas.” — Ben Barnes, who helped advance JFK’s fatal Texas trip In Texas, there’s nothing in the middle of the road, Jim Hightower famously quipped, but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. But Ben Barnes has spent seven decades disproving him. Elected as a Democratic moderate to the Texas legislature at 21, Speaker of t...

“You didn’t have to look someone in the eye while you extinguished their life, and you could do it from a distance.” — Mike McIntire on what the gun changed Is there an American way of violence? Earlier this month, the film critic David Thomson blamed gory Hollywood movies, like Coppola’s Godfather, for glorifying it. Today’s guest has an even more brutal answer. According to Mike McIntire , the t...

“Theory said, it doesn’t matter what you’ve read. It’s how you read.” — Emily Eakin on the seduction of the Frenchmen When I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the Eighties, there was a bewildering rage for Frenchmen. Foucault in history, Derrida in literature, Althusser in political philosophy, Lacan in psychology. Not that anybody could quite explain what any of them meant — which only made t...

We’ve done plenty of abstract shows on American Christian nationalism. But this one is about a single family: the Greens of Oklahoma City, owners of the Hobby Lobby retail empire, and probably the wealthiest Christian nationalist family you’ve never heard of.   According to investigative writer Michael Blanding , the Greens have amassed a $14 billion fortune from selling glitter glue and popsicle...

“I want someone who has regrets. I want someone who’s learned the hard way. I want someone who understands that life is made of those messy compromises.” — Joel Christensen on the Odysseus he hopes to see in Matt Damon   Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is out — the controversial movie of the year, much of the controversy raging before anyone had seen a frame. So, before either of us had seen the e...

In 1776 — that same year America declared its independence — Adam Smith published the equally revolutionary The Wealth of Nations, his founding explanation of national economic value. Two hundred and fifty years later, Tim O’Reilly argues in the free-market Economist that Elon Musk and his fellow tech barons are building a monarchical form of capitalism that the proto-democratic Smith would have h...

“We have a Justice Department which is now 100% the political pawn of the president,” warns Brookings senior fellow Jonathan Rauch . “He points, and they shoot.”   Point and shoot. Like an old Kodak camera. Not exactly assuring words, you might think, from a man who begins our conversation looking back at the first six months of 2026 by announcing that he’s significantly less alarmed than he was a...

“If you can only explain the arguments of the other side because they’re mad or dangerous or dumb, the problem is with you.” — Turi Munthe   On yesterday’s show, the psychiatrist Sally Satel described how Americans imagine their own mental condition differently, depending on their politics and age. Which is a nice segue for today’s conversation with the Anglo-French journalist turned media entrepr...

“You can do as many brain scans as you want, but you’ll never be able to distinguish an impulse that wasn’t resisted from one that’s irresistible.” — Sally Satel on why social media addiction can’t be proven in court   When Meta and YouTube lost the so-called landmark social media addiction trial back in March, there was jubilation inside and outside the courtroom. Finally, Big Tech seemed a bit l...

The Israeli art restorer and spy Gabriel Allon is as real as George Smiley or Hercule Poirot. He even has his own Wikipedia page. The CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel describes herself on X as a friend of Gabriel Allon before she gets around to mentioning her husband, the best-selling thriller writer Daniel Silva who, of course, is the creator of Allon. As with all successful literary invent...

The leftist cultural critic David Masciotra isn’t happy with the state of America in the first half of 2026. His dislike of the MAGA crowd goes without saying. But his anger at the state of progressive politics is more noteworthy. So far, he says, 2026 has been — to borrow from Antonio Gramsci — a time for monsters both on the left and right. With its “Epstein class” vocabulary, knee-jerk Luddism...

Will 2026 be one of those grand historical years that change the world — like 1917, 1789 or 1968? Not according to Keith Teare , publisher of That Was The Week newsletter and co-host of our weekly tech roundup. For Keith, the best historical analogy is 1905, the year of the first abortive Russian revolution. The year that didn’t change the world.   Keith’s latest tech newsletter asks “What Time Is...

“Someone said, oh, you look like Steve Bannon, and I love you for that… No, I just shaved my hair and lost some pounds.” — Kaya Genç on Trumpism’s global fanbase   The NATO circus rumbled into the Turkish capital of Ankara this week resembling more of a gun show than an alliance summit. Ringmaster Donald J. Trump promised Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the F-35s and lifted the very sanctions that Trump hims...

“A place that doesn’t have great philosophers will not have great technologists either.” — Mehran Gul on Europe’s inexplicable underperformance   The digital revolution, we were promised, would mean the end of geography. From Beijing to Birmingham to Berlin to Barcelona, anyone could invent anything anywhere, and so the geography of innovation would no longer matter. But that’s not the way it has...

“I crack the tab open, and I feel the cold metal… I hear the tink and give of the aluminum. And maybe when I’m done, I crush it into a small patty.” — Ian Bogost on the everyday enchantment of a Diet Coke can   Don’t sweat the small stuff is one of the most persistent (and annoying) mantras of the self-help industry. But the counter-intuitive Atlantic columnist Ian Bogost advises the opposite. In...

“America has a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance.” — the message Tad Devine and Ben Tulchin developed for Bernie Sanders, which tested highest in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2015   How the Democrats Screwed Bernie . It could have been coined by Donald Trump. That was Tad Devine ’s first objection when his editor floated it. But as Devine, Bernie Sanders’ chief stra...

“For all the paperwork of democracy — government by and for the people — we have become a citizenry of spectators who simply want to be entertained. And we are accustomed to the realization that we can’t do anything about what’s on the screen.” — David Thomson   Has the prolific film critic David Thomson fallen out of love with the movies? That’s the question I began my conversation with Thomson,...

“White Americans considered themselves chosen by God to possess the continent and lord it over others — and they saw Native people as indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction.” — David J. Silverman   Was the colonization of North America a genocidal project? That is the delicate question David J. Silverman confronts in his powerful new book, The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and t...

“The pinnacle of capitalism is still flawed. Any idea that it’s perfect — this idea of the perfect union — is deeply flawed as a concept and always has been.” — Keith Teare   With July 4 finally done, we can look forward to the next American revolution. Just as AI is revolutionizing the economy, so too are radical ideas about harnessing this disruption for the benefit of all Americans. One idea th...

“What is happening today in America is part of a global political turn — and what’s odd is how little the American people seem to realize it.” — Madeleine Schwartz   So we’ve finally arrived. America is 250 today. But where, exactly, have we come? How should we think about the United States of America on July 4, 2026?   Rather than peering inwards, Madeleine Schwartz — the Paris-based founder and...

Tomorrow, America will celebrate its birth. But the decisive moment, even the real birth of modern America, argues Alexander Mikaberidze in his new book The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America , may not have been 1776 at all. It was 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase. The year Thomas Jefferson bought the future from Napoleon Bonaparte. This was the moment the youn...

“There’s a kind of exhaustion and resentment — maybe sometimes feeling a little foolish about still feeling attached to some idea of this country that seems like it’s maybe not holding that strong or that healthy anymore.” — Christopher Hooks   Happy fucking birthday, America. No, not my tasteless language. These words adorn the cover of the July 2026 issue of the 175-year-old Harper’s , America’s...

“The second law of thermodynamics is not to be negotiated with.” — Thomas S. Mullaney   The second law of thermodynamics is non-negotiable. The universe will end. Every human being dies. Everything decays and every record disintegrates. So why record history? Why bother remembering? These are the questions that the Stanford historian Thomas S. Mullaney addresses in his intriguing new book, How We...

“If I perish, I perish.” — the chant Katie Gaddini heard from Esther’s Army at the National Mall, weeks before the 2024 election   Back in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, Margaret Atwood came on the show to talk about The Handmaid’s Tale — her warning of how trad wives, to borrow a contemporary phrase, could be exploited by an evangelical patriarchy. Five years later, the Stanford fellow Kati...