Keen On America

“Being a father is probably one of the toughest and most rewarding jobs I’ve ever had. A lot of the principles I used to teach snipers apply to kids: dealing with negativity, replacing negative self-talk, learning that well-meaning adults can say terrible things — and you don’t have to take that on as baggage.” — Brandon Webb   Brandon Webb defines himself as an author, entrepreneur, Navy SEAL sni...

“As recently as the mid-seventies, under 5% of Ivy Leaguers are headed to Wall Street. It’s actually not that attractive. But as Wall Street’s deregulated, it changes the incentive structure — it makes it much more profitable and demands this huge labor force.” — Dylan Gottlieb   They stalked the sidewalks of Manhattan in button-down shirts embroidered with the names of investment banks. They jogg...

“All the warnings were there. It was almost a carbon copy — the same warnings that were ignored before Paradise, ignored again before the Palisades. And nobody was held accountable.” — Jonathan Vigliotti   On January 7, 2025, the Palisades Fire ignited in Los Angeles. Over the first few hours of the fire, the second-largest city in America had no firefighters on the front lines and no coordinated...

  “They’re all me. Every single one. I see them almost as if they’re inoculated on various petri dishes, and the petri dishes are all put into this pressure-cooker situation — that of a missile alert.” — Vincent Yu   So what would you do with the last 19 minutes of your life? That’s the question Vincent Yu plays with in Seek Immediate Shelter . Triggered (so to speak) by a 2018 Hawaii missile aler...

“We’re losing home on so many different levels. Physically. Politically. Morally. And after AI, spiritually — because language, our spiritual home, is taken away from us. We now have to share it with an unhuman entity.” — Ece Temelkuran   Do you feel homeless — physically, politically, morally or spiritually? That’s the question posed by Ece Temelkuran ’s new book Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding H...

“You can’t be confident about human decision-making. You can be confident on the potential of technology. Humans are quite capable of making both wrong and bad decisions.” — Keith Teare   Is a jobless AI future really something to celebrate? That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare certainly thinks so. His editorial “Civilization: What Is Worth Doing” this week imagines a future in which nobody has...

“It was a completely unthinking exercise in cost-cutting that made no sense in terms of the newspaper. I think perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper, it made sense.” — Simon Elegant on being ‘eliminated’ by the Washington Post   Hong Kong in 2019. A dismembered body is found in a landfill. A disgraced police superintendent is called back from internal exile to solve it. The city around him...

“If criticism isn’t going to be written by one human mind, what else is it for? Criticism done by AI means nothing.” — Bethanne Patrick   Is London really falling? Perhaps. This week on Keen On America , everything seems to be falling. There are young men falling from riverside apartments. Girlhood is falling to the commodification of appearance. Book reviewing is falling to AI. Mary Todd Lincoln...

“Fraud makes up between 40 and 50 percent of all crime in the UK. Police resource dedicated to fraud: 1 percent. No country is giving fraud the attention it deserves.” — Becky Holmes   Was Shakespeare a fraud? Possibly, says Becky Holmes , the Stratford-upon-Avon-based writer and the lady behind the X account @deathtospinach. She should know. Best known as the author of Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love...

“Justice may have been served, but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up.” — James Lasdun   In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh — wealthy scion of a South Carolina prosecutorial dynasty — was found guilty of murdering his wife Maggie and his son Paul at their family estate. With its opioid addiction, fatal boat crash, staged suicide, and a cousin called Eddie, the case could have been inve...

“Every single person that we meet was both the endpoint of thousands of years that brought them there, and the midpoint of some other process, and was the beginning of something else entirely. Think of yourselves as the middle and the beginning, not just the end.” — Patrick Wyman   History, we are often told, is a simple story of progress — from caves and villages to cities; from forests and farms...

“The current crisis was far from inevitable. Politicians made consistently bad choices. In doing so, they fostered a crisis of confidence in political institutions, empowered anti-system candidates, and produced a new Cold War as dangerous as the last.” — Ian Shapiro   The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was a moment of extraordinary euphoria. Fukuyama even described it as the end of hist...

“Post-war Europe is essentially an American protectorate. Europeans don’t like to admit that. They only came to realize just how dependent they were on the United States in 2025, when Trump basically leveraged US security and forced Europe into a very disadvantageous trade deal.” — Glyn Morgan   Post Second World War Europe was always an American project. At least according to The Rise and Fall of...

“Orbán rigged the electoral system to highly benefit the winner. He thought he would never face the realistic possibility of losing. When someone actually threatened his plan, he just couldn’t imagine it. And that person got more than 55% — a two-thirds-plus majority. Orbán shot himself in the foot.” — Marc Loustau   On April 12, Viktor Orbán — the populist who invented the illiberal playbook — go...

“Anyone that’s properly using AI now knows that you tell it what you want, it gives you a plan, carries out the work, and you judge and tweak. You’re not a passive victim — you’re an active user with outcomes in mind.” — Keith Teare   Do we really want a no-hands job from Silicon Valley? That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare — who thinks all tech innovation results in human progress —...

“Trump has no strategy and no endgame. No amount of success in tactics will win. No military campaign has ever been won solely from the air.” — Jason Pack   Happy May Day! Today’s papers are leading with stories about Obamacare, a Gaza flotilla, and the price of oil. Everything but the story at both the front and back of our minds. Only the Wall Street Journal leads with Iran. Which is more than a...

“Nobody has ever made money selling America short. We’re an extraordinary country.” — John Steele Gordon   To honor America’s semiquincentennial birthday, the Wall Street Journal has been celebrating the most impactful American inventions of all time:   1. Internet 2. Light bulb 3. Integrated circuit 4. Personal computer 5. Airplane   The railroad doesn’t even make the top twenty. But the business...

“It’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses. The sunglasses are the ransom. The damage to the car is fifty to seventy-five billion dollars a year.” — Anja Shortland   Cybercrime is booming. Ransomware attacks — where criminal gangs encrypt your servers and hold your data hostage until you pay — cost victims somewhere between fifty and seventy-five billion dollars a year in damage. The...

“Violence has been misdiagnosed. And there’s a misdiagnosis that has caused us to not be able to control it as we could.” — Dr. Gary Slutkin   Human violence appears ubiquitous. In Iran. In Gaza. In Ukraine. In Sudan. In American cities and homes. So widespread, indeed, that it seems naturally hardwired into us. Our species-being, so to speak.   But, for Dr. Gary Slutkin , there is nothing inevita...

America is once again at war. Helen Benedict is one of our most distinguished writers on the moral consequences of war. Her new novel, The Soldier’s House , is set in the aftermath of the Iraq war. But it could, equally, be about the aftermath of Afghanistan. Or even Iran. “The war turned me into a monster,” veterans tell Benedict, again and again. “How am I supposed to face my wife, my children,...

“All these groups from 1945 on said: we can resist any hate group in America, even the Ku Klux Klan, as long as we take them on one at a time. But our great fear is if these right-wing groups figure out a way to communicate with one another in a more instantaneous way — we are in big trouble.” — Steven J. Ross   It’s not just springtime for Hitler in America. It’s winter, summer and fall too. Ther...

“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free.” — Current Affairs editor, quoted by Brewster Kahle   The internet, we were promised, would remember everything. Rather than memory, however, it is now most distinguished by its digital forgetfulness. That’s the warning in Vanishing Culture , a new series of essays published by the San Francisco-based Internet Archive . In its concluding essay by Bre...

“White men are 29 percent of the population but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all money managed by money managers. Is that because they’re smarter? Or is it because there is preference, inequality, and active bias in favor of white men?” — Steve Phillips   Are white men really smarter than other Americans? Some white men might think...

“Sam Altman’s best case scenario is that abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but it also exacerbates inequality. That was his favorite outcome.” — Keith Teare   This week’s editorial from Keith Teare , publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, is entitled “Adulting.” His verdict: this was the week the AI industry finally started behaving like grown-ups. The evidence: OpenAI...

“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...