Keen On America

“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...

“My brothers always think: what would Jesus do? And they do that. I think: what would dad do? And I do the opposite.” — Jamison Firestone   What do you do if your dad was a multimillionaire conman, crack addict, and owner of New York’s most expensive brothel? If you’re Jamison Firestone , you transform yourself into his antithesis. You go to law school. You go to post-Soviet Russia and establish t...

“His descent is in a sense our descent.” — Peter Wehner on Trump at 80   Donald Trump turned 80 two weeks ago. But Peter Wehner ’s timely Atlantic piece , “The Apotheosis of Donald Trump,” isn’t much of a birthday present. Wehner even suggests that for all Trump’s madness, mayhem and malevolence, the orange octogenarian eludes Shakespearean tragedy. So no historic hall of infamy for Donald. He’s t...

“The frontier AI companies invited the government into the room. Now the government is beginning to behave as if it owns the door, the guest list, the schedule, and the product roadmap.” — Keith Teare   Last week, I was away in Europe. So Keith Teare ran our That Was The Week show solo — with a chillingly authentic Andrew Keen bot. So realistic, in fact, that the fake version sounds (to me, at lea...

“You cannot expect a society to open its doors if there is no way to close them. You cannot expect a society to open its gates if there is no gate to open.” — Justin Gest   It’s a counterintuitive and deliberately provocative argument. Rather than bolstering open societies, migration actually benefits authoritarianism. And it’s the argument that Justin Gest makes in his new book, Democratic Drain:...

“Narrative remains a pretty unbeatable delivery device for information.” — Patrick Radden Keefe   Has London really fallen? That’s the question Patrick Radden Keefe — staff writer at The New Yorker and bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing — addressed in his new book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth .   One thing for sure is that K...

“The United States and America are not the same thing. The United States is a government, an administration. America is an idea — and that idea is still there, even when the government is not.” — Konstanty Gebert   What is the best thing about America? At least when viewed from Warsaw. For Konstanty Gebert — Polish-Jewish journalist, Solidarity activist, co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza , and one of...

“People in my generation worshipped the United States during communism. Everybody wanted to flee to the US. It was the land of the dream. And now we confront a different type of country, different type of politics — and we don’t dream of the US anymore.” — Bartosz Wieliński   I’m just back from Warsaw where I spent an afternoon at the offices of Gazeta Wyborcza , Poland’s liberal newspaper of reco...

“If your opening position is: your views are beyond the pale, you are deplorable, there is no space for you in democracy — then how on earth do we expect anything other than revolutionary conservatism as a response?” — Maciej Kisilowski   For Americans concerned about the fragility of their democracy, Poland offers some reassuring news. Having experienced its own illiberal blip, democracy in Polan...

“The Gross National Product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” — Robert F. Kennedy, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968   It is June 5, 1968. An eleven-year-old English boy is watching the assassination of Bobby Kennedy on his black and white television. That little boy is Tim Jackson — now one of Britain’s most influential critics of capitalism. He had no idea then tha...

“Just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. The agent is the unacknowledged legislator of the literary field.” — Laura McGrath   We think of publishers and editors as the ultimate tastemakers. As those godlike gatekeepers controlling what we read. But if you’re looking for literary gods, Laura McGrath argues, then you need to look at literar...

“AI companies are taking advantage of our natural tendency to ascribe an inner life to our interlocutors. They profit when you think the chatbot cares.” — Kate O’Neill   If we don’t like someone, we call them a fascist. And if we like them, we say they are a humanist. The F and H words. Both meaningless in our sloppy, bot-infested age. But maybe I’m just a cranky anti-humanist. Even anti-human — w...

“I considered it elder abuse. She put him through the paces, not only before the debate, but after. She should have gotten him out of there immediately.” — Sally Quinn on Jill Biden and the debate   Today’s guest is amongst America’s most verbal octogenarians. No, not you-know-who. Sally Quinn is the illustrious Washington DC hostess, writer and commentator. The almost 85-year-old does improv come...

“Age is the modality in which class is lived in America today.” — Samuel Moyn   Yesterday we had 91-year-old Mordecai Kurz on the show. Tomorrow, it will be 84-year-old Sally Quinn. But today’s guest, the Yale legal historian Samuel Moyn , has a bit of a problem with old people. His new book, Gerontocracy in America , argues that the old folks are hoarding power and wealth in America. For Moyn, Dy...

“Between 1980 and 2019, the billionaires gained $25 trillion. By today it’s probably $35 trillion. The question is who will pay for reform? You go where the money is.” — Mordecai Kurz   Keynes observed that in the long run, we are all dead. The nonagenarian Stanford economist Mordecai Kurz agrees. Which is why he has no patience for the tech utopians’ promise of abundance for all of us in the long...