Keen On America

"American culture likes martyrs, not marchers." — David Masciotra, quoting Jesse Jackson A couple of days ago, a great American died. Jesse Jackson was 84. He was somebody. Even Donald Trump acknowledged the passing of "a good man"—which, as my guest today notes, Jackson probably wouldn't have appreciated. David Masciotra is the author of I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters , one of the most...

"It truly is becoming a desert right now for book publicists." — Bethanne Patrick A couple of weeks ago, there was an " absolute bloodbath " at The Washington Post with hundreds of workers laid off and the book section totally gutted. Ron Charles , the beloved fiction editor, is gone. So is Becca Rothfeld , who described it in The New Yorker as " The Death of Book World ." Today I'm talking to Kee...

"I'm much more likely to protest when I feel responsible—when violence is being done in my name." — Bruce Robbins As always, the media is full of stories about political protest. A Columbia University Gaza protester held by ICE claims to have been chained to her bed after a seizure. Our friends at FIRE are addressing the right to demonstrate against ICE in a house of worship. Obama is arguing that...

"We are still dealing with a system which tolerates rampant abuse of accused people." — Emily Galvin Almanza Back in April 2024, we interviewed Thelton Henderson , one of the first African American federal judges in America. What disturbed me about our conversation was that even though Henderson grew up in the late Jim Crow era, he didn't seem to think that America is a profoundly more just place...

"Two years from now, all white-collar jobs may be gone." — Dario Amodei (via Keith Teare) Keith Teare leads this week's tech roundup with a video he made on Google's Veo: one glass half-full of water, another half-full of spiders. It's a metaphor for the AI moment. The water represents the tools released in the past two weeks—Anthropic's Claude 4.6, OpenAI's CodeX 5.3—which Keith calls "beyond bel...

"She's a ten to me and that's the part that matters." — Paul Eastwick If it's Valentine's Day, we must be talking about love. Paul Eastwick studies attraction and relationships at UC Davis, and his new book Bonded by Evolution takes aim at the "old science" that treated romance like a competitive market where everyone gets assigned a number. The incels, of course, ran with that research to compoun...

"How can you not be a populist in this day and age?" — Hélène Landemore In February 2020, The New Yorker profiled a Yale professor making the case for citizen rule. Six years later, that political scientist, Hélène Landemore, has a new book entitled Politics Without Politicians arguing that politics should be "an amateur sport instead of an expert's job" and that randomly selected citizen assembli...

"I will say that QAnon was right and I was wrong." — Pepper Culpepper From Bannon and Trump to Summers, Gates, Blavatnik and Chomsky, the Epstein scandal has revealed elites of all ideological stripes behaving shamefully together. The Oxford political scientist Pepper Culpepper argues this is exactly the kind of corporate scandal that can save democracy—not despite its ugliness, but because of it....

"You either need to call it fascism or you need to invent a new word with more or less the same meaning." — Jonathan Rauch Jonathan Rauch's viral Atlantic essay has reignited the debate over what to call the Trump administration. Having previously settled on "semi-fascist," Rauch now argues that Trump ticks all 18 boxes on his checklist of fascist characteristics — from the glorification of violen...

"The black market exists only because we decided that this form of trade should be illegal." — Scott Eden In October 2019, tech executive Tushar Atre was abducted from his oceanfront home in Santa Cruz and found murdered on his own property in the redwoods — shot execution-style, hands bound. He had spent barely three years in the cannabis business. Scott Eden's new book traces how a charismatic S...

"We all love Thomas Paine. We just wish we liked him." — Jonathan Turley Jonathan Turley's new book asks a deceptively simple question: why did the American Revolution become the longest-running successful democracy while the French Revolution devoured itself? The answer, he argues, lies in Madison's "auxiliary precautions" — constitutional safeguards designed not to eliminate rage but to channel...

"It may not be Mister Right YouTube, but it is Mister Right Now." — Erika Dilday On Super Bowl Sunday — with America celebrating its 250th anniversary — Erika Dilday joins to discuss the power of documentary film to cut through algorithmic noise and show us who we really are. As executive producer of POV, the longest-running documentary program on American television (now entering its 39th season)...

"I didn't use my own software this week because the OpenAI agents were better. And that's me retiring my own software." — Keith Teare Something broke this week. Both Anthropic and OpenAI launched multi-agent systems—"agent swarms"—that don't just assist with tasks but replace custom-built software entirely. The market noticed: Adobe, Salesforce, Workday, and other legacy SaaS companies saw their s...

What kind of leadership can hold a fractured democracy together? About the Guest Stephen Schlesinger is an American historian, author, and foreign policy analyst. The son of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and special assistant to President John F. Kennedy—and grandson of Arthur Schlesinger Sr., he grew up at the centre of one of America's most distinguished intellectual fa...

A man was convicted by his own heartbeat — and that's just the beginning of our digital dystopia. About the Guest Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School and a national expert on surveillance technologies, policing, and criminal justice. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the author of the PROSE Award–winning The Rise of Big Dat...

An anti-fascist spy handed American officials evidence of murderous intent from a Nazi planning server — and they declined to act. About the Guest Christopher Mathias is a journalist covering the far right, formerly a senior reporter at HuffPost, with work appearing in The Guardian, The Nation, MSNBC, Zeteo, and WNYC. His reporting has helped unmask white supremacist cops, soldiers, teachers, and...

Can meat save the planet? That’s the paradoxical promise of the longtime vegan activist Bruce Friedrich , founder of the Good Food Institute. In his new book , Meat , Friedrich argues that plant-based and cultivated meat can satisfy the craving of the most hardline carnivore while simultaneously fixing the apocalyptic environmental consequences of industrial farming. So new tech, particularly the...

There’s something absurdly Strangelovian about the American quest for a perfect weapon. As Jeffrey Stern warns in The Warhead , his new history of The Paveway, the first “smart” bomb, weapons are always, like their human engineers, imperfect. “It’s always exploding somewhere,” Stern dryly notes, and those explosions in the Texas Instruments developed Paveway were not only unexpected, but often tra...

Why did Nixon trigger a remarkable cultural American renaissance while Trump has generated an avalanche of social media bluster, but few great movies, songs or novels? For Silicon Valley critic Jon Taplin , the problem isn’t just technological. Yes, he argues in Rolling Stone , social media has sucked a lot of the cultural vitality out of America and created a self-interested new class of influenc...

Is AI going through an adolescent crisis, even it’s still just a toddler? There certainly seems to be a lot of adolescent angst amongst our new AI overlords like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. In his latest essay , appropriately entitled “The Adolescence of Technology”, Amodei lays out all the existential dangers of AI while simultaneously rejecting the doomsday pessimism of many tech sceptics. Amode...

When asked what his parents did, Atlantic CEO and competitive marathoner Nicholas Thompson had a stock response. "My mother's an art historian at Babson," he would answer, "my father runs a male brothel in Bali." Thompson's new best-selling autobiography, The Running Ground , is an extended version of his extraordinary family history, focusing on the dramatic fall from grace of his Rhodes Scholar...

According to our favorite literary reviewer, Bethanne Patrick, these are the seven books that “will really matter” in 2026: * Land by Maggie O’Farrell — The Hamnet author returns with a luminous novel set in 1865 Ireland, two decades after the Great Famine. A father and son survey their region for the British—mapping the land in English when their hearts speak Gaelic. O’Farrell explores post-famin...

Pay attention to this interview. Because, you see, attention is seriously expensive — the Silicon Valley industry being worth $17 trillion, at least according to the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett , co-editor of a new manifesto entitled Attensity . For Burnett and his friends in the Attention Liberation Movement, the attention industry is "fracking" the human out of us. Liberating ourselves...

New books are like London buses. You wait and wait and then a handful comes at the same time. Take, for example, histories of the New York City vigilante Bernie Goetz. Last week, we featured the CNN legal analyst Elliott Williams who has a new book out on Goetz. And now we have another uncannily timely book on Goetz. This one from the Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, Heather Ann Thompson . Entitl...

This is the final conversation from DLD. And the most optimistic - at least from a European perspective. John Thornhill , the FT’s Innovation Editor and founder of Sifted , has a quite different take on Europe’s tech scene from our other guests. Yes, he acknowledges, the regulatory environment is complex. And, yes, late-stage capital is thin. But Thornhill sees something the doomsayers miss: resil...