Keen On America

Did American eugenics really fuel the murderous euthanasia programs of the Nazis? Yes, according to Susanne Paola Antonetta , author of The Devil’s Castle , a history of Nazi eugenics and euthanasia. According to Antonetta, pioneering American eugenicists not only influenced Nazi thinking—Hitler himself corresponded with them and praised U.S. sterilization laws in Mein Kampf —but the New York City...

On November 20, 1925, Robert Francis Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. A hundred years later, Bobby might matter more than ever. Chris Matthews , longtime host of MSNBC’s “Hardball”, is already the author of one bestselling RFK biography, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit . And today, to celebrate the centennial of his birth, the pugnacious polemicist has a new book about RFK’s abiding re...

25 movies and 0 hits: it’s been a particularly rough quarter for Hollywood. But as I discuss with the cultural commentator David Masciotra, it’s actually been a pretty strong quarter in terms of movie quality. From Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” and Jennifer Lawrence’s astonishing performance in “Die My Love” to a glitteringly bald Emma Stone in “Bugonia” and Ethan Coen’s “Honey...

It’s the ultimate financial nightmare. Kristin Collier , a young student in Minnesota, woke up one morning to discover that her mother had taken out $200,000 in Kristin’s name. Collier tells this story in What Debt Demands , a book about America’s student debt crisis that is both personal and political. Collier, who proudly defines herself as a “democratic socialist”, believes that student debt is...

There are those who ask why so many Americans speak Spanish. But according to the Latino media entrepreneur and historian Javier Marin , you might as well ask why so many Americans speak English. Over the last half century, the Hispanic community in America has risen from 3.5 to 62 million. In his new history of Latino media, Live From America , Marin charts how networks like Univision and Telemun...

The big news in Silicon Valley this week of a supposedly orchestrated “Panic Campaign” against AI. According to the researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt , the campaign about the apocalyptical inevitability of AI is being driven by doomers like former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever . Weiss-Blatt’s analysis are now being taken seriously in a Silicon Valley not adverse to conspiracy theories - particu...

“Predictions are hard,” Yogi Berra once quipped, “especially about the future”. Yes they are. But in today’s AI boom/bubble, how exactly can we predict the future? According to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Aman Verjee , access to the future lies in the past. In his new book, A Brief History of Financial Bubbles , Verjee looks at history - particularly the 17th century Dutch tulip mania and th...

America is not only a good country, but it can also make the world a better place. That’s the somewhat surprising conclusion of the progressive Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, whose new book, The Case for American Power , argues that America remains the one great power that can improve the world. Hamid, once a militant anti-Iraq War campus activist, has undergone a striking ideological jour...

We’ve done shows before on how contemporary America resembles late-stage Soviet society. But none quite as intriguing as with the Russian-born, US-based journalist Mikhail Zygar . In The Dark Side of the Earth, his new history of the Soviet Union’s demise, Zygar underlines the moral exhaustion of its citizens. People no longer believed in anything, he reports on the collapse of this vast Euro-Asia...

The world is a remake. Yesterday’s show featured the MAGA remake of The Handmaid’s Tale . Today it’s Dr Strangelove 2.0 and the remaking of the trillion-dollar military-industrial complex in Silicon Valley. As William Hartung, co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine , notes, Dwight Eisenhower’s old military-industrial complex has migrated west to Silicon Valley. It even has a Strangelovian an...

Back in 2021, Margaret Atwood came on the show to give her dark take on the American future. Four years later, Atwood’s prescience, particularly in her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale , is increasingly self-evident. As the journalist Irin Carmon notes, MAGA America has become an Atwoodian dystopia of trad wives and state fecundity. But it is also, Carmon warns in her new book Unbearable , a place...

How to fix today’s epidemic of loneliness? For the New Yorker cartoonist and author Sophie Lucido Johnson , the answer involves both pigeons and polyamory. As she argues in her brand new book, K in: The Future of Family , Johnson provides the tools to forge kinship in everything from asking for help on a grocery run, to choosing to have roommates later in life to combat loneliness, to living in mo...

Lawyers usually like the law. The more the better. But in addition to his life as a top corporate lawyer, Philip K. Howard has made a second career out of criticizing the invasion of law into American society. In books like The Death of Common Sense , Life Without Lawyers and his latest, Saving Can-Do , Howard argues that a uncontrolled thicket of legal red tape is undermining innovation in Americ...

My neologism-du-jour i s “enstatification”. It’s what is happening in MAGA America with Trump’s Gaucho-style swaggering into the economy and his reversal to autarky and a back-to-the-future Monroe Doctrine. With the growth of a 19th-century style state power, America is trying to become the new China. Meanwhile, as Keith Teare notes in his latest That Was The Week n ewsletter, China is the new Ame...

One big story captures all six books selected by the Financial Times for their short list of best business books of 2025. As the FT’s Senior Business Writer, Andrew Hill , notes, it’s the story of the shift in global economic power from the United States to China. It’s game over. From Dan Wang’s Breakneck , which contrasts China’s “engineering state” with America’s “lawyering nation,” to Ezra Klei...

We all have our roles. I’m the smug San Francisco intellectual and the Orlando-based Dr Chloe Carmichael is the fearlessly authentic psychologist. She’s also the author of Can I Say That?, a feisty defense of free speech in our time of cancellation and unfriending. Most of us are too scared to say what we think, Carmichael argues about this anxiety-ridden, intolerant age. Such self-censorship is d...

A week is a long time in American politics. I did this interview with Alex Zakaras last week, before the midterms and Trump’s slide in the polls. But in spite of Mamdani’s victory earlier this week, the left still needs to figure out how to successfully reinvent itself in the MAGA age. That, at least, is the argument that Zakaras, a progressive political philosopher, makes in his new book Freedom...

If money is supposed to make you happy, then why do tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen seem so miserably angry? That’s the question at the heart of Jacob Silverman ’s new book, Gilded Rage , an expose of Silicon Valley’s angry plutocracy. The weird thing is that a lot of these billionaires behave little differently from the apoplectic lumpen commentariat on X or Redd...

Bell Curve author joins the intellectual mob (Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, Ross Douthat et al) and finds God Charles Murray , the infamous co-author of the Bell Curve , has joined the crowd and is Taking Religion Seriously . But what if God doesn’t take him s eriously —or worse, finds his work on cognitive elites sufficiently annoying to sentence him to give powerpoint presentations on IQ for ete...

Lea Ypi’s new book about her Greek-Albanian grandmother is a philosophical meditation on dignity, a history of Ottoman collapse and Balkan nationalism, and a warning about our own indignant age of manufactured identities and resurgent tribalism. Back in January 2022, Lea Ypi came on the show to discuss Free , her brilliant account of growing up in communist Albania. Now Ypi , who teaches political...

A former US ambassador to Russia warns of America’s slide into autocracy As American ambassador in Moscow between 2012 and 2014, Michael McFau l had a front row seat on Russia’s slide into autocracy. But in his new book, Autocrats vs Democrats , McFaul warns that it’s not just Putin, but also Xi and Trump who are fueling the “new global disorder”. And the intended audience for his jeremiad against...

A Nobel laureate on why we should sometimes trust scientists, and not politicians, to fix the future Peter Agre won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003, but he’s not interested in playing God. Or even know-it-all. “When Nobel Prize winners start predicting what the stock market would do, or who’s going to win the World Series, they may be beyond their specialty,” he says. Yet in his new book, Ca...

Why our panic about AI is nothing new—and why history suggests we have far more creative agency over our technological future than either Silicon Valley’s determinists or the neo-Luddites would have you believe. Who isn’t afraid of AI? But according to the San Francisco-based technology historian Vanessa Chang , that’s nothing new. So, she says, our ChatGPT age should give us hope rather than the...

WHY LISTEN? Because Jeff Pearlman strips away the myth to reveal the real Tupac Shakur—a brilliant, wounded, and fiercely human artist whose story still speaks to America’s struggles with family, race, trauma, and truth. Happy Halloween, everyone. To celebrate, we’re turning our attention to one of white America’s most mythic—and most feared—figures: the hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur. In Only God Ca...

After almost two decades in limbo, Michael Pack’s once-rejected Iraq War film finds its moment — a reminder that even the most supposedly “patriotic” war stories reveal the tragic cost of battle. Seventeen years after PBS rejected his Iraq War documentary The Last 600 Meters as “too pro-military,” conservative filmmaker Michael Pack is finally seeing it air — fittingly, on Veterans Day weekend. Pa...