Keen On America

For media moguls, we are living, to borrow from Dickens, in the best and worst of times. As Nicholas Thompson confessed to me at DLD, The Atlantic CEO is simultaneously “excited” and “terrified” by the power of AI to revolutionize his media industry. On the one hand, Thompson explains, AI represents the best tool journalism has ever had for locating needles in haystacks. On the other hand, AI has...

One of the most bracing presentations at DLD this year was given by Crunchbase's data queen Gene Teare . Breaking down America's VC dominance, Teare's speech might have been entitled "64% and Counting." As Teare told Keith and me in a special Teare family edition of our regular That Was The Week show, the VC gap between Europe and America is only getting wider. From 2014 to 2023, US share of globa...

Not everything at DLD this year was on the growing US-European economic and technological divide. There were many speeches on the environment including from heavyweights like Kate Raworth. And I had the opportunity to catch up with my favorite advocate of regenerative agriculture, the managing partner at Acton Capital, Jan-Gisbert Schultze . According to Schultze, today's deepest problem is our sp...

Few speakers at DLD this year were more sombre than The Economist 's deputy executive editor Kenneth Cukier . “Civilizations aren’t killed,” Cukier says, “they commit suicide.” It's now "three minutes to midnight" in Europe, he warns, and what he called the priceless "vase" of the liberal order is about to shatter. Borrowing from Hemingway's description of personal bankruptcy, Cukier argues that c...

Few people experienced the Dot-Com bubble with more vertiginous intensity than Bill Gross , the Pasadena-based founder of Idealab and many many other internet startups over the last 30 years. So when I sat down with Gross at DLD, I couldn’t resist opening with the boom/bubble gambit. How, I asked him, does today’s AI hysteria compare with the Web 1.0 madness of the Nineties? While Gross - whose cu...

Yesterday’s show from the DLD conference was about the need for Europe to relearn the language of power. Today, things get even more dire for our European friends. I asked another DLD speaker, Carl Benedikt Frey , a Swedish economic historian who teaches at Oxford, whether it’s “game over” for Europe in terms of its ability to compete with American and Chinese big tech. His answer: not yet—but clo...

I'm just back from another stimulating Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich where all the talk was about the growing technological and political gap with the United States and China. From Machiavelli and Hobbes to Napoleon and Bismarck, Europe invented the modern concept of state power. But decades of outsourcing security to NATO and the US have left the continent dangerously rusty both...

For a country forever flirting with amnesia about its racial history, America sure struggles to forget. Take, for example, Bernie Goetz, the white subway vigilante, who shot four black teenagers on a NYC subway in December 1984. There’s not just one - but two major new books about the anything but colorblind Goetz case which we’ll be discussing over the next couple of weeks. The first is by the CN...

In his new co-authored book It’s On You , the English behavioral scientist Nick Chater exposes how the rich and powerful - the THEM - have convinced us that we're to blame for society's deepest problems. Can't lose weight? That's because YOU lack willpower—or so THEY would have you believe. But willpower, Chater argues, is a convenient myth. And that means the behavioral economists got it wrong to...

According to the New Yorker writer Nicholas Niarchos , Africa is rich in both raw materials and tragic paradox. We know about the continent's wealth in the rare earth minerals that enable our global transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. But it's contemporary African paradoxes that Niarchos describes in his important new book, The Elements of Power . There's the paradox of clean energy's di...

We all have our own favorite Robert Redford movie. But what's Redford’s most prescient film about today’s America? His Seventies trilogy about American politics — The Candidate , Three Days of the Condor and All the President's Men — are all, in their own profound ways, lasting meditations on the United States. But of the three, it might be Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975) which ha...

Can Swiftynomics save America? That’s the intriguing thesis at the heart of Misty Heggeness’ new book about Swift’s impact on the American economy. Entitled Swiftynomics , it’s as much about Taylor Swift’s fans as it is about the megastar herself. “Taylor Swift is not moving mountains in local communities,” Heggeness acknowledges. “Her fans are. They are willing to fork out thousands of dollars, t...

The Music Man was a 1957 Broadway show written by Meredith Willson, a musician from the small Iowa town of Mason City. The popular play (and later movie) featured a con man called Harold Hill who ripped off the naive people of River City, a fictional small town based on Mason City. Nearly seventy years later, Josiah Hesse , another Iowan from Mason City, sees the Music Man narrative replaying itse...

Few biographers can claim to know what it feels like to be Thomas Jefferson more than the Charlottesville-based historian Andrew Burstein . The author of many books about Jefferson, Burstein’s latest, Being Thomas Jefferson , offers an “intimate history” of the great man. From Jefferson’s views on love and race to his take on mortality, Andrew Burstein gets inside America’s most controversial and...

There was a time in the mid 20th century, the literary historian Gayle Feldman reminds us, when the book business was cool. Back then, New York publishing resembled Silicon Valley tech and the Mark Zuckerberg of his day was the Random House founder Bennett Cerf. In her new biography of Cerf, Nothing Random , Feldman tells the story of this celebrity entrepreneur, noting that he helped pioneer the...

Trump’s Gazan dream is to overlay the complex human history with his own narcissistic real-estate fantasy. But for Maia Carter Hallward , co-author of a new contemporary history of Gaza, this once vibrant Mediterranean entrepôt linking Africa, Asia and Europe is now defined more by nightmare than dreams. “In peace studies, we talk about positive peace, which has rights, liberties, the ability to r...

What if the right isn’t wrong - or, at least, totally wrong, about education? That seems to be the conclusion of James Traub , a liberal educationalist, who has spent the last year visiting the civics programs of American high schools. Neither the 1619 Project nor Trump’s 1776 Report seems to be the message of Traub’s account of these travels, The Cradle of Citizenship . Schools can help save our...

Timing is everything. The versatile American journalist Kenneth Rosen was last on the show in early 2021 talking about troubled teens . Since then, Rosen has travelled extensively in the Arctic and has just published Polar War , a narrative about the chilling costs to both America and the world of the new Cold War in the Arctic. Timing is, indeed, everything, especially in the book business. But R...

Will Trump be removed by the 25th Amendment? No, it’s never going to happen - not after Jan 6 or Venezuela or Greenland or any other mad foreign or domestic adventure. That, at least, seems the conclusion of Rebecca Lubot , author of Keeping a Finger on the Button , a timely new analysis of the 25th Amendment. But the real question isn't about the nuclear button—it's about who controls the White H...

The great John Maynard Keynes explained it a century ago. In his 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," Keynes predicted that the future would be defined by economic abundance rather than scarcity. But such a cornucopian future, Keynes warned, would create societies teetering perpetually on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Keynes' vision has been updated by Niskanen Center SV...

Back in 2018, the New York Times reporters Katie Benner and Erica L. Green exposed the disturbing reality of the T.M. Landry college prep school in rural Louisiana. Celebrated as a “miracle” institution that successfully sent underprivileged black students to elite colleges, Benner and Green uncovered a miserable school that doctored college applications and bullied its students. Seven years later...

WTF will happen in 2026? Over the last week, we’ve been running a series of interviews about the promise and peril of the new year. And in this new weekly magazine-style KEEN ON AMERICA show, we feature highlights of conversations with Charles Kupchan, Julia Hobsbawm , K eith Teare , Jason Pack , Jim Goldgeier , Chris Schroeder and Soli Ozel . And I end the show with some thoughts from the David M...

If Darwin’s evolutionary theories couldn’t kill America’s faith in God, then what could? That’s the message in Daniel K. William ’s new book, The Search for a Rational Faith . Americans, Williams argues, have always sought to combine scientific knowledge with Christian apologetics. From the Founding Puritans to John Adams, Harriet Beecher and Martin Luther King, Americans have clung to the idea th...

Hold onto your collars. The AI-generated crisis of work is here, and the storm will concentrate on white-collar workers from the professional economy. According to Julia Hobsbawm , founder of Workathon.io, these workers are about to experience the dismal reality of blue-collar redundancy. 50% of the US workforce will be freelance by 2030, some experts warn, making this transition the biggest shift...

Happy New Year everyone! As the final show of 2025 and first for 2026, we turned the tables and had me interviewed by the formidable D avid Masciotra . As you will see, my reading of 2025 is more optimistic than many of my guests. And my sense about 2026 is that it will be a happier year for America than 2025 (which isn’t saying much). As I explain to David, I suspect the zeitgeist is shifting bac...