Keen On America

Is the idea of “progress” the propaganda of the ruling class? Yes, according to Samuel Miller McDonald , author of Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy it . McDonald traces this “narrative formula” back 5,000 years to the first market empires in Mesopotamia—societies that were parasitic from the start, extracting from nature for profit and expansion. The Mesopotam...

They certainly are an odd couple. Silicon Valley veterans Dave McClure and Aman Verjee have been friends and business partners for 25 years — first at PayPal, then at 500 Startups, and now at Practical Venture Capital. Yet they have quite different styles, personalities and, above all, politics. What they share, however, is an unvarnished take on the world — especially on the much mythologized Sil...

If you think the American Dream is dead, then you probably don’t know the story of Lu Zhang . Born in Mongolia and educated in China, Zhang came to Stanford as a graduate student, struck it rich as a young tech entrepreneur and is now managing partner of her own early-stage venture fund . In our conversation, Zhang makes a compelling case for why Silicon Valley remains the world’s most important i...

We all know about the broken American Dream. But according to the American-based China scholar Minxin Pei , China’s dream is equally broken. In his new book, The Broken China Dream , Pie argues that the party-centric reforms of both Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping have, by definition, revived totalitarianism. So while he does acknowledge some material achievements of the communist revolution, Pei is...

For P eter Wehner , American politics is a tale of two Kellys. On the one hand, there’s the moral resistance of Arizona Senator Mark Kelly to what appears to be the gratuitous violence of American forces overseas. On the other hand, there’s the conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly who has openly fantasized about this bloodthirsty behavior. For Wehner, Megyn Kelly’s immorality is an excellent example...

Dick Cheney died four weeks ago, but his dark legacy lives on—quite literally—at Guantanamo Bay. The human rights lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan was among the first attorneys to enter the notorious prison in 2004, and what he found there shattered every official justification for its existence. The “worst of the worst”? Most detainees were never even accused of acting against America. Many were sim...

Who’s winning and losing in AI plays like a wacky race in that every week there seems to be a new leader. But that’s actually the wrong way of thinking about today’s AI revolution. The right questions are about the three Cs: Capability, Capital and Civics. That’s the lesson of Keith Teare’s latest That Was The Week tech newsletter which focuses on what he calls “the Year in Intelligence”. Nobody i...

“May you live in interesting times,” is supposed to be a Chinese mantra. But according to Cambridge University China expert, Christopher Marquis , our current interesting times are actually a curse for businesses seeking stability rather than disorder. Is this, then, a moment for “strategic hibernation” Marquis asks in a provocative Harvard Business Review piece. Yes, he mostly answers. Businesses...

Few journalists, certainly non-Italians, know Italian football as intimately as The Athletic’ James Horncastle , co-author of The Soccer 100. For Horncastle, Italian football presents a fascinating paradox: a nation celebrated for beauty, fashion, and La Grande Bellezza built its footballing identity around winning ugly. Forged in post-war austerity, the Italians embraced a minimalist, counter-att...

Should we be giving thanks today for our capitalist system? Maybe. But we should certainly be thankful for a 1100-page book about the history of capitalism published this week by the Harvard historian Sven Beckert . Entitled Capitalism: A Global History , this magisterial history, which took Beckert 8 years to write, covers the last thousand years of our increasingly dominant capitalist world. In...

In The Soccer 100 , the Athletic’s list of the greatest footballers in history, Lionel Messi is ranked number one. Perhaps. But he might also be its most boring—at least as a man. For Michael Cox , a contributor to The Soccer 100, Messi is undeniably great, but compared to his fellow Argentine Diego Maradona, he’s a nonentity. Football is theater. That’s why it’s the world’s game. So it’s the trag...

Maradona, Pele or Messi? It’s the eternal debate. Who is the greatest footballer of all time? According to The Soccer 100 , The Athletic’s new book ranking football’s hundred greatest players, the answer is Messi. But the North London based contributor Amy Lawrence cast a dissenting vote: she chose Pelé, deferring to those who witnessed the Brazilian king’s dominance firsthand. The book’s official...

Whither America? It’s the question that the Swedish writer Johan Norberg examines in both a recent Washington Pos t op-ed as well as his new book, Peak Human . What we can learn from history’s great civilizations, Norberg argues, is that they decline when they turn inward, away from both the outside world and innovation. “All Sparta, no Athens”, as he puts it. So what does that tell us not only ab...

I’ve spent this week in Washington DC where most people seem suspicious and sometimes even downright hostile about the future. Especially the supposedly “abundant” AI future being built in Silicon Valley. So where is this abundance going to come from? Some optimists, like The Great Progression ’s Peter Leyden , believe there’s an emerging coalition of smart technocratic elites who will construct a...

Call it the Zakaria paradox. We live in revolutionary times, the CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria explains, and yet it’s the reactionary MAGA politics of resentment that is currently ascendant. It’s this paradox that laces Zakaria’s 2024 book, Age of Revolutions (just out in paperback), a narrative that traces the history of liberalism from the 17th century revolutionary Dutch...

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...