Keen On America

How should we punish criminals? In Impermissible Punishments , the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Judith Resnik , provides a historical narrative of punishment in European and American prisons. Tracing the evolution from Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian Panopticon through post-World War II human rights frameworks, Resnik argues that punishment systems developed as a transatlantic ra...

In a week dominated by the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, Cynthia Miller-Idriss ’ insights as the founding director of American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab ( PERIL ) are particularly valuable. Her new book about what she identifies as “the new misogyny and the rise of violent extremism” is entitled Man Up . But its message might be summarized as Man D...

Today’s $3 trillion investment in AI is not only rational and beyond inevitable - it’s “predestined”. At least according to That Was The Week newletter publisher and techno-determinist Keith Teare. Exuberance is not only required, Keith argues, but absolutely essential in today’s AI mad gold rush. And he’s particularly critical of all skeptics - from traditional tech naysayers (like myself) to mai...

David Lesch is a poster child for something. I’m just not sure what. On the one hand, given his personal reinvention from Los Angeles Dodgers first-round draft pick to official biographer of Bashar al Assad, some might consider him proof that the American Dream still exists. But others, including even himself , would argue that his incredible pivot from baseball protege to Harvard-educated Middle...

Things aren’t quite as sunny on the environmental front as some recent guests suggest. According to the award winning science writer Peter Brannen , our planet is in an unprecedented crisis. We’re burning 500 million years of the earth's history in a few decades, Brannen warns, so we should all quit pretending that our recycling will miraculously save the planet. That said, though, his latest book...

If Geoffrey Hinton is the Godfather of AI, then Bruce Schneier might be described as the Godfather of Security. A celebrated cryptographer and computer security expert, Schneier’s latest co-authored (with Nathan Sanders) book is entitled Rewiring Democracy and speculates on how AI might transform our politics, government and citizenship. American democracy, Schneier notes, runs on archaic 1776 tec...

There are few more prolific Americans than the Harvard scholar, activist and athlete Cass Sunstein . The author of almost 30 books (including the best-selling Nudge ) as well as an influential advisor in the Presidencies of Biden and Obama, Sunstein’s new book, On Liberalism , is an unambiguously full throated defense of freedom. Both Reagan and FDR are part of the same big tent liberal family, Su...

Can we humans make it to 2125? According to Gary F. Bengier , author of Journey to 2125 , our species faces three existential threats over the next 100 years. His horsemen of the apocalypse are climate change, nuclear war and robots. No great surprises there. Where Bengier is more original is his stress on narrowing the manifold threats to humanity. Focus, focus, focus is Bengier’s species surviva...

For anyone who has seen Michael B. Jordan’s excellent new movie Sinners , it’s clear that any sort of deal with the devil - what has become known as the Faustian Bargain - is still very much alive. So relevant, in fact, that cultural historian Ed Simon has a book, just out in paperback, about its enduring relevance entitled Devil’s Contract . From Shakespeare and Goethe to Thomas Mann and Donald T...

How to bring peace to Gaza and Ukraine? Maybe the United Nations can help. Or, sadly, maybe not. But there really was a time, in the second half of the 20th century, when the United Nations could help bring peace to supposedly insoluble wars. The U.N.'s glory days were in the Sixties when it was run by a former Burmese school teacher called U Thant. His incredible story is told by his grandson, th...

Lead in gasoline powered cars have killed more people than those that died in World War Two. That’s the astonishing claim of David Obst who, in his new Saving Ourselves From Big Car , lays out a strategy to kick our self-destructive automobile addiction. The former investigative reporter, who worked with Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre story and represented Woodward and Bernstein for All the...

There is no more shakespearean parable of the tragic rise and fall of the postwar American meritocratic elite than Robert Strange McNamara . War hero, Harvard Business School, head of Ford, begged by JFK to take a role - any role - in Camelot. Then came the equally meteoric fall as JFK and then LBJ’s Secretary of Defense - Vietnam and all its death and deceit. With his brother William, Philip Taub...

Dumb globalization: America’s worst bet. That, at least, is the view of the Washington Post financial writer David J Lynch and author of The World’s Worst Bet . From Clinton to Bush, Lynch argues, America has bet stupidly on globalization and, not surprisingly, has lost. It’s no coincidence, he suggests, that the American dream has also unraveled in this tumultuous period. While globalization lift...

In our angry MAHA times, how can we get people trusting science and scientists again. According to MIT’s Alan Lightman , one of America’s greatest scientific writers, we need to both demystify science and humanize scientists. Lightman is the co-author, with Martin Rees, of The Shape of Wonder , a timely collection of essays about how scientists think, work, and live. We need to learn from scientis...

The human brain is so unbelievably complex that we barely understand its most basic functions. According to the British neuroscientist Daniel Yon , our brains - which some speculate are the most mysteriously complicated things in the universe - might even have minds of their own. In his latest book, A Trick of the Mind , Yon argues that our brains quite literally create our own realities. So is al...

According to former college president B everly Daniel Tatum , Trump’s war on university admissions is deeply hypocritical. On the one hand, she argues, his attack on affirmative action admissions policy is made in the populist language of “anti-woke” egalitarianism; but on the other, wealthy families are already gaming college admissions through clever manipulation of the system. A Harvard study r...

Globalization is dying, maybe even dead. Borders are back, baby. That’s the message in J onn Elledge’ s sparkling Brief History of the World in 47 Borders . In this romp around world history , Elledge introduces us to 47 of the world’s oddest borders including particularly weird ones in Detroit, Kaliningrad and Bolivia. So should be celebrating or mourning the rebirth of the border? Elledge is in...

When somebody says “win-win” in Silicon Valley, check your pockets. It’s usually some elaborate prelude to a sales pitch. And the only thing dodgier than a two-way win is the “win-win-win” narrative that my friend Keith Teare is selling this week. “ User, Publishers and AI: Everybody Wins ” is the title of Keith’s That Was The Week newsletter this week. And to be fair, what he’s selling is the dre...

It’s only been a quarter century, but IN FORMATION magazine is now back. Published by David Temkin with the tagline “Every Day, Computers are Making People Easier to Use”, IN FORMATION was originally designed in 1998 as the “Anti-Wired” - a glossily skeptical anti-tech publication for Silicon Valley insiders. And now, as more tech hysteria grips the Valley, IN FORMATION has - like the promise of A...

Is the convicted sex criminal Roman Polanski worth defending? Particularly in the context of “An Officer and a Spy”, his vaguely autobiographical 2019 movie about the Dreyfus case, the first Polanski film in a decade to be shown in the United States. Writing in Liberties Quarterly , Charles Taylor answers yes, intelligently making the case that we should concentrate on evaluating Polanski’s art ra...

It's become the new orthodoxy: social media is the cause of the epidemic of anxiety amongst adolescents. So the way to fix this is by taking away their smartphones. But according to Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times writer Matt Richtel , things are actually a lot more complicated than blaming everything on digital technology. In fact, we may have got things a bit upside down. In his new book,...

Shaka Senghor is one of America’s great survivors. Having spent 19 years in high-security prison, he has reinvented himself as a best-selling writer and public speaker on individual freedom and responsibility. In his new book, How to Be Free , Senghor argues that everyone — inside and outside jail — lives in hidden prisons of trauma, shame, and grief. Drawing from his own personal transformation i...

It hasn’t always been easy being Gary Marcus these last few years. OpenAI’s most persistently outspoken AI sceptic has been in minority, sometimes of one, in his critique both of Sam Altman’s claims about the imminence of AGI as well as the general “intelligence” and economic viability of ChatGPT. Since the supposedly “ botched ” release of GPT-5, however, even Sam Altman seems to want to be Gary...

Maybe he never went away. But Dr Strangelove is back now at the heart of America’s new military-industrial-digital complex. And Strangelove 2.0 might offer an even more existential threat than Kubrick’s original cigar-chewing model played with such absurdist aplomb by the great Peter Sellers. While the first Strangelove was just dumb, today’s powers-that-be at the Pentagon are both stupid and corr...

What’s the matter with America? We’ve been told for years about the dumb working class MAGA voter. That they are exploited by Trump, that their interests are the reverse of a self-interested Republican cultural or economic elite. But according to the iconoclastic Tablet magazine contributor Michael Lind , we’ve got it the wrong way around. MAGA Voters are anything but stupid, he argues. That's why...