Keen On America

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...

Perhaps the real question isn’t whether we can still talk about Israel, but whether we can afford not to. Silence, Daniel Sokatch warns, is complicity — and in both America and Israel, there’s already too much of it. Four years ago, Daniel Sokatch came on the show to discuss Can We Talk About Israel? , a guide for what he called “the curious, the confused, and the conflicted.” Now Sokatch is back...

As AI radically democratizes the world, we’re all about to become James Bond — or so says longtime spook watcher (and player) Anthony Vinci . In his new book, The Fourth Intelligence Revolution ,, Vinci argues that we must all become spies in order to save America. That’s the future of espionage in an age when, at least according to Vinci, the Chinese might be hacking our data to subvert the Unite...

Huawei matters, not just because it’s the world’s largest telecommunications company, but because it reveals so much about contemporary Chinese economics and politics. In House of Huawei , just shortlisted for the FT business book of the year, the Washington Post ’s Eva Dou has written the untold story of this mysterious company that has shaken the world. As much about its reclusive founder, Ren Z...

So how smart is the MAGA intelligentsia? According to Laura K. Field — a longtime observer of the American right and author of Furious Minds — the making of the new right has less to do with original intelligence than with timing and marketing. What the professors, philosophers, and trolls of this movement have done so effectively, Field argues, is transform rage into a winning political coalition...

The Belgian surrealist René Magritte was a smart artist, but could the 20th century futurist really have predicted the end of the Worldwide Web age? Not exactly, of course. But according to That Was The Week publisher, Keith Teare, Magritte’s 1929 painting, “ The Treachery of Images ” (featuring the image of a pipe with the immortal words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”), is a helpful way of thinking ab...

American intellectuals always seem to believe they are living through the end times. From the fascist poet Ezra Pound in the 1930s to the historian of fascism Timothy Snyder today, they flee America in despair. In Seekers and Partisans ,, Boston University historian David Mayers tells the story of these exiled thinkers between 1935 and 1941 — what he calls “the crisis years.” But crisis… what cris...

How should America choke enemies like Iran, Russia and China? Not on the battlefield—according to Edward Fishman , that’s yesterday’s game. Today, Fishman argues in Chokepoint , America has turned the world economy into its weapon of global domination. In his bestseller, already shortlisted for the FT’s best business books of the year, Fishman reveals that 21st century American power relies on eco...

Twenty years ago, the religious scholar Reza Aslan wrote his first book, There is No god but God , about the origins, evolution and future of Islam. It was a huge hit which lead to many other bestselling books on Islam and Christianity. Now Aslan has released a twentieth anniversary version of There is No god But God suggesting that the internet is reinventing Islam in ways that even he couldn’t h...

Last time the anti-monopoly crusader Tim Wu appeared on the show, he was warning broadly about the road to serfdom. But in his new book, The Age of Extraction , Wu gets much more specific. The real road to serfdom, he warns, runs through Silicon Valley. Forget for a moment about surveillance capitalism, Wu suggests, and imagine that the most existential threat to 21st century freedom and prosperit...

A couple of years ago, I asked the great military historian Richard Overy if World War Two had ended yet. Overy answered inconclusively, suggesting that wars were never really over. And such depressing wisdom is shared by Michael Livingston , a historian of another great war that shattered Europe - the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) between England and France. In his new book, Bloody Crowns , Livin...