Keen On America

For lonely young men who have forgotten how to read, the LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick some some simple advice: Get Queer Quicker. And to make her point, Patrick discusses five great books on today’s male identity crisis - including from Keen On alums like Jessa Crispin and Andrew Lipstein . Patrick argues that reports of the literary man's death are greatly exaggerated - he's just evolved...

Those who do win . Those are Keith Teare’s immortal words to describe the winners of today’s Silicon Valley battle to control tomorrow’s AI world. But the real question, of course, is what to do t o win this war. The battle (to excuse all these blunt military metaphors) is to assemble the AI pieces to reassemble what Keith calls the “jigsaw” of our new chat centric world. And to do that, the veter...

Is the history of New York City the heart of the American story? Or does it exist in parallel, perhaps even independently, from the main American narrative. As with everything about the Big Apple ( so good they named it twice), the answer is both. Or everything. At least according to Jonathan Mahler , author of The Gods of New York , a new history of the egoists and opportunists who remade the cit...

It’s not often that there’s sunny news on the environmental front, especially from grizzled activists like the great Bill McKibben . But in his new book, Here Comes the Sun , McKibben argues that the sun - or, at least, solar power - might actually save the earth. There’s a pagan quality to McKibben’s manichaean message: the sun, he says, offers both last chance for the climate and a fresh chance...

Who is to blame for the redistricting farce that many fear is breaking American democracy? There’s Trump, of course, and his gang of MAGA crazies. But according to David Daley , the author of Antidemocratic, Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections, the real culprit is anything but crazy. It’s John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In a devastating 2019 decision...

Might the supposedly revolutionary future of AI healthcare actually be a return to the gig economics of Uber and Airbnb? That’s the intriguing proposition put forward by former Kaiser Permanente Chief and Stanford Medical School professor Robert Pearl , a prescient observer of the future of his industry. According to Pearl, we may be returning to the digital future: freelance doctors, he predicts,...

Anyone lucky enough to have seen Wim Wenders’ 2023 masterpiece Perfect Days is familiar with the dignity of professional Japanese toilet cleaners. Mark Eltringham , the publisher of the excellent future of work newsletter Workplace Insight , hasn’t seen Wenders’ movie, but he is nonetheless sympathetic to the dignity of the armies of invisible workers paid to clean up our mess - from those who tid...

Once upon a time, it was very easy for the American left to determine progress. The working class was good, the traditional left knew, and so progress meant embracing the economic and cultural interests of that class. Today, however, in our age of authoritarian populism in which part, at least, of the (white) working class appears nostalgic for the economics and culture of industrial America, thin...

Tech nostalgia. Winner-take-all economics. The cult of "storytelling". A Stanford educated aristocratic elite. This was the week that nothing changed in Silicon Valley. Alternatively, it was the week that radical change broke some ChatGPT users hearts. That, at least, is how That Was the Week tech newsletter publisher Keith Teare described this week in Silicon Valley. From Sam Altman's sensitivity...

I’m not sure on this one. On the one hand, Isabelle Boemeke is a pin-up of an environmentally activist generation - going from superstar Brazilian model and Instagram influencer to the author of Rad Future , a manifesto about how nuclear electricity will save the world. On other other hand, there’s something slightly troubling in our social media age about this kind of dramatic trajectory - especi...

Few of the world’s great scientists have given more thought to the existential threats to humanity than the irrepressible British cosmologist and astronomer Martin Rees . He’s the co-founder of Cambridge University’s Centre for Existential Risk as well as the author of the 2003 book Our Final Hour . So it’s striking that Rees has a quite different take on the existential risk of artificial intelli...

So will AI wipe us out? According to Geoffrey Hinton , the 2024 Nobel laureate in physics, there's about a 10-20% chance of AI being humanity's final invention. Which, as the so-called Godfather of AI acknowledges, is his way of saying he has no more idea than you or I about its species-killing qualities. That said, Hinton is deeply concerned about some of the consequences of an AI revolution that...

We all are familiar, of course, with Robert Altman’s classic 1971 movie about the settling of the west, McCabe and Mrs Miller . But most of us, I’m guessing, don’t know about another McCabe, this one African-American, the black Moses in fact, who almost created an African -American land in Oklahoma. McCabe’s all-too-American story is told in Caleb Gayle ’s new book, appropriately entitled Black Mo...

Should we be defending American democracy if it never really existed? That’s the controversial thesis at the heart of Osita Nwanevu ’s new book, The Right of the People . What America needs, the Baltimore-based Nigerian-born Nwanevu argues, is a radical reinvention of its political system. Nwanevu dismantles liberal pieties about traditional American institutions, arguing that the founders deliber...

In what climate pessimists define as our environmentally apocalyptic times, we’ve become the metaphorical frog in the boiling water. That, at least, is the bleak conclusion of Roy Scranton , the author of Impasse , a new book about climate change and the end of technological progress. For the deeply pessimistic Scranton, the planet is screwed. So the real question is how we can live ethically in t...

How many more times can we report on a week in tech that changed the world? But here we go again…. We just had a week in Silicon Valley where everything , supposedly, changed. At least according to Keith Teare , publisher of the tech That Was the Week weekly newsletter. But last week really really was a special week, Keith insists. It was the week when AI became an actor. When it broke all our tra...

Like it or not, Trump and his surreal version of a libertarian patrimonial America is reshaping the world. At least in what the FT’s Janan Ganesh dubs “the high summer of Donald Trump”. But my old friend Jason Pack , host of the excellent Disorder podcast, doesn’t believe that a strategy of short-term chaos is a viable long-term global strategy for America. Pack argues that while Trump may be achi...

Are we Rome yet? It’s become all too easy to compare contemporary America's woes with those of late republican Rome. And even easier to argue that the democracy destroying Donald Trump is the second coming of Julius Caesar. But according to the distinguished American classicist David Potter , author of Master of Rome, we’ve got Julius Caesar all wrong. Don’t trust Cicero’s version of Caesar, Potte...

For five hundred years, scientists as credible as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin and Freud chipped away at the scientific existence of God. So, by the beginning of the 20th century, Nietzsche was able to announce the death of God. A century later, however, modern science is now resurrecting God. That, at least, is the suggestion of Michel-Yves Bollore, the co-author of Europe’s latest publish...

For all its multiple obituary notices, the American Dream is alive and kicking. That, at least, is the view of Matson Money CEO and founder, Mark Matson , author of Experiencing the American Dream . But you have to work for it, the Scottsdale, Arizona based Matson says, arguing that many Americans have lost agency over their own lives. Growing up in poverty in West Virginia, Matson built an $11.7...

Podcasts are ruining our lives. That, at least, is the thesis of the sometime podcaster, Liel Leibovitz . It’s the insidious charm of chat, Leibovitz believes, that is behind the faux intimacy of popular podcasters like Joe Rogan. Speaking from Tel Aviv, the Tablet magazine editor-at-large argues that what began as a revolutionary medium for deep, unfiltered conversation has devolved into the same...

Yesterday, the Canadian writer Diane Francis argued that Donald Trump should consider Xi Jinping’s China a competitor rather than an enemy. Perhaps. But in this zero-sum “competition” between Trump and Xi for top tough guy, there can only be one winner. As Xi Jinping’s father’s biographer, Joseph Torigian explains, Xi had a brutally harsh upbringing. In his new book about Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun,...

Should America go soft on China? According to the Toronto based foreign affairs writer Diane Francis , the United States ought to consider Xi Jinping’s China a competitor, rather than a enemy. In contrast, Francis views Vladimir Putin’s Russia as not just an enemy, but an existential threat to Europe, North America and free world. Putin Won’t Stop , Francis’ latest Substack post argues. Unless, pe...

I’ve always considered my friend Keith Teare a bit weird. Maybe it’s living in Palo Alto amidst the tech plutocracy. But I wonder if the That Was The Week weekly tech news publisher has finally lost his mind. In this week’s conversation, he speculates that OpenAI will soon be worth $10 trillion while its closest competitor Anthropic, will be valued at $5 trillion. Has he finally gone totally bonke...

Can Democrats pull a Ronald Reagan? That's the provocative question at the heart of Peter Wehner and Jonathan Rauch 's New York Times intriguing piece about how the Democrats can win back the presidency in 2028. Just as the neo-liberal Reagan crushed the cardigan-wearing Carter by promising economic vitality over malaise, Democrats now have a chance to flip the script—if only they can drop their a...