Keen On America

How to write about the kaleidoscopic Sixties in the gloom of 2025? According to James Grady , author of the classic Six Days of the Condor and the new mid-century novel American Sky , the key is calibrating nostalgia with unflinching honesty about the past's complexities. "You can't just write about the past and not have a focus also on current times and really the future," Grady explains. The nov...

Both the American left and right are revolted by elites. But whereas the right has channeled its distaste for the powers-that-be into Trump and MAGA, the left has mostly failed to capitalize on populist hatred of American elites. So what to do? According to the influential Turkish political theorist Soli Ozel, progressives need to reread Christopher Lasch, author of the 1995 classic, The Revolt of...

Dubbed the Meme Queen of Depression by Mashable, Aiden Arata 's real goal on Instagram was to build a big enough following to convince traditional publishers to let her write a book. Thus her new collection of essays, You Have a New Memory , in which Arata reveals the chillingly empty realities about her millennial "Doom" generation's relationship with social media. There really isn't much of an i...

The troubling thing about William F. Buckley , the media savvy founder of modern American conservatism, isn’t so much his politics, but his likability. How could such an overtly reactionary racist and homophobe (even if he was himself gay), be such a charming fellow beloved by all who knew him? That’s one of the central questions which Sam Tanenhaus addresses in his massive new biography Buckley ....

Yesterday, we focused on the death of the American way of work. But today the news on the AI front isn’t quite as dire. According to the New York based economic historian Dror Poleg , AI will be too busy to take your job. That’s the provocative thesis of Poleg’s upcoming book focused on the radical opportunities in our AI age. He argues that AI's massive energy consumption will actually preserve h...

In 1963, Jessica Mitford published her remarkable account of the American funeral industry, An American Way of Death . Over sixty years later, another distinguished Englishwoman, the workplace futurist Julia Hobsbaw m, is announcing the death of the American way of work. Whereas Mitford exposed the predatory practices of funeral directors, Hobsbawn reveals how corporate America has become equally...

It’s an old thesis - that capitalism has created a religion out of money. But nobody, not even Marx, has been quite as theologically explicit as Paul Vigna, author of The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin . The former Wall Street Journal reporter argues that money literally functions as our modern deity, complete with faith-based belief systems, sacred ritu...

Douglas Rushkoff has spent decades warning how each new digital technological “revolution” has promised liberation but actually only compounds social and economic injustice. Six months after describing AI to me as the "first native app for the internet," the New York City media theorist and author returns with a provocative historical parallel: AI as the next "dumb waiter." Just as Thomas Jefferso...

So who killed privacy? It's the central question of Tiffany Jenkins ' provocative new history of private life, Strangers and Intimates . The answer, according to Jenkins, is that we are all complicit—having gradually and often accidentally contributed to privacy's demise from the 16th century onwards. Luther started it by challenging Papal religious authority and the public sacraments, thereby cre...

Is Mohammed bin Salman a tyrant or an enlightened despot? According to the former Wall Street Journal publisher Karen Elliott House , Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Man Who Would Be King , a new biography of MBS, he might be both. Or neither. House who spent years reporting from and writing on Saudi Arabia, offers a complex (and unofficial) portrait of the Crown Prince's ambitious transforma...

Sociocide is a chilling word. Coined by the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, it means the deliberate destruction of a society's social infrastructure and capacity to function as a cohesive unit. According to Boston College sociologist Charles Derber , this kind of social suicide is now destroying America. In his latest book, Bonfire , Derber argues that America is slipping and sliding into a s...

It’s the fantasy of countless Wall Street analysts. Amran Gowani traded his lucrative career in hedge funds for the scarily solitary world of novel writing. His debut satirical novel Leverage draws from his insider experience at investment banks and hedge funds, exposing the toxic culture and perverse incentives that drive corporate America's financial sector. In this bracingly frank conversation,...

How can anyone forget those photos of Trump’s sons celebrating over the carcasses of dead animals that they shot in Africa? Fortunately, not all sons of American Presidents behave so tastelessly in the wild. As Nathalia Holt argues in her new history, The Beast in the Clouds , Teddy Roosevelt’s sons found redemption - and regret - in their (peaceful) 1928 quest for the giant panda in northwestern...

The last time Peter Wehner , who I’ve always imagined as America’s conscience, appeared on the show to talk about the “ethical darkness” that has fallen upon America, I suggested that this was an “important” interview. Today’s conversation is much more important than being simply important. Based on Wehner’s recent Atlantic piece about why MAGA evangelicals have turned their back on PEPFAR, the Am...

From suburban swimming pools and SUVs to White Lives Matter rallies, the Johns Hopkins anthropologist Anand Pandian has been exploring the everyday walls of American life. In his new book, Something Between Us , Pandian travels across the United States in his search to both climb and overcome these walls. What he finds is a nation tragically at war with itself. Through intimate portraits of commun...

So what, exactly, is the AI wedge? According to Ewan Morrison , author of For Emma , an already acclaimed novel about our dystopian biotech future, it means a “V-shaped” force that starts small but gradually drives people apart, replacing human connection with technological mediation."It starts off really small. You end up with something like internet dating... it begins as a novelty and then peop...

You've heard it before and you'll hear it again. AI is a gold rush. It will change everything. But 2025 is different, That Was The Week tech newsletter publisher Keith Teare argues. This is the year that the AI gold rush is changing everything. In our reflection of the first six months of 2025, Keith argues that we're witnessing a fundamental "phase shift" - not just another tech cycle, but an inf...

On July 4, 2025, is America still worth the fireworks? For Paul Orgel, producer of America 250, C-SPAN's upcoming celebration of 250 years of independence, the answer is a full stars 'n stripes YES! But even this C-SPAN veteran acknowledges the complexity of celebrating America in 2025. "We're not just going to be celebratory," Orgel admits, "but realistic to the good, the bad and the ugly of our...

Few people have spent more of their lives thinking about the Nazis than the English filmmaker and writer Laurence Rees . In his new book, The Nazi Mind , Rees offers a lifetime of knowledge about the Nazis to warn about today’s fragility of democracy. Borrowing from his extensive interviews of both former Nazis and Holocaust survivors, Rees discusses how Nazi ideology developed, why democracy prov...

If the American dream died in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, then who killed it? According to the crime novelist Terrence McCauley, the JFK assassination was carried out by organized crime. That’s the heart of his new novel, Twilight Town , in which McCauley reexamines the JFK assassination in Dallas. But this wasn't Oliver Stone style CIA or shadowy government conspirators, pulling well-oiled...

If everything is propaganda (even this show), then we are forever engaged in a war to control other people's minds. That, at least, is the view of the self-described “freedom fighter”, Connor Boyack , the libertarian author of the best-selling Tuttle Twins series of children books. In his latest piece of Tuttle Twins propaganda, A Guide to the World’s Worst Ideas , Boyack argues against all forms...

As we transition from the social media age (the internet of trolls) to the AI epoch (the internet of tolls), has the publishing apocalypse finally arrived? That’s the question Keith Teare and I discuss in our That Was the Week summary of tech news. Two major court cases this week—Getty Images vs. Stability AI and the Anthropic lawsuit—have fundamentally shifted the legal landscape around AI and co...

Yesterday’s show was on the Great White Hoax of manufactured racism in America. Today’s is on Black Capitalists , the title of a provocative new book by Rachel Layrea. But is this a great black hoax? Or might her focus on race and class really be a blueprint for a more ethical 21st century capitalism? Laryea, who holds a PhD from Yale and works in wealth management at JPMorgan Chase, argues that B...

There’s something fishy about what Philip Kadish calls The Great White Hoax. It’s his new book about America's long con - how racist scientific hoaxes have shaped two centuries of racist politics. From the 1840 Census Scandal to Henry Ford to George Wallace, Kadish exposes the conmen who have tried to sell racism to America. But here's the chilling twist: many of these fraudsters knew exactly what...

Next month, America will celebrate the centenary of the Scopes Trial , the so-called 1925 “Monkey Trial” on evolution that riveted a nation. Although perhaps celebrate is the wrong word to describe the Tennessee trial that not only riveted America but also divided it. According to the historian Brenda Wineapple , author of Keeping The Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation , th...