Keen On America

Two years ago, free speech champion Greg Lukianoff came on the show to express his concerns about conservative students getting cancelled on college campuses. Today, he’s terrified of the President of the United States. The CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ( FIRE ) has spent decades defending free speech against overzealous university administrators. But in Trump’s second...

What the former Finance Minister of Chile Andres Velasco has called the Deliveroo effect is most evident in Poland. Despite unprecedented economic growth and prosperity, Velasco explains, Poles remain miserable. The problem, he suggests, is that we’ve become so used to the magical efficiencies of the digital revolution, that we expect instant miracles in both our political and economic lives. That...

In the midst of today’s AI hysteria, have we forgotten about blockchain technology and the seductive Web3 promise of decentralization? Robbie Bach , longtime Xbox chief and lieutenant of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, certainly hasn’t. In his new novel, The Blockchain Syndicate , the prescient Bach imagines not only a giant political crypto grift, but also warns about the siren song of Distri...

Bubble or not? But the debate that’s been raging over the current AI exuberance might be missing the bigger point. Yes, of course, it’s a trillion-dollar speculative bubble built around AI start-ups that mostly remain unprofitable. But as I note in my weekly tech conversation with That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare (who is significantly more optimistic than me), it’s more than just another Si...

What’s the point of going to college? There used to be an obvious answer to this: to acquire the knowledge to get a better job. But in our AI age, when smart machines are already challenging many white collar professions, the point of college is increasingly coming into question—especially given its time and financial commitment. According to Caroline Levander , author of the upcoming InventEd , t...

What unites Rudy Giuliani and Hunter Biden? According to the New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel , they are both on the payroll of corrupt foreign interests. In his new book, Devils’ Advocates, Vogel reveals the hidden story of Giuliani, Biden and the other Washington insiders who sold access to American foreign policy. From the Balkans to Brazil, shadowy foreign players have discovered that the...

How to Save the American experiment? That’s the question the Yale historian John Fabian Witt asks this week in both a New York Times f eature and his just published new book, The Radical Fund . Sometimes, Witt suggests, we need what he describes as a “calamity” to recognize and protect the American experiment in democracy. In the 1920s, the historian reminds us, this happened with the emergence of...

For financial journalist Elizabeth MacBride , the New American economy is like the old one - only worse. Describing it as the “Frankenstein version of neo-liberalism”, MacBride explains that business has overtaken government to create ever-more-powerful bankers like Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon. But all is not lost. In her upcoming new book, Capital Evolution , co-authored with the VC Seth Levine, M...

Churchill described Communist Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. For Pulitzer Prize winning Princeton historian, Paul Starr , America might be the new Soviet Union. It’s a such contradiction, in fact, that he entitles his new book American Contradiction , in an attempt to describe the dominant narrative of “revolution and revenge” from the 1950s to today’s America. But unlik...

At 85, the venerable Jeffrey Archer has lived through enough crises to stay calm and carry on whatever the stormy political weather. The best-selling author—who has sold 275 million books and, as a Conservative MP and party chairman, served Margaret Thatcher for 11 years—speaks with the authority of someone who witnessed the Iron Lady’s firm politics up close and personal. But Mrs Thatcher isn’t t...

History rarely repeats itself, especially speculative bubbles. As it becomes increasingly obvious that today’s AI bubble will dramatically burst, the real question is not when but how. What makes this boom profoundly different from the DotCom crash of the nineties is OpenAI’s attempt to create an AI private monopoly by positioning itself at the center of trillions of dollars worth of self-serving...

Tom Brokaw famously described America’s World War II servicemen as the “Greatest Generation”. But according to the historian David Nasaw , the Americans who fought in the Second World War are better understood as The Wounded Generation . His eponymous new book describes the pain and hardships that 16 million veterans endured upon their return home - a tragic story of PTSD, racism and family breaku...

According to the platform economist Sangeet Paul Choudary , author of Reshuffle , today’s AI hype is a feature rather than a bug in Silicon Valley. It’s a deliberate mechanism to attract capital in an “attention-poor, capital-heavy economy” while distracting from the lack of short-term business results. So who will ultimately win and who will lose in today’s AI arms race? While Choudary predicts p...

It’s springtime for charlatans. At least according to Quico Toro, coauthor (with my old friend Moises Naim) of Charlatans , a new screed about how grifters, swindlers and hucksters are bamboozling the media, the markets and the masses. If you listen to Toro, you wouldn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. Everywhere - on our screens, in our churches, even in the White House - there lurk charla...

Next Monday is Columbus Day. Or should it be Indigenous People’s Day? According to the historian Matthew Restall we should be celebrating both Columbus and Indigenous People on Monday. The author of the timely The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus , Restall places Genoa’s most famous sailor as a prisoner of history - endlessly protean to reflect each era’s changing values. The many lives of Colum...

Last weekend, the English reggae band UB 40 played in the Orpheum in Los Angeles and included in the set their 1980 song “Tyler”. Tyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not soTyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not soTyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not soTyler is guilty white judges said soWhat righ...

Just be yourself many career coaches tell us. But for the psychologist and entrepreneur Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic , the reverse is true. Don’t Be Yourself Chamorro-Premuzic advises in his new book, arguing that authenticity Is overrated and what to do instead. Drawing from extensive behavioral science research, Chamorro-Premuzic contends that success comes not from unleashing your unfiltered self bu...

What unites America, it used to be said, is a common commitment to “freedom”. But in our disunited times, it's worth remembering that two incompatible versions of freedom have actually divided rather than brought the United States together. As the historian Nicholas Buccola notes in his intriguing new book One Man’s Freedom , these competing freedoms are represented in the thinking of the two icon...

We’ve done a couple ( here and here ) of shows recently about the war on cars. But we never discussed the connections, both literal and metaphorical, between the damage of “Big Car” and “Big University” . According to the tenured Emory law professor Deepa Das Acevedo , what she calls in her new book, The War on Tenure , is really an attempt to transform the modern university into an academic versi...

One of the most painful lessons of the Kirk assassination is that conservatives are running rings around progressives in political mobilization - especially of young Americans. So how to make the left relevant in America again? For the philosopher Michael Brownstein , co-author of Somebody Should Do Something , progressives need to learn to lose both cleverly and loudly. And they can learn from NR...

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” were, of course, the closing words from Polanski’s 1974 movie, Chinatown . But the point of Jeff Chang ’s new biography of Bruce Lee, Water Mirror Echo , is that by 1973, when Lee died, Asian America was more than just Chinatown. Lee made Asian America, Chang argues, by giving Asian Americans dignity. Chang shows how Lee’s journey from segregated Seattle and San...

Back in 1990, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur called Jim Fruchterman chose purpose over profit. In his new book, Technology for Good , Fruchterman explains how nonprofit leaders like him are using software and data to solve our most pressing social problems. Thirty five years ago, when his investors vetoed a reading machine for the blind because the market was only $1 million annually, Fruchterman w...

It’s not exactly news that the Nazis didn’t like the Jews. But according to the Rutgers historian Jochen Hellbeck , author of World Enemy Number One , the Nazi obsession went so far as to believe that the Soviet Union was owned and operated by a global cabal of Jews. And so, Hellbeck argues, it was not the Western powers but Communist Russia that Nazi Germany viewed as an existential threat—in fac...

The numbers are mind blowing. According to Roadkill authors Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay , cars have killed more people than both world wars combined. That’s how toxic our relationship with cars has been over the last century, they argue. The UN figures they cite—60 to 80 million direct deaths since the automobile’s invention—don’t even include premature deaths from air pollution or the millions...

It’s the $320,000 question both parents and students are asking themselves: Is that four-year liberal arts degree really worth it? According to Brandeis University President Arthur Levine, it’s a question they should, indeed, be asking. In his co-authored book The Great Upheaval , Levine argues that the United States is experiencing a profound transformation not seen since the Industrial Revolutio...