Keen On America

Don’t blame women. Men are failing spectacularly and it’s totally their own fault. In What Is Wrong with Men , cultural critic Jessica Crispin borrows from Michael Douglas movies to dissect how masculinity devolved from Seventies style vulnerability into today's aggressive displays of insecurity. While billionaires like Musk compulsively impregnate women and Zuckerberg learns jujitsu to feel "manl...

So I get why Jeff Bezos isn’t popular in Venice this week. But why would Africans in general, and Kenyans in particular, not love Bill Gates after the philanthropist pledged to give away $200 billion of his fortune to Africa? According to Tablet staff writer, Armin Rosen , it’s because Gates’ top-down, metrics-driven approach often ignores what Africans actually want. Drawing from extensive on-the...

Are Donald Trump and Steven Miller terrorists? Pakistani-American lawyer and author Rafia Zakaria argues that their willfully cruel immigration policies reflect what she describes as an "architecture of terror." In her June Liberties Quarterly piece " Silencings ", Zakaria argues that these policies represent a deliberate strategy to terrorize communities and systematically dismantle the American...

In today’s age of authoritarian plutocracy, the UCLA political theorist Natasha Piano argues that we need to rethink the supposed “elitist” school of Italian thinkers like Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca. In her intriguing new book, Democratic Elitism , Piano suggests Pareto, Mosca and even the Marxist Antonio Gramsci were actually "democratic theorists of elitism" who warned that electoral inst...

Yes, there still are some well meaning folks in Silicon Valley. Take, for example, Jimmy Chen , founder and CEO of Propel , an app designed to simplify food assistance for 41 million of the poorest Americans. Growing up food insecure himself, the Stanford educated Chen left lucrative jobs at Facebook and LinkedIn to build technology that actually serves those who need it most, proving that some Va...

Can we ever really know Primo Levi ? We know his books, of course, especially If This Is A Man , the astonishing account of his survival from Auschwitz. But what, then, of his apparent suicide in 1987? How can a man who miraculously survived Auschwitz take his own life forty years later? That’s one of the questions that Joseph Olshan asks in Milo’s Reckoning , a new novel about Levi, suicide and o...

Yesterday, The Talking Heads , today, Dylan. The Great Man’s Jewish identity has long been overshadowed by his pantheistic status as American prophet. So when, for example, at the beginning of his biopic “ A Complete Unknown ” , Dylan arrives in Greenwich Village, he is presented as having no history, like a biblical prophet wandering out of the desert. But the London-based historian Harry Freedma...

Do The Talking Heads, the quinessential art school band of the East Village scene of the 1970’s, still matter? Very much so. At least according to the band’s biographer, Jonathan Gould , who believes that The Talking Heads remain "the archetype of what we now think of as the alternative rock group" - a band prioritizing aesthetic evolution over commercial success. Born from New York's affordable c...

What does it really mean to be a “good woman”? For the controversial podcaster and writer Elise Loehnen , female goodness is a misery trap. And so reclaim their happiness, to make themselves whole, Loehnen says, women need to stop being good. The former goop executive and co-author of the upcoming Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness explains how the seven deadly sins reveal women's hidden conditionin...

“Let me tell you about the very rich”, Scott Fitzgerald once said. “They are different from you and me”. One way they are different, the New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos reports, is that they own yachts - very very big, expensive yachts. In The Haves and The Have-Yachts , Osnos’ dispatches about today’s ultrarich, he takes us on board these boats to reveal the obscenity of our new gilded age. Fr...

It all began in 2019 at DeadSpin where Megan Greenwell was editor-in-chief. She had her dream job at the sports publication she'd always loved, leading a profitable digital media company with a devoted readership. Then the curse of private equity arrived. Within three months, everything collapsed. As Greenwell argues in her new book, Bad Company, she was pushed out, her entire staff followed, and...

25 years after serving as the bridge between the Web 1.0 and 2.0 revolutions, Google stands at the vortex of another technological revolution. The company's new AI mode threatens to destroy the "simple bargain" that has sustained the web since 2005 — Google’s deal with websites which sent them traffic in exchange for indexing their content. Unlike traditional search results with links, Google’s re...

Happy NO KINGS DAY! Today, as nationwide protests sweep America, historian and activist Mark Bray argues that Trump and his MAGA movement represent a type of American fascism rooted in the country's long history of racist backlash against the struggle for civil rights. As the author of the iconic Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook , Bray connects today's resistance to Trump to historical anti-fasci...

So what, exactly, is libertarianism? Spike Cohen , the Libertarian Party's 2020 vice presidential nominee, boils it down to "the principle of human respect"—treating people as individuals, not as what he calls "tax cattle." Speaking from FreedomFest in Palm Springs, the founder of You Are The Power offers a scathing critique of both major parties while exposing what he calls a federal funding sche...

According to Deborah Baker , author of Charlottesville: An American Story , America has become the Charlottesville of the Unite the Right Rally of August 12, 2017. Baker, who grew up in Charlottesville in the shadow of Jefferson's Monticello, watched in shock as neo-Nazis marched through her hometown in August 2017 with torches and flags. What began as her attempt to understand how such hatred cou...

Postmodern Patrimonialism. That’s the term Brookings Institution scholar Jonathan Rauch uses to describe Trump's second presidency, arguing it represents a 21st century model of running government as if it’s his own personal property. Rauch describes Trump 2's "everything everywhere all at once" strategy as a venture capital-like approach: launching numerous initiatives simultaneously to overwhelm...

FreedomFest , America’s annual celebration of libertarian values, begins tomorrow in Palm Springs. According to FreedomFest’s CEO Valerie Durham , there’s something quintessentially American about her libertarian creed. Attracting speakers as diverse as Cornell West and RFK Jr, Durham argues that the libertarian doctrine articulated at FreedomFest offers America a politics beyond the conventional...

Karen Hao has been warning us about Sam Altman’s OpenAI for a while now. In her bestselling Empire of AI , she argues that the Silicon Valley startup is a classic colonial power, akin to Britain’s East India Company. Like those colonial merchants and policy makers who wrapped profit-seeking in civilizing missions, OpenAI cloaks its relentless scaling ambitions behind the noble goal of "ensuring ar...

Do we get the nonfiction we deserve? LATimes book critic Bethanne Patrick wrestles with this question through five new books that both mirror and address our fractured psyche. From Melissa Fibos’ choice of celibacy over toxic sexual romance to a lone wolf crossing impossible borders, all these works expose a world grappling with isolation, AI empires, and the collapse of meaningful discourse. Whet...

Is the promise of AI abundance Silicon Valley’s biggest lie? That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare argues that while AI will inevitably reduce human labor and increase productivity, the real question isn't economic—it's about distribution. Who, exactly, benefits from all this abundance? Currently, it’s private companies like OpenAI and Google that own the technology; not you and I, the public. T...

No, I’m not amused. Today’s Trump vs Musk social media wrestling fiasco is one more example of how digital media is actually bemusing ourselves to death. Walter Lippmann , the brilliant but emotionally detached journalist who coined the term "stereotype," foresaw this nightmare a century ago. Lippmann’s intellectual biographer Tom Arnold-Forster explains how Lippmann's theories about "manufactured...

Revered by some, vilified by others, Ibram X. Kendi is America's most controversial anti-racism scholar. In this wide-ranging and frank conversation, the bestselling author of How to Be an Anti-Racist discusses his foundational (and republished) 2012 book The Black Campus Movement, drawing parallels between 1960s student activism and today's Gaza protests. Kendi argues critics deliberately misrepr...

Do we get the serial killers & heroes we deserve? The always generous literary critic Bethanne Patrick uses five new non-fiction books to respond to this rather absurd question. From French women resisting Nazis at Ravensbrück concentration camp to the CIA's Cold War book smuggling operation, these new books examine human behavior under the most extreme circumstances. Caroline Fraser's Murderl...

Black swan events used to be considered as one-of-a-kind events signifying something rare and exceptional. Today, however, we may be drowning in black swans. That, at least, is the view of global venture investor Christopher Schroeder , in his reflections on recent travel in India, the Gulf, Estonia & the United Kingdom. From the sudden eruption of India-Pakistan tensions that nobody saw comin...

Popeye might have gotten strong from eating spinach, but for the family of C.F. Seabrook, New Jersey’s narcissistic patriarch of industrialized farming, spinach has been a curse. In his new book The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook charts the dramatic rise and fall of his family’s Seabrook Farms. Part family memoir, part critique of indu...