Keen On America

Lead in gasoline powered cars have killed more people than those that died in World War Two. That’s the astonishing claim of David Obst who, in his new Saving Ourselves From Big Car , lays out a strategy to kick our self-destructive automobile addiction. The former investigative reporter, who worked with Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre story and represented Woodward and Bernstein for All the...

There is no more shakespearean parable of the tragic rise and fall of the postwar American meritocratic elite than Robert Strange McNamara . War hero, Harvard Business School, head of Ford, begged by JFK to take a role - any role - in Camelot. Then came the equally meteoric fall as JFK and then LBJ’s Secretary of Defense - Vietnam and all its death and deceit. With his brother William, Philip Taub...

Dumb globalization: America’s worst bet. That, at least, is the view of the Washington Post financial writer David J Lynch and author of The World’s Worst Bet . From Clinton to Bush, Lynch argues, America has bet stupidly on globalization and, not surprisingly, has lost. It’s no coincidence, he suggests, that the American dream has also unraveled in this tumultuous period. While globalization lift...

In our angry MAHA times, how can we get people trusting science and scientists again. According to MIT’s Alan Lightman , one of America’s greatest scientific writers, we need to both demystify science and humanize scientists. Lightman is the co-author, with Martin Rees, of The Shape of Wonder , a timely collection of essays about how scientists think, work, and live. We need to learn from scientis...

The human brain is so unbelievably complex that we barely understand its most basic functions. According to the British neuroscientist Daniel Yon , our brains - which some speculate are the most mysteriously complicated things in the universe - might even have minds of their own. In his latest book, A Trick of the Mind , Yon argues that our brains quite literally create our own realities. So is al...

According to former college president B everly Daniel Tatum , Trump’s war on university admissions is deeply hypocritical. On the one hand, she argues, his attack on affirmative action admissions policy is made in the populist language of “anti-woke” egalitarianism; but on the other, wealthy families are already gaming college admissions through clever manipulation of the system. A Harvard study r...

Globalization is dying, maybe even dead. Borders are back, baby. That’s the message in J onn Elledge’ s sparkling Brief History of the World in 47 Borders . In this romp around world history , Elledge introduces us to 47 of the world’s oddest borders including particularly weird ones in Detroit, Kaliningrad and Bolivia. So should be celebrating or mourning the rebirth of the border? Elledge is in...

When somebody says “win-win” in Silicon Valley, check your pockets. It’s usually some elaborate prelude to a sales pitch. And the only thing dodgier than a two-way win is the “win-win-win” narrative that my friend Keith Teare is selling this week. “ User, Publishers and AI: Everybody Wins ” is the title of Keith’s That Was The Week newsletter this week. And to be fair, what he’s selling is the dre...

It’s only been a quarter century, but IN FORMATION magazine is now back. Published by David Temkin with the tagline “Every Day, Computers are Making People Easier to Use”, IN FORMATION was originally designed in 1998 as the “Anti-Wired” - a glossily skeptical anti-tech publication for Silicon Valley insiders. And now, as more tech hysteria grips the Valley, IN FORMATION has - like the promise of A...

Is the convicted sex criminal Roman Polanski worth defending? Particularly in the context of “An Officer and a Spy”, his vaguely autobiographical 2019 movie about the Dreyfus case, the first Polanski film in a decade to be shown in the United States. Writing in Liberties Quarterly , Charles Taylor answers yes, intelligently making the case that we should concentrate on evaluating Polanski’s art ra...

It's become the new orthodoxy: social media is the cause of the epidemic of anxiety amongst adolescents. So the way to fix this is by taking away their smartphones. But according to Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times writer Matt Richtel , things are actually a lot more complicated than blaming everything on digital technology. In fact, we may have got things a bit upside down. In his new book,...

Shaka Senghor is one of America’s great survivors. Having spent 19 years in high-security prison, he has reinvented himself as a best-selling writer and public speaker on individual freedom and responsibility. In his new book, How to Be Free , Senghor argues that everyone — inside and outside jail — lives in hidden prisons of trauma, shame, and grief. Drawing from his own personal transformation i...

It hasn’t always been easy being Gary Marcus these last few years. OpenAI’s most persistently outspoken AI sceptic has been in minority, sometimes of one, in his critique both of Sam Altman’s claims about the imminence of AGI as well as the general “intelligence” and economic viability of ChatGPT. Since the supposedly “ botched ” release of GPT-5, however, even Sam Altman seems to want to be Gary...

Maybe he never went away. But Dr Strangelove is back now at the heart of America’s new military-industrial-digital complex. And Strangelove 2.0 might offer an even more existential threat than Kubrick’s original cigar-chewing model played with such absurdist aplomb by the great Peter Sellers. While the first Strangelove was just dumb, today’s powers-that-be at the Pentagon are both stupid and corr...

What’s the matter with America? We’ve been told for years about the dumb working class MAGA voter. That they are exploited by Trump, that their interests are the reverse of a self-interested Republican cultural or economic elite. But according to the iconoclastic Tablet magazine contributor Michael Lind , we’ve got it the wrong way around. MAGA Voters are anything but stupid, he argues. That's why...

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...