Keen On America

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...

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...