Keen On America

“We’ve taken our democratic functioning for granted, and we’ve forgotten what it looks like to actually have to fight for it.” — William Hitchcock   Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, and there’s a lot of sombre talk about the forever wars triggered by the attack. But sometimes, fighting evil might be necessary. So argues William Hitchcock , whose A Shadow Over the World is a major new...

“I’m a military correspondent, but I would be totally happy if there was world peace and I had to change jobs.” — Yonah Jeremy Bob   Oil hit $100 a barrel (again) today. Donald Trump confessed, with uncharacteristic honesty, that the Iran war won’t end until after the November elections. And while Israel’s war with Iran ended back in April, America’s hasn’t, with the US and Iran shooting at each o...

“The number one tool that autocratic actors have is not voter suppression or gerrymandering. It’s making you feel alone and isolated.” — Skye Perryman   Three years ago, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward Skye Perryman came on the show to wonder what our kids will one day ask us about what we did to confront authoritarianism in America. Now she returns with an answer in the form of her New...

“A sailor doesn’t control the sea, but understanding the waves matters enormously.” — Mikko Ketovuori   Our mood, as always, is miserable. Iran, the price of oil, the AfD, the long-term cancers from 9/11 dominate the headlines. But today’s guest thinks we’ve got the mood wrong. The writer Mikko Ketovuori — who wrote the intro to the Finnish edition of my own The Internet Is Not the Answer — has a...

“We might have invented the aliens that we’ve been looking for.” — Adam Kirsch   First he took on the transhumanists. Then the settler-colonialism fanatics. Now Adam Kirsch aims his critical pen at the ultimate crazies — the flying saucer crowd. In We Want to Believe , Kirsch explains how aliens went mainstream and why this once-crackpot conspiracy theory has become a mainstream political and cult...

“When people trade, even before fees and commissions, the average trade loses money.” — Alex Edmans   Isaac Newton might be able to foresee the movement of the stars, but he couldn’t foretell the madness of men. It was a lesson that cost the great physicist £4 million (in today’s money) when he threw his fortune into the South Sea Bubble. This priceless parable in Newtonian psychology opens The Ma...

“You can’t talk people out of wanting a burger.” — Erin Somers   In February, Bruce Friedrich came on the show to explain how lab-grown meat would save the planet. Today’s guest is less sanguine about this revolution. Erin Somers — author of the bestselling novel The Ten Year Affair and a twenty-year vegetarian — spent a year exploring our supposedly meatless future. In “ Where’s the Beef? ”, the...

“I trust them to kiss the government’s ass. I don’t trust them to serve me.” — Keith Teare   Who to trust in an age of AI agents? Especially when it seems as if these swarming agents — akin to the gang of adolescents in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies — are developing minds of their own.   At this week’s G20 Innovation Ministerial in North Carolina, Donald Trump and his minions produced a hand...

“We all kinda secretly at some level wanna use power against our enemies.” — Stephanie Slade   Earlier this week, Silicon Valley heretic Paulina Borsook railed against libertarianism. Today, the libertarians get their turn. Stephanie Slade is a senior editor at Reason and the author of Fusionism in which she lays out a contemporary path for American conservatism.   For Slade, libertarianism is cap...

“If a society cannot find a way to deal with something that is actively melting it from within, then that is a terminal symptom.” — Finn Brunton   A couple of days ago, Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, led a billion-dollar funding round in Polymarket. As today’s guest, the fintech expert Finn Brunton , notes in an insightful Harper’s essay this month, prediction markets like Polym...

“On my headstone, it would say: I was always right. I never lied, and no one paid any attention to me.” — Paulina Borsook   A quarter of a century ago, the tech journalist Paulina Borsook published Cyberselfish , one of the earliest critiques of Silicon Valley’s libertarian culture. While the heretical book got widely reviewed, it not only didn’t sell but cursed her writing career, Borsook claimin...

“We’re hardwired for love. We are taught to do violence, and to hate.” — Dana Mashoian Walrath   A couple of months ago in Warsaw, the Polish writer and Jewish activist Konstanty Gebert argued that Gaza wasn’t a genocide. Today’s guest disagrees. In The Book of Genocides , graphic artist and anthropologist Dana Mashoian Walrath draws ten genocides including what she sees as the crimes against huma...

“We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods, and we are not.” — John West   Back in 2006, at the height of Web 2.0 optimism, Time made YOU person of the year. The user-generated technology of the internet, Time implied, would make all of us into digital gods of memory and forgetting. Twenty years later, the script has been totally flipped. Now we know that the internet is all-too-...

“It’s a dying gasp of white supremacy — and I say dying with a caveat, because that part depends on us.” — Sonali Kolhatkar   Yesterday, Wendy Lesser suggested that Americans can learn much from the anti-fascist history of Berlin in the 1930s. Today, Rising Up With Sonali host Sonali Kolhatkar is even more explicit. Yes, she argues in her new book, Breaking ICE , the 2020s are eerily similar to th...

“Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” — Wendy Lesser   “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I Am a Berliner), JFK famously said in West Berlin on June 26, 1963, in the face of Soviet imperial tyranny. Today, Wendy Lesser is offering the same defiance in her new book Berlin Before and After . Only Lesser offers a cautionary mirror for our times of not just post-Soviet Putin but also wannabe-tyr...

“There’s no exit in capitalism.” — Jeremy Adelman   Is that ongoing quarrel of modern politics, the battle over capitalism, just a storm in a teacup? Economic historian Jeremy Adelman thinks it might be. In The Capitalist Era , Adelman argues that all camps — left and right, Keynesian and Hayekian, socialist and libertarian — accept the unavoidability of global capitalism. There is no alternative,...

“Seward had all the money and Seward had all the bullies. Lincoln didn’t have money or bullies, but by God, he had the people.” — Jonathan Earle   Yesterday, Kurt Andersen fictionalized a 21st-century broken America without an Abe Lincoln as savior. Today we talk about the man himself with Jonathan Earle , author of He Has the People , a new history of the 1860 election that made Lincoln president...

“We are the beginning of a bright and shiny dark age.” — Kurt Andersen, from The Breakup   It’s 2045 and America has got divorced. That’s the premise of The Breakup , by the historian and novelist Kurt Andersen . “The future is fiction. It hasn’t happened yet,” the historian in Andersen reminds us. But his near-term fictional future, an America of civil war and national divorce, certainly isn’t in...

Grandfathers, grandfathers. Yesterday, David Baerwald talked about his grandfather, Ernst Baerwald, an American spy in Second World War Japan. Today, Katie S. Sanders talks about her grandfather, Murray Simon, whose life was saved by an American spy in Second World War France. In Ortiz’s War , co-authored with historian Nicholas Reynolds, Sanders writes about Peter Ortiz, who became the Allies’ se...

“That’s how I would picture fascists: this never-satisfied, dissonant climb to nothing… to ruin.” — David Baerwald   Earlier this month, the historian James M. Scott came on the show to talk about those three deadly days in August 1945 when the Americans dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Today we return to that war in the skies above Japan. Only with a fictional twist.   Behind this fiction, how...

What’s the truth about our AI future? Our guests have different takes. On the one hand, Dave McClure and Aman Verjee predict a $7 trillion future for just three AI startups in 2027. On the other, Salima Bhimani doesn’t believe that Silicon Valley has the imagination to create the moonshot to address our jobless future.   For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare , it’s a time for what he calls “...

“Just because I think something is dumb doesn’t mean I think it should be illegal.” — Nicholas Anthony on meme coins   Earlier this month, Elizabeth Warren called for an SEC investigation of Donald Trump’s meme coin. Is the Pope Catholic? No surprise there. More revealing are other critics of the “presidential” token which netted our Grifter-in-Chief $636 million last year. Take, for example, Nich...

“If we continue to build for people and not with people, we won’t have a say in what this technology will look like or do in ten or twenty years.” — Salima Bhimani   Finally some inventive news in our summer of Luddite discontent. Salima Bhimani spent six and a half years at Google X’s moonshot factory as its first Chief Strategist for Responsible Tech. So thank her for the (responsible) magic of...

“When will be the end of thus exhausting the earth, and how far will avarice finally penetrate?” the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder asked in 77 AD. Two thousand years later, the answer seems clear. At least according to the contemporary Scottish natural historian James Crawford . In his new book, The Vanishing Earth , the Edinburgh-based Crawford provides dispatches from what he calls the...

“Our language is valuable, and we’ve gotta hold on to that. That’s the most human thing we have.” — Jeff Jarvis   Last week, to celebrate episode 3,000 of the show, the New York Times ’ Sam Roberts articulated the art of the obituary. Borrowing from Citizen Kane , he described it as the Rosebud method. Obits are all about life (death only figuring as an afterthought), Roberts explained, so hunt fo...