Keen On America

Sociocide is a chilling word. Coined by the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, it means the deliberate destruction of a society's social infrastructure and capacity to function as a cohesive unit. According to Boston College sociologist Charles Derber , this kind of social suicide is now destroying America. In his latest book, Bonfire , Derber argues that America is slipping and sliding into a s...

It’s the fantasy of countless Wall Street analysts. Amran Gowani traded his lucrative career in hedge funds for the scarily solitary world of novel writing. His debut satirical novel Leverage draws from his insider experience at investment banks and hedge funds, exposing the toxic culture and perverse incentives that drive corporate America's financial sector. In this bracingly frank conversation,...

How can anyone forget those photos of Trump’s sons celebrating over the carcasses of dead animals that they shot in Africa? Fortunately, not all sons of American Presidents behave so tastelessly in the wild. As Nathalia Holt argues in her new history, The Beast in the Clouds , Teddy Roosevelt’s sons found redemption - and regret - in their (peaceful) 1928 quest for the giant panda in northwestern...

The last time Peter Wehner , who I’ve always imagined as America’s conscience, appeared on the show to talk about the “ethical darkness” that has fallen upon America, I suggested that this was an “important” interview. Today’s conversation is much more important than being simply important. Based on Wehner’s recent Atlantic piece about why MAGA evangelicals have turned their back on PEPFAR, the Am...

From suburban swimming pools and SUVs to White Lives Matter rallies, the Johns Hopkins anthropologist Anand Pandian has been exploring the everyday walls of American life. In his new book, Something Between Us , Pandian travels across the United States in his search to both climb and overcome these walls. What he finds is a nation tragically at war with itself. Through intimate portraits of commun...

So what, exactly, is the AI wedge? According to Ewan Morrison , author of For Emma , an already acclaimed novel about our dystopian biotech future, it means a “V-shaped” force that starts small but gradually drives people apart, replacing human connection with technological mediation."It starts off really small. You end up with something like internet dating... it begins as a novelty and then peop...

You've heard it before and you'll hear it again. AI is a gold rush. It will change everything. But 2025 is different, That Was The Week tech newsletter publisher Keith Teare argues. This is the year that the AI gold rush is changing everything. In our reflection of the first six months of 2025, Keith argues that we're witnessing a fundamental "phase shift" - not just another tech cycle, but an inf...

On July 4, 2025, is America still worth the fireworks? For Paul Orgel, producer of America 250, C-SPAN's upcoming celebration of 250 years of independence, the answer is a full stars 'n stripes YES! But even this C-SPAN veteran acknowledges the complexity of celebrating America in 2025. "We're not just going to be celebratory," Orgel admits, "but realistic to the good, the bad and the ugly of our...

Few people have spent more of their lives thinking about the Nazis than the English filmmaker and writer Laurence Rees . In his new book, The Nazi Mind , Rees offers a lifetime of knowledge about the Nazis to warn about today’s fragility of democracy. Borrowing from his extensive interviews of both former Nazis and Holocaust survivors, Rees discusses how Nazi ideology developed, why democracy prov...

If the American dream died in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, then who killed it? According to the crime novelist Terrence McCauley, the JFK assassination was carried out by organized crime. That’s the heart of his new novel, Twilight Town , in which McCauley reexamines the JFK assassination in Dallas. But this wasn't Oliver Stone style CIA or shadowy government conspirators, pulling well-oiled...

If everything is propaganda (even this show), then we are forever engaged in a war to control other people's minds. That, at least, is the view of the self-described “freedom fighter”, Connor Boyack , the libertarian author of the best-selling Tuttle Twins series of children books. In his latest piece of Tuttle Twins propaganda, A Guide to the World’s Worst Ideas , Boyack argues against all forms...

As we transition from the social media age (the internet of trolls) to the AI epoch (the internet of tolls), has the publishing apocalypse finally arrived? That’s the question Keith Teare and I discuss in our That Was the Week summary of tech news. Two major court cases this week—Getty Images vs. Stability AI and the Anthropic lawsuit—have fundamentally shifted the legal landscape around AI and co...

Yesterday’s show was on the Great White Hoax of manufactured racism in America. Today’s is on Black Capitalists , the title of a provocative new book by Rachel Layrea. But is this a great black hoax? Or might her focus on race and class really be a blueprint for a more ethical 21st century capitalism? Laryea, who holds a PhD from Yale and works in wealth management at JPMorgan Chase, argues that B...

There’s something fishy about what Philip Kadish calls The Great White Hoax. It’s his new book about America's long con - how racist scientific hoaxes have shaped two centuries of racist politics. From the 1840 Census Scandal to Henry Ford to George Wallace, Kadish exposes the conmen who have tried to sell racism to America. But here's the chilling twist: many of these fraudsters knew exactly what...

Next month, America will celebrate the centenary of the Scopes Trial , the so-called 1925 “Monkey Trial” on evolution that riveted a nation. Although perhaps celebrate is the wrong word to describe the Tennessee trial that not only riveted America but also divided it. According to the historian Brenda Wineapple , author of Keeping The Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation , th...

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...