Keen On America

MIT professor Thomas Levenson is one of America’s most celebrated science writers and filmmakers. In his upcoming new book, So Very Small , Levenson charts the history of germ theory to underline how modern scientific research has changed the world and saved tens of millions of lives. Not surprisingly, then, Levenson expresses deep concern about the Trump administration's attacks on the American s...

Brookings Senior Fellow Andre M. Perry has a new book out today which measures what he calls the “racial gap” in America and asks what we can do to close it. Entitled The Black Power Scorecard , it draws on extensive research and analysis to quantify how much power Black Americans actually have. Using big data metrics, Perry compares Black communities to each other rather than to white populations...

Who are the most symbolic mid 20th century American Jews? In Eminent Jews , New Yorker staff writer David Denby tells the remarkable stories of Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. He explains how each embodied a new Jewish confidence after WWII, contrasting with earlier generations' restraint. Each figure pushed boundaries in their own way - Bernstein through his music...

The Harper ’s cover story this month is about the ever-softening soft skills of American workers. Written by Lily Scherlis , it suggests that today’s emphasis on "soft skills" reflects America’s broader anxieties about automation, workplace conditions, and ever deepening socioeconomic inequality. After attending a Dale Carnegie training course, Scherlis observed how these programs frame human conn...

Lenin quipped that "there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." The post Liberation Day drama of early April 2025, That Was The Week’s Keith Teare suggests, will be remembered as one of those weeks. While the world isn’t exactly ending, Keith suggests, the “West” - or at least a post Bretton Woods American centric west - is finished. He may well be right in...

In late February in DC, I attended the US premiere of the Bertelsmann Foundation of North America produced documentary “ Lithium Rising ”, a movie about the extraction of essential rare minerals like lithium, nickel and cobalt. Afterwards, I moderated a panel featuring the movie’s director Samuel George , the Biden US Department of Energy Director Giulia Siccardo and Environmental Lawyer JingJing...

It’s a small world. The great David Rieff came to my San Francisco studio today for in person interview about his new anti-woke polemic Desire and Fate. And half way through our conversation, he brought up Daniel Bessner’s This Is America piece which Bessner discussed on yesterday’s show. I’m not sure what that tells us about wokeness, a subject which Rieff and I aren’t in agreement. For him, it’s...

Liberals won’t like it, but according to the Seattle based historian and podcaster Daniel Bessner , Trump’s wannabe imperial presidency is a “natural outgrowth” of the centralized power of the FDR presidency. In a provocative Jacobin piece , Bessner contends that executive power has been expanding since FDR, with the U.S. President increasingly becoming an "elected monarch." The leftist Bessner cr...

Question : What was the position of 19th century American Jews to the Civil War and Slavery? Answer : Complicated. Very complicated. Painfully and, in some ways, shamefully complicated, according to the historian Richard Kreitner . In his new book, Fear No Pharaoh , Kreitner explores the radically diverse positions that American Jews held toward slavery during the Civil War. He highlights 6 promin...

Stephen Witt ’s last book was entitled How Music Got Free . His latest, The Thinking Machine , a history of NVIDIA and its CEO Jensen Huang, might have been called How Intelligence Got Expensive . It’s about NVIDIA’s role in both the multi trillion dollar AI revolution and the world’s Taiwan-centric microchip economy. Witt explains how NVIDIA transformed itself from an obscure gaming graphics comp...

Should death row prisoners have the right to demand to be executed? In her debut book The Volunteer , Bay Area journalist Gianna Toboni exposes the absurd bureaucratization of the American death penalty system through the story of Scott Dozier, a death row inmate who volunteered for execution. Convicted of two murders on circumstantial evidence, Dozier preferred death to living 22-24 hours daily i...

How to measure the good life? According to Cambridge University’s Professor of Public Policy, Diane Coyle, quantifying progress doesn’t involve traditional economic metrics. In her new book, Measure of Progress , Coyle discusses how economic metrics like GDP, designed 80 years ago, are increasingly inadequate for measuring today's complex economy. She argues we need new approaches that account for...

Keach Hagey ’s upcoming new biography of OpenAI's Sam Altman is entitled The Optimist . But it could alternatively be called The Salesman . The Wall Street Journal reporter describes Altman as an exceptional salesman whose superpower is convincing (ie: selling) others of his vision. This was as true, she notes, in Altman’s founding of OpenAI with Elon Musk, their eventual split, and the company's...

According to the LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick , every generation gets the Gatsby it deserves. And our generation, the social media generation, has gotten it with Careless People , by the Sarah Wynne Williams, Facebook's former global policy director, which draws obvious parallels between Facebook and The Great Gatsby . Williams explicitly compares Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to Fi...

It might be Liberation Day today, but according to Paul Rice , founder of US Fair Trade and author of Every Purchase Matters , Trump’s tariffs are dumb. Rice firmly distances Fair Trade from Trump's controversial trade policies, calling them "backward" and "bad for American business." He explains how Fair Trade - which has expanded beyond coffee to include 40 products, from produce to furniture -...

Happy April Fools, everyone! Although, according to cultural critic David Masciotra every day in Trump 2.0 America is now April Fool's Day. KEEN ON AMERICA regular Masciotra argues that the new Trump's administration represents a "bipartisan phantasm" featuring absurdly unqualified and ignorant figures from both right (Hegseth & Vance) and left (RFK Jr. & Tulsi Gabbard). Masciotra explores...

This is an important interview. I’ve always thought of the political essayist Peter Wehner as representing the conscience of conservative, religious America. Wehner, who writes both for the Atlantic and the New York Times , has been offering a moral critique of Trump’s MAGA movement since 2015. And now that many of his direst warnings are being realized, his voice is amongst the most important in...

That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare believes that the publishing industry is about to be dramatically swept away by AI. I’m not sure. Here, for example, is Anthropic ‘s (Claude) 100 word summary of this week’s KEEN ON AMERICA conversation with Keith: “The conversation between Andrew Keen and Keith Teare discusses OpenAI's new image generation tool that can now integrate text with images—a capa...

Has Signalgate triggered a credible resistance movement to Trump 2.0? Brookings scholar and Atlantic columnist Jonathan Rauch isn’t particularly optimistic. He discusses the emerging resistance from law firms, media, and some religious groups, while expressing concern about Trump potential defiance of Supreme Court orders. Rauch observes that the opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism remains frag...

This isn’t exactly the radical message one would expect from a primary physician from Columbia, Maryland. But according to Dr Andy Lazris , co-author of A Return to Healing , Big Pharma wields an iron grip on the American healthcare system. And it’s only by aggressively challenging the control of the pharmaceutical industry, Lazris says, that we can begin to reform the system. Lazris discusses how...

Amidst all the chaos and hysteria of Trump 2.0, some things in America never change. As the Atlanta based journalist Brian Goldstone notes in There Is No Place For Us, America’s “invisible” working homeless population have been mostly ignored by both Democratic and Republican administrations. Goldstone reveals how approximately 4 million Americans who work full-time jobs cannot today afford housin...

Which countries are best positioned to thrive in the 21st century? No, it’s not Denmark. Nor China. According to Parag Khanna , the Singapore based geo-strategist, the three countries that top what he calls The Periodic Table of States are Germany, Japan and Switzerland. And the United States of America, Khanna says, going against conventional wisdom, isn’t far behind. Khanna’s analysis describes...

The writer Daniel Oppenheimer and his wife, Jessica, have been going to marriage therapy for many years. But, as he confessed in a recent New York Times magazine piece, he had to go to a superstar councillor to finally recognize that the biggest problem with his marriage was himself. Oppenheimer explains how renowned therapist Terry Real helped them, particularly by teaching him about healthy expr...

Few observers are more insightful than the critic William Deresiewicz at identifying the changing landscape of American culture. In my latest conversation with Deresiewicz, best known for his book Excellent Sheep , we explore how young American men are increasingly drawn to right-wing politics while feeling socially devalued and alienated by progressive rhetoric. Deresiewicz critiques universities...

How to achieve BIG change with small acts? According to the Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton , this requires what, in his new book, he dubs Ordinary Magic . Small psychological interventions , Walton argues, can create significant positive changes. He explains that people often face "agency-depriving questions" that undermine their confidence and sense of belonging. His research shows how addr...