Keen On America

In an era where even toothpaste shopping can trigger an existential crisis, intellectual historian Sophia Rosenfeld explore how we became both imprisoned and freed by endless options. Her new book The Age of Choice traces our evolution from a world where nobility bragged about not having any choices to one where choice itself has become our modern religion. From voting booths to gender identity, f...

According to Andrew Lipstein , here are 3 questions at the heart of his acclaimed new novel Something Rotten : a) What do we want masculinity to look like? b) What constitutes truth? c) How to present death in our culture? Yeah, seriously big questions for anb ambitious novel. Set in Copenhagen, Something Rotten follows a canceled NPR host wrestling with masculinity in liberal society. Lipstein, a...

From Dylan to democracy, from Bobby Kennedy to Putin's Russia - this wide-ranging conversation with Michael Ignatieff riffs off “ The Adults in the Room ,” his latest essay for Liberties Quarterly. A liberal intellectual and politician who grew up enchanted by the Sixties counterculture, Ignatieff is deeply concerned by the American lurch into MAGAism. That said, however, the Canadian still seems...

A new book by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Nicholas Carr is always a major event. And today’s release of SUPERBLOOM: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart offers a prescient critique of our social media age. As Carr explains, our assumption that more communication leads to better understanding is fundamentally wrong. Instead, he suggests that excessive communication through digital platforms...

Is AI the latest chapter in our long history of creating an all-knowing God? AI ethicist Christopher DiCarlo certainly suspects it is. In his new book " Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It, DiCarlo argues that we are creating AI systems with godlike capabilities that will eventually exceed all human intelligence through their ability to make unprecedent...

Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it’s another anti tech book. In Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia , digital activist Mike Pepi argues that major tech companies like Meta, Amazon, Tesla, and OpenAI are all driven by "platform logic" - a business model focused on creating intermediary layers that mediate human activities while collecting data and maintaining control. While different tech...

In Keith Teare’s That Was the Week newsletter for this week, he categorically asserts that there is no oligarchy in Trump’s America. Instead there are “just technologists with a passion for change and, of course, self-interest”. But I’m not so sure. So in this issue of our weekly show, Keith and I debate the nature of tech power in America. Keith argues argues against characterizing tech leaders l...

So what, exactly, is a philosophical life? According the University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard , author of the much acclaimed new book Open Socrates, it means being able to ask questions with the intuitive fluency of Socrates. In our conversation, Callard confesses her own hilarious early attempt to emulate Socrates by approaching strangers at the Art Institute of Chicago, and explains w...

This is the last and amongst the liveliest of my interviews at Munich’s DLD Conference this year. An old friend who has appeared on KEEN ON several times before, Andrew McAfee is a MIT professor who co-wrote the 2014 classic The Second Machine Age . In our conversation, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the DLD Conference, McAfee reflects on the technological changes of the past 20 years,. He ac...

Most of the breathless talk in snowy Munich at this year’s DLD conference , of course, was about the generative AI revolution. But amongst all the hype and glitz about our brave new AI future, Richard Socher stands out. Born in 1983 in Dresden, East Germany, the now Silicon Valley based Socher is amongst the headful of genuine pioneers who helped revolutionize natural language processing. In this...

If anyone should be anointed “aunt” or “court jEsther” of the tech industry, it’s long time journalist, investor and philanthropist Esther Dyson . When I caught up with Dyson at DLD, she reflected on her 40+ year career in technology and her evolution from tech industry observer to wellness advocate. Her aunt/court jester" role, she explains, is to provide honest feedback to the tech powers-that-b...

With Trump’s inauguration today, are we really about experience a new “golden age” in America? No. Not at least according to the best selling writer Robert D. Kaplan , author of Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis ( out next week), who argues that Trump's inaugural ceremony today, attended by fawning Silicon Valley moguls, exemplifies the moneyed “decadence” that often precedes imperial declin...

Amidst all the doom and gloom of the current zeitgeist, Harvard University literature professor & DLD 2025 speaker Martin Puchner remains cautiously optimistic about our high tech future. Reflecting on cultural and technological changes over the past 20 years. Puchner explains how digital technology has transformed academic research and teaching since 2005, noting how the internet has made obs...

In this week’s That Was The Week round up of tech news, Andrew and Keith Teare discuss the need for progressives to become what Keith calls “yes people” on technology. At the moment, he argues, their reactionary “no” on tech is handing MAGA conservatives and their Silicon Valley backers a free pass to win the debate about the future. While Keith and Andrew aren’t always on the same page about the...

The Stanford Business School professor Michal Kosinski has spent his career warning about the corrosive impact of technology, and particularly social media, on democratic institutions and individual freedom. The Polish born academic gained notoriety for his research at Cambridge University on how social media data could predict intimate personal traits. His work became particularly relevant during...

Few people have a better perch to observe technological change than Kenneth Cukier , deputy executive editor at The Economist and co-author of the best-selling book Big Data . I caught up with Cukier at DLD this year to get his take on the last twenty years of technology disruption. He began by remembering how, in 2005, tech giants like Google and Facebook were viewed simply as successful startups...

One person I didn’t expect to see at DLD is the feted Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran . Not exactly a regular on the tech circuit, Temelkuran is best known as a critic of the Erdogan regime and author of the influential 2019 book How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. In our conversation at DLD, Temelkuran argued that the world is experiencing a profound transformation co...

We are back in Munich at the DLD Conference , Europe’s foremost tech gathering. DLD is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and, to mark this occasion, we spoke to some of the leading DLD’ers about the tumultuous last twenty years. First up is the Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger , author of The World After Capital , who - in spite of all the problems of the last two decades - rem...

Published on the eve of you-know-who’s second inauguration, Kurt Gray ’s new book Outraged focuses on why Americans are so divided and how they might find common ground despite their political differences. Gray argues that both sides of the political spectrum are driven by a desire to protect themselves, their families, and their vision of America from perceived threats. He suggests that humans ev...

A new book by the acclaimed neuroscientist Lisa Genova is always a big event. Genova, best known for her best-selling 2007 novel, Still Alice , has a new novel out this week, More or Less Maddy , which follows a 20-year-old aspiring stand-up comedian who is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The protagonist, Maddy, grows up in affluent suburban Connecticut with a father who disappeared when she was...

The world is shutting its borders to immigrants. Yesterday , we featured a conversation with Laurie Trautman who dates the Covid crisis of 2020 as the tragic moment when the entire world closed its doors to immigrants. But even in the internationalist EU, border policy is tightening. According to Washington Post ’s Isaac Stanley-Becker , author of the new book Europe Without Borders: A History , b...

From MAGA and the UK’s Reform Party to the German AfD, aggressively nationalist borders controls are back in political fashion. According to Laurie Trautman , an expert on immigration at Western Washington University, we can date much of this back to 2020 and the Covid-19 tragedy. The co-author of When the World Closed its Doors , Trautman sees the global Covid crisis as the unintentional trigger...

Nicholas Carr has been amongst the most persistently prescient observers of the digital revolution over the last quarter century. Take, for example, his 2012 essay "The Arc of Innovation Bends Towards Decadence," which, in many ways, foresaw our current technological and social predicament. Carr's thesis was that technological innovation increasingly moves toward fulfilling self-indulgent desires...

Is there really a data-driven science that enables us to predict and change human behavior? Mind Masters author and Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz certainly is a believer. But I wonder whether Matz’s observations about psychological targeting and data analysis through large language models represent anything fundamentally new or original. I’m also not convinced of her glib take on...

Everything old is new again in international politics. According to Jill Kastner , co-author of A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion , today's international tensions over Ukraine, Taiwan and Greenland mark a return to historical normalcy after a brief period of global American unipolarity. Kastner explains that subversion—defined as hostile or unwanted action on a riva...