Keen On America

Americans, it’s time to move to Europe! The American geo-strategist Jason Pack anticipated last week’s advice from Simon Kuper and moved to London a few years ago during the first Trump Presidency. Pack, the host of the excellent Disorde r podcast, confesses to be thrilled to have escaped MAGA America. He describes the esthetics of contemporary Washington DC as "post-apocalyptic" and criticizes wh...

Don’t say we weren’t warned. Project 2025, the 2022 Heritage Foundation’s 900-page policy blueprint, unambiguously plotted out the strategy of the second Trump administration. As Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham makes clear in his refreshingly brief The Project , the Heritage Foundation document is an verbose summary of Trump 2.0’s ambition to reshape government by strengthening executive pow...

We are all Waymo Democrats now. That Was the Week ’s Keith Teare and I appropriate Thomas Friedman’s controversial new term to dream of an American high tech future. Keith and I also talk about last week’s interview with Peter Leyden, a founding member of the Waymo Democracy club. Keith might not be altogether convinced by Leyden’s thesis about the inevitability of America’s 80 year historical cyc...

A year ago , the great American historian Adam Hochschild came on KEEN ON AMERICA to discuss American Midnight , his best selling account of the crisis of American democracy after World War One. A year later, is history really repeating itself in today’s crisis of American democracy? For Hochschild, there are certainly parallels between the current political situation in the US and post WW1 Americ...

Adam Becker ’s new critique of Silicon Valley More Everything Forever should probably be entitled Less Nothing Never . The science journalist accuses Silicon Valley overlords like Elon Musk and Sam Altman of promoting exaggerated dangers and promises about AI. Becker argues that these apocalyptic fears of superintelligent AI are science fictional fantasies rather than scientifically reasoned argum...

In contrast with yesterday’s guest, the Paris based Financial Times writer Simon Kuper , the newspaper’s London based c olumnist J emima Kelly hasn’t quite given up on the United States of America. Trump, she suggests, might be the end of the line for the MAGA movement. Indeed, like another recent guest on the show, former Wired editor Peter Leyden , Kelly suggests that the Republicans might be fl...

It’s official. The American Dream is dead. And it’s been resurrected in Europe where, according to the FT columnist Simon Kuper , disillusioned Americans should relocate. Compared with the United States, Kuper argues , Europe offers the three key metrics of a 21st century good life: “four years more longevity, higher self-reported happiness and less than half the carbon emissions per person”. So w...

So what, exactly, was “The Enlightenment”? According to the Princeton historian David A. Bell , it was an intellectual movement roughly spanning the early 18th century through to the French Revolution. In his Spring 2025 Liberties Quarterly piece “The Enlightenment, Then and Now”, Bell charts the Enlightenment as a complex intellectual movement centered in Paris but with hubs across Europe and Ame...

Why is America so over-medicated? According to Harvard Medical School professor Jerry Avorn , author of Rethinking Medications, everything begins and ends with the unaccountable power of Big Pharma. While acknowledging the tremendous benefits of modern medications, Avorn critiques the American healthcare system's pricing structures, pharmaceutical patent abuse, and profit incentives that drives th...

Is America screwed? Not according to the former managing editor of Wired , Peter Leyden . The creator of the Substack newsletter The Great Progression , Leyden believes that U.S. history operates in 80 year cycles and that America, empowered by Northern Californian technology, is gearing up for another remarkable period of innovation. Leyden is no MAGA fanboy, but argues that Trump is enabling the...

Are Google and Facebook screwed? That’s the question which Keith Teare asks in today’s That Was The Week tech newsletter. In our age of nationalist globalization, Teare argues, Facebook and Google, the original darlings of the Web 2.0 revolution are, so-to-speak, half-fucked. On the one hand, they are the victims of a legal witch hunt by a nationalist U.S. government intent on punishing Big Tech i...

Few Americans have been as explicit in their warnings about Donald Trump than the St. Louis based writer Sarah Kendzior . Her latest book, The Last American Road Trip , is a memoir chronicling Kendzior’s journey down Route 66 to show her children America before it is destroyed. Borrowing from her research of post Soviet Central Asia, Kendzior argues that Trump is establishing a kleptocratic “mafia...

In yesterday’s show, the neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod explained how radical ideology is infecting our brains. Today, Unite America executive director Nick Troiano explains how the American democratic system is empowering radicals in both parties. In The Primary Solution , Troiano argues that party primaries give disproportionate influence to political extremes, with 90% of elections being decided i...

Our brains are delicate things. That, at least, is the view of the neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod , whose new book, The Ideological Brain , is a warning about how radical ideologies of both left and right can infect our brains. She argues that, in contrast with flexible thinking, ideological discourse involves rigid adherence to doctrines and anti-scientific dismissal of factual evidence. She notes t...

To celebrate our 2500th show, long time KEEN ON friend David Masciotra interviewed me about the current perilous situation in America. We discuss why I’ve renamed the show KEEN ON AMERICA and my thoughts on the U.S’s increasingly pivotal role in 21st century history. We discuss America's changing "operating system" as it struggles to reinvent its 20th century industrial identity. We explore Americ...

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...