Keen On America

What’s wrong with the U.S. economy? Not much according to Wall Street. But according to Adam Chandler , author of 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life , there’s a fundamental contradiction at the heart of American capitalism. While the U.S. leads in AI investment ($50 billion of $56 billion globally in 2020) and Wall Street performance, Chandler notes, there's signif...

This is a good one. Former mobster Louis Ferrante discusses the second volume of his history of the American mafia, Borgata: Clash of Titans , covering the critical period between 1960 and 1985 when the mob was at its height of power. The era began with the Kennedys' rise to power, where Joe Kennedy paradoxically used mob connections to help JFK win the 1960 election, particularly in Illinois and...

Addiction specialist and former meth addict Dr. Adi Jaffe challenges everything we take for granted about addiction and recovery. Opening our KEEN ON conversation with his own dramatic story of a SWAT team arrest that turned his young life around, Jaffe goes on to deliver some startling insights: nearly half of all Americans are hooked on something, whether it's drugs, porn, social media, or the l...

Paula Whyman 's journey from bug-obsessed city kid to mountaintop conservationist is an inspiring environmental tale. Now the owner of a 200-acre Virginia mountaintop, she's traded her childhood fascination with cicadas for an ambitious ecological restoration project. Her new book Bad Naturalist chronicles this transformation. Despite the self-deprecating title, Whyman is dead serious about her mi...

It’s not just the MAGA crowd who are concerned with government waste and inefficiency. In a convincing Wall Street Journal op-ed, best-selling tech author Larry Downes questions the need for a thousand Social Security offices around the country. Downes argues that the federal government's resistance to digital transformation has resulted in staggeringly low user satisfaction rates - just 12% for f...

Remember that time in 1977 when Jesse Jackson debated KKK grand wizard David Duke on national tv? As David Masciotra reminds us , it was one of those now forgotten moments from the recent past that can help bring some clarity to today’s American politics. In particular, Masciotra argues, the 1977 debate underlines the idiocy of Kamala Harris’ refusal to go on Joe Rogan show. As Masciotra explains,...

Avid reader, global investor and German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder , who devoured around 150 books in 2024, engages in a spirited New Year discussion about literacy, geopolitics, and the power of deep reading. Despite hand-wringing about America's reading decline, Schroeder remains optimistic about young entrepreneurs' intellectual curiosity, particularly in Southeast Asia, Latin America,...

While most of us can at least hope for a happy new year in 2025, the same can’t be true for the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. That, at least, is the view of Michael Scott-Baumann , author of The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine . Given the ineffectiveness of the United Nations and the unwillingness of the United States to rethink its alliance with Israel, Scott-Baumann suggests,...

Marshall Poe runs the New Books Network , a podcasting platform incorporating over 25,000 individual podcasts from thousands of podcasters and many millions of downloads. 2024, he acknowledges, was a bad year for podcasting because Apple changed their metrics so that the audience numbers for most podcasts fell precipitously overnight. And 2025, he suggests, probably isn’g going to be much better w...

Gary Marcus is amongst the world’s leading skeptics on the AI revolution. So it’s worth taking note when Marcus admits that “of course we are getting to AGI eventually”. No, he says, artificial general intelligence (AGI) won’t take place in 2027 or perhaps even 2050. But it will happen, he confidently predicts, by 2100. So that only underlines Marcus’ argument, made in his acclaimed 2024 book Tami...

Is it entirely coincidental that some of the leading figures in the MAGA movement - including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks - all grew up in Apartheid South Africa? Not according to Simon Kuper who raised the alarm about “Musk, Thiel and the shadow of apartheid South Africa” in a bracing September Financial Times column . But this is a reactionary shadow, Kuper warns, not just haunting th...

Our job is to make Trump fail. That, at least, is the view of the writer Joseph O’Neill , whose essays in the New York Review of Books offer not just a powerful critique of Trump but also of the contemporary Democratic party which he describes as a “cancerous thing”. There’s a desperate need, O’Neill believes, for the Democrats to reinvent themselves as an populist alternative to Trumpism. And tha...

As the author of the well-received Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet, Seth Rogovoy knows his Dylan. So his critical review of the A Complete Unknown , the much hyped new movie featuring Timothee Chamalat as a young Dylan, is worth noting. Rogovoy questions the whole point of the movie, arguing that nobody - neither enthusiasts nor newbies to Dylan - learn anything from A Complete Unknown . And as the...

The Artificial Intelligence revolution has dwarfed everything else in tech during 2024. But according to Toby Walsh , author of the upcoming The Shortest History of AI , 2025 also promises to be a revolutionary year in the history of AI. The AI agents are coming, Walsh suggests, warning that 2025 might be the first year in which we will be able to quantify the job losses caused by smart machines....

So what’s it to be in the Middle East in 2025: Mad Max style anarchy or a "Pax Hebraica" orchestrated from Israel? According to regional expert Soli Ozel , the Mad Max scenario is more likely - although, as he notes, many of us oversimplify the contemporary Middle East into false binaries such as the Sunni vs Shiite conflict or Iran vs the Arab world. That said, Ozel warns, the mostly cataclysmic...

Time waits for no one. As 2024 winds down, what are the key moments of a year that perhaps overpromised and underdelivered? According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch , six events in 2024 captured the year’s zeitgeist. There’s the November election and the tumult in the Middle East, of course. Then there’s the ongoing lawfare between Trump and the legal establishment as well as the Supreme...

As both a much published poet and cultural critic, Adam Kirsch brings an etymological sensibility to the great issues of our day. In his new book, On Settler Colonialism , Kirsch excavates the nonsense now taken for granted by many academics about the supposedly twin intrinsic evils of American and Israeli history. Unlike the European colonialists in America, Kirsch reminds us, Jewish settlers in...

Bloomberg columnist, Parmy Olson , won the FT Business Book of 2024 for Supremacy , her story of the race between Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Demis Hassabis’ Google DeepMind for control of the AI ecosystem. Given that Parmy Olson finished writing Supremacy at the end of 2023, I asked her what she would have added to her narrative with the hindsight of knowing what actually transpired in 2024. And what...

Yesterday, we featured a conversation between Andrew and That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare looking back at the major tech events of 2024. Today, Andrew and Keith look forward to the upcoming year for big tech. What will be the fate of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft in 2025? And who, if anyone, will win the multi trillion dollar race for AI supremacy in 2025? Keith Teare i...

So how will future historians think about 2024? In tech terms, 2024 will probably be remembered as the year when AI began to become ubiquitous. Although, as Keith Teare and Andrew discuss in this special 2024 edition of THAT WAS THE WEEK , only hardcore techies like Keith are currently making the use of AI central to their lives. For mainstream users like Andrew, AI in 2024 remained an abstract pr...

As Elon Musk continues to plot, with Trumpian glee, against the American Federal government, it is important to remind ourselves of the essential value of this state bureaucracy. As the founding president and CEO of the Washington DC based Partnership for Public Service , Max Stier has spent the last quarter century focused on making American government more efficient and accountable. And Stier’s...

The supposed “science” of eugenics is one of the most dangerous myths of the modern age. As Erik Peterson, author of The Shortest History of Eugenics explains, it not only was used by Nazi thugs to justify the Final Solution, but also has been deployed by American racists to justify slavery and inequality. And today, in a brave new world increasingly shaped by advances in biotech, Peterson warns,...

There is a counter intuitive school of thought - represented by Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen - which suggests that America, for all its technological innovation, remains trapped by long term economic stagnation. So it’s no coincidence that the Austin based investor, consultant, and writer, Byrne Hobart ’s co-authored new book, Boom , comes with enthusiastic blurbs from Cowen, Thiel...

The iconic DLD conference will be holding its twentieth annual event in Munich next month. Founded in January 2005, DLD has hosted many of the world’s leading tech thinkers and entrepreneurs from both Europe and the United States. What most distinguishes DLD, however, is its community of loyal regulars whose presence in Munich in January promises a degree of certainty in an increasingly uncertain...

Yesterday, we ran Bethanne Patrick’s five best novels of 2024. Today, we feature her top non-fiction of the year including new books about reality television, Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife and Handel's Messiah. ‘Tis the season. Enjoy! Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Bethanne Patrick maintains a storie...