Keen On America

Few Americans have been as consistently critical of Donald Trump’s morality than the New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner . How to prevent the worst happening , Wehner thus wrote, in his final Atlantic column before the election. So now that the worst has actually happened, how exactly is Wehner - who worked in several Republican administrations - feeling about the future of the Amer...

It’s hard to know if F.H. Buckley is keen on Donald Trump. On the one hand, Buckley and his wife wrote a number of speeches for Trump in his 2016 campaign; on the other, Buckley publicly wrote Donald Trump off in 2022, arguing in the Wall Street Journal that Trump “can’t win another presidential election”. What Buckley was explicitly calling for was Trumpism without Trump. So what, exactly, is “Tr...

So how can The Dude and The Boss save America? According to the cultural critic, David Masciotra , Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski and Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen, represent the antithesis of Donald Trumps’s illiberal authoritarianism. Masciotra’s thesis of Lebowski and Springsteen as twin paragons of American liberalism is compelling. Both men have a childish faith in the goodness of others. Both of...

So was November 5 a moral catastrophe signaling the death knell of American liberalism or just another election in the turbulent history of American democracy. According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch , the Trump-Harris election was both. On the one hand, Rauch argues, wearing his unashamedly liberal cap, November 5 was a moral catastrophe for the future of American democracy. But, on the...

“There is one winner regarding the most significant story this week,” Keith Teare writes in his That Was The Week technology newsletter. But, as he explains, there are, in fact, two winners: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneurs trusted by Trump to reform and shrink the federal government. So how seriously might we take Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)? Should...

In association with our friends at Digital-Life-Design (DLD), Europe’s iconic annual tech conference which next January celebrates its twentieth anniversary, we are starting a series of conversations with DLD speakers looking back over the last twenty years. First up is Silicon Valley entrepreneur, speaker and author John Hagel , who talked, quite openly, about his lifelong fear of fear and how he...

The endless culture wars rage on. In his new book, The War Against the Past , the sociologist Frank Furedi believes that unless what he calls “the West” fights for its history, the “grievance entrepreneurs” will take over and undermine all our hard won intellectual freedoms. It’s the convention conservative argument, of course, but what’s interesting about Furedi is that he used to be a revolution...

As the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order , the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle was one of first people to recognize the collapse of neoliberalism. But today, the real question is not about the death of neoliberalism, but what comes after it. And, of course, when I sat down with Gerstle, I began by asking him what the Trump victory tells us about what comes after neoli...

Gary Shapiro is my Pivot Guy. As the longtime CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, the organization that puts on Las Vegas’ annual CES, Gary knows a thing or two about pivoting. And now he’s put his pivoting wisdom into a pivotal new book, Pivot or Die: How Leaders Thrive When Everything Changes , a guide about how to pivot successfully. As Gary explained to me, he breaks pivoting down into...

It’s the race that will change the world. In Supremacy , one of the FT’s six short-listed best business book of the year, Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson tells the story of what she sees as the key battle of our digital age between Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind. Altman and Hassabis, Olson argues, are fighting to dominate our new AI world and this war, she suggests, is as much on...

Might November 5 mark a new dawn for both Silicon Valley and America? Palo Alto based serial entrepreneur Keith Teare is ambivalent. In his That Was The Week tech newsletter for this week, Keith confesses that while he voted for Harris, he recognizes that the Trump victory probably benefits him economically. It’s almost as if Keith is embarrassed to admit this - which may be true more broadly abou...

The election is over and, is spite of Trump’s clear victory, America remains as divided as ever. So how to put the country together again? Juliana Tafur , the director of the Bridging Differences Program at UC Berkeley , has been giving this existential question much thought. What all Americans need, Tafur tells me, is the compassion, empathy and humility to understand the other side. But, as I as...

If there’s a disease that captures the toxic spirit of our times, it’s what the therapist, Vanessa Resier , in her new book, calls Narcissistic Abuse . Even the language of this disease - Gaslighting. Love bombing. Hoovering. Triangulating - has become part of the dictionary of life in the 2020’s. Narcissism and narcissists seem to be everywhere these days. In fact, as Resier told me (see full tra...

War is never pretty, but its privatized high tech future dominated by companies like Palintir and SpaceX is particularly chilling. In Unit X , their FT shortlisted best business book of the year, Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff ’s explain how the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are transforming the future of war with the creation of a new kind of military-digital complex. As Shah and Kirchhoff e...

I did this interview with John Driscoll , co-author of Pay the People! Why Fair Pay is Good for Business and Great for America , earlier this week, assuming that Harris would lose the election. And let’s be clear: she did lose an election that should have been eminently winnable. Driscoll spelt it out clearly in a powerful The Hill article last week about how raising the minimum wage is the key to...

Lauren Oyler’s “Revenge Plot”, a literary diary of her trip to this year’s Republican convention in Milwaukee, is the cover story of this month’s Harper’s . So when I talked today with the Berlin based writer , we discussed both the revengefulness of the Republican party and what she calls the “risk aversion” of the Democrats. While Oyler cares a lot about the outcome of today’s election, she is w...

The good news is that the interminable 2024 election is almost done. The bad news is that the 2028 Presidential campaign - sure to be described as the most important e lection in American history - will begin later this week. The best-selling writer Paul Greenberg is already imagining this election. “It is 2028 and a certain president wants a third term,” is the premise of Greenberg’s new satire,...

This was the week of Techcrunch Disrupt , one of San Francisco’s biggest technology events of the year. That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare attended Disrupt this year and, as he explained in our weekly round up of tech news, the event - which was attended by over 10,000 people - only confirmed to him that we are living in profoundly disruptive technology times. And yet, as Keith and I discuss,...

Yesterday, we featured a conversation with the British pro-market Conservative, Jon Moynihan, who is unambiguously in favor of economic growth. But Daniel Susskind , author of Growth: A History and a Reckoning , is less of an ideological warrior on behalf of unrestrained economic growth. In Growth , which is deservedly included on the Financial Times ’ short list of best business books for 2024, S...

Not everyone believes in the promise of economic growth. We’ve done KEEN ON shows in the past with “degrowth” advocates like Tim Jackson and Jason Hickle who argue that we need to get beyond the false promise of ever expanding wealth. Our guest today, however, is anything but a sceptic of capitalist economics. Jon Moynihan is a Conservative member of the House of Lords, a vocal supporter of BREXIT...

Maybe Halloween is a bit early this year. As Jason Pack , the host of the excellent Disorder podcast notes, a Trump victory on Tuesday would be a horror show. And while he’s much more optimistic than me about a Harris victory, Pack nonetheless views Trump as Exhibit A in his arguments about the global disorder now threatening peace and stability around the world. My own view is that America - alwa...

Can one age with grace and wisdom? Yes, according to Andrew J. Scott , author of the Longevity Imperative, one of the six books on the Financial Times ’ illustrious short list for best business books of the year . For Scott, aging in the 21st century requires a sharp shift in both personal and public policy attitudes to “old age”. No, we can’t live forever, he reminds us, but we do need to make th...

Last week, the Los Angeles Times book critic, Bethanne Patrick, came on the show to talk about the best new non-fiction books for the Fall. Today she is back to talk new novels by great fictional writers like Allan Hollinghurst, Rachel Kushner and Paula Hawkins. For those of you for whom American reality is currently too depressing, Patrick’s list of great new literature will be of particular sola...

There are few more passionate bibliophiles than those who have dedicated their lives to the publishing business. Take, for example, Stephen Riggio , the former CEO of Barnes & Noble who, as he confessed to me, has been hooked on books his whole life. Riggio’s latest book project is as the translator of Silician Avengers , the greatest Italian novel that you’ve probably never heard of. Written...

There are few men politically or intellectually smarter than President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary Robert McNamara . So how did LBJ and McNamara screw up America’s involvement in Vietnam so tragically? According to Peter Osnos , the author of LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail , it might have been because the two men were, in their own quite different ways, too...