Keen On America

The zealously anti-regulatory Trump is back and anti-corruption activist Frank Vogl is very worried. Vogl warns that MAGA’s increasingly deregulated America financial landscape could make the 2008 crash look like a minor bump in the economic road. With Trump putting the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act on "pause" and DOGE kingpin Elon Musk openly dreaming of turning X into a bank, we're watching trad...

So what to J.D. Vance's highly controversial speech at the Paris AI Summit this week? According to That Was The Week ’s Keith Teare, it was “a breath of fresh air”. Others will argue it was just more MAGA putridity designed to alienate our European friends. Some tech notables, like Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger, take both views simultaneously, acknowledging on the one hand that Vance...

“ Expect More Bulldozings ”, the Princeton historian Matthew Karp predicts in this month’s Harpers magazine about MAGA America. In his analysis of the Democrats' loss to Trump, Karp argues that the supposedly progressive party has become disconnected from working-class voters partially because it represents what he calls "the nerve center of American capitalism." He suggests that for all Democrats...

What can a mother say to the cold-blooded executioner of her son? In American Mother , the heartrending story of the murdered American journalist Jim Foley, the writer Colum McCann and Diane Foley , Foley’s mother and founder of the Foley Foundation , explore this terrible dilemma. This memorable conversation with Foley and McCann explores forgiveness, faith, and the moral complexities of justice....

If there’s anyone who knows the value of a pardon, it’s Jeffrey Toobin , the publicly shamed and now rehabilitated CNN legal analyst. In his latest book, The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy , Toobin examines the history and evolution of presidential pardons, focusing particularly on Gerald Ford's controversial pardon of Richard Nixon. Toobin argues that while historical opinion has shif...

The acclaimed American writer Walter Mosley has a new King Oliver book out: B een Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right , a novel that follows Oliver's search for both a missing woman and his estranged father who was released from prison nine years ago. But before getting to his latest mystery, I couldn’t resist asking Mosley to compare his most famous fictional character, Easy Rawlins, with King Oliv...

According to the Scottish economist Sir John Kay , author of The Corporation in the 21st Century , the Magnificent Seven tech companies that supposedly control the global economy aren’t quite as magnificent as we are led to believe. These corporations aren’t even really capitalist, he says, noting that companies like Amazon and Apple own surprisingly few physical assets and thus should be consider...

So what’s it like co-authoring a book with Reid Hoffman, the multi-billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and amongst Silicon Valley’s most prominent Democrats? According to Greg Beato , who just co-wrote Superagency with Hoffman, it certainly beats co-authoring anything with an AI algorithm. Not that Beato has anything against artificial intelligence. The doomers and the gloomers have it all wrong, h...

It’s been quite a few days in Silicon Valley. "There are decades where nothing happens,” Lenin famously observed, “and there are weeks where decades happen”. As Andrew and Keith Teare reflect in their regular THAT WAS THE WEEK tech roundup, this was the week that Silicon Valley went from Woke to DOGE. It was the week that our Do No Evil friends @ Google slammed the door on diversity and embraced A...

Wow. According to the journalist and historian Eoin Higgins, right wing tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and Peter Thiel have “bought” prominent anti establishment journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. That’s the highly provocative thesis at the heart of his new book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left . While I’m no great...

Internet scholar and activist Ethan Zuckerman is horrified by the American ban on TikTok. As a self-described “progressive” with a long and distinguished career advocating for internet freedom, Zuckerman expresses alarm at how the U.S. has moved from defending unfettered access to information in the 1960s to now being willing to ban popular Chinese platforms like TikTok and perhaps even DeepSeek....

Trust a gay Jewish atheist to defend the value of American Christianity. In his new book Cross-Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, the Brookings scholar and gay marriage activist Jonathan Rauch argues that Christianity plays a vital role in sustaining American democracy. He points to the Mormon Church (LDS) as a model for balancing religious beliefs with democratic pluralism, c...

Who gets to go to heaven and who doesn’t? According to John Lee Hooker Jr. , son of the legendary bluesman and author of From The Shadow of the Blues , many are called but not everyone is chosen. In the new autobiography, he confesses his own journey from addiction and imprisonment to religious redemption, while reflecting on growing up in his father's musical shadow. Hooker Jr. distinguishes betw...

Few people know the U.S. car industry more intimately than the Wall Street Journal deputy auto editor Mike Colias . His new book, Inevitable , offers an insiders guide into what he sees as our messy, yet unstoppable transition to electric vehicles. In this wide ranging conversation on all things automotive, Colias addresses Trump's recent tariff impacts on the American car industry, the stark cont...

More than 6 million Americans now suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease. So the stakes in find a cure for this neurological illness are huge. Too large, in fact, for some fraudulent American medical researchers. As the investigative science reporter Charles Piller reveals in DOCTORED , there has been considerable fraud, some of it outright criminal, in Alzheimer’s research in the United States. Piller’s...

A week is certainly a long time in tech. On last week’s That Was the Week roundup, Keith Teare and I were asking if Trump’s America was a tech oligarchy. This week is all about the so-called “Sputnik Moment” of DeepSeek, a relatively underfunded Chinese AI company which seems to have radically undercut the value of massively financed American AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. As Keith not...

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...