Keen On America

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...

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...