Keen On America

Yesterday, I interviewed The Financial Times ’ Andrew Hill about the FT’s best six business books of the year. Today, I talk to Michael Morris , the author of one of those books. In Tribal , Morris explains how the cultural instincts that divide us can also help bring us together. Our tribal instincts are humanity’s secret weapon, Morris suggests. Rather than deriding tribal impulses for their irr...

The Financial Times has just announced their short list of the best six business books of 2024. Authors include KEEN ON regulars like Andrew Scott as well as Michael Morris , who will appear on tomorrow’s show. As the competition’s manager, Andrew Hill, told me when I visited him at the FT offices in London last week, a business book is a tricky thing to define. Perhaps, like pornography, you know...

While many fear that Trump offers an existential threat to American democracy, Barry C. Lynn believes that the real danger comes from big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute, is the author of “ Antitrust Revolution ”, Harper’s October cover story. Lynn argues that big tech offers the real threat to American freedom and major...

Finally a tech show not about AI. Martin Schmidt is the President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as well a distinguished technologist in his own right. So rather than having just another conversation about AI, I talked to Schmidt about how he expects quantum computing to change the world. Schmidt, who taught at MIT for many years, has a particularly interesting take on quantum because R...

Dr Josh McConkey ’s new book, Be the Weight Behind the Spear , is about how to fix America. McConkey, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in North Carolina, believes that the strength of America has always been its people. So his focus is on motivating all Americans to be, what he calls, “the weight behind the spears” of the country’s future leaders. For McConkey, an US Air Force Rese...

Is there anyone who still believes in America as a force for good in the world today? There’s that doddery old cold warrior Joe Biden, of course, and his younger globalizing sidekick, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. And then there’s Edward Goldberg , the author of The United States as Global Liberal Hegemon , who is still hawking the idea that the world needs America as the global policeman fo...

Instagram superstar and “Here’s Where It Gets Interesting” podcast host S haron McMahon has been dubbed America’s government teacher. In her first book, The Small and the Mighty , McMahon writes about twelve unsung Americans who changed the course of history. Some of her heroes are more unsung than others, but as she explains, they all - like Sharon McMahon herself - capture the moral agency &...

Back in April 2011, Saad Mohseni was made one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world. And who exactly is that, you might ask. I have to admit I hadn’t heard of him either. But as Rupert Murdoch wrote about Mohseni for that Time award, “he's the best-informed person in the world about Afghanistan”. Mohseni, in fact, is the Afghan version of Murdoch (without the wives & nasty right-w...

There are few more authoritative American journalists than the longtime NPR and PBS host Ray Suarez . So it was a real treat to sit down with Ray earlier this month in Washington DC to talk broadly about his and his family’s experience as American immigrants from Puerto Rico. Suarez is part of that golden generation of late twentieth century American journalists who exemplified both trust and auth...

Do you work too hard? Is it ruining your life? If so, then you may want to look at Brigid Schulte’s new book, Over Work , an exploration of why American work isn’t working and how our lives can be made more meaningful. Schulte traces the arc of our discontent from a time before the neo-liberal 1980s, when work was compatible with well-being and allowed a single earner to support a family, until to...

Few people are more familiar with America’s drug addiction crisis than Ryan Hampton . A former addict himself as well as the author of three books on the crisis, including the new Fentanyl Nation , the Las Vegas based Hampton is also running for the Nevada State Assembly in November. For Hampton, America’s failed war on drugs and its toxic politics are part of the same “uniquely American” problem...

Not everyone fears that AI revolution represents an existential event for humanity. Anindya Ghose , the Heinz Riehl Professor of Business at NYU’s illustrious Stern school, actually believes AI can positively impact our daily lives - from health and wellness, to work, education, even love and dating. In Thrive , a new book he co-authored with Ravi Bapna , Ghose explains how we can maximize our wel...

Working on Sheryl Sandberg’s team at Google, Megan Hellerer - who had just graduated top of her Stanford class - was on the fast track to become a young Silicon Valley superstar. A few years later, however, she had a breakdown and quit. Describing herself as an “underfulfilled overachiever”, she writes about this traumatic experience in her new book, Directional Living . Hellerer - who now runs he...

Earlier this week, I interviewed the Australian AI expert Toby Walsh about Google’s new NotebookLM , a seemingly magical AI product that creates believable conversation between bots. Today, on our weekly That Was The Week tech roundup, Keith Teare and I agreed that this is going to profoundly change the way we not only produce media, but also how we imagine “trust” and “truth” in our synthetic med...

Last year, Michael Scott-Baumann, author of The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine and a peace activist at the Balfour Project , came on the show to talk about the problem to end all problems - the Israel-Palestine question. Today, Scott-Baumann explains, this problem has, if anything, metastasized into something even more shameful and insoluble. Gaza has been transformed from what he calls...

The AI revolution, long in hype but short in practice, is finally beginning to happen. In today’s WSJ, the tech writer Joanna Stern introduces her own Joannabot to review the new iPhone 16. Soon, of course, we will increasingly struggle to distinguished between the real Joanna and her Joannabot. And the same will also be true for yours truly on KEEN ON who will, in the not too distant future, be e...

This is the final episode of a trilogy of critical conversations about the digital revolution. Earlier this week, Gary Marcus explained how to tame Silicon Valley’s AI barons. Then Mark Weinstein talked to us the reinvention of social media. And now we have the former member of the European Parliament & current Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, Marietje Schaake, explaining how we can s...

And still they come. Every week, it seems, there’s a new book celebrating resistance to Nazism. The latest is Two Wheels to Freedom , Arthur J. Magida’s true story of Cioma Schonhaus, a 20 year-old Jewish art student in Nazi Berlin who successfully forged papers for hundreds of Jews. Yes, of course, Magida’s new book is, in part, about the triumph of human agency in fighting the evils of Nazism. B...

Early social media pioneer Mark Weinstein is deeply disturbed by the current state of social media. He’s not alone of course, but in his new book, Restoring Our Sanity Online , Weinstein lays out what he boasts is a “revolutionary social framework” to clean up social media. The book comes with blurbs from tech royalty like Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Steve Wozniak, but I wonder if Weinstein, in his at...

Yesterday, KEEN ON featured a conversation with the technologist Gary Marcus about how we can ensure that AI works for us. Today, on our regular That Was The Week tech weekly roundup, Andrew and Keith Teare discuss the role of human agency in determining our tech future. For Keith, optimism in itself is what he calls a “false God”. It’s not enough just to hope for a better future, he reminds us, e...

Few artificial intelligence experts have been as outspoken or prescient as the author and entrepreneur Gary Marcus . In his new book, Taming Silicon Valley , Marcus takes on the new AI barons of Silicon Valley - billionaires like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who are building an AI future that works for them rather than for the rest of us. In technology, Marcus argues, human agency is all important. So Ma...

As Donald Trump’s 79 year-old Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross was the oldest first-time Cabinet appointee in American history. Ross’ mom, however - Agnes, a lifelong New Jersey schoolteacher and proud Democrat - probably wouldn’t have been proud of her boy. As he acknowledges in his new memoir, Risks and Returns , Agnes always wanted her son to attend law school and was far from thrilled when W...

At the debate last night, Kamala Harris opened her remarks by talking about the need for America to fix its housing crisis. And crisis it is, at least according to Jerusalem Demsas , a staff writer at The Atlantic who has written extensively on the increasing scarcity and rising cost of American housing. In her new collection of essays, On the Housing Crisis , Demsas suggests that the best way to...

At the debate tonight, there probably won’t be much talk about American education. Which is a shame - at least according to Josh Cowen , author of The Privateers , a new book about how radical conservative billionaires like Betsy De Vos have created a culture war to sell their idea of school vouchers. It’s all part of the right-wing Project 2025 vision, Cowen suggests, of collapsing the church-sta...

The Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic is one of the world’s leading authorities on inequality. In this KEEN ON America conversation, we talked about Milanovic’s interpretation of the history of American economic inequality - from slavery to contemporary capitalism. Why has America become so much unequal over the last fifty years, I asked. And today, in what Milanovic sees as a post neo-l...