Keen On America

The Brooklyn based Rafil Kroll-Zaidi is a Princeton educated reporter formerly on the editorial staff of Harper's Magazine. And he is another kind of reporter too - a citizen- sleuth who makes six figures annually by reporting polluting trucks in New York City. Writing about this experience for New York magazine, Kroll argues that, in theory, at least, it’s a “win-win” for both himself and the env...

Last Saturday , on our regular That Was The Week tech roundup, Keith Teare and I discussed the French decision to imprison Telegram founder Pavel Durov. Today, we discuss the theoretical imprisonment of Elon Musk, an idea touted yesterday by Robert Reich in The Guardian . Elon Musk, according to Reich, is “out of control” and one way to “rein him in” is to “threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t...

Last month we ran an interview with the Oregon based regenerative wine maker Mimi Casteel about fixing America one sip at a time . In addition, we recorded a KEEN ON America segment with Casteel about her life-long love affair with the American land. Filmed at her family’s beautiful H ope Well Winery , Casteel spoke with an infectious passion about the natural beauty of America. However you think...

Andrew Leigh is a minister in the Australian parliament with a doctorate in economics from Harvard. Unlike many academic economists, however, Leigh has the gift of simplifying economics for all of us. His new book, How Economics Explains the World , presents economics as the prism to understand the human story. From the dawn of agriculture to AI, Leigh tells the story of how ingenuity, greed, and...

Formerly Le Monde’s guy in Jerusalem, Piotr Smolar is now the senior correspondent for Le Monde in Washington, DC. He is also the grandson of Hersh Smolar, one of the 20th century’s more remarkable men. As Smolar notes in Bad Jew , the astonishing story of his grandfather’s life from Stalin’s Russia & the Minsk Ghetto to Netanyahu’s Israel, there was, in fact, nothing particularly bad about He...

Exactly 85 years ago today, on 3 September 1939, the Second World War officially began with Britain’s declaration of war against Germany. Russians might argue, however, the real war began on 22 June 1941 with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. While, for America, of course, the war began on December 7, 1941, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. World War Two was then, in a sense, three wa...

Controversial things are happening on the campus of the University of Austin (UATX), the brand new anti-woke university designed to “dare” its students to “think”. Last week, we interviewed UATX’s founding president, Pano Kanelos, who explained how he was trying to build what he called a 21st century “liberal university”. Today, in this KEEN ON America interview, we talk to Jacob Howland , UATX’s...

Bryan VanDyke’s new dystopian AI novel, In Our Likeness , only came out today, but it has already over 1,400 reviews on Amazon and is currently their bestselling science fiction book. So what does our seemingly infinite appetite for dystopian AI literature tell us about ourself, I asked VanDyke? Is the popularity of this type of dystopian literature because AI is about to replace humans with smart...

There’s a big fight, perhaps even a war, about to break out between Big Tech and governments around the world. It’s been brewing for several years now, but the news this week from France and Brazil suggests that conventional nation-states are increasingly confident of shutting down popular social networks and jailing their founders. For libertarians like That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, th...

According to the Californian political sociologist Peter Phillips , American capitalism is facing an existential crisis. In his new book, Titans of Capital , he argues that the concentrated wealth of investment companies like BlackRock and Fidelity not only threatens human rights and democracy, but also the future of planet. Perhaps. But where Phillips really goes out on a limb is to argue that th...

The Anglo-Jewish writer Tanya Gold went on holiday to Auschwitz and didn’t much like what she saw. She writes about the experience in “My Auschwitz Vacation: On Holocaust tourism” which ran in this month’s Harper’s . But, as she told me, she would have preferred the piece to have been entitled: “Her Gay Romp Through Jewish Poland” - in honor , of course, of Mel Brooke’s satirical “Springtime for H...

Last year, we had a great conversation with Branko Milanovic, author of Visions of Inequalit y, a bout how classical economists like Smith, Riccardo, Marx and Pareto analyze inequality. Our guest today, David Lay Williams , asks the same question - but from the perspective of political philosophers like Rousseau, JS Rousseau and Hobbes. In his new book, The Greatest of All Plagues , Williams trace...

Something interesting is happening in downtown Austin. Next month, The University of Austin (UATX), a new undergraduate college claiming to “be dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth”, opens its well financed doors. Launched as a supposedly “anti-woke” university, UATX has some heavy hitting advisors including Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Larry Summers, Andrew Young, Jonathan Haidt and Bar...

As the author of the bestselling Master Algorithm , University of Washington professor Pedro Domingos is one of the world’s most respected AI experts. So I was a little surprised that his new book, 2040 , is a science-fictional satire of American politics & Silicon Valley. In 2040 , Domingos is, however, also using fiction to write a critique of the current Silicon Valley mania for AI. The boo...

At the DNC last week, the Warriors coach and former Bulls star Steve Kerr spoke of his excitement at his return to Chicago’s United Center, the home of some his greatest basketball triumphs. According to the Columbia University historian Frank Andre Guridy, there’s nothing coincidental about this convergence of American politics and sports. In his intriguing new book, THE STADIUM , Guridy reimagin...

As one of the victims of Donald Trump’s notorious 2020 dismissal of Inspector Generals, Glenn A. Fine — a longtime Inspector General of both the departments of Justice & Defense - knows a thing or two about both honest government. In his new book, Watchdogs, Fine presents the Inspectors General as the last line of defense for uncorrupt American institutions. In his words, they are “pillars of...

“We don’t need no education”, Pink Floyd announced in 1979. “Teachers leave those kids alone”: We don't need no education We don’t need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teachers leave them kids alone Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone! But today, almost half a century later, That Was The Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare believes that technology might be radically reinvent...

William Deresiewicz is a leading American writer best known as the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life . And so, when Bill and I sat down in Portland for a KEEN ON America conversation, we discussed the crisis of a high-end university system that he, as a former professor at Yale, knows all too well. But Bill, a keen conversationalist,...

I have to admit that I’m always a little uncomfortable with non-Jews fetishizing the supposedly unique gifts & accomplishments of the Jewish people. A century ago, Winston Churchill did it. And now George Gilder , the influential tech futurist, picks up that Churchillian mantle in a new edition of his 2012 book The Israel Test . Israel’s “genius”, Gilder argues, “enriches” the world to such an...

How to fix American democracy? It’s a question that, over the last couple of years, we’ve been addressing in my Bertelsmann Foundation supported How To Fix Democracy show, now its fifth year. And it is, of course, also a subject much addressed over the years on KEEN ON. My guest on today’s show, Meredith Sumpter , has also given the subject of fixing American democracy much thought. Sumpter is the...

Andrew C.M. Cooper is the author of the new book, The Ethical Imperative: Leading with Conscience to Shape the Future of Business . He is also an Associate General Counsel and Head of Patent Acquisitions at Meta. While he didn’t write The Ethical Imperative as a Meta person, it is still intriguing that one of Zuckerberg’s lawyers should be writing a book about corporate ethics, especially since he...

It’s ironic that Keith Teare, editor of That Was The Week newsletter, just spent two idyllic weeks in Europe, enjoying the Paris Olympics and London theater. Because his first newsletter on his return to the United States asks if “ Is Europe Dying ?” and suggests that innovation on the European continent has been killed by the regulatory bureaucratic state. More ominously, Keith argues, United Sta...

We are living in interesting political times. A month ago, the Presidential election appeared over. Today, however, it appears as if it’s barely begun. So in my conversation today with the prolific columnist David Masciotra , I asked him if he glimpsed the outlines of a “Harrisist” ideology behind the avalanche of Kamala memes on TikTok. Is the Harris excitement simply a repeat of the Obama mania...

What do Hum , Hitler’s People and The Hypocrite have in common? They are all recommended new books from KEEN ON’s best read regular guest, Los Angeles Times book critic Bethanne Patrick . As usual, she recommends six books, but - whether you are looking for a magically realistic novel about the Dutch resistance to Nazism or new non-fiction on Putin’s Russia or the Scopes Trial - they all offer gre...

Last month, we were in western Virginia talking to the pioneering regenerative farmer Joel Salatin about how American can fix itself one bite at a time . Today we are on the other coast, in western Oregon, talking to another regenerative farmer, Mimi Casteel . In contrast with Salatin’s Polyface Farm, Casteel’s beautiful Hope Well vineyard focuses on the production of wine. And yet, as Casteel exp...