Keen On America

“If you write something you think is really fanciful today, tomorrow’s news headlines might be telling the exact same story. That’s the challenge of writing realism today — when everything feels so sci-fi and so dystopic.” — Fred Lunzer   Boy meets girl meets AI therapist. That is the premise of Sike , the debut novel by Fred Lunzer . Adrian is a rap ghostwriter who has never met any of the rapper...

“Vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression — not as the product of scientific misinformation. These debates have been proxies for existential concerns about justice and morality.” — Kira Ganga Kieffer   Are anti-vaxxers simply bizarre anti-science crazies egged on by conspiracists like RFK Jr? For Kira Ganga Kieffer , author of Unvaccinated Under God , what she cal...

“The rules-based system just hasn’t worked. China’s system is so opaque that you can’t see the subsidies. And when you’ve got China not interested in new rules and the US not interested in a referee, you’ve got two of the world’s biggest actors who aren’t on board.” — Soumaya Keynes   It would have been nice to get John Maynard Keynes on the show to get his critique of Trump’s trade war. But in th...

“The end of labor means the end of paid slavery. And the opening up of freedom — that is to say, choice of how to spend your time. The only question, a big question, is how do you eat?” — Keith Teare   Does capitalism have a future in our AI age? For Musk, Silicon Valley’s baddest bad entrepreneur, the answer might surprise. Musk seems to think that in the long run, money and wealth will disappear...

“Maps are communicating vast quantities of new knowledge that was only estimated. They convey this imaginative energy — an imaginative energy that maps today have lost, because today maps are so functional, so utilitarian.” — Peter Keating   In the sixteenth century, Spanish cartographers represented California as an island. They weren’t being careless. Nor were they drawing New Yorker covers. The...

“Fascism is the term that is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary political discussions. We can talk about right-wing populism — but the type of politics they share with classic fascism is what I call red pill politics.” — David Ost   Please don’t use the F-word. At least to describe the politics of Trump, Orbán, Meloni, Netanyahu, Modi, Farage et al. Rather than fascism, the best way to demysti...

“Retirement is a false construct created a hundred years ago by the government. It was basically created when Social Security was born. Prior to that, people worked until they died — because they didn’t live as long.” — Michael Clinton   At the ripe young age of 70, Michael Clinton hiked nine days to Everest Base Camp and ran the Tenzing-Hillary Marathon down. Now 72, he is president of his own lo...

“Soccer matches are poorly designed experiments — you don’t necessarily find out which team was better. But any soccer fan will tell you that. Oftentimes, the better team does not win.” — Nick Greene, via a NASA scientist   On June 11, the World Cup comes to North America. Fifty-six years ago, I watched the searing injustice of Johann Cruyff’s Holland getting robbed in the 1974 final by Germany. T...

“The dangers are human, not AI. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what the AI does itself. In fact, even the idea that there is such a thing as the AI in itself is a mistake.” — Keith Teare   I’m in Korea this week. So rather than doing a traditional one-on-one That Was the Week tech summary, Keith Teare and I are trying something different. We invited Jonathan Rauch — Brookings I...

“History is really interesting because it’s about people. And people are interesting. So there are plenty of different ways of doing this, and I think there’s room for everybody.” — Adrian Goldsworthy   The greatest rivalry in antiquity is also uncomfortably relevant to us today. In Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece , the classical scholar Adrian Goldsworthy covers the long...

“We need to develop better theories of why the other side believes what they do. Having an accurate theory includes recognizing if somebody is a psychopath — but also recognizing that psychopaths are rarer than we think.” — Audun Dahl   If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no head. While this sounds like an annoying cliché (especiall...

“Being a father is probably one of the toughest and most rewarding jobs I’ve ever had. A lot of the principles I used to teach snipers apply to kids: dealing with negativity, replacing negative self-talk, learning that well-meaning adults can say terrible things — and you don’t have to take that on as baggage.” — Brandon Webb   Brandon Webb defines himself as an author, entrepreneur, Navy SEAL sni...

“As recently as the mid-seventies, under 5% of Ivy Leaguers are headed to Wall Street. It’s actually not that attractive. But as Wall Street’s deregulated, it changes the incentive structure — it makes it much more profitable and demands this huge labor force.” — Dylan Gottlieb   They stalked the sidewalks of Manhattan in button-down shirts embroidered with the names of investment banks. They jogg...

“All the warnings were there. It was almost a carbon copy — the same warnings that were ignored before Paradise, ignored again before the Palisades. And nobody was held accountable.” — Jonathan Vigliotti   On January 7, 2025, the Palisades Fire ignited in Los Angeles. Over the first few hours of the fire, the second-largest city in America had no firefighters on the front lines and no coordinated...

  “They’re all me. Every single one. I see them almost as if they’re inoculated on various petri dishes, and the petri dishes are all put into this pressure-cooker situation — that of a missile alert.” — Vincent Yu   So what would you do with the last 19 minutes of your life? That’s the question Vincent Yu plays with in Seek Immediate Shelter . Triggered (so to speak) by a 2018 Hawaii missile aler...

“We’re losing home on so many different levels. Physically. Politically. Morally. And after AI, spiritually — because language, our spiritual home, is taken away from us. We now have to share it with an unhuman entity.” — Ece Temelkuran   Do you feel homeless — physically, politically, morally or spiritually? That’s the question posed by Ece Temelkuran ’s new book Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding H...

“You can’t be confident about human decision-making. You can be confident on the potential of technology. Humans are quite capable of making both wrong and bad decisions.” — Keith Teare   Is a jobless AI future really something to celebrate? That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare certainly thinks so. His editorial “Civilization: What Is Worth Doing” this week imagines a future in which nobody has...

“It was a completely unthinking exercise in cost-cutting that made no sense in terms of the newspaper. I think perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper, it made sense.” — Simon Elegant on being ‘eliminated’ by the Washington Post   Hong Kong in 2019. A dismembered body is found in a landfill. A disgraced police superintendent is called back from internal exile to solve it. The city around him...

“If criticism isn’t going to be written by one human mind, what else is it for? Criticism done by AI means nothing.” — Bethanne Patrick   Is London really falling? Perhaps. This week on Keen On America , everything seems to be falling. There are young men falling from riverside apartments. Girlhood is falling to the commodification of appearance. Book reviewing is falling to AI. Mary Todd Lincoln...

“Fraud makes up between 40 and 50 percent of all crime in the UK. Police resource dedicated to fraud: 1 percent. No country is giving fraud the attention it deserves.” — Becky Holmes   Was Shakespeare a fraud? Possibly, says Becky Holmes , the Stratford-upon-Avon-based writer and the lady behind the X account @deathtospinach. She should know. Best known as the author of Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love...

“Justice may have been served, but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up.” — James Lasdun   In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh — wealthy scion of a South Carolina prosecutorial dynasty — was found guilty of murdering his wife Maggie and his son Paul at their family estate. With its opioid addiction, fatal boat crash, staged suicide, and a cousin called Eddie, the case could have been inve...

“Every single person that we meet was both the endpoint of thousands of years that brought them there, and the midpoint of some other process, and was the beginning of something else entirely. Think of yourselves as the middle and the beginning, not just the end.” — Patrick Wyman   History, we are often told, is a simple story of progress — from caves and villages to cities; from forests and farms...

“The current crisis was far from inevitable. Politicians made consistently bad choices. In doing so, they fostered a crisis of confidence in political institutions, empowered anti-system candidates, and produced a new Cold War as dangerous as the last.” — Ian Shapiro   The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was a moment of extraordinary euphoria. Fukuyama even described it as the end of hist...

“Post-war Europe is essentially an American protectorate. Europeans don’t like to admit that. They only came to realize just how dependent they were on the United States in 2025, when Trump basically leveraged US security and forced Europe into a very disadvantageous trade deal.” — Glyn Morgan   Post Second World War Europe was always an American project. At least according to The Rise and Fall of...

“Orbán rigged the electoral system to highly benefit the winner. He thought he would never face the realistic possibility of losing. When someone actually threatened his plan, he just couldn’t imagine it. And that person got more than 55% — a two-thirds-plus majority. Orbán shot himself in the foot.” — Marc Loustau   On April 12, Viktor Orbán — the populist who invented the illiberal playbook — go...