Keen On America

The New York City based writer John Ganz appeared on episode 2099 talking about how American cracked up in the Nineties with the rise of neo-Nazis like David Duke. When it comes to national crack-ups, however, nothing much competes with Nazi Germany in the Thirties - and Ganz, as a grandson of German Jewish refugees from Nazism, recently travelled to Cologne to search for his family’s bookstore. T...

Whatever one thinks of the creative potential of AI, it’s definitely been great for metaphor makers. Yesterday, we had Shannon Vallor explaining why AI is a mirror of our social and political values. Today, Madhumita Murgia , the Financial Times ’ Artificial Intelligence editor and author of CODE DEPENDENT, suggests that we are all living in the shadow of the economic perils and inequities AI. The...

According to Shannon Vallor, a self-styled AI “ethicist”, artificial intelligence is a mirror . When we interact with the latest algorithms from OpenAI or Anthropic, she says, we are actually observing our social and political values, prejudices and ideals. This all-too-human quality of AI makes it less of an existential threat to humanity and more of a reflection both of society’s flaws and a pro...

We are focusing on the impact of AI this week with interviews featuring Shannon Vallor, Matt Beane and Madhumita Murgia. First up Beane , who teaches Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara and has a new book out about how to save human ability in an age of intelligent machines. The book is called The Skill Code , but as Matt Beane explains, it’s really about a human code that will allow us to m...

Little has changed in America more dramatically over the last half century than the retail fashion industry. There was a time, Julie Satow tells us the mid 20th century, when the high fashion department stores on New York City’s Fifth Avenue were not only glamorous, but were actually run by women. This is the story of her new book, When Women Ran Fifth Avenue , a wistful, yet sociologically penetr...

There are those who believe that fighting for democracy is more important than defending the rather nebulous concept of “liberalism”. And then there are those, like the political philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre, who, in their eponymous new book, see liberalism as a way of life which makes us both better and happier people. For Lefebvre, liberalism is the ideology of our times, as ubiquitous as reli...

  It’s an odd world. Many of our most pressing political problems, particularly global warming, are long term, and yet we are still confined to the here-and-now of national politics to determine policy. This is the issue that Thomas Hale, an Oxford Professor of Public Policy, addresses in his interesting new book, LONG PROBLEMS: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing across Time . For the s...

Are we on the brink of technological “super intelligence”, machines that will be able to think and reason with infinitely more power than humans? According to Leopold Aschenbrenner , the author of Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, a technological roadmap for the next ten years, super intelligence will inevitably arrive by 2027. Much of Silicon Valley agrees with Aschenbrenner, a young Germa...

Peter S. Goodman , The New York Times’ Global Economics correspondent, is one of America’s most innovative and outspoken journalists. He was on KEEN ON a couple of years ago talking about how the billionaire class - aka: Davos Man - has devoured the world. And now Goodman is back on the show to talk about his latest book, How the World Ran Out of Everything - what he describes as a “cosmically bew...

Bethanne Patrick , the world’s best read woman and KEEN ON’s official literary maven, has six recommended new books to read this June. Three non-fiction works and three novels, they extend from books all about women, to the dangers of jelly fish to a gay Hungarian in the Lavender Scare Hollywood of the Fifties. So something for everyone and Bethanne even suggests whether each book should be read o...

Back in August 2021, we did a show featuring the British psychologist Lucy Jones , about how nature maintains our sanity. Jones’ thesis is born out in the astonishing story of Banning Lyon , who was institutionalized in a Texan psychiatric hospital as a teenager and freed by his discovery of the outdoors. Lyon’s new memoir The Chair and the Valley is excellent - as, I hope, is this interview. In c...

It’s becoming more and more self-evident that the Nineties matter . John Ganz’s important new book, When the Clock Broke , focuses on how, in the early 1990’s, the seemingly crackpot ideas of what at the time appeared to be con men like David Duke and Pat Buchanan, infiltrated what remained Ronald Reagan’s optimistic, globalist Republican party. The seeds of Trumpian reactionary populism, Ganz bel...

In episode 2065 , we discussed the Malaysian contractor, Leonard Glenn Francis (aka: Fat Leonard) about the biggest recent scandal in the US navy. But, as Guy Lawson, author of Hot Dog Money explains in this episode, Louis Martin “Marty” Blazer gives Fat Leonard a good run for his money (so to speak) in Blazer’s participation and later expose of the profoundly corrupt nature of American college sp...

As America braces itself for the upcoming Presidential election, a growing army of coastal commentators are agonizing over the health of the country’s democracy. In contrast with many of these desk bound pundits, the Bloomberg editorial director Frank Barry bought an RV and drove from New York City to San Francisco on the backroads of old Lincoln Highway. His new book, Back Roads and Better Angels...

In the wake of a “ major Summit ” on Ukraine which neither the Russians nor the Chinese attended, the war remains as murky and inconclusive as ever. And it’s this murkiness and inconclusiveness that the San Francisco based writer Sasha Vasiljuk explores in her new novel, Y our Presence is Mandatory. But Vasiljuk’s semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional canvas focuses on more than just Putin’s invas...

Big Tech is getting even bigger. This was the week that NVIDIA joined Microsoft and Apple as a three trillion dollar company. And it’s also the week that, according to That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, in which OpenAI’s deals with Microsoft and Apple might have locked up the AI economy. CHECKMATE! Keith thus entitles this week’s newsletter, suggesting a Big Tech economy in which an isolated...

The Euros start today and Copa America next week. So expect a slew of garbage about soccer/football as the “beautiful game” or, even more ludicrously, the “people’s game”. But as Joseph O’Neill shows in his timely new novel, Godwin , today’s trillion dollar football industry is a mirror of our globalized, neo-colonial economy. Think of Godwin as a chirpy Heart of Darkness for our celebrity age of...

How to write a history of labor in the United States for young people? According to the award-winning author J. Albert Mann , a history of labor written for children shouldn’t be childish. Indeed, her new book, Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States , is anything but childish in its very grown-up focus on exploitation and injustice. And given that our young adults are on the fron...

In episode 2082, James Kirchick suggested that being Jewish and being a Zionist should be of all of one thing. Shane Burley reverses this. The co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Antisemitism , the Portland based, religiously orthodox Burley suggests that being Jewish might actually mean questioning not just Netanyahu, but the very intellectual foundations of the Zionist pro...

 One fashionable English language word I’d like to blow up is “weaponization”. Another is “victimhood”. So I couldn’t resist talking the London School of Eonomics professor Lilie Chouliaraki about Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood , her new book attempting to right how we abuse these two maligned words. Feeling wronged, Chouliaraki explains, is really all about establishing power. No wonder...

Sixteen months feels like sixteen centuries in the history of digital technology. Last year, the NYU data scientist Meredith Broussard came on episode 1360 to explain how technology is reinforcing inequality and what we can do about it. Today, seventeen hundred episodes later, Broussard explained to me when she came back on KEEN ON, both nothing and everything has changed. AI is dramatically disru...

The Nineties are back in fashion. Last week on KEEN ON, Terry Anderson explained why the Nineties still matter . Next week, we are featuring a conversation with John Ganz, the author of When the Calock Broke , his interpretation of how America “cracked up” in the early Nineties. Today we feature a conversation with D.W. Gibson, author of the oral history of Seattle’s World Trade Organization prote...

We are having a Stanford self-improvement sort of weekend. Yesterday, KEEN ON featured a conversation with two Stanford profs on how to acquire a venture capital mindset. Today, Jeremy Utley, the director of education at Stanford’s Institute of Design, teaches us how to facilitate our own epiphanies. In his new co-authored book, IdeaFlow: The Only Business Metric that Matters , Utley - who boasts...

Venture capitalists aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. For leftists, they are Trump supporting vultures, feasting on the rotting carcass of neo-liberalism. But for Alex Dang and Ilya Strebulaev, co-authors of THE VENTURE MINDSET , the top venture capitalists offer a lesson to all of us in how to make smarter bets and achieve extraordinary growth in both our businesses and our lives. Dang and Strebulaev...

That Was The Week author and Silicon Valley based entrepreneur Keith Teare isn’t a great fan of either Trump or Biden. But as he notes in this week’s newsletter , while Joe Biden is no dream candidate, Donald Trump is a “big no no” nightmare. But not everyone in Silicon Valley shares Keith’s distaste for Trump. Sequoia Capital partner, Doug Leone, for example, tweeted this week that he would be vo...