Keen On America

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...

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...