Keen On America

The KEEN ON America series is supposed to feature conversations with prominent Americans about the post, present and future of their almost 250 year-old Republic. And while Nick Bryant was born in the UK and now lives in Australia, I think he nonetheless qualifies as an honorary American. The BBC’s America correspondent during the Bush and Clinton presidencies, Bryant has been compared with the ic...

“The past is never dead”, William Faulkner quipped, “it’s not even past.” Angry white men, a disruptive internet, political gridlock in DC, right-wing terrorism, lying Presidents…. Yes, the 2020’s began in the 1990’s with Ruby Ridge, Newt Gingrich, the Oklahoma bombing, Bill and Monica, Russ Limbaugh, and the dotcom madness. Indeed, according to Terry H. Anderson’s intriguing new book WHY THE NINE...

What goes up, comes down. As the Dow continues to hover at 40,000, something is inevitably going to burst the Wall Street’s current irrational exuberance. According to Andrew Lipstein , the biggest danger to today’s stock market boom is the $15 trillion in global passive investing funds managed by companies like Vanguard. In this month’s Harpers cover story, WHAT GOES UP, the Brooklyn based Lipste...

James Kirchick’s New York Times op-ed, “A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing”, has elicited much controversy. I have to admit that I’m not entirely convinced by Kirchick’s thesis, particularly on his position that a Jew these days has no choice but to be a Zionist, but it’s a provocative argument. While meritocracy has “been good for the Jews”, he explains, our new “woke” politics, especiall...

On yesterday’s show, Keith Teare mourned the scarcity of utopian thinking in Silicon Valley. But maybe Keith was looking on the wrong coast. Robert Wolcott , who teaches at the University of Chicago and is the chair of the World Innovation Network, recognizes the value of utopian idealism in his co-authored new book, Proximity: How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-in-Time Transform Business, Society a...

If you want to insult somebody in Silicon Valley, call them a “utopian”. It suggests a fantastical mind unable or unwilling to come to terms with reality. Utopians, it is assumed by self styled “realists”, are children. They’ve failed to grow up. But according to That Was The Week tech newsletter Keith Teare, the problem with today’s Silicon Valley is the scarcity rather than abundance of utopian...

Heroism might be out of fashion, but that hasn’t deterred Jeremy S. Adams from offering what he calls Lessons in Liberty from the lives of ten extraordinary Americans. His list (yes to RBG, but no to JFK, FDR or MLK) will inevitably be controversial, but most of us don’t doubt that Americans need civic inspiration from their most distinguished citizens. And Adams, a much celebrated high school tea...

We live in a erotically dissonant and carnally confused age. One the one hand, young people are having a lot less sex these days; on the other, they are listening intently to the music of erotically dissonant artists like Billy Eilish and Taylor Swift. I first came across the ideas of “erotic dissonance” and “carnal confusion” in “ The New Sound of Sexual Frustration” , an intriguing Atlantic piec...

Is history, particularly the last thousand year history of North America, written by the victors? Perhaps. After all, as Kathleen DuVal, the author of  NATIVE NATIONS  reminds us, a thousand years ago, back in 1024, North America was inhabited by a rich mosaic of indigenous civilizations that in many ways mirrored European societies. Today, of course, things are quite different. But as DuVal, a mu...

There will be a British general election on July 4. “The most consequential of our generation” no doubt many politicians will remind the voters. But almost exactly 45 years ago, there really was a profoundly consequential British election. Back in May 1979, Mrs Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party won power in an election that ultimately changed everything about Britain. In 1979, (Sir) Tim Lanke...

May might be almost finished, but you’ve still got time this Memorial weekend to begin reading one of Bethanne Patrick’s recommended new books. And this month, Patrick’s list is really scintillating - extending from fresh fiction by Claire Messud, Kaliane Bradley and Colm Toibin to new non-fictional books by George Stephanopoulos, Nina St. Pierre and Alan M. Taylor. So no excuses. Watch/listen to...

Few people are better equipped to unravel the riddle of the Indian economy than the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan . As the co-author (with Rohit Lamba) of the just published Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity , Rajan lays out a strategy for Indian economic development that might allow the country to both maintain its much storied democracy and p...

Along with Ukraine and Gaza, Taiwan represents the third leg of our increasingly wobbly international political system. This week, for example, the Chinese navy put on military drills off the Taiwanese coast designed, supposedly, to test its ability to “ seize power ”. So is the world on the brink of a third world war between China and the United States? Perhaps, according to the Tufts university...

Another week in tech, another splashy AI scandal. This one involves OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the voice of Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson. Dear Sam, Keith Teare’s That Was The Week newsletter begins, as the SignalRank CEO tries to give the OpenAI CEO advice about how to minimize these sorts of scandals in the future. But I wonder if the Johansson-Altman spat is a very early example of the multi...

The debate about the supposed “colonial” foundations of Israel goes on and on. But I wonder whether Jehuda Reinharz’s definitive new biography of Chaim Weizmann might help clarify the unintentional colonial foundations of the Zionist project. Reinharz explains that Weizmann made his name as a brilliant chemist in the UK, where he leveraged his equally glittering social networking skills into the p...

The digital revolution has few more persistent critics than John (Rick) MacArthur , the legendarily outspoken publisher of Harper’s Magazine . His skepticism about Silicon Valley, he confesses, came at the turn of the century when he overheard the gibberish sales talk from a rabble of start-up entrepreneurs in a San Francisco restaurant. In the quarter century since, MacArthur hasn’t been shy to a...

Bobi Conn’s life is an American story. Growing up in a desolate Kentucky holler, her father a drug addicted outlaw who abused her mother, Conn has reinvented herself as a successful writer and mother. But for all Conn’s unflinching honesty about her brutal upbringing, she remains proudly America - both in her love of the Kentucky land and her unwillingness to demonize rural America. Her American s...

Is it time to start worrying about the Germans again? Perhaps, at least according to Jacob Kushner, the author of LOOK AWAY: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants , a book about an eleven year terror campaign by the National Socialist Underground (NSU). Kushner is ambivalent about the broad appeal in Germany of the NSU’s murderous violence against...

Jordan Elgrably , the Morrocan-French editor of the Markaz Review , wants us to read complex stories about the Middle East and North Africa that our simplistic newspaper headlines mostly ignore. In his new anthology, Stories from the Center of the World , Elgrably includes short stories from writers as diverse as Leila Aboulela, Amany Kamal Eldinn and Hanif Kureishi that reflect the rich mosaic of...

I’ve always been a big admirer of Steven Johnson , whose prolific work focuses on the disruptive role of new technologies in shaping our past and future. In his new book, The Infernal Machine , Johnson writes about the turn of the 20th century, a period of feverish technology innovation and no less febrile political unrest. Our conversation focuses on the strange symbiosis between Alfred Nobel’s i...

It’s a mind blowing story. In Fat Leonard , the Washington Post ’s prize winning investigative journalist Craig Whitlock tells of a Malaysian contractor called Leonard Glenn Francis who successfully seduced up to a thousand US naval officers with prostitutes, fancy dinners and expensive gifts. The most astonishing thing of all, he explains, is that many Naval officers seems to have known exactly w...

Ever wondered why the never-endingTrump show seems simultaneously like a reality show remake and sequel? According to Chris Gavaler, the self styled Patron Saint of Superheroes , it’s because our view of reality itself has been shaped by all those “sequels, remakes, retcons and rejects” endlessly spewing out of Hollywood. Our addiction to the Stars Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Marvel...

Given the situation in Gaza, some might interpret a new book entitled Judaism Is About Love to be either satirical or slightly chutzpahdik . But its author, Rabbi Shai Held , President & Dean of New York City’s Hadar Institute, is all too serious in his argument that the idea of love lies at the historic heart of traditional Jewish life. It’s an intriguing, if idealistic, interpretation. Chris...

Last week’s KEEN ON America interview featured a conversation with R. Derek Black, the son of a KKK Grand Wizard, whose all-too-American life has been defined by radical personal reinvention and second chances. In contrast, Ali Velshi, host of MSNBC's "The Last Word", not only chose to come to America from Canada, but also chose to become an American citizen. For Velshi, a self-styled libertarian...

What is the most American town in the USA? Las Vegas comes to mind, of course. And Memphis, with its uniquely American church of Graceland. Or one of Springsteen’s forgotten beach towns in New Jersey. Imagine rolling Vegas and Memphis and one of those sad NJ boardwalk places into a small Missouri town that you’ve never heard of. That’s Branson, Missouri, the 12,,638 person self-styled “city” in th...