Keen On America

I’m just back from five glorious days in Syracuse, the ancient Mediterranean city in the south western corner of Sicily. And to extend my trip, at least virtually, I spoke to the young Irish novelist, Ferdia Lennon , author of the very unusual and much acclaimed Glorious Exploits , a tragicomic novel set in the Syracuse of the Peloponnesian War. We talked the Syracuse of antiquity, of course, but...

Apple’s Crush advertisement for their new range of iPads got so crushed by its critics that Apple apologized and announced the commercial wouldn’t go on tv. But according to Keith Teare, author of the That Was The Week tech newsletter, the massive reaction to this ad reflects a troubling cultural hysteria which, he believes, is driven by “snowflakes” on social networks like Threads. And the truth,...

Timothy Morton, who teaches English at Rice, has become a bit of a rock star interpreter of our hellishly hot planetary times. And his eclectic work has even gotten the stamp of approval of real rock stars - like Laurie Anderson & Björk as well as the Big Lebowski himself, Jeff Bridges. So it was really fun to have him on KEEN ON to talk about HELL: In Search of a Christian Ecology , his new t...

How seriously should we take the white nationalist threat in the United States? Very seriously, at least according to R. Derek Black, a young man who knows a thing or two about the US white nationalist movement. The son of a Grand Wizard of the KKK and a close family friend of David Duke, Black believes that white nationalism is no longer a fringe feature of the Trumpist Republican party. And it’s...

Marx’s 19th century remark that history repeats itself twice, first as tragedy and then as farce, helps us makes sense of the seemingly surreal politics of the contemporary Republican Party. As Kyle Paoletta notes in his insightful Harpers essay “The Race For Second Place”, the 2024 Republican primaries have been a complete “farce” (the tragedy , of course, being the 2016 primaries). Everything ab...

Pete Townsend said it best. “Hope I die before I get old” he wrote in The Who’s anthemic 1965 hit, “My Generation”. But what Townsend really meant in a lyric that best captured the rebellious Boomer spirit of the Sixties, he later acknowledged , was “hope I die before I get very rich” . Townsend, as it happens, is still alive and, like many other members of his generation, very very rich. In fact,...

The more that changes in the digital world, the more that stays the same. For all the disruption of AI, two trends appear totally unchanging. Firstly, it’s the big players - Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple - that appear to be most benefitting from the AI revolution. Secondly, creative individuals continue to struggle to make money in the online economy. That, at least, is the view of That Was...

We don’t often image Miami as a city of Cold War subterfuge akin to Berlin or Vienna. But according to Vince Houghton, co-author of COVERT CITY , Miami was as crucial to winning the Cold War as Washington DC or Moscow. The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War, he argues. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere miles away, was a pivo...

We’ve done several shows on the housing crisis in America, mostly from a progressive perspective in which the solution to the shortage of homes is presented in terms of government investment. The libertarian economist, Bryan Caplan, however, comes at the problem from a more conservative angle. The co-author of the new graphic novel, BUILD, BABY, BUILD , Caplan argues that the housing industry need...

One of Bethanne Patrick’s recommended books for April was Mohamed Amer Meziane’s The States of the Earth . It sounded intriguing, if not entirely coherent, and so I invited Meziane on the show. Even now, I’m not sure I exactly get Meziane’s point. He seems to be saying that secularization is not only behind western racial colonialism but also the destruction of the land. It’s a provocative thesis,...

In today’s stultified American gerontocracy, not everyone is convinced that we should care about old people. After all, aging baby boomers still control most of the wealth and power in an increasingly divided & inegalitarian country. But, in contrast with many of today’s age warriors, Andrew J Scott cares about the old. In fact, the 58 year-old British business school academic has built a care...

Samyr Laine might be a model for how to become a Haitian-American in the 21st century. Son of Haitian emigrants, Laine was a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, competed at the London 2012 Olympics as a Haitian triple jumper, and is now an entrepreneur and investor in sports and entertainment. It’s quite a remarkable story and will speaks, to some, of the continued existence of the American Dr...

Given the industry of Holocaust remembering, do we really need another book about the Nazis and their industrial death camps? Yes, according to Tobias Buck, author of the much acclaimed A Final Verdict: the Holocaust on Trial in the 21st Century. As the half-German managing editor of the Financial Times , Buck brings a subtlety to the discussion of the Holocaust which is sometimes missing from oth...

The Harvard academic Elisa New is host of the much acclaimed PBS series POETRY IN AMERICA . Now in Season Four, the show has featured conversations about American poetry with Joe Biden, Herbie Hancock, Gloria Estefan, Shaquille O’Neal, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. While America isn’t normally considered a poetic nation, New’s show has brought poetry into the homes of millions of Americans. So when I...

In November of this year, two particularly out of touch eighty-year old men will contest the US Presidential election. America, in other words, has an age problem. According to David Faris, author of THE KIDS ARE ALL LEFT , the country might be on the brink of a generational war between young and old. But there’s nothing apocalyptic about this imminent conflict, Faris believes. The majority of Ame...

As founding director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute and author of the new ALIEN EARTHS: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos , Lisa Kaltenegger is one of the world’s most respected cosmologists. She believes that, with our revolutionary new cosmological technologies, we are likely to “discover” non-human life somewhere in the cosmos. What’s particularly astonishing about these kinds of conve...

In a “post-truth” world, who should we trust? According to Alex Edmans, one of the UK’s hottest business school professors, you should trust him enough to read his new book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics and Studies Exploit Our Biases - And What We Can Do About It . You should also trust me enough to listen to and/or watch this conversation with Edmans, but not enough to believe everyt...

Museums, the distinguished anthropologist Adam Kuper argues in his new book Museums of Other People , are actually mirrors of ourselves. Rather than revealing curiosities about cultures of antiquity, they are actually living documents of power - particularly western, colonial power. Does this mean we affluent westerners should all feel horribly guilty ever time we go to the British Museum or the P...

There are few people more adept at navigating America’s labyrinthine medical system than Robert Pearl . Yale medical degree, Stanford University professor, best-selling author, former CEO of the Californian insurance network Kaiser Permanente, Pearl has explored this byzantine confusion of private enterprise monopoly and government supported bureaucracy from almost every angle. And now Dr Pearl ha...

Dr Judy Ho has a new book entitled The New Rules of Attachment: How to Heal Your Relationships, Reparent Your Inner Child, and Secure Your Life Vision . It’s one of those books which explain to us, in our therapeutic age of intense anxiety, how to stop f*****g ourselves up. Yeah, I know. These kinds of books, by “clinical and forensic neuropsychologists” like the telegenic Judy Ho, can be intensel...

The suburbs haven’t got a great press recently on KEEN ON. First there was Benjamin Herold , author of Disillusioned, who found the dead body of the American Dream in the American suburb. And then David Masciotra , author of Exurbia Now, discovered political lethargy and reaction in the outer suburbs of American “exurbia”. Matt Hern, however, disagrees, finding in the suburbs the very political en...

In his early opposition to the Iraq war and other overseas misadventures in Bosnia, Haiti and El Salvador, Mark Danner is one of the most respected observers of American foreign policy. So it was a real honor to sit down with him and talk about his life both as an American and as a critic of America’s increasingly frayed relations with the rest of the world. Given his peripatetic life as a corresp...

Harper’s has a great cover story this month entitled “The Life and Death of Hollywood” by the intellectual historian, podcast and general muckraker Daniel Bessner. Film & tv writers face an existential threat, Bessner told me, from a Hollywood now controlled by four financialized mega-companies operated by MBA touting execs. But is this really new, I asked him, or is today’s dismal story just...

Elliot Ackerman has an intriguing essay in this issue of Liberties Quarterly on the use and abuse of mercenaries throughout history. Linking the history of the British in India, the US in Afghanistan and Russia in contemporary Ukraine, he ask what it means when mercenaries replace regular soldiers to fight supposedly “national” wars? It’s not usually good news, he suggests, arguing that for Americ...

I have to admit I absolutely HATED Alex Garland’s new movie Civil War . I found it annoyingly trite, self-evidently packaged for an ahistorical cinematic audience addicted to the amnesia of mindless violence. That’s fine, of course, for most Hollywood productions, but not for a supposedly serious movie about the American future by a highly talented filmmaker. However, my Canadian friend, Stephen M...