Keen On America

What a treat. LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick and I got the opportunity to talk today with the great Andrew O’Hagan , author of Caledonian Road , his new blockbuster novel about the state of contemporary Britain. It’s a fabulous read and O’Hagan was no less fab, generously dedicating an hour to our questions. As O’Hagan explained, for all his horror at the Dickensian squalor of contemporary...

Spy novelists often make excellent moralists and the American writer Daniel Silva , author of the Gabriel Allon series of best-selling thrillers, is a particularly sharp critic of contemporary morals. His new Allon thriller, A Death in Cornwall , focuses on money laundering, murder and mayhem in the art world. The novel is set in the contemporary United Kingdom of the (once) ruling Tory party wher...

Earlier this week, I visited the offices of Floodgate Partners in Menlo Park to talk with its co-founding partner Mike Maples . As an early investor in Twitter, Twitch.tv and many other successful start-ups, Maples is one of Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capitalists. He is, to borrow the title of his new book, an investor in “ Pattern Breakers ” - entrepreneurs whose radical innovations...

In episode 2022 , That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare and I violently disagreed about the current AI boom. Keith, the eternal techno-optimist, thinks AI is about to radically change everything; as the perennial techno-pessimist, I argued that much of the current Wall St AI insanity is a 21st version of 17th century Dutch tulip mania. But if we were to split the baby and come up with a more car...

The seductive promise of microfinance might have conveniently died in the Western media, but Muhammad Yunis’ alluring economic idea has actually wreaked unintentional havoc around the world. Mara Kardas-Nelson’s important new book, We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky , reveals the damage done by microfinance loans in developing world countries like Sierra Leone and Bangladesh because their predator...

Last week, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare and I discussed whether Silicon Valley has an AI Bubble Problem. And we return to the same subject today, comparing today’s AI driven Wall Street techno-mania with the automotive centric Wall Street madness of the roaring 1920s. As usual, Keith is the optimistic, arguing that stock market booms are always founded on some new technological reality....

Memoirs are usually morally uplifting reads with happy endings. But Phil Elwood’s new memoir, All the Worst Humans , is a confession of how Elwood, as a top DC based PR operative, created what he calls a “counter-narrative” for Assad, Gaddafi and the Qataris. Elwood isn’t proud about any of this. As he confessed to me, he still sleeps poorly and often wakes up at 3.00 am regretting the morally poo...

In 2011, Simon Reynolds is one of the world’s most prolific music journalists, came on KEEN ON to explain why the Internet has been bad for both musical artists and fans. Back then it took a brave man like Reynolds to argue against the supposedly cornucopian cultural potential of the Web 2 revolution. Today, in contrast, most mainstream cultural critics see the internet, and particularly the AI re...

Our second July 4 interview features Diane McLain Smith , author of Remaking the Space Between Us: How Citizens Can Work Together to Build a Better Future For All . The problem with America, McLain Smith believes, is that “we the people have become the problem” with our endlessly divisive tribalism. But just as we are the problem, we can also be the solution if we join her citizen network and work...

As the former Assistant Attorney General for Maryland, one would expect Debbie Hines to be a strong supporter of the American criminal justice system. But the Baltimore based veteran trial lawyer is unambiguously critical in her new memoir, GET OFF MY NECK , of what she sees as the structural racism of a “conveyer belt” American legal system which sends so many African-American people to jail. Hin...

Last week’s horror show debate woke up a lot of progressive Americans. For Celeste Marcus , managing editor of Liberties Quarterly , Biden’s dismal performance was akin to the shock of the January 6th insurrection. In contrast with Jan 6, however, Marcus is calling for a political insurrection amongst progressives that will trigger a generational shift in power. Both American democracy and liberal...

Over the last couple of years we’ve had multiple guests questioning the economic and moral value of a college education. But Daniel R. Porterfield, the Aspen Institute CEO and former President of Franklin and Marshall College, strongly disagrees. In his new book, MINDSET MATTERS , Porterfield argues that in our age of rapid technological change, the college experience is particularly valuable, esp...

Amongst the most bizarro thing about last week’s truly bizarre Presidential debate was how much Biden and Trump were in violent agreement on China. Trump certainly has won the ideological battle about the supposedly existential China threat and the two decrepit old men both celebrate American embroilment in a second Cold War. This is great news , of course, for the America’s sprawling military ind...

In the wake of Biden’s pathetically dismal performance last week, it’s worth remembering that some progressive thinkers have been warning for months about this catastrophe. Back in May, the New York Times ran an op-ed by UC Berkeley political science professor M. Steven Fish entitled “ Trump Knows Dominance Wins, Someone Tell Democrats ”. Even though The Times functions as the Pravda of the Democr...

Does Silicon Valley have an AI bubble problem? That Was the Week’s Keith Teare, usually the most bullish of tech bulls, acknowledges that Silicon Valley has an overvaluation issue with AI startups. But I wonder if the problem with AI goes deeper than the frothiness of its startup valuations. What, if anything, is AI search good for? asks a Vox piece that Keith links to this week. That could be rep...

Imagine accosting a stranger in a grocery store because you mistook him to be your husband? That was the fate of the Washington Post science reporter, Sadie Dingfelder , who suffers from the bizarre condition of faceblindness. She explores this condition in DO I KNOW YOU? , her own journey into the strange science of sight, memory, and imagination. Dingfelder’s embrace of her own neurodiversity is...

If you liked Davy Chou’s excellent 2022 movie, Return to Seoul , then Tracy O’Neill’s new memoir, Woman of Interest , might be for you. Both movie and book are about an a female adoptee’s return to South Korea in search of their mysterious birth mother. Chou’s movie features a heartbreakingly lost Ji-Min Park wandering through life in the West and finally stumbling emptily onto the foggy truth of...

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...