Keen On America

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...

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...