Keen On America

Do we really need more jeremiads exposing the Randian greed of Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg & Travis Kalanick? Rob Lalka’s THE VENTURE ALCHEMISTS is about how big tech turned profits into power. but this has been the alchemy of American economic life for two hundred years. What isn’t clear to me is how we are supposed to distinguish good big tech guys like Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, Craig New...

All the tech news this week seems to be about how Big Tech is, for better or worse, getting BIGGER. There’s the Department of Justice anti-trust case against Apple, a hail-Mary attempt by Biden’s DOJ to transform to the high-end iPhone into a lower-end Android device. There’s Microsoft’s “acquisition” of InflectionAI, orchestrated by Reid Hoffman, both a co-founder of InflectionAI and a Microsoft...

As we approach Easter and Passover, it’s worth noting that our mainstream monotheistic creeds are based on a belief in what Professor Chris French, the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths college at London University, would call “weird s**t”. So as French, the author of new MIT press book THE SCIENCE OF WEIRD S**T , explained to me, maybe we...

We would all be way more ignorant without omnivorous book critic and regular KEEN ON guest Bethanne Patrick. This month she recommends six new books by Russell Banks, Adam Philips, Percival Everett, Andrew Dubus III, Marie Mutsuki Mockett & Adelle Waldman. So don’t complain you’ve got nothing to read. No excuses. Bethanne Patrick maintains a storied place in the publishing industry as a critic...

Warning: this is an adults-only show. David Baker, the Australian based author of The Shortest History of Sex , takes us through two billion years of sexual evolution. And, from the first microbial exchanges of DNA to Darwin and Freud, Tinder and sexbots, it’s not a pretty story. The good news, however, is that neither Baker nor I took off our clothes or confessed to any unusual fetishes. But we d...

Even if it isn’t quite Spring, the professional baseball season begins today in, of all places, Korea. And to celebrate this premature rite, I spoke with Keith O’Brien, the author of CHARLIE HUSTLE , the new Pete Rose biography already acclaimed as a “ masterpiece ”. Rose himself, O’Brien reveals, was anything but a masterpiece - a gambling addict who reflected all the gendered, class and racial r...

In his new book AMERICA LAST: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators , Jacob Heilbrunn argues that American conservatives have always had the hots for foreign dictators like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Mussolini, Franco and Pinochet. And so, he argues, it’s no great surprise that contemporary rightists like Ron DeSantis, Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson have all fallen so heavily for contem...

Did history ever go away? For the former BBC Russia correspondent, Martin Sixsmith, there was a few euphoric years, in the early 1990’s, when history promised to end. That time, of course, was the post-Soviet Russia of Boris Yeltsin and the promise that “they” could become like “us” and embrace both democracy and a Chicago school market capitalism. In his new book, PUTIN AND THE RETURN OF HISTORY...

Once-upon-a-time, there was the “ Silent Generation ” - the self-sacrificing generation of WW2 vets who won the war and built America into a Cold War superpower. But Elaine Lin Hering, the author of UNLEARNING SILENCE , isn’t sold on this stoically self-sacrificing generation. Rather than silence, she believes that speaking our minds, both at work and at home, will unleash our talent and enable us...

To celebrate over two thousand episodes of the show, we are launching KEEN ON AMERICA - a special series of personal conversations with prominent Americans about their now almost 250 year-old Republic. First up is Adam Hochschild , the co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, author of American Midnight and many other important books about the modern world. As Hochschild told me when I sat down with h...

I usually hate agreeing with Keith Teare, my libertarian-conservative friend from Palo Alto/Yorkshire. But on TikTok, we are in violent agreement. As Keith explains, TikTok isn’t a Chinese company and even it was, there’s absolutely no reason to ban it or force a US sale. That such self-serving stupidity is being peddled by the Biden administration is particularly worrying. Where are the grown-ups...

The most troubling casualty of today’s social media age is our shared sense of reality. Perceptions of reality still exist, but they often come packaged, mirroring a priori assumptions about the world. So how to win democratic elections in this age of multiple informations? How to promote/peddle truths that will get people to vote for your candidate? That’s the story Sasha Issenberg writes about i...

Last week, the LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick came on the show to discuss new books about life in our age of the polycrisis. One of these was Emily Raboteau’s much acclaimed Lessons For Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” . So how, exactly, I asked the Bronx based Raboteau, do you mother against “the apocalypse”? And what does Raboteau, a amateur photographer and birdwatcher, have...

University of Pennsylvania sociologist Benjamin Shestakofksy spent a couple of years as the fly on the wall in an anonymous tech startup. His new book, BEHIND THE STARTUP , not only reveals what he learned about the insanely frenetic nature of work in a culture dominated by raising the next round of venture investment, but also about the broader impact of the startup economy on innovation and ineq...

Think you know Frank H. McCourt, Jr , the illustrious real estate media magnate, former chairman/owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers & current owner of Marseilles FC? Think again. McCourt is also now in the business of saving us from digital monopolists of Silicon Valley who, in his opinion, are trying to steal our liberty, humanity and our dignity. McCourt’s latest philanthropic venture is Proje...

If, as Sam Daley-Harris believes, “cynicism is obedience”, then active citizenship is a form of rebellion. That seems to be the argument in both the 2024 edition of Daley-Harris’ RECLAIMING OUR DEMOCRACY and in our discussion today about how to resurrect American democracy in 2024. But what about the role of leadership in transforming America? And why would anyone invest all their spare time in tr...

I talk to Peter Ross Range, Hitler historian and author of 1924 & UNFATHOMABLE ASCENT, about Adolf Hitler as the "gold standard" of authoritarianism and how the Nazi leader compares with Donald Trump. In contrast with Range, I don’t see any similarities between Trump and Hitler. Yes, both men might use the word “vermin” to describe people they loathe, but they are entirely different men operat...

The US Congress just announced war on TikTok; while, in Europe, the EU declared war this week on Spotify and Apple. Elon Musk and Sam Altman have declared war over OpenAI. And everyone inside and outside Google are all war over Gemini. But That Was The Week ’s Keith Teare, Silicon Valley’s most cheerful optimist, still believes in what he sees as the inevitably progressive arc of history away from...

The cover story of Harper ’s this month is piece by Andrew Cockburn , their Washington DC editor, entitled “The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem”. But as Cockburn explained to me today, the Pentagon’s problem is also ours. Silicon Valley, he argues, was in many ways founded and financed by the Cold War military-industrial complex and has become the economic, military and ideological motor of 21st...

In episode 1991, Andrew talks to the LA Times book critic, Bethanne Patrick, about six intriguing new non-fiction books about our contemporary age of inequality, existential anxiety and political and environmental upheaval. Bethanne Patrick maintains a storied place in the publishing industry as a critic and as @TheBookMaven on Twitter, where she created the popular #FridayReads and regularly comm...

“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself,” Miles Davis once remarked. Most artists, of course, never ascend to the heights of even closely sounding like themselves . But as James Kaplan, the author of 3 SHADES OF BLUE , argues, Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans did get to sound like themselves in their studio album, Kind of the Blue . That’s the metaphysical truth of the 1...

One of the more annoying characteristics of our coastal elites is their incessant virtue signaling. Every life choice - from drinking from plastic water bottles to driving electric cars to deciding to have children - is presented in terms of what Travis Rieder, the Johns Hopkins bio-ethicist and author of CATASTROPHE ETHICS , calls the “purity ethic”. Everybody these days seems greedy for virtue....

You couldn’t make up the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army in February 1974. The granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, America’s most divisive media baron, was kidnapped in Berkeley (of all places) by domestic terrorists who demand that Hearst feed the poor in exchange for the 19 year-old woman. That, in itself, was quite a story in an America still embroiled in both...

In episode 1977, Andrew talks to Maxwell L. Stearns, author of PARLIAMENTARY AMERICA, about the need for a parliamentary system to repair the broken democratic system in America. Maxwell L. Stearns (BALTIMORE, MD) is the Venable, Baetjer & Howard Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. He has authored dozens of articles and several books on the Constitution, the Sup...

In our weekly KEEN ON wrap of tech news with Keith Teare, author of the THAT WAS THE WEEK newletter, Keith explains why the Google Gemini fiasco is a feature rather than a bug of our preoccupation with identity politics. Keith Teare is a Founder and CEO at SignalRank Corporation. Previously he was Executive Chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd - A UK-based global investment company focused...