Keen On America

“The media has its own agenda, completely separate from anything going on in the real world, creating the story themselves.” — Keith Teare Last night, somebody hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion. I live a couple of hills over, but heard nothing. Meanwhile, the New Yorker hurled its own explosive cocktail at Sam, publishing a 15,000-word hit piece rhetorically entitle...

“It’s ultra stable. Health care doesn’t move. If you biopsied American health care in 2010 and again in 2026, no one could figure out which slide was which.” — Robert Pearl, MD Bad news. The patient, I’m afraid, is ultra-stable. Robert Pearl , former CEO of Kaiser Permanente for eighteen years and author of ChatGPT MD , returns with the bleakest diagnosis we’ve heard all month. American healthcare...

“You can face your history and still love your country. This is my attempt at doing that.” — Beverly Gage When the Yale Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage finished her almost nine-hundred-page biography of J. Edgar Hoover, she needed a little break before starting her next book on Ronald Reagan. So she got in her old Subaru and spent six months on the road driving across America to prep...

“Doing science is like reading the mind of God.” — Demis Hassabis, quoted in The Infinity Machine This week’s New Yorker uncomplimentary profile of OpenAI’s CEO is entitled “The Many Faces of Sam Altman.” But not all AI leaders are quite as many faced as slippery Sam. Take, for example, Demis Hassabis, the North London based co-founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind. In his new biography, The Infini...

“There are parts of the business and finance world that are invested in making these things seem intimidating and scary. We really enjoy making things more approachable.” — Alex Mayyasi What’s the last taboo? The thing that we are totally embarrassed to discuss? No, not sex. It’s money. At least according to Alex Mayyasi — frequent contributor to NPR’s Planet Money — who has just published Planet...

“Historically, when the college-educated become politically radicalised, that does tend to lead to real shifts.” — Noam Scheiber A university degree has always been seen as a passport out of the working class. But according to the New York Times ’ Noam Scheiber , the reverse is now true. In his new book, Mutiny , Scheiber argues that the good white-collar jobs college once promised have been quiet...

“When we trust AI to tell us the truth, we are setting ourselves up to hand over something deeply human to a machine that does not have our best interests at heart.” — Steven Rosenbaum Truth, Steven Rosenbaum cheerfully admits, is a shitty word. It has two ontological realities — one objective, the other subjective — but most of us use the word without much thought. Maybe it’s like pornography. It...

“His ultimate failure is not simply losing. It’s his failure to stop Trumpism from being such a dominant force in America.” — Julian Zelizer On this Easter Sunday, can we resurrect Joe Biden’s reputation? Perhaps not — according to Julian Zelizer , the Princeton historian and editor of The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden , a collection of essays about the historical significance of the Biden Preside...

“We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan (attributed) Who gets to tell the AI story? A movie, a media company or Marshall McLuhan? 1. The movie: the AI doc, How I Became an Apocaloptimist , which That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare dismissed because it failed to define AI. 2. A media company: OpenAI bought the streaming show TBPN for hundreds of millions of dollar...

“Millions of people have gone out and said, ‘Stop, don’t do that.’ And that is a wonderful thing.” — Peter Edelman We are in Washington DC this week, in search of America’s heart. And there may be no better guide than Peter Edelman — one of the few remaining members of the Bobby Kennedy braintrust. Edelman was a close Kennedy aide from just after JFK’s assassination through the 1968 presidential c...

“That’s my story, but not where it ends.” — Bob Dylan, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in the American story. But it is, of course, a narrative of second chances. And there’s no more of an American story than Bob Dylan, whose second act may be more memorable than his first. Robert Polito — poet, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biographer, and fo...

“When Haiti plays Brazil, Haitians will feel equal. Football gives even the weakest and the poorest a fighting chance. That is profound.” — Dimitry Elias Léger Yesterday , Simon Kuper defined the World Cup as a religious feast for all of humanity. Today, Dimitry Elias Léger asks whether God is watching. His new novel, Death of the Soccer God , is a fictional reimagining of the most famous goal in...

“The World Cup is a kind of religious feast. It’s like Easter, or Passover, or Eid, but it’s for all of humanity.” — A Church of England vicar, quoted by Simon Kuper Nick Hornby measured his (sad) life in Arsenal fixtures. The FT columnist Simon Kuper has measured his in World Cups. His new book, World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments , is the Kuper story told through the nine tourn...

“There is tremendous loneliness in the kind of life where you just don’t feel like anybody knows you.” — Margaret Rutherford Yesterday, the Brooklyn psychotherapist Daniel Smith defined perfection as the devil. Today, the Arkansas-based Dr. Margaret Rutherford explains what happens in our FOMO age when the devil wins. Her subject is what she calls the “perfectly hidden depression” of today’s Insta...

“Perfection is the devil. Growth means a greater capaciousness, not a narrowing and an optimisation.” — Daniel Smith Don’t feel bad about feeling bad. That’s the message of Daniel Smith ’s therapeutic new book, Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions . Smith — psychotherapist, anxiety memoirist, married Brooklynite — wants to rescue boredom, envy, shame, and regret from the categ...

“We can survive. Can we thrive? That’s a different question.” — Corey Nathan Robert Mueller died last week. Educated at Princeton, this Vietnam veteran won a Purple Heart and then enjoyed decades of public service under presidents of both parties. But the current president celebrated Mueller’s death. Such are the vagaries of American history. In contrast, Corey Nathan — host of the Talking Politic...

“Happiness is a rare commodity. There’s a lot of fuel for the claim that unhappiness is caused by some software, when in fact the roots of unhappiness are way deeper than that.” — Keith Teare If it’s not warfare in Iran, then it’s lawfare in California. Out here in Silicon Valley, it’s been a week dominated by two trials of big tech. First, Meta and YouTube were found liable for designing products...

“Why does someone need to be the first trillionaire? The damage it’s doing just to get to that level is extreme.” — Glen Galaich Excessive wealth disorder. It sounds like a disease — which, at least according to Glen Galaich — CEO of the Stupski Foundation and author of Control: Why Big Giving Falls Short, it is. There’s $2 trillion sitting in American charitable accounts Galaich says, mostly inve...

“Friction is what brings us together. If we were never able to communicate in real space, we would not truly learn what it is to be human.” — Stephen Balkam Is social media a drug? In what the Financial Times called a landmark case, Facebook (Meta) and YouTube (Google) have been found guilty of designing their products to be addictive to kids. Is this a big tobacco moment? the tut-tutting New York...

“The shortest distance between you and me is a story.” — Colum McCann In 1932, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud asking if humanity could cure its “lust for hatred.” Freud said no. Mankind’s instinct for death and destruction could not be eliminated. That said, the Viennese doctor went on, the desire to end war should never be abandoned. What was needed was a “mythology of the instincts” and...

“What conclusion do you draw if you see a system that continues to grow more powerful despite failing at the things it says it’s going to accomplish?” — Jacob Siegel Jacob Siegel grew up in Brooklyn, studied history at Boston University, enlisted in the US Army after September 11, and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, as an intelligence officer, he had the latest drones, sensors, Pal...

“If the regime doesn’t lose, it wins.” — Soli Özel It was just past midnight in Istanbul when I reached Soli Özel . The Pentagon had just announced it was deploying 3,000 soldiers — the 82nd Airborne — to the Gulf. Özel — professor of international relations at Kadir Has University, columnist, and one of the most trusted analysts of Middle Eastern politics — is blunt. This might, he warns, be Amer...

“The problems start when I conclude that only an uninformed, unintelligent, or evil person could hold the view that you hold.” — Julia Minson In a sneak preview of the 2028 Presidential election, Andy Beshear called JD Vance the most arrogant politician in America. Vance’s spokesperson fires back that Beshear is chasing headlines. Just another disagreeable day in American public life. So how can w...

“AI is a theft of knowledge. I can’t believe we as a society allowed this.” — Noam Cohen Ten years ago, Noam Cohen came on the show to ask if it was “Too Late to Save the Internet from Itself?” Back then, this early Silicon Valley critic was a New York Times writer. He was, as it turns out, a “premature anti-technologist” — Cohen’s phrase, borrowed from the premature antifascists who were called c...

“We read so as not to feel alone.” — C.S. Lewis (possibly) Dan Turello is a cultural historian of medieval Italy, a much published photographer, and the author of the new Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans . I’m sceptical. Especially the promise (or illusion) of better humans. But Turello’s definition of technology goes back further than most — all the way to the original fig lea...