Keen On America

"You can't wear a yellow vest on a demonstration anymore because you get arrested as soon as the police see you." — Ida Susser In November 2018, something strange happened in France. People from the urban periphery—truck drivers, nurses, teachers, plumbers—drove seven or eight hours to Paris wearing yellow safety vests. They weren't students. They weren't union members. They weren't organized by a...

"He lied more than I thought he did—and I thought he lied a lot." — Tom Wells on Henry Kissinger In our Epstein age, everyone seems to have access to everyone else's dirtiest secrets. But half a century ago, in the Watergate era, it was harder to get one's hands on the secret files, phone calls and other private data. But historian Tom Wells has done exactly that with the private phone calls of He...

"They are fundamentally bound at the hip, because the Trump age is a conspiratorial age and a backlash against global wealth inequality... Epstein facilitated the rise of Trump." — Jason Pack Late last year, Disorder podcast host Jason Pack came on the show and predicted that Mark Carney would be the "orderer" of 2025 and Jeffrey Epstein would be 2026's "disorderer-in-chief". Pack was uncannily ri...

"The House hasn't reorganized committee jurisdictions since the early 70s—before the internet existed." — Maya Kornberg America is stuck stuck stuck stuck. Almost exactly a year ago, I interviewed the Atlantic's Yoni Applebaum about Stuck , his influential critique of the housing crisis. Now we have another Stuck —this one by Maya Kornberg , a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. Only...

"We didn't have to grow up with that." — Ross Greene, on school shootings One of the most persistent worries these days is that our kids aren't okay. With most of the blame, of course, now being placed on the ubiquity of social media. But psychologist Ross W. Greene , author of the bestselling Lost at School , has a new book out today called The Kids Who Aren't Okay which doesn't place all the bla...

"I wake up at 3 AM, check my phone to see what fresh hell has come out, and it's usually two words: 'Trump threatens.'" — Peter Bale We're reversing the lens today. Rather than examining America from the inside, we're peering at it from the outside in—from New Zealand, at the bottom of the world. Peter Bale is a longtime media executive who's had senior positions at CNN, Reuters, and News Corp. He...

"Great minds think alike? It's completely wrong. It's not that great minds think alike; it's that different minds are great." — David Oppenheimer It's diversity week. Yesterday, Brian Soucek argued in favor of what he calls the "opinionated university" to protect free speech. Today David Oppenheimer , law professor at UC Berkeley, on The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea . Op...

"They are changing venture capital from a 30% tax to 0% tax. If Robinhood succeeds, it makes Sequoia and Andreessen's business model untenable." — Keith Teare The Silicon Gods must have their blood. And they've finally come for the funders of disruption, the venture capitalists, who are now being disrupted by something called Public Venture Capital (PVC). That, at least, is the view of That Was Th...

"150 universities have adopted neutrality policies just since October 7th. I'm on the losing end of this trend." — Brian Soucek Universities keep claiming what they see as the moral high ground of neutrality. But Brian Soucek , who holds the MLK chair at UC Davis School of Law, believes that's a dangerous myth. In his new book, The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth...

"72% of Americans say they hate big corporations—including Republicans." — Charles Derber It's not just the right that's reacting against liberal democracy. Some progressives are also embracing populism. Charles Derber , longtime professor of sociology at Boston College, has a new book called Fighting Oligarchy: How Positive Populism Can Reclaim America . Rather than a dirty word, he argues, popul...

"American culture likes martyrs, not marchers." — David Masciotra, quoting Jesse Jackson A couple of days ago, a great American died. Jesse Jackson was 84. He was somebody. Even Donald Trump acknowledged the passing of "a good man"—which, as my guest today notes, Jackson probably wouldn't have appreciated. David Masciotra is the author of I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters , one of the most...

"It truly is becoming a desert right now for book publicists." — Bethanne Patrick A couple of weeks ago, there was an " absolute bloodbath " at The Washington Post with hundreds of workers laid off and the book section totally gutted. Ron Charles , the beloved fiction editor, is gone. So is Becca Rothfeld , who described it in The New Yorker as " The Death of Book World ." Today I'm talking to Kee...

"I'm much more likely to protest when I feel responsible—when violence is being done in my name." — Bruce Robbins As always, the media is full of stories about political protest. A Columbia University Gaza protester held by ICE claims to have been chained to her bed after a seizure. Our friends at FIRE are addressing the right to demonstrate against ICE in a house of worship. Obama is arguing that...

"We are still dealing with a system which tolerates rampant abuse of accused people." — Emily Galvin Almanza Back in April 2024, we interviewed Thelton Henderson , one of the first African American federal judges in America. What disturbed me about our conversation was that even though Henderson grew up in the late Jim Crow era, he didn't seem to think that America is a profoundly more just place...

"Two years from now, all white-collar jobs may be gone." — Dario Amodei (via Keith Teare) Keith Teare leads this week's tech roundup with a video he made on Google's Veo: one glass half-full of water, another half-full of spiders. It's a metaphor for the AI moment. The water represents the tools released in the past two weeks—Anthropic's Claude 4.6, OpenAI's CodeX 5.3—which Keith calls "beyond bel...

"She's a ten to me and that's the part that matters." — Paul Eastwick If it's Valentine's Day, we must be talking about love. Paul Eastwick studies attraction and relationships at UC Davis, and his new book Bonded by Evolution takes aim at the "old science" that treated romance like a competitive market where everyone gets assigned a number. The incels, of course, ran with that research to compoun...

"How can you not be a populist in this day and age?" — Hélène Landemore In February 2020, The New Yorker profiled a Yale professor making the case for citizen rule. Six years later, that political scientist, Hélène Landemore, has a new book entitled Politics Without Politicians arguing that politics should be "an amateur sport instead of an expert's job" and that randomly selected citizen assembli...

"I will say that QAnon was right and I was wrong." — Pepper Culpepper From Bannon and Trump to Summers, Gates, Blavatnik and Chomsky, the Epstein scandal has revealed elites of all ideological stripes behaving shamefully together. The Oxford political scientist Pepper Culpepper argues this is exactly the kind of corporate scandal that can save democracy—not despite its ugliness, but because of it....

"You either need to call it fascism or you need to invent a new word with more or less the same meaning." — Jonathan Rauch Jonathan Rauch's viral Atlantic essay has reignited the debate over what to call the Trump administration. Having previously settled on "semi-fascist," Rauch now argues that Trump ticks all 18 boxes on his checklist of fascist characteristics — from the glorification of violen...

"The black market exists only because we decided that this form of trade should be illegal." — Scott Eden In October 2019, tech executive Tushar Atre was abducted from his oceanfront home in Santa Cruz and found murdered on his own property in the redwoods — shot execution-style, hands bound. He had spent barely three years in the cannabis business. Scott Eden's new book traces how a charismatic S...

"We all love Thomas Paine. We just wish we liked him." — Jonathan Turley Jonathan Turley's new book asks a deceptively simple question: why did the American Revolution become the longest-running successful democracy while the French Revolution devoured itself? The answer, he argues, lies in Madison's "auxiliary precautions" — constitutional safeguards designed not to eliminate rage but to channel...

"It may not be Mister Right YouTube, but it is Mister Right Now." — Erika Dilday On Super Bowl Sunday — with America celebrating its 250th anniversary — Erika Dilday joins to discuss the power of documentary film to cut through algorithmic noise and show us who we really are. As executive producer of POV, the longest-running documentary program on American television (now entering its 39th season)...

"I didn't use my own software this week because the OpenAI agents were better. And that's me retiring my own software." — Keith Teare Something broke this week. Both Anthropic and OpenAI launched multi-agent systems—"agent swarms"—that don't just assist with tasks but replace custom-built software entirely. The market noticed: Adobe, Salesforce, Workday, and other legacy SaaS companies saw their s...

What kind of leadership can hold a fractured democracy together? About the Guest Stephen Schlesinger is an American historian, author, and foreign policy analyst. The son of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and special assistant to President John F. Kennedy—and grandson of Arthur Schlesinger Sr., he grew up at the centre of one of America's most distinguished intellectual fa...

A man was convicted by his own heartbeat — and that's just the beginning of our digital dystopia. About the Guest Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School and a national expert on surveillance technologies, policing, and criminal justice. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the author of the PROSE Award–winning The Rise of Big Dat...