Keen On America

An anti-fascist spy handed American officials evidence of murderous intent from a Nazi planning server — and they declined to act. About the Guest Christopher Mathias is a journalist covering the far right, formerly a senior reporter at HuffPost, with work appearing in The Guardian, The Nation, MSNBC, Zeteo, and WNYC. His reporting has helped unmask white supremacist cops, soldiers, teachers, and...

Can meat save the planet? That’s the paradoxical promise of the longtime vegan activist Bruce Friedrich , founder of the Good Food Institute. In his new book , Meat , Friedrich argues that plant-based and cultivated meat can satisfy the craving of the most hardline carnivore while simultaneously fixing the apocalyptic environmental consequences of industrial farming. So new tech, particularly the...

There’s something absurdly Strangelovian about the American quest for a perfect weapon. As Jeffrey Stern warns in The Warhead , his new history of The Paveway, the first “smart” bomb, weapons are always, like their human engineers, imperfect. “It’s always exploding somewhere,” Stern dryly notes, and those explosions in the Texas Instruments developed Paveway were not only unexpected, but often tra...

Why did Nixon trigger a remarkable cultural American renaissance while Trump has generated an avalanche of social media bluster, but few great movies, songs or novels? For Silicon Valley critic Jon Taplin , the problem isn’t just technological. Yes, he argues in Rolling Stone , social media has sucked a lot of the cultural vitality out of America and created a self-interested new class of influenc...

Is AI going through an adolescent crisis, even it’s still just a toddler? There certainly seems to be a lot of adolescent angst amongst our new AI overlords like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. In his latest essay , appropriately entitled “The Adolescence of Technology”, Amodei lays out all the existential dangers of AI while simultaneously rejecting the doomsday pessimism of many tech sceptics. Amode...

When asked what his parents did, Atlantic CEO and competitive marathoner Nicholas Thompson had a stock response. "My mother's an art historian at Babson," he would answer, "my father runs a male brothel in Bali." Thompson's new best-selling autobiography, The Running Ground , is an extended version of his extraordinary family history, focusing on the dramatic fall from grace of his Rhodes Scholar...

According to our favorite literary reviewer, Bethanne Patrick, these are the seven books that “will really matter” in 2026: * Land by Maggie O’Farrell — The Hamnet author returns with a luminous novel set in 1865 Ireland, two decades after the Great Famine. A father and son survey their region for the British—mapping the land in English when their hearts speak Gaelic. O’Farrell explores post-famin...

Pay attention to this interview. Because, you see, attention is seriously expensive — the Silicon Valley industry being worth $17 trillion, at least according to the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett , co-editor of a new manifesto entitled Attensity . For Burnett and his friends in the Attention Liberation Movement, the attention industry is "fracking" the human out of us. Liberating ourselves...

New books are like London buses. You wait and wait and then a handful comes at the same time. Take, for example, histories of the New York City vigilante Bernie Goetz. Last week, we featured the CNN legal analyst Elliott Williams who has a new book out on Goetz. And now we have another uncannily timely book on Goetz. This one from the Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, Heather Ann Thompson . Entitl...

This is the final conversation from DLD. And the most optimistic - at least from a European perspective. John Thornhill , the FT’s Innovation Editor and founder of Sifted , has a quite different take on Europe’s tech scene from our other guests. Yes, he acknowledges, the regulatory environment is complex. And, yes, late-stage capital is thin. But Thornhill sees something the doomsayers miss: resil...

For media moguls, we are living, to borrow from Dickens, in the best and worst of times. As Nicholas Thompson confessed to me at DLD, The Atlantic CEO is simultaneously “excited” and “terrified” by the power of AI to revolutionize his media industry. On the one hand, Thompson explains, AI represents the best tool journalism has ever had for locating needles in haystacks. On the other hand, AI has...

One of the most bracing presentations at DLD this year was given by Crunchbase's data queen Gene Teare . Breaking down America's VC dominance, Teare's speech might have been entitled "64% and Counting." As Teare told Keith and me in a special Teare family edition of our regular That Was The Week show, the VC gap between Europe and America is only getting wider. From 2014 to 2023, US share of globa...

Not everything at DLD this year was on the growing US-European economic and technological divide. There were many speeches on the environment including from heavyweights like Kate Raworth. And I had the opportunity to catch up with my favorite advocate of regenerative agriculture, the managing partner at Acton Capital, Jan-Gisbert Schultze . According to Schultze, today's deepest problem is our sp...

Few speakers at DLD this year were more sombre than The Economist 's deputy executive editor Kenneth Cukier . “Civilizations aren’t killed,” Cukier says, “they commit suicide.” It's now "three minutes to midnight" in Europe, he warns, and what he called the priceless "vase" of the liberal order is about to shatter. Borrowing from Hemingway's description of personal bankruptcy, Cukier argues that c...

Few people experienced the Dot-Com bubble with more vertiginous intensity than Bill Gross , the Pasadena-based founder of Idealab and many many other internet startups over the last 30 years. So when I sat down with Gross at DLD, I couldn’t resist opening with the boom/bubble gambit. How, I asked him, does today’s AI hysteria compare with the Web 1.0 madness of the Nineties? While Gross - whose cu...

Yesterday’s show from the DLD conference was about the need for Europe to relearn the language of power. Today, things get even more dire for our European friends. I asked another DLD speaker, Carl Benedikt Frey , a Swedish economic historian who teaches at Oxford, whether it’s “game over” for Europe in terms of its ability to compete with American and Chinese big tech. His answer: not yet—but clo...

I'm just back from another stimulating Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich where all the talk was about the growing technological and political gap with the United States and China. From Machiavelli and Hobbes to Napoleon and Bismarck, Europe invented the modern concept of state power. But decades of outsourcing security to NATO and the US have left the continent dangerously rusty both...

For a country forever flirting with amnesia about its racial history, America sure struggles to forget. Take, for example, Bernie Goetz, the white subway vigilante, who shot four black teenagers on a NYC subway in December 1984. There’s not just one - but two major new books about the anything but colorblind Goetz case which we’ll be discussing over the next couple of weeks. The first is by the CN...

In his new co-authored book It’s On You , the English behavioral scientist Nick Chater exposes how the rich and powerful - the THEM - have convinced us that we're to blame for society's deepest problems. Can't lose weight? That's because YOU lack willpower—or so THEY would have you believe. But willpower, Chater argues, is a convenient myth. And that means the behavioral economists got it wrong to...

According to the New Yorker writer Nicholas Niarchos , Africa is rich in both raw materials and tragic paradox. We know about the continent's wealth in the rare earth minerals that enable our global transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. But it's contemporary African paradoxes that Niarchos describes in his important new book, The Elements of Power . There's the paradox of clean energy's di...

We all have our own favorite Robert Redford movie. But what's Redford’s most prescient film about today’s America? His Seventies trilogy about American politics — The Candidate , Three Days of the Condor and All the President's Men — are all, in their own profound ways, lasting meditations on the United States. But of the three, it might be Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975) which ha...

Can Swiftynomics save America? That’s the intriguing thesis at the heart of Misty Heggeness’ new book about Swift’s impact on the American economy. Entitled Swiftynomics , it’s as much about Taylor Swift’s fans as it is about the megastar herself. “Taylor Swift is not moving mountains in local communities,” Heggeness acknowledges. “Her fans are. They are willing to fork out thousands of dollars, t...

The Music Man was a 1957 Broadway show written by Meredith Willson, a musician from the small Iowa town of Mason City. The popular play (and later movie) featured a con man called Harold Hill who ripped off the naive people of River City, a fictional small town based on Mason City. Nearly seventy years later, Josiah Hesse , another Iowan from Mason City, sees the Music Man narrative replaying itse...

Few biographers can claim to know what it feels like to be Thomas Jefferson more than the Charlottesville-based historian Andrew Burstein . The author of many books about Jefferson, Burstein’s latest, Being Thomas Jefferson , offers an “intimate history” of the great man. From Jefferson’s views on love and race to his take on mortality, Andrew Burstein gets inside America’s most controversial and...

There was a time in the mid 20th century, the literary historian Gayle Feldman reminds us, when the book business was cool. Back then, New York publishing resembled Silicon Valley tech and the Mark Zuckerberg of his day was the Random House founder Bennett Cerf. In her new biography of Cerf, Nothing Random , Feldman tells the story of this celebrity entrepreneur, noting that he helped pioneer the...