Keen On America

Trump’s Gazan dream is to overlay the complex human history with his own narcissistic real-estate fantasy. But for Maia Carter Hallward , co-author of a new contemporary history of Gaza, this once vibrant Mediterranean entrepôt linking Africa, Asia and Europe is now defined more by nightmare than dreams. “In peace studies, we talk about positive peace, which has rights, liberties, the ability to r...

What if the right isn’t wrong - or, at least, totally wrong, about education? That seems to be the conclusion of James Traub , a liberal educationalist, who has spent the last year visiting the civics programs of American high schools. Neither the 1619 Project nor Trump’s 1776 Report seems to be the message of Traub’s account of these travels, The Cradle of Citizenship . Schools can help save our...

Timing is everything. The versatile American journalist Kenneth Rosen was last on the show in early 2021 talking about troubled teens . Since then, Rosen has travelled extensively in the Arctic and has just published Polar War , a narrative about the chilling costs to both America and the world of the new Cold War in the Arctic. Timing is, indeed, everything, especially in the book business. But R...

Will Trump be removed by the 25th Amendment? No, it’s never going to happen - not after Jan 6 or Venezuela or Greenland or any other mad foreign or domestic adventure. That, at least, seems the conclusion of Rebecca Lubot , author of Keeping a Finger on the Button , a timely new analysis of the 25th Amendment. But the real question isn't about the nuclear button—it's about who controls the White H...

The great John Maynard Keynes explained it a century ago. In his 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," Keynes predicted that the future would be defined by economic abundance rather than scarcity. But such a cornucopian future, Keynes warned, would create societies teetering perpetually on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Keynes' vision has been updated by Niskanen Center SV...

Back in 2018, the New York Times reporters Katie Benner and Erica L. Green exposed the disturbing reality of the T.M. Landry college prep school in rural Louisiana. Celebrated as a “miracle” institution that successfully sent underprivileged black students to elite colleges, Benner and Green uncovered a miserable school that doctored college applications and bullied its students. Seven years later...

WTF will happen in 2026? Over the last week, we’ve been running a series of interviews about the promise and peril of the new year. And in this new weekly magazine-style KEEN ON AMERICA show, we feature highlights of conversations with Charles Kupchan, Julia Hobsbawm , K eith Teare , Jason Pack , Jim Goldgeier , Chris Schroeder and Soli Ozel . And I end the show with some thoughts from the David M...

If Darwin’s evolutionary theories couldn’t kill America’s faith in God, then what could? That’s the message in Daniel K. William ’s new book, The Search for a Rational Faith . Americans, Williams argues, have always sought to combine scientific knowledge with Christian apologetics. From the Founding Puritans to John Adams, Harriet Beecher and Martin Luther King, Americans have clung to the idea th...

Hold onto your collars. The AI-generated crisis of work is here, and the storm will concentrate on white-collar workers from the professional economy. According to Julia Hobsbawm , founder of Workathon.io, these workers are about to experience the dismal reality of blue-collar redundancy. 50% of the US workforce will be freelance by 2030, some experts warn, making this transition the biggest shift...

Happy New Year everyone! As the final show of 2025 and first for 2026, we turned the tables and had me interviewed by the formidable D avid Masciotra . As you will see, my reading of 2025 is more optimistic than many of my guests. And my sense about 2026 is that it will be a happier year for America than 2025 (which isn’t saying much). As I explain to David, I suspect the zeitgeist is shifting bac...

We live in transitional times. "The old is dead and the new cannot be born—this is the time of monsters," Antonio Gramsci famously wrote. But today, as the West declines and the East rises, these may equally be times for middle powers like Turkey. That, at least, is the view from Istanbul of the Turkish commentator Soli Özel , who sees an opportunity for regional powers to become more influential...

For Jason Pack , presenter of the Disorder podcast, the person of the year for 2025 was the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney. But for 2026, Pack predicts, the person of the year will be a resurrected Jeffrey Epstein (or, at least, the Epstein scandal). Orderers vs Disorderers: the dialectic driving our age of upheaval. The Canadian Prime Minister, for Pack, is a hero. "Carney stood up to Trump...

According to the German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder , China both goes to bed and wakes up thinking of China rather than America. How does the Washington DC based Schroeder know? Because, unlike almost all Americans, he actually made the effort of visiting China this year and seeing this vast and paradoxical country for himself. “Curiosity has never been more valuable,” Schroeder warns. “If...

That was the year in tech. When nothing and yet everything happened. A year betwixt and between, simultaneously revolutionary and uneventful. That's the ironic conclusion Keith Teare and I reach about Silicon Valley in 2025. It's as if the AI revolution is changing the world without us fully noticing. AI has become electricity—ubiquitous and essential, yet barely noticed. So what will happen on th...

For all the talk of abundance, what’s really abundant these days are the morbid symptoms of a dying international system. According to Georgetown’s Charles Kupchan , these symptoms include the endless wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Trump’s frenetic demolition-man act, and the rise not just of China but of India and Turkey. As the Pax Americana of the post-World War Two era withers away, the key questio...

Lots of headlines today about "peace" negotiations in Ukraine. But does Putin really want to end the war — and is Trump able and willing to broker a real peace? According to the longtime Russia watcher Jim Goldgeier , Putin isn't interested in ending the war on anything other than complete Russian control over Ukraine. Putin, Goldgeier bleakly concludes, "just doesn't believe Ukraine should be an...

What’s the data behind the data? According to data scientist Andrea Jones-Rooy , America-by-the-numbers doesn’t always add up to a pretty picture. Take, for example, the political divisions in American society, the fabled ideological cleavages that have supposedly splintered America into warring tribes. “We don’t really disagree,” Jones-Rooy says about her fellow Americans, “we just dislike each o...

Did 2025 mark the formal end of the neoliberal age? Gary Gerstle , author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, has already written neoliberalism’s official obituary, so he’s quite comfortable with a post neoliberal world. But Trump 2.0, Gerstle suggests, marks the formal beginning of America’s place in this new cracked, jagged and leaderless world. What most defines it, Gerstle suggests,...

Gary Marcus claims to just be an AI “realist”. Some would describe the controversial AI sceptic otherwise. But whatever his moniker, Marcus’ warnings about AI have been eerily accurate. In fact, 2025 could be described as the year scripted by Gary Marcus in 2024. He warned us about the limitations of LLMs, the bubbly economics of Sam Altman’s OpenAI, and the AGI hype. So what does Marcus predict a...

Could Trump woo the upcoming 2026 World Cup and subvert the world’s most beloved sport for his own ugly ends? Not according to Simon Kuper , the Anglo-Dutch-French football writer whose adventures at the last nine World Cups are documented in his upcoming book World Cup Fever . Mussolini failed to control the 1934 World Cup in Italy, Kuper reminds us, and Trump won’t have any more success manipula...

What comes after neoliberalism? According to Branko Milanovic , the World Bank’s former lead research economist, it’s capitalism with a nationalist face. In his new book, The Great Global Transformation , Milanovic argues that globalization of the neoliberal age has been replaced by state-centric Chinese and American capitalism. Greed still drives these twin models, he argues, but they are dominat...

The 2025 Trump was supposed to be a more refined version of the 2017 original. But according to National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn, Trump 2.0 has fizzled into Trump 0.2. 2025 will be remembered, Heilbrunn argues, as the beginning of the end of Trump’s authoritarian aspirations. MAGA has fractured, the administration is incompetent, and Trump himself is running what Heilbrunn calls an "absent...

Whither America? For the Canadian writer Stephen Marche , that’s no longer the question. America in 2025, for Marche, has already withered . The Toronto-based author of The Next Civil War argues that the future has already arrived in the United States. And it’s a violent, regressive future - which is only going to get more dismal in 2026. That’s the view from Toronto where Marche is enjoying a fro...

The best fiction seems real, the best non-fiction books read like fiction. That, at least, is Bethanne Patrick ’s take on the best books of 2025. Selecting her favorite four fiction and four non-fiction books, the LA Times book critic suggests that all eight of these books brilliantly blur the line between fact and fiction. Take, for example, Murderland , Caroline Fraser’s new non-fiction linking...

Might 2025 turn out to be the new 1925? In other words, are we currently in the Roaring Twenties and on the brink of another Great Depression? This historical analogy, according to the Financial Times’ c hief economics commentator Martin Wolf , isn’t entirely fanciful. Economic history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, Wolf acknowledges, but it has a rhythmic quality. We are living, he suggests, in a...