Keen On America

Two straight days of murder in America. Yesterday we were in Ozark, Alabama with Matt Kessler investigating the gruesome murder of two young women. Today’s guest has spent four decades investigating homicidal crimes and continues to have the time of his life. Harold Schechter has written more than thirty true crime books, his latest being Murder by the Numbers , an account of 199 chilling tales of...

Ah, the American South. So romantic. A few days ago we were in Clayton, Georgia, hearing about the dissident Lillian Smith, whose house was burned down for telling the truth about Jim Crow. Today we go south-west into Alabama, to Ozark, in the Wiregrass, the boondocks of the boondocks — a region named for a scrub that grows where nothing else will. Except for murder. The Wiregrass, as the Birmingh...

On 16 October 1962, exactly sixty-four years ago, photos of Soviet missiles on Cuba were shown to President Kennedy and the world faced nuclear Armageddon. The definitive account of that thirteen-day crisis, One Minute to Midnight , was written by today’s guest, the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs . He has now written about a crisis that few remember, but which he calls the climactic c...

Last month Adam Kirsch was on the show arguing that our current obsession with UFOs represents a new kind of religion. Today’s guest, the international relations expert Alexander Wendt , argues that today’s UFO obsession is the least of our problems. In his new book, The Last Humans (out today), Wendt’s worst-case scenario is that the UFOs are already here — and have been for some time. While the...

“We don’t have to choose between AI and no AI. The bigger choice is what type of AI we want, and who we want in control of it.” — Ben Green INTRO In our age of AI, do we want to be ruled by all-knowing engineer kings ? Not according to Ben Green , a professor of information and public policy at Michigan, whose new book, Algorithmic Realism , presents “data science practices to promote social justi...

Yesterday Janet Reitman described post-9/11 America, with its forever wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, as a tragedy in five acts. Today we meet a man who helped strategize one of those acts. Eliot A. Cohen was Counselor of the State Department under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 — in part responsible (“if that’s the right word” as he puts it) for America’s post-9/11 forever wars. Not that he feels dee...

“They weaponized the fear, and the fear became institutionalized, and we internalized it.” — Janet Reitman Back in 2022, the ex-Marine Elliot Ackerman came on the show to talk about The Fifth Act , his account of America’s humiliating end in Afghanistan. The New York Times Magazine contributing writer Janet Reitman ’s new book, The Inheritance , also imagines post-9/11 America as a tragedy in five...

Jensen Huang biographer Stephen Witt argued in a New York Times op-ed this week that the leather-jacketed Nvidia CEO is the most powerful engineer on Earth. It’s not hard to prove. Just look at who (sans leather jacket) was sitting right next to you-know-who at last week’s AI White House lunch . America is run by lawyers, we were told by the China expert Dan Wang, and China by engineers. But nobod...

It’s always fun to have Nobel Prize winners on the show. Recently, we’ve hosted the journalist-dissident Maria Ressa, the economist Simon Johnson and the gloomy godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton. Today it’s the Delhi-based Kailash Satyarthi , who won the 2014 Peace Prize for his fight against child exploitation. He is now trying to globalize the ideal of compassion. But for Satyarthi, compassion doe...

“A human being is worth more than his opinions”, Hannah Arendt wrote to her Zionist friend Gershom Scholem in 1946, after he read her critical essay on Zionism and accused her of betraying the Jewish people. So how to value a human being? What, according to Arendt, are we worth? According to the Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz , our value lies in the power of friendship. That’s what he calls, in hi...

Matthew Botvinick works at Anthropic, where he leads the Anthropic Institute ’s research on AI and the rule of law. His new book, AI and Political Freedom , focuses on AI’s risk to democracy and how we should respond to it. It’s important to note that for this Princeton University Press book, Botvinick doesn’t represent Anthropic. That said, the fact that he just happens to be a senior policy guy...

The retired money manager Greg Steinmetz has now written three books about very rich men. The first, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived , was about the sixteenth-century Augsburg banker Jacob Fugger. The second, American Rascal , was about the nineteenth-century robber baron Jay Gould. The third, The President and the Oligarch , came out this week, and this time the rich man has a president as a co-st...

Everyone, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare breathlessly announced this week, is about to be offered an AI personal assistant. Or, to put it in Silicon-Valley-speak, a digital chief of staff. OpenAI unveiled Dot at its developer day. Meta already has Muse, Musk has Grok Bot, and a British start-up called Instinct raised a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation while adding group c...

“A book about truth needs to be truthful.” — Steven Rosenbaum   In April , the New York City based tech impresario Steven Rosenbaum came on the show to discuss The Future of Truth , his then new book about artificial intelligence. He warned that AI is a spectacularly good liar and that we should be concerned about the future of truth. A few weeks later, The New York Times reported that the book co...

“When Dylan was booed, at the festivals or on tour, even over in England — some of that was Tom Wilson’s fault.” — Steven E. Jones   Five years ago, the Los Angeles based Ron Brownstein came on the show to argue that 1974 was the greatest year in American cultural history. Steven E. Jones has a rival candidate. His new book, Everything Is Everything , makes the case for 1966. In contrast with Brow...

“The United States is speed running into a more authoritarian model that the Russians have been living in for quite some time now.” — Dan Storyev   How to survive authoritarianism in the United States? Maybe we can learn from the Russians. At least according to the Russian-American Dan Storyev , co-author (with Maria Kuznetsova) of How to Survive Authoritarianism , a phrasebook which provides a hu...

“She is absolutely a Cassandra. She is unafraid to tell the stark naked truth, no matter how ugly it is.” — Keri Leigh Merritt   In April, Gal Beckerman came on the show to identify the ten qualities of being a dissident. They included pessimism, humour and recklessness. But he left one out: inconvenience. Dissidents are profoundly inconvenient people — to the government, to society, sometimes eve...

“The Enlightenment may have produced race, but it also produced what we might call anti-racism.” — Andrew Curran   Most of us imagine the eighteenth century Enlightenment positively. As the victory of reason, science and individual rights over superstition and intolerance. But Andrew Curran , who has spent his career interpreting the Enlightenment, has a more nuanced view. Indeed, his new book, Bi...

“The original sin of generative AI is having chatbots speak in the first person.” — Sherry Turkle   Fifteen years ago, at the height of the social media boom, the MIT technology scholar Sherry Turkle came on the show to warn that we were now “alone together.” She was, of course, chillingly prescient. A decade and a half later, she warns in her new book Artificial Intimacy that if social media came...

“What if we fell out with the Brits? What if the agency and the Brits started spying on each other again?” — David McCloskey What if the Americans and the British started spying on each other again? That’s the premise of London Station , David McCloskey’s fifth novel, out today. It isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Before the Second World War those perfidious Brits did spy on America, breaking Am...

“Kennedy and Trump are taking a wrecking ball to probably the most important thing we have done consistently better than the rest of the world over the last eighty years, and I don’t get it.” — Barry Werth   Last week on the show, the San Francisco based AI mogul and Eureka Machine author Richard Socher promised a scientific renaissance in which AI will cure everything. Socher’s eureka moment, how...

Amidst all the talk of an AI bubble, bonds are back in the news. The world’s two leading business newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times , both feature stories this weekend warning about bond ructions and surging yields . While these warnings might only interfere with the sleep of bond geeks, they are a good reminder of the centrality of the bond market to our prosperity.   Fo...

Lenin supposedly said there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. This wasn’t one of those weeks.   It might have looked like a historic week. The AI circus rolled into the UN with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei addressing the Security Council on the peril facing “humanity as a whole.” Britain and Australia weighed in with middling diplomatic or regulatory AI initiatives...

“His intent is getting worse, but his capacity is diminishing. The next two years will be some kind of mad race to figure out which of these two things will prevail.” — Jonathan Rauch   As the nights get shorter, we are drifting into the autumn of the patriarch. That, at least, is the view of two old friends of the show, Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner , who argued in The New York Times that Trump...

“A good divorce is better than a bad marriage, and this is a good divorce.” — Alan Dershowitz   The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz says he’s been voting Democrat since John F. Kennedy. He even defended Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Alan Cranston in court. But, at 88 years old, Dershowitz has now left — or, as he puts it, been forced out of the Dems, in the same way Ronald Reagan was sixty years a...