Keen On America

How to resist bad government? Become a dissident is the standard response. But what happens if you work in that government? And if that government tampers with or eliminates your job? That’s the focus of Blockers , the new bestseller by Michael Lewis about the rebels in the deep state that resisted the second Trump administration. It takes its title from Elon Musk, who instructed the DOGE twenty-s...

“People ask me if I think Helms was really offended by this stuff, and I think Helms was having the time of his fucking life.” — Isaac Butler A few days ago, Katy Siegel and Elise Armani came on the show to assess the state of American culture in 1976. What was America? we asked. Today’s guest picks up the story immediately afterwards, when the health of this culture sharply declines. Isaac Butler...

“The lynching itself was the explanation. The adults who were participating in a communal homicide are the curriculum.” — Stacey Patton For Halloween, a true American horror story. Last week, Joseph Kelly came on the show to argue that racialized American fascism has a prehistory running back to 1818. But today’s guest goes much, much further — both in time and in criminality. Stacey Patton wrote...

“They didn’t really ever create value for the company. They shifted value. They extracted value from the workers and communities and gave it to the shareholders.” — Chris Marquis INTRO You would expect the man publicly calling for the abolition of business schools to be a Bolshevik. But he is, in fact, the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School. It’s a little like...

“President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were, in fact, working with the CIA to kill Castro. The CIA wasn’t plotting behind the Kennedys’ back.” — Mark Allen A few days ago we had the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs on the show talking about the thirteen days in 1962 when John F. Kennedy saved the world from nuclear annihilation. That was him at his best, the Kennedy we want to remember. T...

“We have to be willing to lose elections. That is the very essence of a democracy.” — Michael G. Miller Will the midterms be free and fair? With only six days to go, these are now the questions about American democracy that we most fear. But much of this nervousness might be misplaced. Rather than militiamen in balaclavas, the real damage to American democracy was done quietly, thirteen years ago,...

“Why would you want the guy who is good at coding to decide what we all do? Why would you want the guy who built the pyramids to actually run Egypt?” — Noam Cohen The war movie is back in vogue. Only this time it’s Hollywood turning its guns on Silicon Valley. There’s the four-hour Musk doc, an upcoming Sam Altman satire entitled Artificial , Nathan Fielder’s love/hate Elizabeth Holmes picture, an...

“It would be lovely to imagine that writing comes out of some instinct to compose works of great literature. It absolutely doesn’t. It’s a side effect of accountancy.” — Jonn Elledge “Borders Are Back, Baby” we proclaimed last year to celebrate Jonn Elledge ’s appearance on the show to talk about his 2025 work A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders . And now the prolific Elledge, currently res...

“If you have a space of democracy that is closing, you have infinitely more leverage to act before it closes than after.” — Paul Rogat Loeb The Impossible Will Take a Little While is an anthology of essays, speeches, memoirs and poems about perseverance & hope in troubled times. Edited and introduced by Paul Rogat Loeb , the anthology came out in 2004, in the middle of the Bush years and the I...

“There are ways of being evil that are not fascist, but I don’t think there’s a way of being fascist without being evil.” — Joseph Kelly INTRO On yesterday’s show, Anthony Badger, author of Prosperity Road, told the story of America’s transformation into a global superpower between 1920 and 1945. Today is the prequel. Joseph Kelly , author of The Biggest Lie , narrates the story of America between...

“Hoover is probably the most intelligent president the United States has ever had. That is not necessarily a guarantee of political success.” — Anthony Badger Given our preoccupation with American decline, it’s nice to sometimes remind ourselves of the reasons for the country’s rise to superpowerdom. Anthony Badger , the former Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge, has dedicated...

“Nobody in the United States wants to call it that. But I write history, and I know what a coup d’état looks like.” — John Ralston Saul As the leaves turn, it’s becoming Canada week. Yesterday we had the Newfoundland-based Paris Marx offering an incisive critique of American Big Tech. Today, it’s my old Canadian friend, John Ralston Saul — novelist, essayist, former president of PEN International...

“The only reason to write history is because it helps us in the present. It’s not a vegetable. It’s not good for you.” — Katy Siegel INTRO It’s been three months since America’s 250th, although I’m guessing few are nostalgic for those official MAGA celebrations. That said, nostalgia is a feature rather than a bug of these types of anniversaries in America. Take, for example, What Was America? by K...

“Scale” is such a loaded word. In Silicon Valley, it’s the thing-in-itself, the holy grail. So what happens if you scale up “scale”? You accelerate to Hyperscale , the title of a new book by the big tech critic Paris Marx , who has turned Silicon Valley’s holy grail against itself. So what, exactly, does the H word mean? We say “big tech” which means everything and nothing. In his use of hyperscal...

“My whole life has been coming up with ideas myself, and now AI can do that better than me.” — Bill Gross INTRO Bill Gross has been Mr Ideas Man since 1996 when he founded Idealab in Pasadena and started the hand production of startups. Today, he launches Idealab AI where the hand production of startup ideas is replaced by the algorithm. He fed seventeen million documents — news stories, expired p...

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...