Episodes

It’s been quite a week in tech. The Australian social media ban, the Netflix vs Paramount fight over Warner Bros & the Disney-OpenAI deal. That Was The Week’ s Keith Teare and I try to explain all this in the broader context of the future of media in 2026 and beyond. Has Australia really gone Orwellian in its teen social media ban, who should own Warner and will movie theaters & serious journalism have a future in the AI age? Our answers aren’t always what you’d expect. This is a public episode....

Mount Rushmore, with its images of four Presidents carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota, is America’s most identifiable monument. It might also be its most monumental contradiction — which is saying a lot, given the country’s gaping contradictions. According to Matthew Davis , the mountain’s biographer, the history of the Rushmore project captures both the remarkable engineering achievements of early 20th-century America and the country’s bloody colonial and racist past. So Mount Rushmore...

George Packer is one of the most celebrated non-fiction writers on contemporary America. So why, in his new book The Emergency , has he turned to fiction? You’d think, after all, that MAGA America’s surrealism would be an ideal nonfictional canvas for a writer with Packer’s observational gifts. But, as Packer explains, when facts fail a society, then - like Orwell or Atwood - a writer might be obliged to turn to fiction. This emergency, then, begot The Emergency. This is a public episode. If yo...

The CNN anchor Carol Lin was on air on September 11, 2001 when the first plane hit the tower. So, in that now seemingly distant broadcast media age, she was the world’s first television journalist to break the news. But as Lin notes in her new memoir, When New Breaks , 9/11 broke traditional news media, both then and now. That morning was CNN’s finest hour — a network built for exactly this moment, with deep resources, high standards, and global reach. Yet it was also the beginning of the end -...

Jessica was the good Mitford sister. The English aristocrat who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, then came to America and dedicated her life to social justice. According to her biographer Carla Kaplan, Mitford had the fierce, unruly life of a great muckraker. She was a Troublemaker in the best sense of the word. Unlike prudes like Upton Sinclair or Ralph Nader, she was hysterically funny—her voice as distinctive as Jane Austen’s or Virginia Woolf’s. She understood that bullies ar...

The American economy is a numbers game and those numbers are becoming more and more unfair. “30 years ago, if you were born in the bottom 25th percentile of wealth, you had about a 25% chance of dying in the top 25th percentile.” notes the venture capitalist Seth Levine . “Today you’ve got a 5% chance.” So what to do? What Levine wants is more rather than less capitalism. As he argues in his new co-authored (with Elizabeth MacBride) book, Capital Evolution , “if we want more people to have a st...

Numbers often tell the story best. Yesterday, we discussed today’s 95/5 reality in which 5% of Americans control 95% of the wealth. Today, in our conversation with Patrick Markee , author of Placeless , the key number is 2%. That’s the number of Americans who, on any given day, are homeless. But it’s a number, Markee insists, that doesn’t have to be. Mass homelessness, America’s most shameful open secret, is a modern phenomenon, he explains, triggered by Reagan’s neo-liberal policies. There’s n...

Forget Pareto’s 80/20 rule. What AI is doing is producing a new rule in which 5% of society captures 95% of the value of this revolution. That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare calls this the “Great Compression”, describing it as the new math of our AI age. It’s creating a winner-take-most society of increasing inequality and outrage - the kind of situation which, historically, governments have stepped in to redistribute the rewards of a great technological leap forward. That isn’t happening to...

Is the idea of “progress” the propaganda of the ruling class? Yes, according to Samuel Miller McDonald , author of Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy it . McDonald traces this “narrative formula” back 5,000 years to the first market empires in Mesopotamia—societies that were parasitic from the start, extracting from nature for profit and expansion. The Mesopotamian epic Epic of Gilgamesh , McDonald argues, is essentially a celebration of deforestation. Fast fo...

They certainly are an odd couple. Silicon Valley veterans Dave McClure and Aman Verjee have been friends and business partners for 25 years — first at PayPal, then at 500 Startups, and now at Practical Venture Capital. Yet they have quite different styles, personalities and, above all, politics. What they share, however, is an unvarnished take on the world — especially on the much mythologized Silicon Valley. In this refreshingly unfiltered conversation, they assess tech’s two most dominant tita...

If you think the American Dream is dead, then you probably don’t know the story of Lu Zhang . Born in Mongolia and educated in China, Zhang came to Stanford as a graduate student, struck it rich as a young tech entrepreneur and is now managing partner of her own early-stage venture fund . In our conversation, Zhang makes a compelling case for why Silicon Valley remains the world’s most important innovation ecosystem—even as she warns that restrictive immigration policies threaten to strangle the...

We all know about the broken American Dream. But according to the American-based China scholar Minxin Pei , China’s dream is equally broken. In his new book, The Broken China Dream , Pie argues that the party-centric reforms of both Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping have, by definition, revived totalitarianism. So while he does acknowledge some material achievements of the communist revolution, Pei is ultimately skeptical of its long-term benefit to the Chinese people. The party is the problem, Pei s...

For P eter Wehner , American politics is a tale of two Kellys. On the one hand, there’s the moral resistance of Arizona Senator Mark Kelly to what appears to be the gratuitous violence of American forces overseas. On the other hand, there’s the conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly who has openly fantasized about this bloodthirsty behavior. For Wehner, Megyn Kelly’s immorality is an excellent example of both the moral and intellectual decline of the right. Once a serious journalist who challenged (...

Dick Cheney died four weeks ago, but his dark legacy lives on—quite literally—at Guantanamo Bay. The human rights lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan was among the first attorneys to enter the notorious prison in 2004, and what he found there shattered every official justification for its existence. The “worst of the worst”? Most detainees were never even accused of acting against America. Many were simply sold to the Americans for bounties. The sophisticated interrogation program? Techniques copied f...

Who’s winning and losing in AI plays like a wacky race in that every week there seems to be a new leader. But that’s actually the wrong way of thinking about today’s AI revolution. The right questions are about the three Cs: Capability, Capital and Civics. That’s the lesson of Keith Teare’s latest That Was The Week tech newsletter which focuses on what he calls “the Year in Intelligence”. Nobody is winning the AI race, Teare argues, because it isn’t a race. Instead, it’s an endless innovation cy...

“May you live in interesting times,” is supposed to be a Chinese mantra. But according to Cambridge University China expert, Christopher Marquis , our current interesting times are actually a curse for businesses seeking stability rather than disorder. Is this, then, a moment for “strategic hibernation” Marquis asks in a provocative Harvard Business Review piece. Yes, he mostly answers. Businesses are indeed frozen by a perfect storm of uncertainty—overhyped AI, tariffs, and climate disasters. A...

Few journalists, certainly non-Italians, know Italian football as intimately as The Athletic’ James Horncastle , co-author of The Soccer 100. For Horncastle, Italian football presents a fascinating paradox: a nation celebrated for beauty, fashion, and La Grande Bellezza built its footballing identity around winning ugly. Forged in post-war austerity, the Italians embraced a minimalist, counter-attacking style—yet their greatest defenders, Paolo Maldini and Franco Baresi, were anything but ugly p...

Should we be giving thanks today for our capitalist system? Maybe. But we should certainly be thankful for a 1100-page book about the history of capitalism published this week by the Harvard historian Sven Beckert . Entitled Capitalism: A Global History , this magisterial history, which took Beckert 8 years to write, covers the last thousand years of our increasingly dominant capitalist world. In fact, Beckert suggests, capitalism has become so ubiquitous that most of us can’t imagine an alterna...

In The Soccer 100 , the Athletic’s list of the greatest footballers in history, Lionel Messi is ranked number one. Perhaps. But he might also be its most boring—at least as a man. For Michael Cox , a contributor to The Soccer 100, Messi is undeniably great, but compared to his fellow Argentine Diego Maradona, he’s a nonentity. Football is theater. That’s why it’s the world’s game. So it’s the tragic narratives of a Maradona or a Jimmy Greaves we most remember and cherish. The game is beautiful b...

Maradona, Pele or Messi? It’s the eternal debate. Who is the greatest footballer of all time? According to The Soccer 100 , The Athletic’s new book ranking football’s hundred greatest players, the answer is Messi. But the North London based contributor Amy Lawrence cast a dissenting vote: she chose Pelé, deferring to those who witnessed the Brazilian king’s dominance firsthand. The book’s official ranking places Maradona second, Pelé third, then Cruyff, Ronaldo, and Di Stefano. But the list reve...

Whither America? It’s the question that the Swedish writer Johan Norberg examines in both a recent Washington Pos t op-ed as well as his new book, Peak Human . What we can learn from history’s great civilizations, Norberg argues, is that they decline when they turn inward, away from both the outside world and innovation. “All Sparta, no Athens”, as he puts it. So what does that tell us not only about Trump’s America but also Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China? And what should we make of Europe, which...

I’ve spent this week in Washington DC where most people seem suspicious and sometimes even downright hostile about the future. Especially the supposedly “abundant” AI future being built in Silicon Valley. So where is this abundance going to come from? Some optimists, like The Great Progression ’s Peter Leyden , believe there’s an emerging coalition of smart technocratic elites who will construct a more efficient state to engineer a new progressive era. That Was The Week ’s Keith Teare , however,...

Call it the Zakaria paradox. We live in revolutionary times, the CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria explains, and yet it’s the reactionary MAGA politics of resentment that is currently ascendant. It’s this paradox that laces Zakaria’s 2024 book, Age of Revolutions (just out in paperback), a narrative that traces the history of liberalism from the 17th century revolutionary Dutch Republic to today’s reactionary age of populist strongmen. The Trump playbook is clear, Zakaria not...

Did American eugenics really fuel the murderous euthanasia programs of the Nazis? Yes, according to Susanne Paola Antonetta , author of The Devil’s Castle , a history of Nazi eugenics and euthanasia. According to Antonetta, pioneering American eugenicists not only influenced Nazi thinking—Hitler himself corresponded with them and praised U.S. sterilization laws in Mein Kampf —but the New York City-based Carnegie Institute proposed gas chambers in 1918 as one solution for dealing with what eugeni...