Episodes

We are all Waymo Democrats now. That Was the Week ’s Keith Teare and I appropriate Thomas Friedman’s controversial new term to dream of an American high tech future. Keith and I also talk about last week’s interview with Pete...

A year ago , the great American historian Adam Hochschild came on KEEN ON AMERICA to discuss American Midnight , his best selling account of the crisis of American democracy after World War One. A year later, is history reall...

Adam Becker ’s new critique of Silicon Valley More Everything Forever should probably be entitled Less Nothing Never . The science journalist accuses Silicon Valley overlords like Elon Musk and Sam Altman of promoting exagger...

In contrast with yesterday’s guest, the Paris based Financial Times writer Simon Kuper , the newspaper’s London based c olumnist J emima Kelly hasn’t quite given up on the United States of America. Trump, she suggests, might ...

It’s official. The American Dream is dead. And it’s been resurrected in Europe where, according to the FT columnist Simon Kuper , disillusioned Americans should relocate. Compared with the United States, Kuper argues , Europe...

So what, exactly, was “The Enlightenment”? According to the Princeton historian David A. Bell , it was an intellectual movement roughly spanning the early 18th century through to the French Revolution. In his Spring 2025 Libe...

Why is America so over-medicated? According to Harvard Medical School professor Jerry Avorn , author of Rethinking Medications, everything begins and ends with the unaccountable power of Big Pharma. While acknowledging the tr...

Is America screwed? Not according to the former managing editor of Wired , Peter Leyden . The creator of the Substack newsletter The Great Progression , Leyden believes that U.S. history operates in 80 year cycles and that A...

Are Google and Facebook screwed? That’s the question which Keith Teare asks in today’s That Was The Week tech newsletter. In our age of nationalist globalization, Teare argues, Facebook and Google, the original darlings of th...

Few Americans have been as explicit in their warnings about Donald Trump than the St. Louis based writer Sarah Kendzior . Her latest book, The Last American Road Trip , is a memoir chronicling Kendzior’s journey down Route 66...

In yesterday’s show, the neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod explained how radical ideology is infecting our brains. Today, Unite America executive director Nick Troiano explains how the American democratic system is empowering radic...

Our brains are delicate things. That, at least, is the view of the neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod , whose new book, The Ideological Brain , is a warning about how radical ideologies of both left and right can infect our brains. ...

To celebrate our 2500th show, long time KEEN ON friend David Masciotra interviewed me about the current perilous situation in America. We discuss why I’ve renamed the show KEEN ON AMERICA and my thoughts on the U.S’s increasi...

MIT professor Thomas Levenson is one of America’s most celebrated science writers and filmmakers. In his upcoming new book, So Very Small , Levenson charts the history of germ theory to underline how modern scientific researc...

Brookings Senior Fellow Andre M. Perry has a new book out today which measures what he calls the “racial gap” in America and asks what we can do to close it. Entitled The Black Power Scorecard , it draws on extensive research...

Who are the most symbolic mid 20th century American Jews? In Eminent Jews , New Yorker staff writer David Denby tells the remarkable stories of Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. He explains how ...

The Harper ’s cover story this month is about the ever-softening soft skills of American workers. Written by Lily Scherlis , it suggests that today’s emphasis on "soft skills" reflects America’s broader anxieties about autom...

Lenin quipped that "there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." The post Liberation Day drama of early April 2025, That Was The Week’s Keith Teare suggests, will be remembered as one of...

In late February in DC, I attended the US premiere of the Bertelsmann Foundation of North America produced documentary “ Lithium Rising ”, a movie about the extraction of essential rare minerals like lithium, nickel and cobal...

It’s a small world. The great David Rieff came to my San Francisco studio today for in person interview about his new anti-woke polemic Desire and Fate. And half way through our conversation, he brought up Daniel Bessner’s Th...

Liberals won’t like it, but according to the Seattle based historian and podcaster Daniel Bessner , Trump’s wannabe imperial presidency is a “natural outgrowth” of the centralized power of the FDR presidency. In a provocativ...

Question : What was the position of 19th century American Jews to the Civil War and Slavery? Answer : Complicated. Very complicated. Painfully and, in some ways, shamefully complicated, according to the historian Richard Krei...

Stephen Witt ’s last book was entitled How Music Got Free . His latest, The Thinking Machine , a history of NVIDIA and its CEO Jensen Huang, might have been called How Intelligence Got Expensive . It’s about NVIDIA’s role in ...

Should death row prisoners have the right to demand to be executed? In her debut book The Volunteer , Bay Area journalist Gianna Toboni exposes the absurd bureaucratization of the American death penalty system through the sto...