Episodes

How to measure the good life? According to Cambridge University’s Professor of Public Policy, Diane Coyle, quantifying progress doesn’t involve traditional economic metrics. In her new book, Measure of Progress , Coyle discus...

Keach Hagey ’s upcoming new biography of OpenAI's Sam Altman is entitled The Optimist . But it could alternatively be called The Salesman . The Wall Street Journal reporter describes Altman as an exceptional salesman whose su...

According to the LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick , every generation gets the Gatsby it deserves. And our generation, the social media generation, has gotten it with Careless People , by the Sarah Wynne Williams, Faceboo...

It might be Liberation Day today, but according to Paul Rice , founder of US Fair Trade and author of Every Purchase Matters , Trump’s tariffs are dumb. Rice firmly distances Fair Trade from Trump's controversial trade polici...

Happy April Fools, everyone! Although, according to cultural critic David Masciotra every day in Trump 2.0 America is now April Fool's Day. KEEN ON AMERICA regular Masciotra argues that the new Trump's administration represen...

This is an important interview. I’ve always thought of the political essayist Peter Wehner as representing the conscience of conservative, religious America. Wehner, who writes both for the Atlantic and the New York Times , h...

That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare believes that the publishing industry is about to be dramatically swept away by AI. I’m not sure. Here, for example, is Anthropic ‘s (Claude) 100 word summary of this week’s KEEN ON AME...

Has Signalgate triggered a credible resistance movement to Trump 2.0? Brookings scholar and Atlantic columnist Jonathan Rauch isn’t particularly optimistic. He discusses the emerging resistance from law firms, media, and some...

This isn’t exactly the radical message one would expect from a primary physician from Columbia, Maryland. But according to Dr Andy Lazris , co-author of A Return to Healing , Big Pharma wields an iron grip on the American hea...

Amidst all the chaos and hysteria of Trump 2.0, some things in America never change. As the Atlanta based journalist Brian Goldstone notes in There Is No Place For Us, America’s “invisible” working homeless population have be...

Which countries are best positioned to thrive in the 21st century? No, it’s not Denmark. Nor China. According to Parag Khanna , the Singapore based geo-strategist, the three countries that top what he calls The Periodic Table...

The writer Daniel Oppenheimer and his wife, Jessica, have been going to marriage therapy for many years. But, as he confessed in a recent New York Times magazine piece, he had to go to a superstar councillor to finally recogn...

Few observers are more insightful than the critic William Deresiewicz at identifying the changing landscape of American culture. In my latest conversation with Deresiewicz, best known for his book Excellent Sheep , we explore...

How to achieve BIG change with small acts? According to the Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton , this requires what, in his new book, he dubs Ordinary Magic . Small psychological interventions , Walton argues, can create si...

On Thursday, we featured a conversation with Red Scare author Clay Risen about Joe McCarthy, Donald Trump and the Paranoid Style of American History. Today our subject is one of the best known victims of McCarthyism - the Ger...

Is Europe about to become the World's Third Tech Superpower? In our regular That Was The Week round-up of tech news, Keith Teare says NO!, arguing that the EU’s increasingly aggressive regulation of Apple and Google will rele...

American history, Clay Risen reminds us, has an uncanny knack of repeating itself. In Red Scare , his important new book about blacklists, McCarthyism and the making of modern America, Risen suggests that Trump and MAGA have ...

What is the MAGA movement’s aesthetic? According to the New York Times ’ Dan Brooks , it’s an aesthetic captured by the generative AI video “ Trump Gaza ”. Childishly absurd, it’s an aesthetic, Brooks suggests, of “bearded be...

Andrew Checchia , a young journalist at NewsJunkie.net, requested an interview with me about the current state of American journalism. So here are my thoughts about the Fourth Estate’s role in democracy, our supposedly dwindl...

The musician and actor Daryl Davis probably knows more about the Klu Klux Klan than any other living African-American. As the author of Klan-Destine Relationships and his latest The Klan Whisperer , Davis has written about no...

Long-time views of the show know that I’ve always been skeptical of equating Trump/MAGA with European fascism. I’ve always thought it historically facile and misleading. But I’m beginning to change my mind. Take, for example,...

Will AI kill Apple? That’s the (absurd) question with which Keith Teare and I begin our THAT WAS THE WEEK tech summary. We conclude that their failure to develop an in-house LLM or introduce a timely intelligence application ...

So who, exactly is government. It’s the question that Michael Lewis and an all-star team of writers address in a particularly timely new volume of essays. Who is Government? According to the Montana based Sarah Vowell , autho...

As MAGA continues to vandalize the Federal bureaucracy, some progressives are beginning to publicly acknowledge their role in the historic undermining of the US government. In his provocative new book Why Nothing Works , the ...