Episodes

I’ve been in London this week talking to America watchers about the current situation in the United States. First up is Edmund Fawcett , the longtime Economist correspondent in DC and historian of both liberalism and conserva...

What’s it like to have to work physically hard to make a living in America today? In A Living , the writer and physician Michael Stein shares conversations with his working-class patients. He explores how work shapes identity...

Does the United States of America still have anything going for it? According to the Arizona based Larry Aldrich , co-author of the upcoming What’s Right About America , there remains much to celebrate about his country’s fou...

Is any criticism of Israel, by definition, anti-semitic? Not according to Uri Kaufman who, in his new book American Intifada , examines what he calls the "new antisemitism" following the Gaza war. That said, Kaufman nonethele...

In today’s discussion with David Masciotra about the first hundred days of Trump 2.0 I made the (Freudian) error of referring to it as a “hundred years”. It certainly feels like a hundred years . So how should the Democrats r...

Few analysts are more familiar with the politics of both contemporary Turkey and the United States than my old friend , the distinguished Turkish political scientist Soli Ozel . Drawing on his decades of experience in both co...

Americans, it’s time to move to Europe! The American geo-strategist Jason Pack anticipated last week’s advice from Simon Kuper and moved to London a few years ago during the first Trump Presidency. Pack, the host of the excel...

Don’t say we weren’t warned. Project 2025, the 2022 Heritage Foundation’s 900-page policy blueprint, unambiguously plotted out the strategy of the second Trump administration. As Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham makes cl...

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 ...