Episodes

The New York Times ’ David Enrich is one of America’s most tenacious investigative journalists. So when he comes out with a book entitled Murder the Truth , we should take note. There’s a campaign, Enrich warns, sometimes sec...

Not everyone, especially mainstream Democrats, are going to agree with Jessica Pishko on this one. In Liberties , she argues that it was the Democrats who “built Trump’s army”. It was Joe Biden, she claims, who built up the v...

There’s a story today about how a VR headset can make us more empathetic toward nature. But according to the Pacific Northwest based author and biologist Thor Hanson , no digital technology can ever replicate nature. Instead,...

Here are the 4 KEEN ON AMERICA take-aways in our conversation about the dysfunctional American immigration system with Felipe Torres Medina 1) Background & Immigration Journey * Felipe Torres Medina is a comic writer for "The...

We are back to AI (actually it never left us). In this THAT WAS THE WEEK tech show, Keith and Andrew talk about how AI is now enabling anyone - even non-coders - to code. "I was able to do something without having the skill t...

So what’s the most revolutionary invention in the history of the American Republic? The internet, maybe? Or the electric bulb or the motor car? Perhaps. But according to the Harvard historian Joyce Chaplin , it might be the F...

Award-winning reporter Kevin Fagan is one of San Francisco’s great treasures. In his much acclaimed new book, The Lost and Found , Fagan tells his his two-decade experience reporting about homelessness in San Francisco. He sh...

What do Fareed Zakaria, Nikki Haley, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Vinod Khosla and Kamala Harris all have in common? They are all, of course, highly successful Americans of Indian descent. According ...

America, to borrow a word from last week’s guest Yoni Appelbaum , is “stuck”. And so the American Dream, for most stuck Americans, is dead. Our guest today, the social entrepreneur Nicholas Lalla , agrees with Appelbaum. The ...

What one word describes how Donald Trump thinks about the world? According to both the Atlantic writer Jonathan Rauch and UC Irvine professor Jeffrey Kopstein , that word is “patrimonialism” - a rather stodgy sociological ter...

The international war reporter John Lechner is a brave man. For his new book Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare , he spent time in both Russia and the Central African Republic resear...

In today’s THAT WAS THE WEEK tech newsletter, Keith Teare asks what “civilization” is good for. Triggered by David Brooks’ “We Can Achieve Great Things” NYTimes piece , Keith’s editorial this week focuses on how we can “earn”...

In the long run, Keynes famously quipped, we are all dead. But Swedish entrepreneur Kristian Ronn reverses Keynes to argue that in the short term we, as a species, might also be death. In his new book Darwinian Trap , Ronn ar...

Should lawyers, home alarm fitters, hairdressers and plumbers all have to get a license to do their business? And what about dog walkers and surgeons? It’s an absurd question, of course, but as Rebecca Haw Allensworth reveals...

Who wants to change their life? Who want to transform their relationships and increase their influence? If that’s you, then Stanford based psychologist Caroline Fleck might be your therapist. In her new book, VALIDATION , Fle...

According to the Atlantic ’s Yoni Applebaum , America is STUCK - literally and otherwise. In his new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity . Appelbaum argues that America f...

Not everyone sees Trump or Musk as an existential threat to the American federal bureaucracy. In the March cover story of Harper’s , their Washington DC editor Andrew Cockburn argues that this latest war against the American ...

Given the shameful American sacrifice of Ukraine, there will be few timelier movies than Anna Kryvenko’s upcoming “ This House is Undamaged ”,. It will be an Orwellian documentary examining the Russian destruction of Mariupol...

Lots of healthy disagreement in this week’s THAT WAS THE WEEK tech show with Keith Teare . We debate the impact of AI on coding jobs, with Keith suggesting that while traditional coding skills may become less important, syste...

Why is reforming capitalism so essential? In the latest issue of Liberties Quarterly , Tim Wu argues that unregulated capitalism not only leads to economic monopolies, but also drives populist anger and authoritarian politics...

How historic are Trump 2.0’s first few weeks? For the veteran correspondent, Nick Bryant , the longtime BBC man in Washington DC, what the Trump regime has done in the first few weeks of his second administration is as histor...

Few books are timelier than Ian Goldin ’s new The Shortest History of Migration . Drawing from his personal history as a South African emigrant and his experience working with Nelson Mandela, the Oxford based Goldin explores ...

No, social media might no longer be the greatest danger to our children’s well-being. According to the writer and digital activist Gaia Bernstein , the most existential new new threat are AI companions. Bernstein, who is orga...

Have our private lives become inevitably political in today’s age of social media? Ray Brescia certainly thinks so. His new book, The Private is Political , examines how tech companies surveil and influence users in today’s a...