Episodes

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...

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...