Episodes

In an era where even toothpaste shopping can trigger an existential crisis, intellectual historian Sophia Rosenfeld explore how we became both imprisoned and freed by endless options. Her new book The Age of Choice traces our...

According to Andrew Lipstein , here are 3 questions at the heart of his acclaimed new novel Something Rotten : a) What do we want masculinity to look like? b) What constitutes truth? c) How to present death in our culture? Ye...

From Dylan to democracy, from Bobby Kennedy to Putin's Russia - this wide-ranging conversation with Michael Ignatieff riffs off “ The Adults in the Room ,” his latest essay for Liberties Quarterly. A liberal intellectual and ...

A new book by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Nicholas Carr is always a major event. And today’s release of SUPERBLOOM: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart offers a prescient critique of our social media age. As Carr exp...

Is AI the latest chapter in our long history of creating an all-knowing God? AI ethicist Christopher DiCarlo certainly suspects it is. In his new book " Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Co...

Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it’s another anti tech book. In Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia , digital activist Mike Pepi argues that major tech companies like Meta, Amazon, Tesla, and OpenAI are all driven b...

In Keith Teare’s That Was the Week newsletter for this week, he categorically asserts that there is no oligarchy in Trump’s America. Instead there are “just technologists with a passion for change and, of course, self-interes...

So what, exactly, is a philosophical life? According the University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard , author of the much acclaimed new book Open Socrates, it means being able to ask questions with the intuitive fluency o...

This is the last and amongst the liveliest of my interviews at Munich’s DLD Conference this year. An old friend who has appeared on KEEN ON several times before, Andrew McAfee is a MIT professor who co-wrote the 2014 classic ...

Most of the breathless talk in snowy Munich at this year’s DLD conference , of course, was about the generative AI revolution. But amongst all the hype and glitz about our brave new AI future, Richard Socher stands out. Born...

If anyone should be anointed “aunt” or “court jEsther” of the tech industry, it’s long time journalist, investor and philanthropist Esther Dyson . When I caught up with Dyson at DLD, she reflected on her 40+ year career in te...

With Trump’s inauguration today, are we really about experience a new “golden age” in America? No. Not at least according to the best selling writer Robert D. Kaplan , author of Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis ( out n...

Amidst all the doom and gloom of the current zeitgeist, Harvard University literature professor & DLD 2025 speaker Martin Puchner remains cautiously optimistic about our high tech future. Reflecting on cultural and technologi...

In this week’s That Was The Week round up of tech news, Andrew and Keith Teare discuss the need for progressives to become what Keith calls “yes people” on technology. At the moment, he argues, their reactionary “no” on tech ...

The Stanford Business School professor Michal Kosinski has spent his career warning about the corrosive impact of technology, and particularly social media, on democratic institutions and individual freedom. The Polish born a...

Few people have a better perch to observe technological change than Kenneth Cukier , deputy executive editor at The Economist and co-author of the best-selling book Big Data . I caught up with Cukier at DLD this year to get h...

One person I didn’t expect to see at DLD is the feted Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran . Not exactly a regular on the tech circuit, Temelkuran is best known as a critic of the Erdogan regime and author of the influential 2019 bo...

We are back in Munich at the DLD Conference , Europe’s foremost tech gathering. DLD is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and, to mark this occasion, we spoke to some of the leading DLD’ers about the tumultuous last t...

Published on the eve of you-know-who’s second inauguration, Kurt Gray ’s new book Outraged focuses on why Americans are so divided and how they might find common ground despite their political differences. Gray argues that bo...

A new book by the acclaimed neuroscientist Lisa Genova is always a big event. Genova, best known for her best-selling 2007 novel, Still Alice , has a new novel out this week, More or Less Maddy , which follows a 20-year-old ...

The world is shutting its borders to immigrants. Yesterday , we featured a conversation with Laurie Trautman who dates the Covid crisis of 2020 as the tragic moment when the entire world closed its doors to immigrants. But ev...

From MAGA and the UK’s Reform Party to the German AfD, aggressively nationalist borders controls are back in political fashion. According to Laurie Trautman , an expert on immigration at Western Washington University, we can ...

Nicholas Carr has been amongst the most persistently prescient observers of the digital revolution over the last quarter century. Take, for example, his 2012 essay "The Arc of Innovation Bends Towards Decadence," which, in m...

Is there really a data-driven science that enables us to predict and change human behavior? Mind Masters author and Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz certainly is a believer. But I wonder whether Matz’s observati...