Episodes

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...

The zealously anti-regulatory Trump is back and anti-corruption activist Frank Vogl is very worried. Vogl warns that MAGA’s increasingly deregulated America financial landscape could make the 2008 crash look like a minor bump...

So what to J.D. Vance's highly controversial speech at the Paris AI Summit this week? According to That Was The Week ’s Keith Teare, it was “a breath of fresh air”. Others will argue it was just more MAGA putridity designed ...

“ Expect More Bulldozings ”, the Princeton historian Matthew Karp predicts in this month’s Harpers magazine about MAGA America. In his analysis of the Democrats' loss to Trump, Karp argues that the supposedly progressive part...

What can a mother say to the cold-blooded executioner of her son? In American Mother , the heartrending story of the murdered American journalist Jim Foley, the writer Colum McCann and Diane Foley , Foley’s mother and founde...

If there’s anyone who knows the value of a pardon, it’s Jeffrey Toobin , the publicly shamed and now rehabilitated CNN legal analyst. In his latest book, The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy , Toobin examines the hi...

The acclaimed American writer Walter Mosley has a new King Oliver book out: B een Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right , a novel that follows Oliver's search for both a missing woman and his estranged father who was released fro...

According to the Scottish economist Sir John Kay , author of The Corporation in the 21st Century , the Magnificent Seven tech companies that supposedly control the global economy aren’t quite as magnificent as we are led to b...

So what’s it like co-authoring a book with Reid Hoffman, the multi-billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and amongst Silicon Valley’s most prominent Democrats? According to Greg Beato , who just co-wrote Superagency with Hoffman...

It’s been quite a few days in Silicon Valley. "There are decades where nothing happens,” Lenin famously observed, “and there are weeks where decades happen”. As Andrew and Keith Teare reflect in their regular THAT WAS THE WE...

Wow. According to the journalist and historian Eoin Higgins, right wing tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and Peter Thiel have “bought” prominent anti establishment journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt ...

Internet scholar and activist Ethan Zuckerman is horrified by the American ban on TikTok. As a self-described “progressive” with a long and distinguished career advocating for internet freedom, Zuckerman expresses alarm at ho...