Episodes

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 Liberties Quarterly piece “The Enlightenment, Then and Now”, Bell charts the Enlightenment as a complex intellectual movement centered in Paris but with hubs across Europe and America. He highlights key figures like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, and Franklin, discussing their con...

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 tremendous benefits of modern medications, Avorn critiques the American healthcare system's pricing structures, pharmaceutical patent abuse, and profit incentives that drives the over-prescription of medicine. Avorn advocates for more thoughtful, evidence-based approaches to m...

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 America, empowered by Northern Californian technology, is gearing up for another remarkable period of innovation. Leyden is no MAGA fanboy, but argues that Trump is enabling the American future by destroying the Republican brand and unintentionally guaranteeing a longterm Dem...

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 the Web 2.0 revolution are, so-to-speak, half-fucked. On the one hand, they are the victims of a legal witch hunt by a nationalist U.S. government intent on punishing Big Tech innovation; on the other, they continue to reap the benefits of an increasingly globalized digital ma...

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 to show her children America before it is destroyed. Borrowing from her research of post Soviet Central Asia, Kendzior argues that Trump is establishing a kleptocratic “mafia state” designed to fleece the country of its valuables. This is the third time that Kendzior has be...

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 radicals in both parties. In The Primary Solution , Troiano argues that party primaries give disproportionate influence to political extremes, with 90% of elections being decided in primaries where few people participate. Troiano advocates for open primaries that allow all voters...

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. She argues that, in contrast with flexible thinking, ideological discourse involves rigid adherence to doctrines and anti-scientific dismissal of factual evidence. She notes that economic and political stress rigidifies our thought processes, making us more susceptible to id...

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 increasingly pivotal role in 21st century history. We discuss America's changing "operating system" as it struggles to reinvent its 20th century industrial identity. We explore America’s age old relationship between technology, entertainment, and politics, particularly in how Trump ...

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 research has changed the world and saved tens of millions of lives. Not surprisingly, then, Levenson expresses deep concern about the Trump administration's attacks on the American scientific establishment, particularly funding cuts affecting critical research. He warns against gro...

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 and analysis to quantify how much power Black Americans actually have. Using big data metrics, Perry compares Black communities to each other rather than to white populations to highlight local progress and solutions. The results are more encouraging that some might think. ...

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 each embodied a new Jewish confidence after WWII, contrasting with earlier generations' restraint. Each figure pushed boundaries in their own way - Bernstein through his musical versatility, Brooks through his boundary-pushing humor about Jewish experiences, Friedan through ...

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 automation, workplace conditions, and ever deepening socioeconomic inequality. After attending a Dale Carnegie training course, Scherlis observed how these programs frame human connection as something that can be quantified and engineered. She suggests that the focus on developin...

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 those weeks. While the world isn’t exactly ending, Keith suggests, the “West” - or at least a post Bretton Woods American centric west - is finished. He may well be right in seeing Trump’s clownish tariffs as a symptom of American decline. But if the United States is the pa...

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 cobalt. Afterwards, I moderated a panel featuring the movie’s director Samuel George , the Biden US Department of Energy Director Giulia Siccardo and Environmental Lawyer JingJing Zhang (the "Erin Brockovich of China"). In post Liberation Day America, of course, the issues addres...

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 This Is America piece which Bessner discussed on yesterday’s show. I’m not sure what that tells us about wokeness, a subject which Rieff and I aren’t in agreement. For him, it’s the thing-in-itself which make sense of our current cultural malaise. Thus Desire and Fate , his at...

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 provocative Jacobin piece , Bessner contends that executive power has been expanding since FDR, with the U.S. President increasingly becoming an "elected monarch." The leftist Bessner criticizes American liberals for both obsessing over the fictional specter of fascism and for failing...

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 Kreitner . In his new book, Fear No Pharaoh , Kreitner explores the radically diverse positions that American Jews held toward slavery during the Civil War. He highlights 6 prominent Jewish figures including Judah Benjamin (a Confederate leader), Rabbi Morris Jacob Raphael (who...

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 both the multi trillion dollar AI revolution and the world’s Taiwan-centric microchip economy. Witt explains how NVIDIA transformed itself from an obscure gaming graphics company into an AI hardware powerhouse by investing in scientific computing when competitors wouldn't. H...

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 story of Scott Dozier, a death row inmate who volunteered for execution. Convicted of two murders on circumstantial evidence, Dozier preferred death to living 22-24 hours daily in a cell. Despite his and the state's shared goal of execution, bureaucratic delays and legal challe...

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 discusses how economic metrics like GDP, designed 80 years ago, are increasingly inadequate for measuring today's complex economy. She argues we need new approaches that account for digital transformation, supply chains, and long-term sustainability. Coyle suggests developing huma...

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 superpower is convincing (ie: selling) others of his vision. This was as true, she notes, in Altman’s founding of OpenAI with Elon Musk, their eventual split, and the company's successful pivot to language models. Hagey details the dramatic firing and rehiring of Altman in 202...

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, Facebook's former global policy director, which draws obvious parallels between Facebook and The Great Gatsby . Williams explicitly compares Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to Fitzgerald’s lazily destructive Tom and Daisy Buchanan. She describes how the company prioritized busi...

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 policies, calling them "backward" and "bad for American business." He explains how Fair Trade - which has expanded beyond coffee to include 40 products, from produce to furniture - certifies products through rigorous standards ensuring workers receive fair wages and environmental ...

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 represents a "bipartisan phantasm" featuring absurdly unqualified and ignorant figures from both right (Hegseth & Vance) and left (RFK Jr. & Tulsi Gabbard). Masciotra explores how the destruction of media gatekeepers has allowed fantasy to dominate reality - creating what he dubs, c...