Episodes

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 Franklin Stove, Benjamin Franklin’s innovation which she claims in an eponymous new book , represents an unintentional American revolution. What’s really important about the Franklin Stove, she explains, is that it democratized heating, thereby enabling ordinary Americans to ...

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 shares the stories of Tyson and Rita, two homeless individuals who he helped reconnect with their families. Tyson, despite having a supportive family, died of a fentanyl overdose, while Rita was rescued by her family and lived 20 more fulfilling years. Fagan, who experienced h...

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 Meenakshi Ahamed, author of Indian Genius, one reason for what she calls the “meteoric rise” of Indians in America are their humble beginnings here. Arriving with minimal resources (what she calls the "$8 club"), Ahamed attributes their success to "jugaad" (resourcefulness),...

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 American Dream might still be alive in privileged coastal communities, Lalla argues in his new book Reinventing the Heartland , but it needs resurrection elsewhere. Defining the American Dream as doing better than one's parents and having financial security, Lalla highlights...

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 term meaning that Trump wants to be the Godfather. Everything under Trump is personal, Rauch and Kopstein explain. Thus, for example, his public bullying of Zelenskyy and his vindictive announcement today of “pausing” military aid to Ukraine. The personal is the political used ...

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 researching the Russian mercenary Wagner Group founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin. In our conversation, he details Prigozhin's rise, his rebellion against Putin, and his eventual death. Lechner argues that mercenary groups like Wagner are generally no more or less bloodthirsty than the ...

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” the future through constant innovation. The problem - as everyone from Keith Teare to David Brooks to KeenOnAmerica guest Yoni Appelbaum all acknowledge - is that America has become stuck in camps, routines and ideologies. So how to unstick America? How to reestablish belie...

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 argues that we're hardwired to prioritize immediate benefits over long-term consequences, creating existential risks like nuclear war and uncontrolled AI development. Ronn suggests we need better system design with proper incentives to overcome these tendencies. He proposes co...

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 in her new book, The Licensing Racket , we live in absurdly credentialed times. As Allensworth notes, at a moment in history when AI is about to replace many professional workers with bots, there really are required licenses for “trades” like home alarm fitters. And what ab...

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 , Fleck lays out a skill set that, she promises, not only revolutionized psychology but can revolutionize all of us. Skeptical? Yes, I was before talking with Dr Fleck. But she actually offer some very practical advice on how we can all improve our relationships and build our sel...

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 faces not just a housing crisis but a mobility crisis, with prohibitively expensive housing in prosperous areas preventing people from moving toward opportunity. Applebaum traces how zoning laws, initially driven by racism and classism, have created a system where Americans m...

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 state is “futile”. He expresses skepticism that DOGE’s efforts to dismantle the Federal will succeed, suggesting courts will likely block them as they did during Trump's first term. He predicts Musk's influence will diminish and that Trump will eventually sideline him. Cockb...

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, the Ukrainian city devastated by Putin’s invasion in 2022. Krivenko, a Fellow at the Artist in Residence program, Institute for Advanced Studies at CEU, explains how Russian authorities are rapidly rebuilding and selling properties there while erasing Ukrainian history and...

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, system architecture and AI guidance skills will be crucial to maintaining the value of human labor. We also discuss the rise of early-stage unicorns , military-tech AI start-ups, and disagree strongly on the status of billionaires, with Keith arguing that it’s “not hard” to be a ...

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. In “ The Real Road to Serfdom ”, Wu advocates for "decentralized capitalism" with distributed economic power, citing examples from Scandinavia and East Asia. Drawing from his experience in the Biden administration's antitrust efforts, he emphasizes the importance of preven...

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 historic as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It’s the end of the America we haver known for the last seventy years, he says. Bryant describes Trump's rapprochement with Russia as Neville Chamberlain style appeasement and notes the dramatic shifts in U.S. foreign policy, parti...

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 the when, why and how humans move - from the prehistoric peopling of the planet to today and tomorrow’s migrants. He addresses current political tensions, including J.D. Vance's recent criticisms of European migration policies and Elon Musk's controversial stance on immigra...

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 organizing a symposium today on AI companions as the “new frontier of kid’s screen addiction”, warns that this new technology, while marketed as solutions to loneliness, may actually worsen social isolation by providing artificially perfect relationships that make real-world int...

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 age of surveillance capitalism. Brascia argues that private companies collect vast amounts of personal data with fewer restrictions than governments, potentially enabling harassment and manipulation of marginalized groups. He proposes a novel solution: a letter-grade system f...

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 in the economic road. With Trump putting the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act on "pause" and DOGE kingpin Elon Musk openly dreaming of turning X into a bank, we're watching traditional financial regulation shrivel to the minimal levels of Calvin Coolidge’s 1920’s. Meanwhile, M...

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 to alienate our European friends. Some tech notables, like Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger, take both views simultaneously, acknowledging on the one hand that Vance was correct to push back against “regulatory capture”, but on the other that Vance was “ mistaking...

“ 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 party has become disconnected from working-class voters partially because it represents what he calls "the nerve center of American capitalism." He suggests that for all Democrats’ strong cultural liberalism and institutional power, the party has failed to deliver meaningful eco...

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 founder of the Foley Foundation , explore this terrible dilemma. This memorable conversation with Foley and McCann explores forgiveness, faith, and the moral complexities of justice. Most of all, though, it’s the conversation about a mother’s remarkable love for her dead son which...

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 history and evolution of presidential pardons, focusing particularly on Gerald Ford's controversial pardon of Richard Nixon. Toobin argues that while historical opinion has shifted to favor Ford's decision, he believes the pardon was wrong as it prevented Nixon’s accountabilit...