Episodes

Yesterday, KEEN ON featured a conversation with the technologist Gary Marcus about how we can ensure that AI works for us. Today, on our regular That Was The Week tech weekly roundup, Andrew and Keith Teare discuss the role o...

Few artificial intelligence experts have been as outspoken or prescient as the author and entrepreneur Gary Marcus . In his new book, Taming Silicon Valley , Marcus takes on the new AI barons of Silicon Valley - billionaires ...

As Donald Trump’s 79 year-old Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross was the oldest first-time Cabinet appointee in American history. Ross’ mom, however - Agnes, a lifelong New Jersey schoolteacher and proud Democrat - probably ...

At the debate last night, Kamala Harris opened her remarks by talking about the need for America to fix its housing crisis. And crisis it is, at least according to Jerusalem Demsas , a staff writer at The Atlantic who has wri...

At the debate tonight, there probably won’t be much talk about American education. Which is a shame - at least according to Josh Cowen , author of The Privateers , a new book about how radical conservative billionaires like ...

The Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic is one of the world’s leading authorities on inequality. In this KEEN ON America conversation, we talked about Milanovic’s interpretation of the history of American economic in...

The Brooklyn based Rafil Kroll-Zaidi is a Princeton educated reporter formerly on the editorial staff of Harper's Magazine. And he is another kind of reporter too - a citizen- sleuth who makes six figures annually by reportin...

Last Saturday , on our regular That Was The Week tech roundup, Keith Teare and I discussed the French decision to imprison Telegram founder Pavel Durov. Today, we discuss the theoretical imprisonment of Elon Musk, an idea tou...

Last month we ran an interview with the Oregon based regenerative wine maker Mimi Casteel about fixing America one sip at a time . In addition, we recorded a KEEN ON America segment with Casteel about her life-long love affai...

Andrew Leigh is a minister in the Australian parliament with a doctorate in economics from Harvard. Unlike many academic economists, however, Leigh has the gift of simplifying economics for all of us. His new book, How Econom...

Formerly Le Monde’s guy in Jerusalem, Piotr Smolar is now the senior correspondent for Le Monde in Washington, DC. He is also the grandson of Hersh Smolar, one of the 20th century’s more remarkable men. As Smolar notes in Bad...

Exactly 85 years ago today, on 3 September 1939, the Second World War officially began with Britain’s declaration of war against Germany. Russians might argue, however, the real war began on 22 June 1941 with Hitler’s invasio...

Controversial things are happening on the campus of the University of Austin (UATX), the brand new anti-woke university designed to “dare” its students to “think”. Last week, we interviewed UATX’s founding president, Pano Kan...

Bryan VanDyke’s new dystopian AI novel, In Our Likeness , only came out today, but it has already over 1,400 reviews on Amazon and is currently their bestselling science fiction book. So what does our seemingly infinite appet...

There’s a big fight, perhaps even a war, about to break out between Big Tech and governments around the world. It’s been brewing for several years now, but the news this week from France and Brazil suggests that conventional ...

According to the Californian political sociologist Peter Phillips , American capitalism is facing an existential crisis. In his new book, Titans of Capital , he argues that the concentrated wealth of investment companies like...

The Anglo-Jewish writer Tanya Gold went on holiday to Auschwitz and didn’t much like what she saw. She writes about the experience in “My Auschwitz Vacation: On Holocaust tourism” which ran in this month’s Harper’s . But, as ...

Last year, we had a great conversation with Branko Milanovic, author of Visions of Inequalit y, a bout how classical economists like Smith, Riccardo, Marx and Pareto analyze inequality. Our guest today, David Lay Williams , ...

Something interesting is happening in downtown Austin. Next month, The University of Austin (UATX), a new undergraduate college claiming to “be dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth”, opens its well financed doors. Launc...

As the author of the bestselling Master Algorithm , University of Washington professor Pedro Domingos is one of the world’s most respected AI experts. So I was a little surprised that his new book, 2040 , is a science-fiction...

At the DNC last week, the Warriors coach and former Bulls star Steve Kerr spoke of his excitement at his return to Chicago’s United Center, the home of some his greatest basketball triumphs. According to the Columbia Universi...

As one of the victims of Donald Trump’s notorious 2020 dismissal of Inspector Generals, Glenn A. Fine — a longtime Inspector General of both the departments of Justice & Defense - knows a thing or two about both honest govern...

“We don’t need no education”, Pink Floyd announced in 1979. “Teachers leave those kids alone”: We don't need no education We don’t need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teachers leave them kids alone Hey! T...

William Deresiewicz is a leading American writer best known as the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life . And so, when Bill and I sat down in Portland for a KEEN O...