Episodes

Our second July 4 interview features Diane McLain Smith , author of Remaking the Space Between Us: How Citizens Can Work Together to Build a Better Future For All . The problem with America, McLain Smith believes, is that “we...

As the former Assistant Attorney General for Maryland, one would expect Debbie Hines to be a strong supporter of the American criminal justice system. But the Baltimore based veteran trial lawyer is unambiguously critical in ...

Last week’s horror show debate woke up a lot of progressive Americans. For Celeste Marcus , managing editor of Liberties Quarterly , Biden’s dismal performance was akin to the shock of the January 6th insurrection. In contras...

Over the last couple of years we’ve had multiple guests questioning the economic and moral value of a college education. But Daniel R. Porterfield, the Aspen Institute CEO and former President of Franklin and Marshall College...

Amongst the most bizarro thing about last week’s truly bizarre Presidential debate was how much Biden and Trump were in violent agreement on China. Trump certainly has won the ideological battle about the supposedly existenti...

In the wake of Biden’s pathetically dismal performance last week, it’s worth remembering that some progressive thinkers have been warning for months about this catastrophe. Back in May, the New York Times ran an op-ed by UC B...

Does Silicon Valley have an AI bubble problem? That Was the Week’s Keith Teare, usually the most bullish of tech bulls, acknowledges that Silicon Valley has an overvaluation issue with AI startups. But I wonder if the problem...

Imagine accosting a stranger in a grocery store because you mistook him to be your husband? That was the fate of the Washington Post science reporter, Sadie Dingfelder , who suffers from the bizarre condition of faceblindness...

If you liked Davy Chou’s excellent 2022 movie, Return to Seoul , then Tracy O’Neill’s new memoir, Woman of Interest , might be for you. Both movie and book are about an a female adoptee’s return to South Korea in search of th...

The New York City based writer John Ganz appeared on episode 2099 talking about how American cracked up in the Nineties with the rise of neo-Nazis like David Duke. When it comes to national crack-ups, however, nothing much co...

Whatever one thinks of the creative potential of AI, it’s definitely been great for metaphor makers. Yesterday, we had Shannon Vallor explaining why AI is a mirror of our social and political values. Today, Madhumita Murgia ,...

According to Shannon Vallor, a self-styled AI “ethicist”, artificial intelligence is a mirror . When we interact with the latest algorithms from OpenAI or Anthropic, she says, we are actually observing our social and politica...

We are focusing on the impact of AI this week with interviews featuring Shannon Vallor, Matt Beane and Madhumita Murgia. First up Beane , who teaches Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara and has a new book out about how ...

Little has changed in America more dramatically over the last half century than the retail fashion industry. There was a time, Julie Satow tells us the mid 20th century, when the high fashion department stores on New York Cit...

There are those who believe that fighting for democracy is more important than defending the rather nebulous concept of “liberalism”. And then there are those, like the political philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre, who, in their ...

It’s an odd world. Many of our most pressing political problems, particularly global warming, are long term, and yet we are still confined to the here-and-now of national politics to determine policy. This is the issue that ...

Are we on the brink of technological “super intelligence”, machines that will be able to think and reason with infinitely more power than humans? According to Leopold Aschenbrenner , the author of Situational Awareness: The D...

Peter S. Goodman , The New York Times’ Global Economics correspondent, is one of America’s most innovative and outspoken journalists. He was on KEEN ON a couple of years ago talking about how the billionaire class - aka: Davo...

Bethanne Patrick , the world’s best read woman and KEEN ON’s official literary maven, has six recommended new books to read this June. Three non-fiction works and three novels, they extend from books all about women, to the d...

Back in August 2021, we did a show featuring the British psychologist Lucy Jones , about how nature maintains our sanity. Jones’ thesis is born out in the astonishing story of Banning Lyon , who was institutionalized in a Te...

It’s becoming more and more self-evident that the Nineties matter . John Ganz’s important new book, When the Clock Broke , focuses on how, in the early 1990’s, the seemingly crackpot ideas of what at the time appeared to be c...

In episode 2065 , we discussed the Malaysian contractor, Leonard Glenn Francis (aka: Fat Leonard) about the biggest recent scandal in the US navy. But, as Guy Lawson, author of Hot Dog Money explains in this episode, Louis Ma...

As America braces itself for the upcoming Presidential election, a growing army of coastal commentators are agonizing over the health of the country’s democracy. In contrast with many of these desk bound pundits, the Bloomber...

In the wake of a “ major Summit ” on Ukraine which neither the Russians nor the Chinese attended, the war remains as murky and inconclusive as ever. And it’s this murkiness and inconclusiveness that the San Francisco based wr...