Episodes

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 appetite for dystopian AI literature tell us about ourself, I asked VanDyke? Is the popularity of this type of dystopian literature because AI is about to replace humans with smart machines thereby making our species redundant? Or might it be a more persistent feature of moderni...

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 nation-states are increasingly confident of shutting down popular social networks and jailing their founders. For libertarians like That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, this isn’t good news. In his editorial this week, Keith is particularly troubled by the French governm...

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 BlackRock and Fidelity not only threatens human rights and democracy, but also the future of planet. Perhaps. But where Phillips really goes out on a limb is to argue that the Chinese state controlled model of capitalism which, he says, has brought hundreds of millions of ...

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 she told me, she would have preferred the piece to have been entitled: “Her Gay Romp Through Jewish Poland” - in honor , of course, of Mel Brooke’s satirical “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden” from his 1967 movie The Producers . And there...

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 , asks the same question - but from the perspective of political philosophers like Rousseau, JS Rousseau and Hobbes. In his new book, The Greatest of All Plagues , Williams traces how economic inequality has shaped political theory over the last two thousand years. And in our ...

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. Launched as a supposedly “anti-woke” university, UATX has some heavy hitting advisors including Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Larry Summers, Andrew Young, Jonathan Haidt and Bari Weiss. It’s founding president is the Shakespeare scholar, Pano Kanelos , who is described as “an ...

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-fictional satire of American politics & Silicon Valley. In 2040 , Domingos is, however, also using fiction to write a critique of the current Silicon Valley mania for AI. The book is both a warning about the technological limits of AI as well as an investigation of the way that it ...

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 University historian Frank Andre Guridy, there’s nothing coincidental about this convergence of American politics and sports. In his intriguing new book, THE STADIUM , Guridy reimagines America through the history of sports stadiums like Candlestick Park & Madison Square Gardens. It...

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 government. In his new book, Watchdogs, Fine presents the Inspectors General as the last line of defense for uncorrupt American institutions. In his words, they are “pillars of democracy” and, as such, we should think of these government officials as “broad shouldered" public serv...

“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! Teachers! Leave them kids alone! But today, almost half a century later, That Was The Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare believes that technology might be radically reinventing education and healing the historically fraught relationship between teachers and kids. Today, Ke...

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 ON America conversation, we discussed the crisis of a high-end university system that he, as a former professor at Yale, knows all too well. But Bill, a keen conversationalist, also talked about what it means to be both a Jew and an American in a country which simultaneously ...

I have to admit that I’m always a little uncomfortable with non-Jews fetishizing the supposedly unique gifts & accomplishments of the Jewish people. A century ago, Winston Churchill did it. And now George Gilder , the influential tech futurist, picks up that Churchillian mantle in a new edition of his 2012 book The Israel Test . Israel’s “genius”, Gilder argues, “enriches” the world to such an extent that anyone who questions it is, by definition, a critic of innovation, freedom and progress - n...

How to fix American democracy? It’s a question that, over the last couple of years, we’ve been addressing in my Bertelsmann Foundation supported How To Fix Democracy show, now its fifth year. And it is, of course, also a subject much addressed over the years on KEEN ON. My guest on today’s show, Meredith Sumpter , has also given the subject of fixing American democracy much thought. Sumpter is the President & CEO of FairVote , a non-profit dedicated to making American democracy more democratic. ...

Andrew C.M. Cooper is the author of the new book, The Ethical Imperative: Leading with Conscience to Shape the Future of Business . He is also an Associate General Counsel and Head of Patent Acquisitions at Meta. While he didn’t write The Ethical Imperative as a Meta person, it is still intriguing that one of Zuckerberg’s lawyers should be writing a book about corporate ethics, especially since he told me that corporations “should be in the business of social engineering”. But I’m not convinced....

It’s ironic that Keith Teare, editor of That Was The Week newsletter, just spent two idyllic weeks in Europe, enjoying the Paris Olympics and London theater. Because his first newsletter on his return to the United States asks if “ Is Europe Dying ?” and suggests that innovation on the European continent has been killed by the regulatory bureaucratic state. More ominously, Keith argues, United States isn’t far behind Europe in the anti innovation regulation of state bureaucrats like the FTC Comm...

We are living in interesting political times. A month ago, the Presidential election appeared over. Today, however, it appears as if it’s barely begun. So in my conversation today with the prolific columnist David Masciotra , I asked him if he glimpsed the outlines of a “Harrisist” ideology behind the avalanche of Kamala memes on TikTok. Is the Harris excitement simply a repeat of the Obama mania from 2008, or has something fundamentally changed over the last fifteen years? Then, of course, ther...

What do Hum , Hitler’s People and The Hypocrite have in common? They are all recommended new books from KEEN ON’s best read regular guest, Los Angeles Times book critic Bethanne Patrick . As usual, she recommends six books, but - whether you are looking for a magically realistic novel about the Dutch resistance to Nazism or new non-fiction on Putin’s Russia or the Scopes Trial - they all offer great late summer reading. Bethanne Patrick maintains a storied place in the publishing industry as a c...

Last month, we were in western Virginia talking to the pioneering regenerative farmer Joel Salatin about how American can fix itself one bite at a time . Today we are on the other coast, in western Oregon, talking to another regenerative farmer, Mimi Casteel . In contrast with Salatin’s Polyface Farm, Casteel’s beautiful Hope Well vineyard focuses on the production of wine. And yet, as Casteel explains, she and Salatin share a faith in the regenerative role of the soil in reinventing American ag...

In Nineteen Eighty-Four , which he wrote in 1948,George Orwell imagined the “Ministry of Truth” to be the central institution that Big Brother used to reinvent reality and make war on the recent past. Three quarters of a century later, Steve Benen, the Emmy award winning producer of the Rachel Maddow Show, revisits Nineteen Eighty-Four and sees the Republican party as a reincarnation of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. In his eponymous new book , Benen argues that the raison d’etre of today’s GOP is...

As author of the authoritative three volume Third Reich Trilogy , Richard J. Evans is probably the most respected scholar of Hitler’s Third Reich in the world today. And his latest book, Hitler’s People, is an attempt to make all-too-human sense of Nazi lieutenants like Goebbels, Himmler, Eichmann and Streicher. It goes without saying of course, that these men were all monsters. But Evans is also interested in the human qualities of these Nazis. What he discovers, he told me, are ordinary middle...

In her new book, Freeman’s Challenge , the Harvard historian Robin Bernstein reveals the early 19th century origins of America’s for profit prisons. Telling the tragic story of William Freeman, an Afro-Native teenager guilty of what she calls the “terrorist” act of killing a white family, Bernstein simultaneously explores the origins of America’s first for profit prison in Auburn, NY. As she explains, there was and there still is an intimate connection between American incarceration and American...

In an America riven with both civic discord and ignorance, how can we nurture a next generation of responsibly informed citizens? That’s the all important question Lindsey Cormack addresses in her new book, How to Raise a Citizen . There are no magical tricks to learning how to be a good citizen, Cormack says, no clever shortcuts or miraculous new technologies. Instead, it’s up to all of us to take responsibility for giving our kids the necessary knowledge to understand the workings of our democ...

There are two core critiques of AI. The first is that it is an existential threat because it replaces humans with algorithms. The second is that AI is a mirror that only compounds preexisting injustices. James Muldoon , an associate professor of management at Essex Business School and co-author of Feeding the Machine , fits into the second category. Reminding us that “AI is people”, he travelled around the world in search of the hidden human labor that is the powering the AI revolution. What he ...

How democratic is American “democracy”. Dramatically less so that it was. That’s at least the rather worrying conclusion of David Daley , the author of ANTIDEMOCRATIC , a new book which exposes what he says is “the far right’s 50-year plot to control American elections”. This half century plot was successfully realized in 2013, Daley told me, with the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now, he argues, individual states have the right to tamper with their electoral laws and...