Episodes

Another week in tech, another splashy AI scandal. This one involves OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the voice of Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson. Dear Sam, Keith Teare’s That Was The Week newsletter begins, as the SignalRank CEO ...

The debate about the supposed “colonial” foundations of Israel goes on and on. But I wonder whether Jehuda Reinharz’s definitive new biography of Chaim Weizmann might help clarify the unintentional colonial foundations of the...

The digital revolution has few more persistent critics than John (Rick) MacArthur , the legendarily outspoken publisher of Harper’s Magazine . His skepticism about Silicon Valley, he confesses, came at the turn of the century...

Bobi Conn’s life is an American story. Growing up in a desolate Kentucky holler, her father a drug addicted outlaw who abused her mother, Conn has reinvented herself as a successful writer and mother. But for all Conn’s unfl...

Is it time to start worrying about the Germans again? Perhaps, at least according to Jacob Kushner, the author of LOOK AWAY: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants , a book ab...

Jordan Elgrably , the Morrocan-French editor of the Markaz Review , wants us to read complex stories about the Middle East and North Africa that our simplistic newspaper headlines mostly ignore. In his new anthology, Stories ...

I’ve always been a big admirer of Steven Johnson , whose prolific work focuses on the disruptive role of new technologies in shaping our past and future. In his new book, The Infernal Machine , Johnson writes about the turn o...

It’s a mind blowing story. In Fat Leonard , the Washington Post ’s prize winning investigative journalist Craig Whitlock tells of a Malaysian contractor called Leonard Glenn Francis who successfully seduced up to a thousand U...

Ever wondered why the never-endingTrump show seems simultaneously like a reality show remake and sequel? According to Chris Gavaler, the self styled Patron Saint of Superheroes , it’s because our view of reality itself has be...

Given the situation in Gaza, some might interpret a new book entitled Judaism Is About Love to be either satirical or slightly chutzpahdik . But its author, Rabbi Shai Held , President & Dean of New York City’s Hadar Institut...

Last week’s KEEN ON America interview featured a conversation with R. Derek Black, the son of a KKK Grand Wizard, whose all-too-American life has been defined by radical personal reinvention and second chances. In contrast, A...

What is the most American town in the USA? Las Vegas comes to mind, of course. And Memphis, with its uniquely American church of Graceland. Or one of Springsteen’s forgotten beach towns in New Jersey. Imagine rolling Vegas a...

I’m just back from five glorious days in Syracuse, the ancient Mediterranean city in the south western corner of Sicily. And to extend my trip, at least virtually, I spoke to the young Irish novelist, Ferdia Lennon , author o...

Apple’s Crush advertisement for their new range of iPads got so crushed by its critics that Apple apologized and announced the commercial wouldn’t go on tv. But according to Keith Teare, author of the That Was The Week tech n...

Timothy Morton, who teaches English at Rice, has become a bit of a rock star interpreter of our hellishly hot planetary times. And his eclectic work has even gotten the stamp of approval of real rock stars - like Laurie Ander...

How seriously should we take the white nationalist threat in the United States? Very seriously, at least according to R. Derek Black, a young man who knows a thing or two about the US white nationalist movement. The son of a ...

Marx’s 19th century remark that history repeats itself twice, first as tragedy and then as farce, helps us makes sense of the seemingly surreal politics of the contemporary Republican Party. As Kyle Paoletta notes in his insi...

Pete Townsend said it best. “Hope I die before I get old” he wrote in The Who’s anthemic 1965 hit, “My Generation”. But what Townsend really meant in a lyric that best captured the rebellious Boomer spirit of the Sixties, he ...

The more that changes in the digital world, the more that stays the same. For all the disruption of AI, two trends appear totally unchanging. Firstly, it’s the big players - Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple - that appear t...

We don’t often image Miami as a city of Cold War subterfuge akin to Berlin or Vienna. But according to Vince Houghton, co-author of COVERT CITY , Miami was as crucial to winning the Cold War as Washington DC or Moscow. The Cu...

We’ve done several shows on the housing crisis in America, mostly from a progressive perspective in which the solution to the shortage of homes is presented in terms of government investment. The libertarian economist, Bryan ...

One of Bethanne Patrick’s recommended books for April was Mohamed Amer Meziane’s The States of the Earth . It sounded intriguing, if not entirely coherent, and so I invited Meziane on the show. Even now, I’m not sure I exact...

In today’s stultified American gerontocracy, not everyone is convinced that we should care about old people. After all, aging baby boomers still control most of the wealth and power in an increasingly divided & inegalitarian ...

Samyr Laine might be a model for how to become a Haitian-American in the 21st century. Son of Haitian emigrants, Laine was a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, competed at the London 2012 Olympics as a Haitian triple jum...