Episodes

Is it really conceivable that Apple will withdraw its products and services from the entire European Union? What might sound absurd is actually conceivable, That Was the Week ’s Keith Teare says, because of what he sees as th...

On the front page of her website , the family therapist and psychologist B. Janet Hibbs quotes Kierkegaard’s observation that “we live our lives forward, but understand them backwards.” But her coauthored You’re Not Done Yet:...

In his 1887 polemic, On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche suggested that the idea of good and evil, of morality itself, might have been born by slaves. Candida Moss, who holds the Edward Cadbury Chair of Theology at the Un...

Surveillance capitalism is ubiquitous. If we’re not being watched by Google or Facebook, then we are watching movies warning about how these digital platforms are watching us. David Donnelly’s new documentary, COST OF CONVENI...

Few conservatives or Christians have stood up to Donald Trump with the coherence and bravery of The New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner. “I think morality is to Trump what color is to a person who is colorblin...

Do we really need more jeremiads exposing the Randian greed of Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg & Travis Kalanick? Rob Lalka’s THE VENTURE ALCHEMISTS is about how big tech turned profits into power. but this has been the alchemy...

All the tech news this week seems to be about how Big Tech is, for better or worse, getting BIGGER. There’s the Department of Justice anti-trust case against Apple, a hail-Mary attempt by Biden’s DOJ to transform to the high-...

As we approach Easter and Passover, it’s worth noting that our mainstream monotheistic creeds are based on a belief in what Professor Chris French, the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Depart...

We would all be way more ignorant without omnivorous book critic and regular KEEN ON guest Bethanne Patrick. This month she recommends six new books by Russell Banks, Adam Philips, Percival Everett, Andrew Dubus III, Marie Mu...

Warning: this is an adults-only show. David Baker, the Australian based author of The Shortest History of Sex , takes us through two billion years of sexual evolution. And, from the first microbial exchanges of DNA to Darwin ...

Even if it isn’t quite Spring, the professional baseball season begins today in, of all places, Korea. And to celebrate this premature rite, I spoke with Keith O’Brien, the author of CHARLIE HUSTLE , the new Pete Rose biograp...

In his new book AMERICA LAST: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators , Jacob Heilbrunn argues that American conservatives have always had the hots for foreign dictators like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Mussolini, Fran...

Did history ever go away? For the former BBC Russia correspondent, Martin Sixsmith, there was a few euphoric years, in the early 1990’s, when history promised to end. That time, of course, was the post-Soviet Russia of Boris ...

Once-upon-a-time, there was the “ Silent Generation ” - the self-sacrificing generation of WW2 vets who won the war and built America into a Cold War superpower. But Elaine Lin Hering, the author of UNLEARNING SILENCE , isn’t...

To celebrate over two thousand episodes of the show, we are launching KEEN ON AMERICA - a special series of personal conversations with prominent Americans about their now almost 250 year-old Republic. First up is Adam Hochsc...

I usually hate agreeing with Keith Teare, my libertarian-conservative friend from Palo Alto/Yorkshire. But on TikTok, we are in violent agreement. As Keith explains, TikTok isn’t a Chinese company and even it was, there’s abs...

The most troubling casualty of today’s social media age is our shared sense of reality. Perceptions of reality still exist, but they often come packaged, mirroring a priori assumptions about the world. So how to win democrati...

Last week, the LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick came on the show to discuss new books about life in our age of the polycrisis. One of these was Emily Raboteau’s much acclaimed Lessons For Survival: Mothering Against “The...

University of Pennsylvania sociologist Benjamin Shestakofksy spent a couple of years as the fly on the wall in an anonymous tech startup. His new book, BEHIND THE STARTUP , not only reveals what he learned about the insanely ...

Think you know Frank H. McCourt, Jr , the illustrious real estate media magnate, former chairman/owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers & current owner of Marseilles FC? Think again. McCourt is also now in the business of saving us...

If, as Sam Daley-Harris believes, “cynicism is obedience”, then active citizenship is a form of rebellion. That seems to be the argument in both the 2024 edition of Daley-Harris’ RECLAIMING OUR DEMOCRACY and in our discussion...

I talk to Peter Ross Range, Hitler historian and author of 1924 & UNFATHOMABLE ASCENT, about Adolf Hitler as the "gold standard" of authoritarianism and how the Nazi leader compares with Donald Trump. In contrast with Range, ...

The US Congress just announced war on TikTok; while, in Europe, the EU declared war this week on Spotify and Apple. Elon Musk and Sam Altman have declared war over OpenAI. And everyone inside and outside Google are all war ov...

The cover story of Harper ’s this month is piece by Andrew Cockburn , their Washington DC editor, entitled “The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem”. But as Cockburn explained to me today, the Pentagon’s problem is also ours. S...