Episodes

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 h...

Shad White has an uncanny resemblance to J.D. Vance. Born in a tiny town in Mississippi, White went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then Harvard Law School and is now the State Auditor of Mississippi. Like Vance, the lifelong Republican White is a converted Catholic whose faith informs his conservative, family centric politics. And, like JD Vance, White is an author. His new book, Mississippi Swindle, which he jokes might be called “Red Neck Elegy”, is the story of Brett Favre and the Mississippi...

If it’s lunchtime, it must be KEEN ON time. At least that’s what it seems, given the long menu of food guests recently on the show. First there was the lunatic regenerative farmer, Joel Salatin, fixing America one bite at a time. Then Nicola Twilley, the food blogger and historian of refrigeration. And don’t forget Andrea Freeman, who reminded us that even free school lunches aren’t really free. But our latest food guest, Lola Milholland, a Portland based Ramen noodle entrepreneur and food write...

Peter Wehner is the conscience of American conservatism. Having worked in three Republican administrations, the ex Republican is now a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Atlantic, writing compelling moral critiques of Trump and the authoritarian populism now dominant in the GOP. Many of you will have already read his latest Times piece, What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me - but what, I asked Wehner, once made the GOP "his” party and could he ever imagine rejoining it? Peter W...

Were politics chess, liberals had white; they moved first. Conservatives had black; they countered liberalism’s opening moves. In time, the initiative changed hands. Conservatives, who began as anti-moderns, came to master modernity, for the right was in telling ways the stronger contestant. So write Edmund Fawcett in his exemplary intellectual history, Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition. As the author of the equally excellent Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, Fawcett is as well positioned a...

So what’s exceptional about America? According to the writer, film producer and scholar Jonathan Taplin, American exceptionalism lies its uniquely global cultural influence. For Taplin - the tour manager for Bob Dylan & producer of Martin Scorcese’s masterpiece Mean Streets - this reflects what he calls America’s right-brain power which dominated the world in the second half of the 20th century. Today, however, he says, left-brained tech magnates like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are all powerful a...

Much of the critical writing about authoritarianism warns that contemporary populism threatens democracy. But as Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein argue in their interesting new book, The Assault on the State, this global attack on legalistic government by wannabe dictators like Putin, Erdogan and Modi endangers not just democracy but also much of what we take for granted about the convenience of modern life. It’s a return to what they call the “patrimonialism” of The Godfather - a chillingly ...

In the 1970’s, J. Doyne Farmer built the first wearable computer which he used to predict the game of roulette. While this didn’t make him particularly popular in casinos, it did mark the beginning of a glittering scientific career in complexity and systems theory, as well as in theoretical physics and biology. And, along the way, Farmer founded a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to UBS in 2006 as well as working for a while as an Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos Labs. So when a...

According to the historian Matthew Warshauer, there was no giant conspiracy on 9/11. The real story about September 11, 2001, he argues in his provocative new book Creating and Failing the 9/11 Generation, is its impact on Gen Z who he believes should be renamed the 9/11 Generation. 9/11 and its disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he argues, have created a lost generation of young Americans without faith in the country’s institutions or elected officials. They’ve been “cast out of the Disne...

Earlier this year, the prolific American political journalist Sasha Issenberg came on the show to offer a playbook for winning elections in our disinformation age. And, on a recent trip to Los Angeles, I sat down with Issenberg in his Venice home to talk more broadly about the American political system for our KEEN ON AMERICA series. In particular, he addressed perhaps the most pressing issue of all about the future of American politics - how we might build more trust and transparency in both me...

Many are called, but few are chosen. In her late twenties, Deesha Dyer was still in community college. By the age of 31, however, she had become Michelle Obama’s social secretary in the White House. So how did this self-styled undiplomatic young woman become a member of the most exclusive club in the world? And what does her authentically irreverent attitude which she says, in her new memoir, creates the “best kind of trouble”, tell us about how to succeed in 21st century America? Deesha Dyer i...

What’s it like to discover a Klansman in one’s own family? A few weeks ago, R. Derek Black, the son of a KKK Grand Wizard and an intimate family friend of David Duke, came on the show to confess the exceptional nature of his own family history. But for Edward Ball, the author of Life of a Klansman, the story of his great great grandfather, perhaps the most disturbing element of having a family history of white supremacy is its unexceptional quality. As Ball - best known as the author of the awar...

We’ve been on a food & farming run this week. First, we talked with America’s “lunatic farmer,” Joel Salatin, about how regenerative agriculture can regenerate the United States. And we followed that up with the food blogger and writer Nicola Twilley who explained about how refrigeration has transformed not only our food, and our planet, but also ourselves. Our guest today, Andrea Freeman, makes food policy central to the politics of America from its foundations to today. Her provocative new boo...

While Kamala Harris has announced that she wants to become the first Silicon Valley President, Donald Trump is speaking today at Bitcoin2024 in Nashville in a self-serving attempt to make Bitcoin Great Again. So where should Silicon Valley be putting its (ample) money in 2024? According to That Was The Week’s Keith Teare, tech is divided between pro Harris classical liberals like Reid Hoffman and pro Trump free market libertarians like Mark Andreessen. But the election, Teare warns, will really ...

A couple of days ago, America’s most controversial regenerative farmer, Joel Salatin, came on the show to explain how industrialized farming is killing our soil, our bodies and our souls. Today, the Los Angeles based food writer and podcaster Nicola Twilley offers a more nuanced account of the impact of industrialization on our food, our planet and ourselves. In her excellent new book, Frostbite, Twilley explains how industrialized refrigeration technology has revolutionized every aspect of the ...

Yesterday, we were in rural Virginia interviewing the pioneering regenerative farmer, Joel Salatin. Today, we are on an equally innovative farm in Houston, Texas, in conversation with Kimberley Meyer, author of Accidental Sisters. It’s called Shamba Ya Amani (Farm of Peace) and, as Meyer explains in her new book, it’s a place where five immigrant women are attempting to build their own American dream. As Meyer notes, American invention comes in all shapes and forms and what these five immigrant ...

As one of America’s most outspoken pioneers of regenerative agriculture, Joel Salatin is popularly known as The Lunatic Farmer. Others have accused him of being a bio-terrorist, Typhoid Mary, a charlatan, and starvation advocate. Less of a lunatic and more of an agricultural visionary, however, Salatin has transformed his family’s Polyface Farms in idyllic western Virginia into one of America’s leading laboratories for non-industrial food production. So when I visited Joel at Polyface recently, ...

A hundred episodes ago, we had the author of Second Class, Batya Ungar-Sargon, on the show to talk specifically about how America’s elites have betrayed the country’s working men and women. So when I bumped into her at the recent Braver Angels convention in Wisconsin, we talked more broadly about her identity as an American and how she would like America to reinvent itself in the 21st century. What I admire about Ungar-Sargon is that she is hard to politically categorize, especially in her non T...

In the wake of Biden’s resignation and the coronation of Kamala Harris, it’s likely that this year’s election will be particularly divisive and vitriolic. We will hear endless hysteria about the election being the most important in American history, blah blah blah. But while I certainly don’t believe that American democracy is under existential threat, there clearly is a problem with the ugliness of political discourse. So what to do about it? Anne Snyder, editor-in-chief of Comment magazine and...

As CEO of the AI start-up DoNotPay, Joshua Browder is one of Silicon Valley’s rising young entrepreneurs. Born in the UK and educated at Stanford, Browder is from a remarkable family of American innovators and activists. His great grandfather, Earl Browder, was head of the US Communist Party. His grandfather, Felix Browder, was one of America’s most brilliant mathematicians. And his father, Bill Browder, is an American investor, activist and high profile critic of Vladimir Putin. Given this uniq...

Lauded by KEEN ON favorites like Dave Eggers & Dale Maharidge, J. Malcolm Garcia might be the Studs Terkel of contemporary American literature. Having worked as a social worker with San Francisco’s homeless community for 14 years, he then became an acclaimed journalist and winner of the Studs Terkel prize for writing about the American working classes. And now Garcia is publishing his first fiction, Out of the Rain, a novel about the people in a San Francisco homeless shelter. Garcia brings the ...

I was at the Liberalism for the 21st Century conference last week in DC where I bumped into an old friend and KEEN ON regular Jonathan Rauch. A Brookings Fellow and prolific author, Rauch is amongst America’s most thoughtful commentators on the contemporary crisis of liberalism and the rising popularity of “post-liberalism”. So, in the wake of Trump’s choice of JD Vance, a politician who has openly embraced the “post-liberal” moniker, I caught up with Rauch to get his take on a liberalism for th...

For all the “progress” in civil rights front over the last couple of generations, the wealth gap between white and black Americans hasn’t changed much. As Ebony Reed, co-author of best selling new book, Fifteen Cents on the Dollar, whites on average have 85% more wealth than blacks, a shockingly inegalitarian fact about a supposedly color blind democracy. Reed’s book is subtitled How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap and, as she hints, until American citizens address these dramatic econo...

In the wake of the failed Trump assassination attempt by what seems to be a conventionally lonely and bullied young man, more and more Americans are asking what has gone wrong. According to CNN correspondent Elle Reeve, online Americans - particularly lonely, alienated young men on networks like Discord and 4Chan - have swallowed the Black Pill of QAnon style conspiracy theories, neo-nazi racism & antisemitism, and a fascist celebration of male violence. Reeves interviews many of these online ni...