Episodes

In his new co-authored book It’s On You , the English behavioral scientist Nick Chater exposes how the rich and powerful - the THEM - have convinced us that we're to blame for society's deepest problems. Can't lose weight? Th...

According to the New Yorker writer Nicholas Niarchos , Africa is rich in both raw materials and tragic paradox. We know about the continent's wealth in the rare earth minerals that enable our global transition from fossil fue...

We all have our own favorite Robert Redford movie. But what's Redford’s most prescient film about today’s America? His Seventies trilogy about American politics — The Candidate , Three Days of the Condor and All the President...

Can Swiftynomics save America? That’s the intriguing thesis at the heart of Misty Heggeness’ new book about Swift’s impact on the American economy. Entitled Swiftynomics , it’s as much about Taylor Swift’s fans as it is about...

The Music Man was a 1957 Broadway show written by Meredith Willson, a musician from the small Iowa town of Mason City. The popular play (and later movie) featured a con man called Harold Hill who ripped off the naive people o...

Few biographers can claim to know what it feels like to be Thomas Jefferson more than the Charlottesville-based historian Andrew Burstein . The author of many books about Jefferson, Burstein’s latest, Being Thomas Jefferson ,...

There was a time in the mid 20th century, the literary historian Gayle Feldman reminds us, when the book business was cool. Back then, New York publishing resembled Silicon Valley tech and the Mark Zuckerberg of his day was t...

Trump’s Gazan dream is to overlay the complex human history with his own narcissistic real-estate fantasy. But for Maia Carter Hallward , co-author of a new contemporary history of Gaza, this once vibrant Mediterranean entrep...

What if the right isn’t wrong - or, at least, totally wrong, about education? That seems to be the conclusion of James Traub , a liberal educationalist, who has spent the last year visiting the civics programs of American hig...

Timing is everything. The versatile American journalist Kenneth Rosen was last on the show in early 2021 talking about troubled teens . Since then, Rosen has travelled extensively in the Arctic and has just published Polar Wa...

Will Trump be removed by the 25th Amendment? No, it’s never going to happen - not after Jan 6 or Venezuela or Greenland or any other mad foreign or domestic adventure. That, at least, seems the conclusion of Rebecca Lubot , a...

The great John Maynard Keynes explained it a century ago. In his 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," Keynes predicted that the future would be defined by economic abundance rather than scarcity. But su...

Back in 2018, the New York Times reporters Katie Benner and Erica L. Green exposed the disturbing reality of the T.M. Landry college prep school in rural Louisiana. Celebrated as a “miracle” institution that successfully sent...

WTF will happen in 2026? Over the last week, we’ve been running a series of interviews about the promise and peril of the new year. And in this new weekly magazine-style KEEN ON AMERICA show, we feature highlights of conversa...

If Darwin’s evolutionary theories couldn’t kill America’s faith in God, then what could? That’s the message in Daniel K. William ’s new book, The Search for a Rational Faith . Americans, Williams argues, have always sought to...

Hold onto your collars. The AI-generated crisis of work is here, and the storm will concentrate on white-collar workers from the professional economy. According to Julia Hobsbawm , founder of Workathon.io, these workers are a...

Happy New Year everyone! As the final show of 2025 and first for 2026, we turned the tables and had me interviewed by the formidable D avid Masciotra . As you will see, my reading of 2025 is more optimistic than many of my gu...

We live in transitional times. "The old is dead and the new cannot be born—this is the time of monsters," Antonio Gramsci famously wrote. But today, as the West declines and the East rises, these may equally be times for midd...

For Jason Pack , presenter of the Disorder podcast, the person of the year for 2025 was the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney. But for 2026, Pack predicts, the person of the year will be a resurrected Jeffrey Epstein (or, ...

According to the German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder , China both goes to bed and wakes up thinking of China rather than America. How does the Washington DC based Schroeder know? Because, unlike almost all Americans, ...

That was the year in tech. When nothing and yet everything happened. A year betwixt and between, simultaneously revolutionary and uneventful. That's the ironic conclusion Keith Teare and I reach about Silicon Valley in 2025. ...

For all the talk of abundance, what’s really abundant these days are the morbid symptoms of a dying international system. According to Georgetown’s Charles Kupchan , these symptoms include the endless wars in Ukraine and Gaza...

Lots of headlines today about "peace" negotiations in Ukraine. But does Putin really want to end the war — and is Trump able and willing to broker a real peace? According to the longtime Russia watcher Jim Goldgeier , Putin i...

What’s the data behind the data? According to data scientist Andrea Jones-Rooy , America-by-the-numbers doesn’t always add up to a pretty picture. Take, for example, the political divisions in American society, the fabled ide...