Videos

As founding director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute and author of the new ALIEN EARTHS: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos (https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/460729/alien-earths-by-kaltenegger-lisa/9780241680988) , Lisa Kaltenegger (https://astro.cornell.edu/lisa-kaltenegger) is one of the world’s most respected cosmologists. She believes that, with our revolutionary new cosmological technologies, we are likely to “discover” non-human life…

In a “post-truth” world, who should we trust? According to Alex Edmans, one of the UK’s hottest business school professors, you should trust him enough to read his new book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics and Studies Exploit Our Biases - And What We Can Do About It (https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/455479/may-contain-lies-by-edmans-alex/9780241630167)…

Museums, the distinguished anthropologist Adam Kuper argues in his new book Museums of Other People (https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-museum-of-other-people-from-colonial-acquisitions-to-cosmopolitan-exhibitions-adam-kuper/20268320?ean=9780593700679) , are actually mirrors of ourselves. Rather than revealing curiosities about cultures of antiquity, they are actually living documents of power - particularly western, colonial power. Does this mean we affluent westerners should all…

There are few people more adept at navigating America’s labyrinthine medical system than Robert Pearl (https://robertpearlmd.com/) . Yale medical degree, Stanford University professor, best-selling author, former CEO of the Californian insurance network Kaiser Permanente, Pearl has explored this byzantine confusion of private enterprise monopoly and government supported bureaucracy from almost…

Dr Judy Ho has a new book entitled The New Rules of Attachment: How to Heal Your Relationships, Reparent Your Inner Child, and Secure Your Life Vision (https://drjudyho.com/books/the-new-rules-of-attachment/) . It’s one of those books which explain to us, in our therapeutic age of intense anxiety, how to stop f*****g ourselves…

The suburbs haven’t got a great press recently on KEEN ON. First there was Benjamin Herold (https://keenon.substack.com/p/suburbia-and-american-disillusionment-e71) , author of Disillusioned, who found the dead body of the American Dream in the American suburb. And then David Masciotra (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2017-david-masciotra-finds) , author of Exurbia Now, discovered political lethargy and reaction in…

In his early opposition to the Iraq war and other overseas misadventures in Bosnia, Haiti and El Salvador, Mark Danner (https://markdanner.com/) is one of the most respected observers of American foreign policy. So it was a real honor to sit down with him and talk about his life both as…

Harper’s has a great cover story (https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/the-life-and-death-of-hollywood-daniel-bessner/) this month entitled “The Life and Death of Hollywood” by the intellectual historian, podcast and general muckraker Daniel Bessner. Film & tv writers face an existential threat, Bessner told me, from a Hollywood now controlled by four financialized mega-companies operated by MBA touting…

Elliot Ackerman has an intriguing essay (https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/mercenaries/) in this issue of Liberties Quarterly (https://libertiesjournal.com/) on the use and abuse of mercenaries throughout history. Linking the history of the British in India, the US in Afghanistan and Russia in contemporary Ukraine, he ask what it means when mercenaries replace regular soldiers…

I have to admit I absolutely HATED Alex Garland’s new movie Civil War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_War_(film)) . I found it annoyingly trite, self-evidently packaged for an ahistorical cinematic audience addicted to the amnesia of mindless violence. That’s fine, of course, for most Hollywood productions, but not for a supposedly serious movie about…