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 and Memphis and one of those sad NJ boardwalk places into 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 (https://www.ferdialennon.com/about) , author of the very unusual and much acclaimed Glorious Exploits (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250893697/gloriousexploits)…
Apple’s Crush (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntjkwIXWtrc) 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 (https://www.thatwastheweek.com/) tech newsletter, the massive reaction to this ad reflects a…
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 Anderson & Björk as well as the Big Lebowski himself,…
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 Grand Wizard of the KKK and a close family…
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 insightful Harpers essay “The Race For Second Place”, (https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/the-race-for-second-place-kyle-paoletta-republican-primaries-donald-trump-nikki-haley-ron-desantis/) the 2024 Republican primaries have…
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 later acknowledged (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Generation) , was “hope I die before…
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 to be most benefitting from the AI revolution. Secondly, creative individuals…
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 (https://www.amazon.com/Covert-City-Cold-Making-Miami/dp/1541774574) , Miami was as crucial to winning the Cold War as Washington DC or Moscow. The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most…
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 Caplan, however, comes at the problem from a more conservative angle. The co-author of the…
One of Bethanne Patrick’s recommended books (https://keenon.substack.com/p/new-books-from-salman-rushdie-erik) for April was Mohamed Amer Meziane’s The States of the Earth (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/741203/the-states-of-the-earth-by-mohamed-amer-meziane/) . It sounded intriguing, if not entirely coherent, and so I invited Meziane on the show. Even now, I’m not sure I exactly get Meziane’s point. He seems to be saying…
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 country. But, in contrast with many of today’s age warriors, Andrew J Scott cares about…
