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…
Part of the purpose of our new KEEN ON AMERICA series is to (re)discover what it means to be an American. Many of the wisest observers of American life - from De Tocqueville in the 19th Century to Max Weber and Alistair Cooke in the 20th - saw the uniqueness…
Like yesterday’s KEEN ON guest, Batya Ungar-Sargon (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2033-batya-ungar-sargon-on) , Dale Maharidge believes that liberals are “equally to blame” for what he calls, in his new collection of essays, America’s Doom Loop (https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/American-Doom-Loop/Dale-Maharidge/9798888451649) . Maharidge, whose Pulitzer prize winning writing about the gutting of the industrial midwest, inspired Springsteen’s iconic 1995…
Behind all the partisan hysteria, a dramatic political realignment is taking place in America. As SECOND CLASS (https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/second-class/) author Batya Ungar-Sargon told me, the Democrats have become the party of a mostly coastal global knowledge elite and the Republicans the party of the old (most white) working class. This new…
Finally some good news for progressive Americans. According to Natalie Foster, whose new book The Guarantee (https://nataliefoster.me/the-guarantee/) is out on April 23, Americans are about to get the economy they deserve. In The Guarantee, Foster gets inside the what she describes as “the fight” for our economic future and discovers…
In his new book AMERICA LAST: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators (https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324094661) , Jacob Heilbrunn argues that American conservatives have always had the hots for foreign dictators like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Mussolini, Franco and Pinochet. And so, he argues, it’s no great surprise that contemporary rightists like Ron…
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 (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714286/charlie-hustle-by-keith-obrien/) , the new Pete Rose biography already acclaimed as a “masterpiece (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/keith-obrien/charlie-hustle/) ”. Rose himself, O’Brien…
Warning: this is an adults-only show. David Baker, the Australian based author of The Shortest History of Sex (https://www.amazon.com/Shortest-History-Sex-Procreation-Recreation/dp/1891011340#:~:text=Review,readers%20from%20start%20to%20finish.%22&text=%22With%20a%20keen%20eye%20for,this%20book%20is%20for%20you.%22) , takes us through two billion years of sexual evolution. And, from the first microbial exchanges of DNA to Darwin and Freud, Tinder and sexbots, it’s not a pretty story. The…
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 Mutsuki Mockett & Adelle Waldman. So don’t complain you’ve got nothing to read. No…
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 Department at Goldsmiths college at London University, would call “weird s**t”. So as French, the…
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-end iPhone into a lower-end Android device. There’s Microsoft’s “acquisition” of…
Do we really need more jeremiads exposing the Randian greed of Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg & Travis Kalanick? Rob Lalka’s THE VENTURE ALCHEMISTS (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-venture-alchemists/9780231558334) is about how big tech turned profits into power. but this has been the alchemy of American economic life for two hundred years. What isn’t clear…
I do enjoy our regular new books show with Bethanne Patrick (https://www.bethannepatrick.com/) , the astonishingly widely read book critic of Los Angeles Times. For April, she recommends freshly published books by Salman Rushdie, Erik Larsen, Amor Towles, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Patric Gagne & Leif Enger. Of these, she picks Leif…
So what does it mean to be an American? Previous guests on KEEN ON AMERICA like Arlie Russell Hochschild (https://keenon.substack.com/p/arlie-russell-hochschild-on-why-america?r=ktr9) and Thelton Henderson (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2028-thelton-henderson-explains?r=ktr9) told me that they learnt to be an American during the civil rights unrest of the Sixties. Sara Paretsky, the creator of the incomparable female Chicago…
