Videos

At the debate last night, Kamala Harris opened her remarks by talking about the need for America to fix its housing crisis. And crisis it is, at least according to Jerusalem Demsas (https://twitter.com/JerusalemDemsas?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) , a staff writer at The Atlantic who has written extensively on the increasing scarcity and rising…

At the debate tonight, there probably won’t be much talk about American education. Which is a shame - at least according to Josh Cowen (https://www.josh-cowen.com/about) , author of The Privateers (https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9781682539101/the-privateers/) , a new book about how radical conservative billionaires like Betsy De Vos have created a culture war to…

The Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branko_Milanovi%C4%87) is one of the world’s leading authorities on inequality. In this KEEN ON America conversation, we talked about Milanovic’s interpretation of the history of American economic inequality - from slavery to contemporary capitalism. Why has America become so much unequal over the last fifty…

The Brooklyn based Rafil Kroll-Zaidi (https://rafilkrollzaidi.com/) is a Princeton educated reporter formerly on the editorial staff (https://harpers.org/author/rafilkrollzaidi/) of Harper's Magazine. And he is another kind of reporter too - a citizen- sleuth who makes six figures annually by reporting polluting trucks in New York City. Writing about this experience (https://www.curbed.com/article/nyc-idling-law-citizen-air-complaint-program.html)…

Last Saturday (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2177-brazil-vs-x-france-vs) , on our regular That Was The Week (https://www.thatwastheweek.com/) tech roundup, Keith Teare and I discussed the French decision to imprison Telegram founder Pavel Durov. Today, we discuss the theoretical imprisonment of Elon Musk, an idea (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/30/elon-musk-wealth-power) touted yesterday by Robert Reich in The Guardian. Elon Musk,…

Last month we ran an interview with the Oregon based regenerative wine maker Mimi Casteel (https://www.hopewellwine.com/people/) about fixing America one sip at a time (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-mimi-casteel-explains-the) . In addition, we recorded a KEEN ON America segment with Casteel about her life-long love affair with the American land. Filmed at her family’s…

Andrew Leigh is a minister in the Australian parliament with a doctorate in economics from Harvard. Unlike many academic economists, however, Leigh has the gift of simplifying economics for all of us. His new book, How Economics Explains the World (https://www.amazon.com/How-Economics-Explains-World-Humanity-ebook/dp/B0CPWX1N9V?ref_=ast_author_mpb) , presents economics as the prism to understand the…

Formerly Le Monde’s guy in Jerusalem, Piotr Smolar is now the senior correspondent for Le Monde in Washington, DC. He is also the grandson of Hersh Smolar, one of the 20th century’s more remarkable men. As Smolar notes in Bad Jew (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/757121/bad-jew-by-piotr-smolar/) , the astonishing story of his grandfather’s life…

Exactly 85 years ago today, on 3 September 1939, the Second World War officially began with Britain’s declaration of war against Germany. Russians might argue, however, the real war began on 22 June 1941 with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. While, for America, of course, the war began on…

Controversial things are happening on the campus of the University of Austin (https://www.uaustin.org/) (UATX), the brand new anti-woke university designed to “dare” its students to “think”. Last week, we interviewed UATX’s founding president, Pano Kanelos, (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-pano-kanelos-on-how-to-build) who explained how he was trying to build what he called a 21st century…

Bryan VanDyke’s (https://www.amazon.com/Our-Likeness-Novel-Bryan-VanDyke-ebook/dp/B0CT4GCSKX) new dystopian AI novel, In Our Likeness (https://www.amazon.com/Our-Likeness-Novel-Bryan-VanDyke-ebook/dp/B0CT4GCSKX) , only came out today, but it has already over 1,400 reviews on Amazon and is currently their bestselling science fiction book. So what does our seemingly infinite appetite for dystopian AI literature tell us about ourself, I asked…

There’s a big fight, perhaps even a war, about to break out between Big Tech and governments around the world. It’s been brewing for several years now, but the news this week from France and Brazil suggests that conventional nation-states are increasingly confident of shutting down popular social networks and…

According to the Californian political sociologist Peter Phillips (https://www.sevenstories.com/authors/309-peter-phillips?srsltid=AfmBOopPfhjQegc1Bxz1MR3_XZrr79SnadUmNxz4yaJGAa--fFVSFe--) , American capitalism is facing an existential crisis. In his new book, Titans of Capital (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760690/titans-of-capital-by-peter-phillips/) , he argues that the concentrated wealth of investment companies like BlackRock and Fidelity not only threatens human rights and democracy, but also the future…

The Anglo-Jewish writer Tanya Gold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Gold) went on holiday to Auschwitz and didn’t much like what she saw. She writes about the experience in “My Auschwitz Vacation: On Holocaust tourism” (https://harpers.org/archive/2024/09/my-auschwitz-vacation-tanya-gold-tourism/) which ran in this month’s Harper’s. But, as she told me, she would have preferred the piece to have…