Videos

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…

How to deal the American crisis of homelessness? Late last year, Kevin Adler, the San Francisco based homeless activist and author of When We Walk By (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730751/when-we-walk-by-by-kevin-f-adler-and-donald-w-burnes-with-amanda-banh-and-andrijana-bilbija/) , came on (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-shame-of-americas-six-million-homeless-people/id1448694012?i=1000636439965) the show to argue that we should all personally interact with the unhoused. Alexander Gorlin, an award winning architect…

Few Americans of any color or creed have had a legal career as historically rich or significant as Thelton Henderson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelton_Henderson) . One of the earliest African-American graduates of Boult law school at UC Berkeley, Henderson was the first black attorney for the civil rights division of the US Department…

Everyone deserves a second chance. The former Harvard professor of psychology Marc D Hauser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Hauser) has had a controversial academic career, having been investigated in a high profile case in 2010 by Harvard for supposedly falsifying research data. But Hauser, who quit Harvard in 2011, remains prolific and has a…

According to Dr Damon Tweedy there a connection between the historic struggle for civil rights and today’s struggle for more mainstream mental healthcare. In 2016, Tweedy wrote Black Man in a White Coat (https://www.damontweedy.com/blackmaninawhitecoat) , his bestselling reflections on race and medicine. And now the Duke University based doctor is…

Today, on the eve of the total lunar eclipse of the sun, the media is full of practical guides about how to tilt our heads at this once-in-a-lifetime celestial event. But what about the metaphysical questions about the eclipse? What should it mean to us humans, both in terms of…

In this KEEN ON show, the music historian Sheryl Kaskowitz, author of A CHANCE TO HARMONIZE (https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Chance-to-Harmonize/Sheryl-Kaskowitz/9781639365715) , narrates how FDR and his team of New Dealers saved America from the Great Depression - one folk song at a time. And she explains that there would have been on popular…

Is there such a thing as an economic bubble? Not according to That Was The Week (https://www.thatwastheweek.com/) author Keith Teare who argues that all bubbles reflect innovation and promise (even if you lose your shirt by investing in tulips or dotcoms). While Keith still doesn’t seem to have met a…

Is Trump really like Hitler? Last month, we did a show (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-1994-why-1924-was-the-year) with the Hitler scholar, Peter Range, who argued that the Adolf Hitler of 1924 had much in common with the Donald Trump of 2024. And now we are back on the Trump-Hitler comparison train with Henk de Berg,…