“It would be lovely to imagine that writing comes out of some instinct to compose works of great literature. It absolutely doesn’t. It’s a side effect of accountancy.” — Jonn Elledge
“Borders Are Back, Baby” we proclaimed last year to celebrate Jonn Elledge’s appearance on the show to talk about his 2025 work A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders. And now the prolific Elledge, currently residing in the bosom of London’s lower east side in Bethnal Green, is back to talk about his latest book A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions. In Blighty, by the way, it’s entitled 31 Inventions That Built Our World. America gets the extra (brief) invention. Not that we’re counting.
Elledge’s most prosaic invention isn’t exactly Archimedean. Writing was invented, he says, because somebody had to count the grain. Once ten thousand people live in one place you need not only a granary but a way of recording what’s in it. And of course, laws protecting grain owners from thieves.
Et voilà (rather than eureka!).
Thus came mathematics, literacy, politics, accountancy and eventually literature. So what we think of as civilization owes itself to urbane places like Bethnal Green. Without such hotspots, you wouldn’t be able to read this. No wonder some of our most glittering cultural figures — Mick Jagger, John Grisham, Robert Plant — studied accountancy. You can’t always count what you want. Not even a history of cities in 32 1/2 inventions.
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. Why Ideas Cluster — There is no technical reason a bank or a tech firm needs to sit next to its rivals — and yet they always do. Elledge puts it down to the sheer density of interactions: more people having more conversations, so more chances for ideas to collide. It is also why Britain worries that Manchester and Birmingham underperform Lyon and Munich.
2. Napoleon Moved at Caesar’s Speed — In 1800 armies crossed Europe no faster than they had two thousand years earlier. You could cover twenty miles a day, so politics happened at twenty miles a day. Nation states are not really possible until the railways of the 1830s. It is the Roman Empire, Elledge notes, not the Italian one.
3. Gilgamesh Already Knew — The oldest surviving work of literature, from Uruk four thousand years ago, already splits the world between the walled city — comfortable, advanced, faintly decadent — and the wild country beyond, which is more dangerous and more authentic. Brexit and the Rust Belt are running on the same fault line.
4. The Empty State Building — Two architects raced to build the tallest tower, each secretly adding height beyond the published plans. Both topped out in the autumn of 1929, exactly as America discovered it had too much office space. The Empire State Building stood half empty for years and acquired the nickname.
5. The Tube Has Warmed the Ground — Edwardian posters invited Londoners to cool off on the Bakerloo line on hot days. A century of trains in unventilated tunnels has since raised the temperature of the earth around them, and nobody is sure how to undo it.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
01:41 — Why America gets an extra invention
08:16 — Napoleon moved at Caesar’s speed
12:34 — Gilgamesh and Enkidu already knew
15:01 — Why ideas cluster
19:07 — Writing is a side effect of accountancy
21:45 — The Home Insurance Building
24:57 — Ego and the race to the sky
26:00 — The Empty State Building
27:15 — Was 9/11 an attack on modernity?
30:30 — The tube has warmed the ground
34:57 — Roger Rabbit and the LA streetcars
39:17 — San Francisco, rents and the AI boom
41:46 — Is AI the thirty-third invention?
44:57 — Closing