Keen On America

How to bring peace to Gaza and Ukraine? Maybe the United Nations can help. Or, sadly, maybe not. But there really was a time, in the second half of the 20th century, when the United Nations could hel…

Lead in gasoline powered cars have killed more people than those that died in World War Two. That’s the astonishing claim of David Obst who, in his new Saving Ourselves From Big Car, lays out a strat…

There is no more shakespearean parable of the tragic rise and fall of the postwar American meritocratic elite than Robert Strange McNamara. War hero, Harvard Business School, head of Ford, begged by …

Dumb globalization: America’s worst bet. That, at least, is the view of the Washington Post financial writer David J Lynch and author of The World’s Worst Bet. From Clinton to Bush, Lynch argues, Ame…

In our angry MAHA times, how can we get people trusting science and scientists again. According to MIT’s Alan Lightman, one of America’s greatest scientific writers, we need to both demystify science…

The human brain is so unbelievably complex that we barely understand its most basic functions. According to the British neuroscientist Daniel Yon, our brains - which some speculate are the most myste…

According to former college president Beverly Daniel Tatum, Trump’s war on university admissions is deeply hypocritical. On the one hand, she argues, his attack on affirmative action admissions poli…

Globalization is dying, maybe even dead. Borders are back, baby. That’s the message in Jonn Elledge’s sparkling Brief History of the World in 47 Borders. In this romp around world history , Elledge i…

When somebody says “win-win” in Silicon Valley, check your pockets. It’s usually some elaborate prelude to a sales pitch. And the only thing dodgier than a two-way win is the “win-win-win” narrative …

It’s only been a quarter century, but IN FORMATION magazine is now back. Published by David Temkin with the tagline “Every Day, Computers are Making People Easier to Use”, IN FORMATION was originally…

Is the convicted sex criminal Roman Polanski worth defending? Particularly in the context of “An Officer and a Spy”, his vaguely autobiographical 2019 movie about the Dreyfus case, the first Polanski…

It's become the new orthodoxy: social media is the cause of the epidemic of anxiety amongst adolescents. So the way to fix this is by taking away their smartphones. But according to Pulitzer prize-wi…

Shaka Senghor is one of America’s great survivors. Having spent 19 years in high-security prison, he has reinvented himself as a best-selling writer and public speaker on individual freedom and respo…

It hasn’t always been easy being Gary Marcus these last few years. OpenAI’s most persistently outspoken AI sceptic has been in minority, sometimes of one, in his critique both of Sam Altman’s claims …

Maybe he never went away. But Dr Strangelove is back now at the heart of America’s new military-industrial-digital complex. And Strangelove 2.0 might offer an even more existential threat than Kubric…

What’s the matter with America? We’ve been told for years about the dumb working class MAGA voter. That they are exploited by Trump, that their interests are the reverse of a self-interested Republic…

For lonely young men who have forgotten how to read, the LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick some some simple advice: Get Queer Quicker. And to make her point, Patrick discusses five great books on…

Those who do win. Those are Keith Teare’s immortal words to describe the winners of today’s Silicon Valley battle to control tomorrow’s AI world. But the real question, of course, is what to do to wi…

Is the history of New York City the heart of the American story? Or does it exist in parallel, perhaps even independently, from the main American narrative. As with everything about the Big Apple (so…

It’s not often that there’s sunny news on the environmental front, especially from grizzled activists like the great Bill McKibben. But in his new book, Here Comes the Sun, McKibben argues that the s…