Keen On America

How should we punish criminals? In Impermissible Punishments, the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Judith Resnik, provides a historical narrative of punishment in European and Americ…

In a week dominated by the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, Cynthia Miller-Idriss’ insights as the founding director of American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation …

Today’s $3 trillion investment in AI is not only rational and beyond inevitable - it’s “predestined”. At least according to That Was The Week newletter publisher and techno-determinist Keith Teare. E…

David Lesch is a poster child for something. I’m just not sure what. On the one hand, given his personal reinvention from Los Angeles Dodgers first-round draft pick to official biographer of Bashar a…

Things aren’t quite as sunny on the environmental front as some recent guests suggest. According to the award winning science writer Peter Brannen, our planet is in an unprecedented crisis. We’re bur…

If Geoffrey Hinton is the Godfather of AI, then Bruce Schneier might be described as the Godfather of Security. A celebrated cryptographer and computer security expert, Schneier’s latest co-authored …

There are few more prolific Americans than the Harvard scholar, activist and athlete Cass Sunstein. The author of almost 30 books (including the best-selling Nudge) as well as an influential advisor …

Can we humans make it to 2125? According to Gary F. Bengier, author of Journey to 2125, our species faces three existential threats over the next 100 years. His horsemen of the apocalypse are climate…

For anyone who has seen Michael B. Jordan’s excellent new movie Sinners, it’s clear that any sort of deal with the devil - what has become known as the Faustian Bargain - is still very much alive. So…

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…