Keen On America

Internet scholar and activist Ethan Zuckerman is horrified by the American ban on TikTok. As a self-described “progressive” with a long and distinguished career advocating for internet freedom, Zucke…

Trust a gay Jewish atheist to defend the value of American Christianity. In his new book Cross-Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, the Brookings scholar and gay marriage activist …

Who gets to go to heaven and who doesn’t? According to John Lee Hooker Jr., son of the legendary bluesman and author of From The Shadow of the Blues, many are called but not everyone is chosen. In th…

Few people know the U.S. car industry more intimately than the Wall Street Journal deputy auto editor Mike Colias. His new book, Inevitable, offers an insiders guide into what he sees as our messy, y…

More than 6 million Americans now suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease. So the stakes in find a cure for this neurological illness are huge. Too large, in fact, for some fraudulent American medical resear…

A week is certainly a long time in tech. On last week’s That Was the Week roundup, Keith Teare and I were asking if Trump’s America was a tech oligarchy. This week is all about the so-called “Sputnik…

In an era where even toothpaste shopping can trigger an existential crisis, intellectual historian Sophia Rosenfeld explore how we became both imprisoned and freed by endless options. Her new book Th…

According to Andrew Lipstein, here are 3 questions at the heart of his acclaimed new novel Something Rotten: a) What do we want masculinity to look like? b) What constitutes truth? c) How to present …

From Dylan to democracy, from Bobby Kennedy to Putin's Russia - this wide-ranging conversation with Michael Ignatieff riffs off “The Adults in the Room,” his latest essay for Liberties Quarterly. A l…

A new book by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Nicholas Carr is always a major event. And today’s release of SUPERBLOOM: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart offers a prescient critique of our so…

Is AI the latest chapter in our long history of creating an all-knowing God? AI ethicist Christopher DiCarlo certainly suspects it is. In his new book "Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intell…

Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it’s another anti tech book. In Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, digital activist Mike Pepi argues that major tech companies like Meta, Amazon, Tesla, an…

In Keith Teare’s That Was the Week newsletter for this week, he categorically asserts that there is no oligarchy in Trump’s America. Instead there are “just technologists with a passion for change an…

So what, exactly, is a philosophical life? According the University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard, author of the much acclaimed new book Open Socrates, it means being able to ask questions wit…

This is the last and amongst the liveliest of my interviews at Munich’s DLD Conference this year. An old friend who has appeared on KEEN ON several times before, Andrew McAfee is a MIT professor who …

Most of the breathless talk in snowy Munich at this year’s DLD conference, of course, was about the generative AI revolution. But amongst all the hype and glitz about our brave new AI future, Richar…

If anyone should be anointed “aunt” or “court jEsther” of the tech industry, it’s long time journalist, investor and philanthropist Esther Dyson. When I caught up with Dyson at DLD, she reflected on …

With Trump’s inauguration today, are we really about experience a new “golden age” in America? No. Not at least according to the best selling writer Robert D. Kaplan, author of Waste Land: A World in…

Amidst all the doom and gloom of the current zeitgeist, Harvard University literature professor & DLD 2025 speaker Martin Puchner remains cautiously optimistic about our high tech future. Reflecting …

In this week’s That Was The Week round up of tech news, Andrew and Keith Teare discuss the need for progressives to become what Keith calls “yes people” on technology. At the moment, he argues, their…