Keen On America

The Stanford Business School professor Michal Kosinski has spent his career warning about the corrosive impact of technology, and particularly social media, on democratic institutions and individual …

Few people have a better perch to observe technological change than Kenneth Cukier, deputy executive editor at The Economist and co-author of the best-selling book Big Data. I caught up with Cukier a…

One person I didn’t expect to see at DLD is the feted Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran. Not exactly a regular on the tech circuit, Temelkuran is best known as a critic of the Erdogan regime and author o…

We are back in Munich at the DLD Conference, Europe’s foremost tech gathering. DLD is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and, to mark this occasion, we spoke to some of the leading DLD’ers ab…

Published on the eve of you-know-who’s second inauguration, Kurt Gray’s new book Outraged focuses on why Americans are so divided and how they might find common ground despite their political differe…

A new book by the acclaimed neuroscientist Lisa Genova is always a big event. Genova, best known for her best-selling 2007 novel, Still Alice, has a new novel out this week, More or Less Maddy, whic…

The world is shutting its borders to immigrants. Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Laurie Trautman who dates the Covid crisis of 2020 as the tragic moment when the entire world closed its do…

From MAGA and the UK’s Reform Party to the German AfD, aggressively nationalist borders controls are back in political fashion. According to Laurie Trautman, an expert on immigration at Western Washi…

Nicholas Carr has been amongst the most persistently prescient observers of the digital revolution over the last quarter century. Take, for example, his 2012 essay "The Arc of Innovation Bends Towar…

Is there really a data-driven science that enables us to predict and change human behavior?Mind Masters author and Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz certainly is a believer. But I wonder…

Everything old is new again in international politics. According to Jill Kastner, co-author of A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion, today's international tensions over U…

What’s wrong with the U.S. economy? Not much according to Wall Street. But according to Adam Chandler, author of 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life, there’s a fundame…

This is a good one. Former mobster Louis Ferrante discusses the second volume of his history of the American mafia, Borgata: Clash of Titans, covering the critical period between 1960 and 1985 when …

Addiction specialist and former meth addict Dr. Adi Jaffe challenges everything we take for granted about addiction and recovery. Opening our KEEN ON conversation with his own dramatic story of a SWA…

Paula Whyman's journey from bug-obsessed city kid to mountaintop conservationist is an inspiring environmental tale. Now the owner of a 200-acre Virginia mountaintop, she's traded her childhood fasci…

It’s not just the MAGA crowd who are concerned with government waste and inefficiency. In a convincing Wall Street Journal op-ed, best-selling tech author Larry Downes questions the need for a thousa…

Remember that time in 1977 when Jesse Jackson debated KKK grand wizard David Duke on national tv? As David Masciotra reminds us, it was one of those now forgotten moments from the recent past that ca…

Avid reader, global investor and German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, who devoured around 150 books in 2024, engages in a spirited New Year discussion about literacy, geopolitics, and the powe…

While most of us can at least hope for a happy new year in 2025, the same can’t be true for the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. That, at least, is the view of Michael Scott-Baumann, author of…

Marshall Poe runs the New Books Network, a podcasting platform incorporating over 25,000 individual podcasts from thousands of podcasters and many millions of downloads. 2024, he acknowledges, was a …