Keen On America

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 …

Gary Marcus is amongst the world’s leading skeptics on the AI revolution. So it’s worth taking note when Marcus admits that “of course we are getting to AGI eventually”. No, he says, artificial gener…

Is it entirely coincidental that some of the leading figures in the MAGA movement - including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks - all grew up in Apartheid South Africa? Not according to Simon Ku…

Our job is to make Trump fail. That, at least, is the view of the writer Joseph O’Neill, whose essays in the New York Review of Books offer not just a powerful critique of Trump but also of the cont…

As the author of the well-received Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet, Seth Rogovoy knows his Dylan. So his critical review of the A Complete Unknown, the much hyped new movie featuring Timothee Chamalat…

The Artificial Intelligence revolution has dwarfed everything else in tech during 2024. But according to Toby Walsh, author of the upcoming The Shortest History of AI, 2025 also promises to be a revo…

So what’s it to be in the Middle East in 2025: Mad Max style anarchy or a "Pax Hebraica" orchestrated from Israel? According to regional expert Soli Ozel, the Mad Max scenario is more likely - althou…

Time waits for no one. As 2024 winds down, what are the key moments of a year that perhaps overpromised and underdelivered? According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch, six events in 2024 captu…

As both a much published poet and cultural critic, Adam Kirsch brings an etymological sensibility to the great issues of our day. In his new book, On Settler Colonialism, Kirsch excavates the nonsens…

Bloomberg columnist, Parmy Olson, won the FT Business Book of 2024 for Supremacy, her story of the race between Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Demis Hassabis’ Google DeepMind for control of the AI ecosystem…

Yesterday, we featured a conversation between Andrew and That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare looking back at the major tech events of 2024. Today, Andrew and Keith look forward to the…

So how will future historians think about 2024? In tech terms, 2024 will probably be remembered as the year when AI began to become ubiquitous. Although, as Keith Teare and Andrew discuss in this spe…

As Elon Musk continues to plot, with Trumpian glee, against the American Federal government, it is important to remind ourselves of the essential value of this state bureaucracy. As the founding pres…

The supposed “science” of eugenics is one of the most dangerous myths of the modern age. As Erik Peterson, author of The Shortest History of Eugenics explains, it not only was used by Nazi thugs to j…

There is a counter intuitive school of thought - represented by Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen - which suggests that America, for all its technological innovation, remains trapped by lo…

The iconic DLD conference will be holding its twentieth annual event in Munich next month. Founded in January 2005, DLD has hosted many of the world’s leading tech thinkers and entrepreneurs from bot…

Yesterday, we ran Bethanne Patrick’s five best novels of 2024. Today, we feature her top non-fiction of the year including new books about reality television, Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife and Handel…

Pity the novelist. In a year which brought us the unbelievable non-fiction of a second Trump victory and the establishment of Luigi Mangione as an American folk hero, what can novelists do to stretch…

For all the hysteria about misinformation and disinformation, maybe we prefer ignorance. That’s the intriguing thesis of the illustrious Columbia University intellectual historian, Mark Lilla, in his…

It’s been coming a while. But now it’s official. Keith Teare has declared his love for Elon Musk. In this week’s THAT WAS THE WEEK newsletter, suitably entitled “I’m With Musk”, Keith argues that wit…