Keen On America

Last week, we featured an interview with the leftist American theologian, Jim Wallis, who warned about the false white gospel of contemporary Christian nationalism. And we return to the existential d…

The 2024 winners of the Nobel prize for Economics were announced this morning. One of the winners was the MIT economist Simon Johnson, who, as the co-author (with his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu) o…

Earlier this week, the prominent African-American broadcaster and writer, Tavis Smiley, came on the show to voice his support for Reparations to correct the past racial injustices in American history…

In her quest for the White House, it seems as if Kamala Harris is doing everything in her power to disassociate herself with liberal ideas. So what, exactly, has happened to liberal politics in the U…

It’s been a strange week in tech. The Nobel prizes in both Chemistry and Physics went to prominent former or current Googlers, and yet the tech news cycle has been dominated by the U.S. government’s …

As a Harvard trained pediatrician as well as television writer and producer, Neal Baer has particularly interesting take on the moral, policy and ethical challenges of CRISPR gene-editing technology.…

Why are black men more likely to vote for Donald Trump than black women? According to Tavis Smiley, the syndicated radio host and best selling author of many books about black America include his lat…

This is an important conversation. Few Americans are better skilled at listening than the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. The author of the best selling Strangers in Their Own Land,…

In December 2008, Lily Bock, the daughter of the novelist Charles Bock, was born. But Bock, the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver, was a reluctant …

American Christianity appears in a state of disrepair, perhaps even imminent civil war. On the one hand, of course, we have the evangelical right who make up much of Trump’s ideological base; on the …

Might future multi-trillion dollar AI platforms like OpenAI represent not just the end of the app age but also of economic competition itself? As That Was The Week’s Keith Teare and Andrew discuss in…

Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley both teach at Stanford’s interdisciplinary d.school. They are also the joint authors of Assembling Tomorrow, an intriguing new book in which, using their D School exp…

Yesterday, I interviewed The Financial Times’ Andrew Hill about the FT’s best six business books of the year. Today, I talk to Michael Morris, the author of one of those books. In Tribal, Morris expl…

The Financial Times has just announced their short list of the best six business books of 2024. Authors include KEEN ON regulars like Andrew Scott as well as Michael Morris, who will appear on tomorr…

While many fear that Trump offers an existential threat to American democracy, Barry C. Lynn believes that the real danger comes from big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Lynn, the e…

Finally a tech show not about AI. Martin Schmidt is the President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as well a distinguished technologist in his own right. So rather than having just another c…

Dr Josh McConkey’s new book, Be the Weight Behind the Spear, is about how to fix America. McConkey, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in North Carolina, believes that the strength of A…

Is there anyone who still believes in America as a force for good in the world today? There’s that doddery old cold warrior Joe Biden, of course, and his younger globalizing sidekick, Secretary of St…

Instagram superstar and “Here’s Where It Gets Interesting” podcast host Sharon McMahon has been dubbed America’s government teacher. In her first book, The Small and the Mighty, McMahon writes about …

Back in April 2011, Saad Mohseni was made one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world. And who exactly is that, you might ask. I have to admit I hadn’t heard of him either. But as Rupert M…