Keen On America

Yes, there still are some well meaning folks in Silicon Valley. Take, for example, Jimmy Chen, founder and CEO of Propel, an app designed to simplify food assistance for 41 million of the poorest Ame…

Can we ever really know Primo Levi? We know his books, of course, especially If This Is A Man, the astonishing account of his survival from Auschwitz. But what, then, of his apparent suicide in 1987?…

Yesterday, The Talking Heads, today, Dylan. The Great Man’s Jewish identity has long been overshadowed by his pantheistic status as American prophet. So when, for example, at the beginning of his bio…

Do The Talking Heads, the quinessential art school band of the East Village scene of the 1970’s, still matter? Very much so. At least according to the band’s biographer, Jonathan Gould, who believes …

What does it really mean to be a “good woman”? For the controversial podcaster and writer Elise Loehnen, female goodness is a misery trap. And so reclaim their happiness, to make themselves whole, Lo…

“Let me tell you about the very rich”, Scott Fitzgerald once said. “They are different from you and me”. One way they are different, the New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos reports, is that they own y…

It all began in 2019 at DeadSpin where Megan Greenwell was editor-in-chief. She had her dream job at the sports publication she'd always loved, leading a profitable digital media company with a devot…

25 years after serving as the bridge between the Web 1.0 and 2.0 revolutions, Google stands at the vortex of another technological revolution. The company's new AI mode threatens to destroy the "simp…

Happy NO KINGS DAY! Today, as nationwide protests sweep America, historian and activist Mark Bray argues that Trump and his MAGA movement represent a type of American fascism rooted in the country's …

So what, exactly, is libertarianism? Spike Cohen, the Libertarian Party's 2020 vice presidential nominee, boils it down to "the principle of human respect"—treating people as individuals, not as what…

According to Deborah Baker, author of Charlottesville: An American Story, America has become the Charlottesville of the Unite the Right Rally of August 12, 2017. Baker, who grew up in Charlottesville…

Postmodern Patrimonialism. That’s the term Brookings Institution scholar Jonathan Rauch uses to describe Trump's second presidency, arguing it represents a 21st century model of running government as…

FreedomFest, America’s annual celebration of libertarian values, begins tomorrow in Palm Springs. According to FreedomFest’s CEO Valerie Durham, there’s something quintessentially American about her …

Karen Hao has been warning us about Sam Altman’s OpenAI for a while now. In her bestselling Empire of AI, she argues that the Silicon Valley startup is a classic colonial power, akin to Britain’s Eas…

Do we get the nonfiction we deserve? LATimes book critic Bethanne Patrick wrestles with this question through five new books that both mirror and address our fractured psyche. From Melissa Fibos’ cho…

Is the promise of AI abundance Silicon Valley’s biggest lie? That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare argues that while AI will inevitably reduce human labor and increase productivity, the real questi…

No, I’m not amused. Today’s Trump vs Musk social media wrestling fiasco is one more example of how digital media is actually bemusing ourselves to death. Walter Lippmann, the brilliant but emotionall…

Revered by some, vilified by others, Ibram X. Kendi is America's most controversial anti-racism scholar. In this wide-ranging and frank conversation, the bestselling author of How to Be an Anti-Racis…

Do we get the serial killers & heroes we deserve? The always generous literary critic Bethanne Patrick uses five new non-fiction books to respond to this rather absurd question. From French women res…

Black swan events used to be considered as one-of-a-kind events signifying something rare and exceptional. Today, however, we may be drowning in black swans. That, at least, is the view of global ven…