Keen On America

Popeye might have gotten strong from eating spinach, but for the family of C.F. Seabrook, New Jersey’s narcissistic patriarch of industrialized farming, spinach has been a curse. In his new book The …

That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare argues we're “accelerating” toward an age of “abundance” in which AI and automation will slash production costs to near-zero, freeing humans to pursue hobbies …

Revenge has become Donald Trump’s brand. That, at least, is the view of James Kimmel Jr, author of The Science of Revenge, who argues that revenge has become America’s “deadliest addiction”. When we …

It’s not just the MAGA or the Woke crowd. According to Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), free speech in America is under existential threat from all p…

As one of the most illustrious rock stars of the sustainability movement, Tim Jackson suggests that we must “f**k the patriarchy” to get beyond capitalism. In his new book, The Care Economy, Jackson …

We Must Save the Books. That’s Michael Kimmage’s SOS message from Trumpian Washington in this issue of Liberties Quarterly. Kimmage, former director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, desc…

How religious was the 80s creative scene? Very. At least according to Paul Elie, whose intriguing new cultural history, The Last Supper, charts the art, faith, sex and controversy of the 1980s. Elie …

Who is the most unsung hero of the American Civil War and Reconstruction? According to Zaakir Tameez, it’s the abolitionist statesmen Charles Sumner. In his eponymous new biography of Sumner, Tameez …

It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. According to the Pulitzer finalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, the majority of Americans no longer trust standard scientific proof. As he notes in his new book…

According to the legal scholar Marcus Alexander Gadson, violence is central to the constitutional history of the United States. As American, in fact, as apple pie. In his new book Sedition, Gadson ar…

Who was America’s great power prophet during the Cold War? Perhaps not Henry Kissinger. In Zbig, Financial Times’ U.S. editor, Edward Luce, makes the case that the Polish-American strategist Zbigni…

Why are the Democrats losing the American working class? According to Joan Williams, it’s because they are failing to prioritize economic concerns of working-class Americans. In her new book Outclass…

In Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us, best selling writer Anna Malaika Tubbs reveals the secret history of American patriarchal values. Tubbs argues this patriarchy is the central n…

History, Marshall Poe wrote in December 2023, shows that Israel will never win a “war of occupation”. Eighteen months later, with Israel on the brink of a full scale occupation of Gaza, Poe’s argumen…

So why did Harris lose in 2024? For one very big reason, according to the progressive essayist Bill Deresiewicz: “because she represented the exhausted Democratic establishment”. This rotting establi…

“That he not busy being born is busy dying”, Dylan noted in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, his grim 1965 masterpiece about reinvention. Sixty years later, at a time when “everything is tech…

Is spying an un-American activity? Not according to Jeffrey Rogg, whose new book, The Spy and the State, tells the story of American intelligence from the Revolutionary War to the present day. Rogg e…

Walmart just announced it would be raising prices because of tariffs. So is that a good argument against Trump’s autarkic trade policies? Perhaps. But, as the Professor of Innovation at the Universit…

Something doesn’t smell right about generative AI. Earlier this week, we had a featuring a former Google researcher who described large language models (LLMs) as a “con”. Then, of course, there’s Ope…