Keen On America

It’s probably not news that today’s Supreme Court runs on crazy conservative grudges and even crazier patrimonial fringe theories. But according to Leah Litman, Crooked Media podcaster and author of …

Rather than apple pie, addiction might be defining quality of 21st century American life. That, at least, is the view of Mattea Kramer, author of Untended, a contemporary novel about addiction in sma…

Is AI a big scam? In their co-authored new book, The AI Con, Emily Bender and Alex Hanna take aim at what they call big tech “hype”. They argue that large language models from OpenAI or Anthropic are…

The traditional notion of western civilization is premised on the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. Other less Eurocentric historians, like the Silk Road author Peter Frankopan, point to the role of…

“Who’s Cheating?” asks Keith Teare in his weekly summary of tech news. Keith is defending a Columbia University student who was punished for openly used AI in his classes. As Arthur C. Clark famously…

Not everyone will like this argument. Jason Riley, the Wall Street Journal columnist and author of The Affirmative Action Myth, argues that affirmative action policies have been counterproductive for…

As a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin, the Chapman University economist Mark Skousen might be a bit biased. That said, Skousen makes an entertaining case in his new book, The Greatest American,…

Much has been made of the hallucinatory qualities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT product. But as the Wall Street Journal’s resident authority on OpenAI, Keach Hagey notes, perhaps the most hallucinatory feature…

What is the ideological alternative to Trumpism? In The Purposeful Warrior, Michigan’s Democratic candidate for Governor, Jocelyn Benson, offers “a road map for shattering the status quo and standing…

There are few more respected economic analysts in the world than the Financial Times Chief Economic Commentator Martin Wolf. Yesterday, we ran a conversation with Wolf about the survival of American …

I’ve been in London this week talking to America watchers about the current situation in the United States. First up is Edmund Fawcett, the longtime Economist correspondent in DC and historian of bot…

What’s it like to have to work physically hard to make a living in America today? In A Living, the writer and physician Michael Stein shares conversations with his working-class patients. He explores…

Does the United States of America still have anything going for it? According to the Arizona based Larry Aldrich, co-author of the upcoming What’s Right About America, there remains much to celebrate…

Is any criticism of Israel, by definition, anti-semitic? Not according to Uri Kaufman who, in his new book American Intifada, examines what he calls the "new antisemitism" following the Gaza war. Tha…

In today’s discussion with David Masciotra about the first hundred days of Trump 2.0 I made the (Freudian) error of referring to it as a “hundred years”. It certainly feels like a hundred years. So h…

Few analysts are more familiar with the politics of both contemporary Turkey and the United States than my old friend , the distinguished Turkish political scientist Soli Ozel. Drawing on his decades…

Americans, it’s time to move to Europe! The American geo-strategist Jason Pack anticipated last week’s advice from Simon Kuper and moved to London a few years ago during the first Trump Presidency. …

Don’t say we weren’t warned. Project 2025, the 2022 Heritage Foundation’s 900-page policy blueprint, unambiguously plotted out the strategy of the second Trump administration. As Atlantic staff write…

We are all Waymo Democrats now. That Was the Week’s Keith Teare and I appropriate Thomas Friedman’s controversial new term to dream of an American high tech future. Keith and I also talk about last w…

A year ago, the great American historian Adam Hochschild came on KEEN ON AMERICA to discuss American Midnight, his best selling account of the crisis of American democracy after World War One. A year…