Keen On America

Stephen Witt’s last book was entitled How Music Got Free. His latest, The Thinking Machine, a history of NVIDIA and its CEO Jensen Huang, might have been called How Intelligence Got Expensive. It’s a…

Should death row prisoners have the right to demand to be executed? In her debut book The Volunteer, Bay Area journalist Gianna Toboni exposes the absurd bureaucratization of the American death penal…

How to measure the good life? According to Cambridge University’s Professor of Public Policy, Diane Coyle, quantifying progress doesn’t involve traditional economic metrics. In her new book, Measure …

Keach Hagey’s upcoming new biography of OpenAI's Sam Altman is entitled The Optimist. But it could alternatively be called The Salesman. The Wall Street Journal reporter describes Altman as an except…

According to the LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick, every generation gets the Gatsby it deserves. And our generation, the social media generation, has gotten it with Careless People, by the Sarah…

It might be Liberation Day today, but according to Paul Rice, founder of US Fair Trade and author of Every Purchase Matters, Trump’s tariffs are dumb. Rice firmly distances Fair Trade from Trump's co…

Happy April Fools, everyone! Although, according to cultural critic David Masciotra every day in Trump 2.0 America is now April Fool's Day. KEEN ON AMERICA regular Masciotra argues that the new Trump…

This is an important interview. I’ve always thought of the political essayist Peter Wehner as representing the conscience of conservative, religious America. Wehner, who writes both for the Atlantic …

That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare believes that the publishing industry is about to be dramatically swept away by AI. I’m not sure. Here, for example, is Anthropic ‘s (Claude) 100 word summary …

Has Signalgate triggered a credible resistance movement to Trump 2.0? Brookings scholar and Atlantic columnist Jonathan Rauch isn’t particularly optimistic. He discusses the emerging resistance from …

This isn’t exactly the radical message one would expect from a primary physician from Columbia, Maryland. But according to Dr Andy Lazris, co-author of A Return to Healing, Big Pharma wields an iron …

Amidst all the chaos and hysteria of Trump 2.0, some things in America never change. As the Atlanta based journalist Brian Goldstone notes in There Is No Place For Us, America’s “invisible” working h…

Which countries are best positioned to thrive in the 21st century? No, it’s not Denmark. Nor China. According to Parag Khanna, the Singapore based geo-strategist, the three countries that top what he…

The writer Daniel Oppenheimer and his wife, Jessica, have been going to marriage therapy for many years. But, as he confessed in a recent New York Times magazine piece, he had to go to a superstar co…

Few observers are more insightful than the critic William Deresiewicz at identifying the changing landscape of American culture. In my latest conversation with Deresiewicz, best known for his book Ex…

How to achieve BIG change with small acts? According to the Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton, this requires what, in his new book, he dubs Ordinary Magic. Small psychological interventions , Wal…

On Thursday, we featured a conversation with Red Scare author Clay Risen about Joe McCarthy, Donald Trump and the Paranoid Style of American History. Today our subject is one of the best known victim…

Is Europe about to become the World's Third Tech Superpower? In our regular That Was The Week round-up of tech news, Keith Teare says NO!, arguing that the EU’s increasingly aggressive regulation of …

American history, Clay Risen reminds us, has an uncanny knack of repeating itself. In Red Scare, his important new book about blacklists, McCarthyism and the making of modern America, Risen suggests …

What is the MAGA movement’s aesthetic? According to the New York Times’ Dan Brooks, it’s an aesthetic captured by the generative AI video “Trump Gaza”. Childishly absurd, it’s an aesthetic, Brooks su…