Keen On

I’ve always been a big admirer of Steven Johnson, whose prolific work focuses on the disruptive role of new technologies in shaping our past and future. In his new book, The Infernal Machine, Johnson writes about the turn of the 20th century, a period of feverish technology innovation and no less febrile political unrest. Our conversation focuses on the strange symbiosis between Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite, Emma Goldman’s anarchist violence and the invention of J. Edgar Hoover’s modern surveillance state. Good stuff from one of the world’s most eclectic thinkers. Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of thirteen books, including Where Good Ideas Come From, How We Got to Now, The Ghost Map, and Extra Life. He’s the host and cocreator of the Emmy-winning PBS/BBC series How We Got to Now, the host of the podcast The TED Interview, and the author of the newsletter Adjacent Possible. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons.Named as one of the "100 most

It’s a mind blowing story. In Fat Leonard, the Washington Post’s prize winning investigative journalist Craig Whitlock tells of a Malaysian contractor called Leonard Glenn Francis who successfully seduced up to a thousand US naval officers with prostitutes, fancy dinners and expensive gifts. The most astonishing thing of all, he explains, is that many Naval officers seems to have known exactly what Fat Leonard was up to. So what, I asked Whitlock, does this tell us about the state not just of the Navy but of all the armed services. Might there be other Fat Leonards also lurking in the closets of the US Air Force and Marines?Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Afghanistan Papers. He has worked for the Post since 1998 as a foreign correspondent, Pentagon reporter, and national security specialist, and has reported from more than sixty countries. His coverage of the war in Afghanistan won the George Polk Award for Military Report

Ever wondered why the never-endingTrump show seems simultaneously like a reality show remake and sequel? According to Chris Gavaler, the self styled Patron Saint of Superheroes, it’s because our view of reality itself has been shaped by all those “sequels, remakes, retcons and rejects” endlessly spewing out of Hollywood. Our addiction to the Stars Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Marvel franchises has “revised" our reality,” Gavaler, the co-author of the new REVISING OUR REALITY, suggests. So how we can seize back reality from these entertainment titans? Here, Gavaler is less instructive. Perhaps the Patron Saint of Superheroes has, himself, been watching too many inane Star Wars or Lord of the Rings remakes. Chris Gavaler is Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, USA. He is also the author of On the Origin of Superheroes: From the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1 (2015) and Superhero Comics (2017) and Creating Comics (2021), both published by Bloomsbury. Since 2021, he has

Given the situation in Gaza, some might interpret a new book entitled Judaism Is About Love to be either satirical or slightly chutzpahdik. But its author, Rabbi Shai Held, President & Dean of New York City’s Hadar Institute, is all too serious in his argument that the idea of love lies at the historic heart of traditional Jewish life. It’s an intriguing, if idealistic, interpretation. Christianity, he suggests, appropriated this idea, thereby creating what he considers the anti-semitic trope of Judaism being the religion of law rather than love. Rabbi Held describes himself as a religious Jew on the left and his embrace of love might be contrasted today with the violently unloving tribalism of many contemporary right-wing religious Jews.Rabbi Shai Held-- philosopher, theologian, and Bible scholar-- is President and Dean at the Hadar Institute.  He received the prestigious Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education, and has been named multiple times by Newsweek as one of the fifty most influential 

Last week’s KEEN ON America interview featured a conversation with R. Derek Black, the son of a KKK Grand Wizard, whose all-too-American life has been defined by radical personal reinvention and second chances. In contrast, Ali Velshi, host of MSNBC's "The Last Word", not only chose to come to America from Canada, but also chose to become an American citizen. For Velshi, a self-styled libertarian who confesses to holding five passports, the act of being America suggests the kind of small act of courage which he writes about in his eponymous new biography. Americanness, for Velshi, is chosen not given. It suggests our agency to fight for democracy. Being American is then, by definition, a form of political obligation. It requires small acts of courage from citizens like Ali Velshi.Ali Velshi is MSNBC’s Chief Correspondent and the host of Velshi. Previously, he was CNN’s Chief Business Correspondent and co-host of American Morning. Velshi has been nominated for multiple News and Documentary Emmy Awards.Named as

What is the most American town in the USA? Las Vegas comes to mind, of course. And Memphis, with its uniquely American church of Graceland. Or one of Springsteen’s forgotten beach towns in New Jersey. Imagine rolling Vegas and Memphis and one of those sad NJ boardwalk places into a small Missouri town that you’ve never heard of. That’s Branson, Missouri, the 12,,638 person self-styled “city” in the Ozarks that is the annual host to millions of mostly white American visitors. a guide to Branson? For a cultural guide to Branson, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi has a 13,000 word essay in this month’s Harper’s entitled “The Branson Pilgrimage”. And as the Princeton educated, Brooklyn based Kroll-Zaidi confesses, it’s a piece about his own surreal experience of trying to gage the soul of the American nation by visiting Branson multiple times of the last ten years. And like his Tocquevillian essay, my conversation with Kroll-Zaidi tries to make sense not just of this weird “beach town” without a waterfront, but of the contempo

I’m just back from five glorious days in Syracuse, the ancient Mediterranean city in the south western corner of Sicily. And to extend my trip, at least virtually, I spoke to the young Irish novelist, Ferdia Lennon, author of the very unusual and much acclaimed Glorious Exploits, a tragicomic novel set in the Syracuse of the Peloponnesian War. We talked the Syracuse of antiquity, of course, but also Lennon discussed the long process of writing Glorious Exploits and gave valuable advice to other first-time novelists working on stories that incorporate their own unique interests, sensibilities and eccentricities. FERDIA LENNON was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Libyan father. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. His short stories have appeared in publications such as the Irish Times and the Stinging Fly. In 2019 and 2021, he received Literature Bursary Awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. After spending m

Apple’s Crush advertisement for their new range of iPads got so crushed by its critics that Apple apologized and announced the commercial wouldn’t go on tv. But according to Keith Teare, author of the That Was The Week tech newsletter, the massive reaction to this ad reflects a troubling cultural hysteria which, he believes, is driven by “snowflakes” on social networks like Threads. And the truth, at least according to Keith, is that critics of new creative devices like the iPad are actually “haters of the future” unwilling to acknowledge the inevitable progress of history.Keith Teare is a Founder and CEO at SignalRank Corporation. Previously he was Executive Chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd - A UK-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. He was also previously the founder at the Palo Alto incubator, Archimedes Labs. Archimedes was the original incubator for TechCrunch and since 2011 has invested, accelerated or incubated many Silicon Valley startups including Around (s

Timothy Morton, who teaches English at Rice, has become a bit of a rock star interpreter of our hellishly hot planetary times. And his eclectic work has even gotten the stamp of approval of real rock stars - like Laurie Anderson & Björk as well as the Big Lebowski himself, Jeff Bridges. So it was really fun to have him on KEEN ON to talk about HELL: In Search of a Christian Ecology, his new theological guide to how to live in catastrophic times. “This is hell, but not the end of the world,” Timothy Morton says of the world. And so it requires a retro Biblical figure like Morton, a self-styled “angelic demon”, to lead us out of our current hell and recover our human agency. Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He has collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about

How seriously should we take the white nationalist threat in the United States? Very seriously, at least according to R. Derek Black, a young man who knows a thing or two about the US white nationalist movement. The son of a Grand Wizard of the KKK and a close family friend of David Duke, Black believes that white nationalism is no longer a fringe feature of the Trumpist Republican party. And it’s this fear of the mainstreaming of overt racism that triggered Black’s new book, The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism, an account of his rebellion not just against racism, but against his family, particularly his Grand Wizard father, Don Black. Derek Black is an American former white supremacist. He is the son of Don Black, founder of the Stormfront online community, and godson of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. He publicly renounced white nationalism and chronicled his personal journey away from his family's beliefs.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazi

Marx’s 19th century remark that history repeats itself twice, first as tragedy and then as farce, helps us makes sense of the seemingly surreal politics of the contemporary Republican Party. As Kyle Paoletta notes in his insightful Harpers essay “The Race For Second Place”, the 2024 Republican primaries have been a complete “farce” (the tragedy, of course, being the 2016 primaries). Everything about this year’s Iowa Causus and the New Hampshire primary, Paoletta reported from Des Moines and Manchester, was untrue. There wasn’t even really a race for second place. The only story was Trump, who not only didn’t show up, but barely acknowledged either the primaries or the Republican party itself. It was classic farce. but behind the absurdity of these 2024 primaries, Paoletta predicts, are tectonic shifts in American democracy which will shape the political geography of the 21st century.Kyle Paoletta’s reporting and criticism has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, New York Magazine, The Nation, The New Rep

Pete Townsend said it best. “Hope I die before I get old” he wrote in The Who’s anthemic 1965 hit, “My Generation”. But what Townsend really meant in a lyric that best captured the rebellious Boomer spirit of the Sixties, he later acknowledged, was “hope I die before I get very rich”. Townsend, as it happens, is still alive and, like many other members of his generation, very very rich. In fact, the accumulated wealth of Townsend’s generation is now estimated by the New York Times to be over $78 trillion. And it’s this seismic imbalance of power and wealth between his Boomer generation and those born after 1960 that Michael Ignatieff writes about in his excellent new LIBERTIES essay, “A History of My Privileges”. Never one to dodge uncomfortable truths, Michael Ignatieff points an accusatory finger at himself in acknowledging that his generation has much responsibility for today’s polycrisis. This is the beginning of a much needed conversation from one of the Boomer generation’s most articulate liberals.Bor

The more that changes in the digital world, the more that stays the same. For all the disruption of AI, two trends appear totally unchanging. Firstly, it’s the big players - Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple - that appear to be most benefitting from the AI revolution. Secondly, creative individuals continue to struggle to make money in the online economy. That, at least, is the view of That Was The Week’s Keith Teare who, in spite of his general optimism about our digital future, argues in his latest newsletter that online creators are struggling to make a living. “Where is the Money” Keith asks. Not, he concludes, with the musicians, writers and filmmakers who create the content of our creative economy. Keith Teare is a Founder and CEO at SignalRank Corporation. Previously he was Executive Chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd - A UK-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. He was also previously the founder at the Palo Alto incubator, Archimedes Labs. Archimedes was the or

We don’t often image Miami as a city of Cold War subterfuge akin to Berlin or Vienna. But according to Vince Houghton, co-author of COVERT CITY, Miami was as crucial to winning the Cold War as Washington DC or Moscow. The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War, he argues. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere miles away, was a pivotal, though less well known, part of Cold War history. On reflection, it make sense. With its population of Communist exiles from Cuba, its strategic value for military operations, and its lax business laws, the DC based Houghton explains, Miami has emerged as America’s most fertile city for espionage over the last half century. Dr. Vince Houghton is the former Historian and Curator of the International Spy Museum. As the museum’s subject matter expert, he was a key member of the team that created and developed the content, exhibits, and design of the new museum. Vince has a PhD in Intelligence History, and is the aut

We’ve done several shows on the housing crisis in America, mostly from a progressive perspective in which the solution to the shortage of homes is presented in terms of government investment. The libertarian economist, Bryan Caplan, however, comes at the problem from a more conservative angle. The co-author of the new graphic novel, BUILD, BABY, BUILD, Caplan argues that the housing industry needs to be radically deregularized. This right-wing libertarian approach to the science and ethics of housing in America certainly makes sense in cities like San Francisco, with its massively inflated real-estate values, absence of affordable new homes, and huge homelessness problem. Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. He has written The Myth of the Rational Voter, named "the best political book of the year" by the New York Times, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, Open Borders (co-authored with SMBC's Zach Weinersmith), La

One of Bethanne Patrick’s recommended books for April was Mohamed Amer Meziane’s The States of the Earth. It sounded intriguing, if not entirely coherent, and so I invited Meziane on the show. Even now, I’m not sure I exactly get Meziane’s point. He seems to be saying that secularization is not only behind western racial colonialism but also the destruction of the land. It’s a provocative thesis, nonetheless, and Meziane, who teaches at Brown University, makes it with a flourish of rich historical anecdotes. Mohamed Amer Meziane is a philosopher, performer and professor at Brown University after teaching for 4 years at Columbia University. He is the author of The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization which won the Albertine Prize for non-fiction in 2023. His second book is titled: At the Edge of the Worlds: Towards a Metaphysical Anthropology.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentato

In today’s stultified American gerontocracy, not everyone is convinced that we should care about old people. After all, aging baby boomers still control most of the wealth and power in an increasingly divided & inegalitarian country. But, in contrast with many of today’s age warriors, Andrew J Scott cares about the old. In fact, the 58 year-old British business school academic has built a career on fetishizing long life. His latest book is entitled The Longevity Imperative in which he explains how to build a better society for healthier, longer lives. It all sounds very reasonable, although I suspect that age will come to replace social class as the driver of political conflict in the 21st century.Andrew J. Scott is the world’s leading expert on the economics of longevity and on ensuring that our lives aren’t just longer but also happier, healthier and more productive. An award winning researcher, speaker, author and teacher he is a co-founder of The Longevity Forum, co-author of the global bestseller, “

Samyr Laine might be a model for how to become a Haitian-American in the 21st century. Son of Haitian emigrants, Laine was a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, competed at the London 2012 Olympics as a Haitian triple jumper, and is now an entrepreneur and investor in sports and entertainment. It’s quite a remarkable story and will speaks, to some, of the continued existence of the American Dream. Although Laine himself might question this optimistic interpretation of his narrative, suggesting to me that discrimination against immigrants, particularly those of black or brown skins, remains a troublingly central feature of 21st century American life. Samyr Laine is an investor, Olympian, and operator with a background in sports & entertainment. He is currently GP of Freedom Trail Capital, SVP of The Creator Project at Raptive, former SVP of Operations & Strategy at Westbrook, and former Senior Director of Operations at Roc Nation. Prior to working on celebrity ventures for Will & Jada Pinkett S

Given the industry of Holocaust remembering, do we really need another book about the Nazis and their industrial death camps? Yes, according to Tobias Buck, author of the much acclaimed A Final Verdict: the Holocaust on Trial in the 21st Century. As the half-German managing editor of the Financial Times, Buck brings a subtlety to the discussion of the Holocaust which is sometimes missing from other commentators. The problem with many Holocaust books is that they routinize this singular historical event into a Hollywood scale horror show. Buck’s A Final Verdict doesn’t do this. Nor, I hope, did our discussion. Tobias Buck is the Managing Editor of the Financial Times. Born in Germany, he studied law in Berlin before joining the FT as a graduate trainee in 2002. He went on to serve as the FT‘s correspondent in Brussels, Jerusalem, Madrid and Berlin. His first book, After the Fall: Crisis, Recovery and the Making of a New Spain, was published in 2019.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, A

The Harvard academic Elisa New is host of the much acclaimed PBS series POETRY IN AMERICA. Now in Season Four, the show has featured conversations about American poetry with Joe Biden, Herbie Hancock, Gloria Estefan, Shaquille O’Neal, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. While America isn’t normally considered a poetic nation, New’s show has brought poetry into the homes of millions of Americans. So when I caught up with New, I asked her whether there was such a thing as an American poem and what it is about America that inspires memorable poetry. Elisa New is the Director and Host of Poetry in America, director of the Center for Public Humanities at Arizona State University, director of Verse Video Education, and Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. New created Poetry in America, a PBS series, to bring poetry beyond classrooms into living rooms and onto screens of all kinds. The show can be seen on public television and streaming platforms, in schools and libraries, and on airlines. G