Keen On

“When we trust AI to tell us the truth, we are setting ourselves up to hand over something deeply human to a machine that does not have our best interests at heart.” — Steven RosenbaumTruth, Steven Rosenbaum cheerfully admits, is a shitty word. It has two ontological realities — one objective, the other subjective — but most of us use the word without much thought. Maybe it’s like pornography. It might be hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Or perhaps you know it, when you don’t see it.His new book, The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, with a foreword by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, takes a cast of tech futurists — Douglas Rushkoff, Larry Lessig, Gary Marcus, Esther Dyson, David Chalmers — and asks what happens to truth in our AI age.AI is, at its core, Rosenbaum’s tech mavens report, a spectacularly good liar. It tells us exactly what we want to hear. And even when it knows it’s wrong, he says, it lies. Rather than a bug, lying is a core, perhaps the core feature of AI.I’m not so sure. H

“His ultimate failure is not simply losing. It’s his failure to stop Trumpism from being such a dominant force in America.” — Julian ZelizerOn this Easter Sunday, can we resurrect Joe Biden’s reputation? Perhaps not — according to Julian Zelizer, the Princeton historian and editor of The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden, a collection of essays about the historical significance of the Biden Presidency.Zelizer argues that Biden’s legislative record was more robust than most Americans remember — climate investments, semiconductor plants, diversity integrated into government programmes. Rather than policy, the problem was the politics. Biden didn’t build a coalition that would last long enough for his ambitious programmes to mature. He is the last of an era: a New Deal Democrat who believed in big government, that the Republicans could be brought back to the centre, that politics could still work the way it used to. Joe Biden promised to save the soul of America from the Charlottesville moment. Instead, his administ

“We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan (attributed)Who gets to tell the AI story? A movie, a media company or Marshall McLuhan?1. The movie: the AI doc, How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare dismissed because it failed to define AI.2. A media company: OpenAI bought the streaming show TBPN for hundreds of millions of dollars in a move that is akin to Lenin starting Pravda.3. Marshall McLuhan: Ezra Klein visited Silicon Valley and was reminded of McLuhan’s (supposed) remark that “first we shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.”Klein argues that AI agents are empowering tools that give humans a massive boost in productivity. But the effect, he writes, is to constantly reinforce a certain version of ourselves. These agentic tools are undermining our agency, he fears. So AI ultimately gets to tell the AI story.Agency is becoming simultaneously the political problem and the cure — the thing-in-itself. Writing in the New York Times, Soph

“Millions of people have gone out and said, ‘Stop, don’t do that.’ And that is a wonderful thing.” — Peter EdelmanWe are in Washington DC this week, in search of America’s heart. And there may be no better guide than Peter Edelman — one of the few remaining members of the Bobby Kennedy braintrust. Edelman was a close Kennedy aide from just after JFK’s assassination through the 1968 presidential campaign. He watched Bobby find himself after his brother’s death — grow from a man defined by serving JFK into the last progressive populist able to unite Black and white working-class Americans.Edelman’s personal and political stories are inseparable from Bobby. In Mississippi, on the 1967 senatorial trip where Kennedy saw firsthand what he called the “third world” poverty in the Delta, Edelman met Marian Wright — the civil rights lawyer who would become his wife. They married a month after Bobby’s assassination, only the third interracial couple ever to marry in Virginia.“Let’s do something good,” Marian and Peter s

“That’s my story, but not where it ends.” — Bob Dylan, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in the American story. But it is, of course, a narrative of second chances. And there’s no more of an American story than Bob Dylan, whose second act may be more memorable than his first.Robert Polito — poet, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biographer, and former director of creative writing at the New School — has written what may be the (anti) definitive book on Dylan’s second act. After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace covers the years from “Time Out of Mind” in 1997 through “Rough and Rowdy Ways” in 2020. It’s structured as an abecedarium — twenty-six chapters, A to Z — because Polito explains, he wanted a form that acknowledged the limits of what anyone can know about Dylan. There is no rosebud sled buried in the Tulsa archive. So an alphabet book as good as we are gonna get.Digging into Dylan’s Tulsa archive, Polito found much blood on the tracks — multipl

“When Haiti plays Brazil, Haitians will feel equal. Football gives even the weakest and the poorest a fighting chance. That is profound.” — Dimitry Elias LégerYesterday, Simon Kuper defined the World Cup as a religious feast for all of humanity. Today, Dimitry Elias Léger asks whether God is watching. His new novel, Death of the Soccer God, is a fictional reimagining of the most famous goal in American World Cup history — scored in 1950 by a non-American. Joe Gaëtjens was a half-German, half-Haitian teenager sent to New York to study, not to play football. He picked up the game in Central Park, somehow (as a non-American) made it onto the US team at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, and scored the goal that famously beat England one–nil in Belo Horizonte. England was so heavily favoured that the football-mad BBC didn’t even send a reporter.Léger — a Haitian-born writer and (for his sins) an Arsenal fan — spent three weeks in Brazil researching the novel, two of them in Belo Horizonte. The philosophical question a

“The World Cup is a kind of religious feast. It’s like Easter, or Passover, or Eid, but it’s for all of humanity.” — A Church of England vicar, quoted by Simon KuperNick Hornby measured his (sad) life in Arsenal fixtures. The FT columnist Simon Kuper has measured his in World Cups. His new book, World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments, is the Kuper story told through the nine tournaments he attended as a journalist — from Italy 1990 to Qatar 2022.World Cup Fever is as irresistible as a Maradona slalom or a Pelé feint. In 1990, three Oxford students blag their way into Italy on Mars corporate tickets, pulling out library cards at the Swiss border to prove they’re not Liverpool hooligans. In 1998, France’s World Cup victory changes Kuper’s life — he buys an apartment/office in Paris and never really leaves, even writing World Cup Fever there. In 2006, the newly reunited Germany reinvents itself as the nice guy of World Cups, and the German Football Association’s designated handler of World War Two

“There is tremendous loneliness in the kind of life where you just don’t feel like anybody knows you.” — Margaret RutherfordYesterday, the Brooklyn psychotherapist Daniel Smith defined perfection as the devil. Today, the Arkansas-based Dr. Margaret Rutherford explains what happens in our FOMO age when the devil wins. Her subject is what she calls the “perfectly hidden depression” of today’s Instagrammable types. Perfectionism rates are going up, Rutherford warns. And so, not uncoincidentally, are suicide rates.Rutherford’s own mother in Fifties suburban Arkansas was a case study. Beautiful, smart, talented and anorexic. The perfectly mannered and coiffeured hostess. Married the “right” husband but in love with the wrong man. An Arkansas Madame Bovary. “The fucked-up fifties woman” as one of her friends called it. She became a prescription drug junkie because of her addiction to perfection. Nobody knew her, not even herself. The relentless camouflage of her life became a prison. Rutherford has spent the last d

“Perfection is the devil. Growth means a greater capaciousness, not a narrowing and an optimisation.” — Daniel SmithDon’t feel bad about feeling bad. That’s the message of Daniel Smith’s therapeutic new book, Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions. Smith — psychotherapist, anxiety memoirist, married Brooklynite — wants to rescue boredom, envy, shame, and regret from the category of emotions that are supposed to shame us. The things that bore us most — raising children, long marriages, breakfast with your spouse for the two thousandth time — are also the most meaningful. Boredom, Smith argues, is the price we pay for meaning. Our darkest emotions aren’t quite as dark as we fear. Five Takeaways•       Boredom Is the Price of Meaning: The things that bore us most — raising children, long marriages, eating breakfast with your spouse for the two thousandth time — are also the most meaningful. Repetition is boring. But that’s where the connection, the love, and the main event reside. Boredom is a

“We can survive. Can we thrive? That’s a different question.” — Corey NathanRobert Mueller died last week. Educated at Princeton, this Vietnam veteran won a Purple Heart and then enjoyed decades of public service under presidents of both parties. But the current president celebrated Mueller’s death. Such are the vagaries of American history.In contrast, Corey Nathan — host of the Talking Politics and Religion Without Killing Each Other podcast — isn’t celebrating Robert Mueller’s death. Nathan is from suburban northern Los Angeles County, very much at the heart of the (mythical?) American center. We discussed whether it’s possible to have a civic conversation anymore. Like so many Americans, Nathan falls back on what he calls “data.” Apparently 85% of Americans are what a recent study calls the “exhausted majority.” They see themselves as anything but extreme. All they want to do is take the kids to soccer practice, enjoy their barbecue, and talk to the neighbour without the conversation degenerating into ver

“Happiness is a rare commodity. There’s a lot of fuel for the claim that unhappiness is caused by some software, when in fact the roots of unhappiness are way deeper than that.” — Keith TeareIf it’s not warfare in Iran, then it’s lawfare in California. Out here in Silicon Valley, it’s been a week dominated by two trials of big tech. First, Meta and YouTube were found liable for designing products that addict children. While the young female social media victims hugged outside the Los Angeles courthouse, the Wall Street Journal dismissed it as a Big Tech shakedown. Then, up the road in San Francisco, a federal judge granted Anthropic an emergency reprieve from the Pentagon’s unprecedented designation of the company as a supply chain risk.For That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare, the social media trial was fighting the last war, while the Anthropic vs US Government trial is about the future of war. Anthropic took the bait, Keith says. Governments, he believes, should get to decide how to use the products the

“Why does someone need to be the first trillionaire? The damage it’s doing just to get to that level is extreme.” — Glen GalaichExcessive wealth disorder. It sounds like a disease — which, at least according to Glen Galaich — CEO of the Stupski Foundation and author of Control: Why Big Giving Falls Short, it is. There’s $2 trillion sitting in American charitable accounts Galaich says, mostly invested in hedge funds and real estate. Foundations are legally required to distribute only 5% a year — the bare minimum — and invest the remaining 95% to ensure they can make that back and live forever. The system rewards perpetuity over impact. The money is stuck — like most other things in America. And this philanthropic wealth is predicted to grow to $18 trillion by 2050 — twice the size of the annual federal budget. A truly excessive wealth disorder.Galaich wants to unstick the system. When a donor puts money in a private foundation, they receive up to a 70% tax exemption. The public is forgoing taxation in return f

“Friction is what brings us together. If we were never able to communicate in real space, we would not truly learn what it is to be human.” — Stephen BalkamIs social media a drug? In what the Financial Times called a landmark case, Facebook (Meta) and YouTube (Google) have been found guilty of designing their products to be addictive to kids. Is this a big tobacco moment? the tut-tutting New York Times asked. In contrast, the free market Wall Street Journal called it a shakedown.So what to make of this decision to make social media a narcotic? Stephen Balkam — founder and CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), amongst Washington’s most credible nonpartisan voices on kids and technology, has been on the front lines of this fight for nearly thirty years. Calling himself a radical moderate, he sees good and bad in social media. He even expelled Meta from FOSI three years ago for what he calls conduct contrary to the institute’s mission.Balkam’s sharpest disagreement is with Jonathan Haidt, amongst the

“The shortest distance between you and me is a story.” — Colum McCannIn 1932, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud asking if humanity could cure its “lust for hatred.” Freud said no. Mankind’s instinct for death and destruction could not be eliminated. That said, the Viennese doctor went on, the desire to end war should never be abandoned. What was needed was a “mythology of the instincts” and a “community of feeling.” In other words: a story. The book sold 2,000 copies. By 1933, the Nazis had seized power and the two men had fled into exile.Colum McCann — National Book Award-winning novelist, author of Let the Great World Spin and American Mother — has spent the last dozen years trying to build Freud’s community of feeling. His organisation, Narrative Four, now operates in 35 countries with 1,200 school partners and 285,000 participants. The method is deceptively simple: two strangers exchange personal stories, then retell each other’s story in the first person. Overpowered by empathy, they realise they’re

“What conclusion do you draw if you see a system that continues to grow more powerful despite failing at the things it says it’s going to accomplish?” — Jacob SiegelJacob Siegel grew up in Brooklyn, studied history at Boston University, enlisted in the US Army after September 11, and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, as an intelligence officer, he had the latest drones, sensors, Palantir databases, and predictive models at his fingertips — but still couldn’t get a coherent answer about what, exactly, America was trying to accomplish in its war with the Taliban. To him, the technology was as extraordinary as the incoherence of the war.In his new book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, Siegel argues that within a few years of coming home, those same tools were being used on American citizens. This “Information State” was born in Herat and Kandahar. It came home to our iPhones.But Siegel’s Information State isn’t the conventional leftist critique of Big Tech. Siegel argue

“If the regime doesn’t lose, it wins.” — Soli ÖzelIt was just past midnight in Istanbul when I reached Soli Özel. The Pentagon had just announced it was deploying 3,000 soldiers — the 82nd Airborne — to the Gulf. Özel — professor of international relations at Kadir Has University, columnist, and one of the most trusted analysts of Middle Eastern politics — is blunt. This might, he warns, be America’s Suez moment.In 1956, Britain and France — two spent imperial powers that refused to accept they were spent — were humiliated in Egypt. Trump is a noisier, more corpulent Anthony Eden. The difference between then and now is that the US and Soviet Union were ready to replace the European colonial powers. Today, no great power can take America’s place in the region. But its prestige is diminished, its ammunition depleted, and when it called on NATO allies to help open the Strait of Hormuz, nobody volunteered. Russia and China, Özel suggests, are winning on every front without sending any of their crack regiments to

“The problems start when I conclude that only an uninformed, unintelligent, or evil person could hold the view that you hold.” — Julia MinsonIn a sneak preview of the 2028 Presidential election, Andy Beshear called JD Vance the most arrogant politician in America. Vance’s spokesperson fires back that Beshear is chasing headlines. Just another disagreeable day in American public life. So how can we make conversation more civil? How to disagree more agreeably?In her new book (out today) How to Disagree Better, the Harvard public policy professor Julia Minson argues that disagreement is not conflict. You and I can see the world differently and have a completely civil conversation about it. The problem is when we decide the other person is stupid, evil, or both.Minson’s test case is her own family. Her father-in-law is a retired Army veteran who served in Vietnam and Korea and has voted Republican his entire life. Minson is a first-generation Russian immigrant who came to Denver as a teenager. They disagree on im

“AI is a theft of knowledge. I can’t believe we as a society allowed this.” — Noam CohenTen years ago, Noam Cohen came on the show to ask if it was “Too Late to Save the Internet from Itself?” Back then, this early Silicon Valley critic was a New York Times writer. He was, as it turns out, a “premature anti-technologist” — Cohen’s phrase, borrowed from the premature antifascists who were called communist for opposing Hitler before it was fashionable. We should have listened to him. Now a freelance writer, Cohen describes himself, without self-pity, as a casualty of the internet revolution. The big media world that employed him barely exists anymore. And tech’s Know-It-All elite that he warned us about are richer than ever.His 2017 book The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball is now back with a new introduction, triggered by that infamous photograph of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Musk at Trump’s inauguration. Cohen’s argument hasn’t changed — history h

“We read so as not to feel alone.” — C.S. Lewis (possibly)Dan Turello is a cultural historian of medieval Italy, a much published photographer, and the author of the new Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans. I’m sceptical. Especially the promise (or illusion) of better humans. But Turello’s definition of technology goes back further than most — all the way to the original fig leaf. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, the first thing they did, he reminds us, was cover their bodies. Technology, then, in Turello’s framing, is everything that extends beyond the human body. Clothing is technology. Double-entry bookkeeping is technology. The iPhone is just the latest chapter of our technology story that began at the beginning.His most surprising argument is that our current tech anxiety has medieval roots. St. Francis of Assisi was what he calls a trust-fund kid “avant la lettre” — his father being a wealthy 13th century silk merchant at a time when northern Italy was Silicon Valley. Fr

“Washington and Hamilton were governed by Willing.” — John Adams, 1813Thomas Willing voted against the Declaration of Independence. He was the wealthiest man in Philadelphia, the largest merchant trader in North America, an Anglican slave trader printing money. So he saw little reason to declare independence from Britain. Especially since the renegades — the poor Scots-Irish Presbyterians flooding into the country, the MAGA people of their day — had no love of wealthy aristocrats like himself. And then Willing did something that took everyone, even perhaps himself, by surprise: he financed the very revolution he’d voted against.In The Banker Who Made America, the financial historian Richard Vague tells a story that reframes the Founding. After Bunker Hill, Willing financed the smuggling of gunpowder via the Caribbean at a critical moment in the struggle against the British. He and his partner Robert Morris became the principal suppliers of finance and other essential materiel for the revolution. When the Cont