Keen On

“When Dylan was booed, at the festivals or on tour, even over in England — some of that was Tom Wilson’s fault.” — Steven E. Jones Five years ago, the Los Angeles based Ron Brownstein came on the show to argue that 1974 was the greatest year in American cultural history. Steven E. Jones has a rival candidate. His new book, Everything Is Everything, makes the case for 1966. In contrast with Brownstein, Jones builds his argument not around a Hollywood star but around a record producer most people have never heard of. Tom Wilson was born in Waco, went to Fisk and then to Harvard, where he read economics, ran a show on the college radio station and founded the Harvard New Jazz Society. He started his own label and produced a remarkably eclectic group of musicians including Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. Then he went to Columbia and was handed a young folk singer, a complete unknown. The rest is musical history. Wilson was not only the man who encouraged Bob Dylan to go electric, but the man who transformed Si

“The United States is speed running into a more authoritarian model that the Russians have been living in for quite some time now.” — Dan Storyev How to survive authoritarianism in the United States? Maybe we can learn from the Russians. At least according to the Russian-American Dan Storyev, co-author (with Maria Kuznetsova) of How to Survive Authoritarianism, a phrasebook which provides a hundred Russian words for the nasty political things Americans can see but can’t yet name. Storyev’s premise is that America hasn’t got the vocabulary to describe its current predicament. The country has never lived under a dictatorship, he explains, so the language simply isn’t there. Russian history, on the other hand, is defined mostly by dictatorship. Storyev experienced Putin’s post-Soviet authoritarianism, his parents Brezhnev’s stagnation, their parents Stalinist totalitarianism, their ancestors one brutal czar or another. So the Russian language shaped itself accordingly, words becoming a way to both describe and r

“She is absolutely a Cassandra. She is unafraid to tell the stark naked truth, no matter how ugly it is.” — Keri Leigh Merritt In April, Gal Beckerman came on the show to identify the ten qualities of being a dissident. They included pessimism, humour and recklessness. But he left one out: inconvenience. Dissidents are profoundly inconvenient people — to the government, to society, sometimes even to themselves. Take, for example, Lillian Smith, author of the bestselling (and banned) 1944 Strange Fruit, a novel about interracial love. Born into a white Florida family at the turn of the century, Smith dissented against Jim Crow. She was, indeed, An Inconvenient Woman, the title of a new biography about her by today’s guest Keri Leigh Merritt. So why, I asked Merritt, isn’t Lillian Smith better known? Part of the answer is bound up in Smith’s own uncomfortable critique of white supremacy. She insisted that Jim Crow damaged white people, that its shame and guilt did immense psychological injury to its supposed be

“The Enlightenment may have produced race, but it also produced what we might call anti-racism.” — Andrew Curran Most of us imagine the eighteenth century Enlightenment positively. As the victory of reason, science and individual rights over superstition and intolerance. But Andrew Curran, who has spent his career interpreting the Enlightenment, has a more nuanced view. Indeed, his new book, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson, suggests that the age of reason was also what he calls the first “anthropological century.” Which meant that in sorting humankind into fixed biological categories for the first time in history, the Enlightenment invented the dangerous idea of “race.” Before the eighteenth century, Curran says, Europeans spoke of nations and peoples using the botanical metaphor of varieties. Variety implies hybridization. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Race, in contrast, separates species into fixed categories. As biblical authority weakened, the Europe

“The original sin of generative AI is having chatbots speak in the first person.” — Sherry Turkle Fifteen years ago, at the height of the social media boom, the MIT technology scholar Sherry Turkle came on the show to warn that we were now “alone together.” She was, of course, chillingly prescient. A decade and a half later, she warns in her new book Artificial Intimacy that if social media came for our attention, AI is now gunning for our human capacity for attachment. Who — or, more chillingly, what — do we become when we talk to machines? Turkle never quite says, but the implication is of a kind of Night of the Living Dead state in which we appear fluent and animated, performing the outward motions of intimacy, but there’s nobody really home. Which is exactly what Turkle says the chatbot is. A machine trying, without much success, to be human. A chatbot has no stake in the real, Turkle explains. It can’t love, for example, because that kind of empathy requires us to be enclosed in a body and have a fear of

“What if we fell out with the Brits? What if the agency and the Brits started spying on each other again?” — David McCloskeyWhat if the Americans and the British started spying on each other again? That’s the premise of London Station, David McCloskey’s fifth novel, out today. It isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Before the Second World War those perfidious Brits did spy on America, breaking American ciphers and running influence campaigns in New York to drag the United States into the war.McCloskey spent eight years as a CIA analyst working on Syria, then a spell at McKinsey, before writing a series of successful spy novels and co-hosting the popular The Rest Is Classified podcast. The Dallas-based author has also, he admits, become an Anglophile — which hasn’t stopped him giving MI6 what the Brits would call a “good kicking” in London Station.His returning heroine is Artemis Aphrodite Procter, so named by a father obsessed with Greek mythology and raised on a Florida alligator farm. Described by another of

“Kennedy and Trump are taking a wrecking ball to probably the most important thing we have done consistently better than the rest of the world over the last eighty years, and I don’t get it.” — Barry Werth Last week on the show, the San Francisco based AI mogul and Eureka Machine author Richard Socher promised a scientific renaissance in which AI will cure everything. Socher’s eureka moment, however, may have already occurred. Not with AI, but with big pharma. At least according to Barry Werth who has spent the last thirty-five years writing about American pharma. Indeed, his new book The Age of Cures: How American Scientists Saved Your Life, a twentieth century history of big pharma, completes a trilogy that began with The Billion-Dollar Molecule in 1994. When it comes to medical breakthroughs, Barry Werth isn’t particularly optimistic on the AI front. It will add more data to preexisting mountains of data, he warns. And Werth reports that many leading scientific designers of drugs don’t think it will change

Amidst all the talk of an AI bubble, bonds are back in the news. The world’s two leading business newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, both feature stories this weekend warning about bond ructions and surging yields. While these warnings might only interfere with the sleep of bond geeks, they are a good reminder of the centrality of the bond market to our prosperity. For all their financial geekiness, Robin Wigglesworth knows that bonds matter. He edits Alphaville, the Financial Times’ splendidly geekish markets blog, and he’s the author of A Fabulous Debt, a new book that tells the “epic” story of how bonds built the modern world. The bond market matters, Wigglesworth reminds us, because when it breaks — as in 1873, 2008 and very nearly in 2020 — then the whole world suffers. So what, exactly, is a bond? Wigglesworth explains that it’s a tradable loan which the Venetians accidentally invented in 1171 to pay for a war with Constantinople. In Venice, it became a forced levy on every cit

Lenin supposedly said there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. This wasn’t one of those weeks. It might have looked like a historic week. The AI circus rolled into the UN with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei addressing the Security Council on the peril facing “humanity as a whole.” Britain and Australia weighed in with middling diplomatic or regulatory AI initiatives of their own. Trump renamed AI as superintelligence. But none of this changed anything. The UN continued its kabuki theater of making global pronouncements without having the power to change even the most local of things. Britain and Australia remained not-great powers with delusions of grandeur. In the autumn of his patriarchy, Trump continued to flail with pathetic powerlessness. And Dario and Sam increasingly seem like bit actors in the unfolding AI drama. So where’s all the power in AI? What’s this week’s real story? In Ezra Klein’s New York Times conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which That Was The Week p

“His intent is getting worse, but his capacity is diminishing. The next two years will be some kind of mad race to figure out which of these two things will prevail.” — Jonathan Rauch As the nights get shorter, we are drifting into the autumn of the patriarch. That, at least, is the view of two old friends of the show, Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner, who argued in The New York Times that Trump has finally lost the plot. So will this really go down as the fall that Trump failed? Rauch and Wehner note what’s failed and what hasn’t. MAGA’s revolutionary project — the regime change, the campaign against the universities, the idea that America had become Flight 93 — was an attempt to rout liberals from the commanding heights of American culture. At first this conservative Leninism succeeded, with universities and law firms folding in the face of a bullying state. But then civil society reorganized, fought back on the streets and in the courts, and district judges mostly held the line. But while the atmosphere of

“A good divorce is better than a bad marriage, and this is a good divorce.” — Alan Dershowitz The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz says he’s been voting Democrat since John F. Kennedy. He even defended Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Alan Cranston in court. But, at 88 years old, Dershowitz has now left — or, as he puts it, been forced out of the Dems, in the same way Ronald Reagan was sixty years ago. His new book Why I Quit the Dems and So Should You is both a history of his souring relations with the Democrats and a confessional of a reluctant Republican. A good divorce, the twice-married Dershowitz promises, is better than a bad marriage. Like many angry spouses, he says he’s been forced into the split. Today’s Democratic Party, he claims, is closer than any political party in modern American history to what the Nazi Party was in 1932 before it came to power. He names Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani as antisemites, calls Bernie Sanders a self-hating Jew, and insists Kamala Harris passed over Josh Shapiro be

“There’s no realistic scenario where AI wipes out all of humanity. It’s like a mix of sci-fi.” — Richard Socher Eighteen months ago, when he last came on the show, the German-born but San Francisco-based AI whizz kid Richard Socher was running You.com. He’s now also the co-founder of Recursive, a $4 billion start-up with fewer than thirty employees, focused on self-improving superintelligence that automates the scientific method. As if that isn’t enough, he has a new book out this week, The Eureka Machine, which argues that AI is the key to unlocking an era of scientific discoveries equal to a combination of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The tech entrepreneur sleeps, he confesses, about seven hours a night and works up to a hundred hours a week. Not a lot of time, I suspect, for fun. But then for Socher, his real fun seems to lie in the AI Eureka Machine that will, he promises, generate such magical products as plastic-eating bacteria, fusion reactors, and cures for cancer.

“Democracies don’t die silently, sleepwalking. Democracies die by going through periods of pretty serious political violence.” — Robert Pape Forget all the long-term civil war scenarios of everyone from Kurt Andersen to Stephen Marche. Today’s guest Robert Pape has spent the last thirty years at the University of Chicago studying political violence, and his warning is about the next six weeks rather than the next ten years. In his new book, Our Own Worst Enemies, Pape argues that tens of millions of Americans, on both left and right, now support political violence. When it comes to an American age of violent populism, his comparison is 1968 rather than 1861. What produced that era of assassinations, violent protest, and state violence, Pape argues, was rapid social change outpacing the political system. Back then, it was fueled by the gap between the Great Migration of African-Americans and the absence of political representation, and a military draft falling hardest on the unrepresented. And it only ended in

“I think patrimonialism is exactly the right phrase to describe the way in which the current administration is governing.” — Peter Hall Neoliberalism is dead. So what comes next? Peter Hall, a Harvard political economist for the last four decades, says the capitalist locomotive left the neoliberal station years ago. His new book, Governing Growth, names the next stop: the “knowledge economy,” the digital, globalized capitalism of the 21st century. The knowledge economy made San Francisco, New York and Boston very rich. It left almost everyone else behind. Out of that came a new political cleavage — college degree versus no college degree — and, on both sides of the Atlantic, the populist wake-up call. But as Jonathan Rauch and Jeff Kopstein have argued on this show, populism has since curdled into something worse: patrimonial capitalism, government on behalf of pitchfork-wielding oligarchs like Orbán and Trump. Ironically, it only deepens the inequalities that produced it. And it’s going to get worse. In the

“I think our genetic makeup makes us miserable. We evolved to be miserable.” — George Loewenstein Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that one before. When Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he remixed Locke’s “life, liberty and estate,” replacing the idea of property with happiness. As we know from last week’s conversation with the historian Joshua Specht, America’s age-old love affair with real estate has been perpetually mortgaged. And our guest today, the behavioral economist George Loewenstein, who happens — probably not coincidentally — to be the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, offers a similar warning about the ideal of happiness. Happiness’ antonym is misery. In his new book The Opposite of Happiness, Loewenstein explains that it’s misery, and not happiness, which has simultaneously broken humans and built humankind. We evolved to be miserable, the behavioral economist argues, explaining that English has four times as many words for negative

Last week we were panicking about a supposedly imminent AI apocalypse. Seven days later, Keith Teare argues, government oversight is about as far away as it could possibly be. That’s because Musk, Altman and Amodei agreed to police themselves and test each other’s models. The doomers, says the publisher of That Was The Week, have lost not just this week’s battle but probably the whole war. So who will then write the AI rules? The people building the models, Keith says — as with California’s building codes, government sanctions the standards but engineers write them. And trust doesn’t come from authority, it comes from use. The real check on our new AI overlords, he promises, will come in court, with the American legal system holding OpenAI and Anthropic financially accountable for all damage. That should doom the doomers. If we survive the apocalypse, of course. Five Takeaways •       The Week Regulation Went Away. Seven days, and the conversation reversed. Last week: the whistleblower, the headlines about AI

My hometown of San Francisco has the unholy problem of a mansion shortage and mass homelessness. AI money is driving house prices to record highs, our mayor has declared a rent emergency, while in New York City housing affordability has become so acute as to become a rare bipartisan concern. This unreality of the real-estate market has heated up both local and national politics. But as Joshua Specht argues in his new book, Property Values, a history that runs from the rent wars of the 1840s to the crash of 2008, the rise (and fall) of the American homeowner has always been the hottest of political potatoes. The American ideal of land ownership originated in John Locke’s promise of individual self-realization through hard work. Hence the Homestead Act of 1862 and its 160 acres as both the carrot and stick of American citizenship. But as with most things Lockean, it was better in theory than in practice. The ups and particularly the downs of American history are, indeed, entangled with the crises in real-estate

“Today’s fascists don’t look at all like those from the past. What is similar is how they act. You’ll recognize the fascist by what they do.” — Rosan Smits Fascism is a reality in both America and Europe. At least according to Rosan Smits, the Dutch political scientist whose This Is Fascism: A Wake-Up Call to Resist is already a bestseller in Europe. Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here in 1935 as a warning about the possibility of fascism in Great Depression America. Not only does Smits argue that it can happen, but she suggests that it is happening right now. Rather than unearthing swastikas and jackboots, she suggests that we identify what she calls the fascist methods which connect the Thirties with today. From Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to MAGA in America, that’s where history is repeating itself. What she sees is grievance manipulated into atavistic populist cults by insecure elites. If the original fascist movements were coping strategies for modernity, today’s fascism is a coping mechanism

“Since Trump’s second election we’ve been in a wave of cowardice, where people have decided — partly by observing what others like them are doing — that there’s no viability to standing up on principle.” — Jacob Weisberg Michelle Goldberg devoted her Monday New York Times column to two new books shaming the elites who caved to Trump. Both of them have appeared on the show this week: Susan Neiman’s Call It Evil on Monday, and now Jacob Weisberg’s Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era. Reversing JFK’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, Weisberg inducts eight powerful Americans who didn’t stand up to Trump into his hall of shame. It’s quite a list. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Wall Street’s Stephen Schwarzman, big law’s Brad Karp, Senator Mitch McConnell, Dartmouth College president Sian Beilock, Chief Justice John Roberts, media influencer Megyn Kelly, and — perhaps most controversially — former President George W. Bush. Rather than MAGA flunkeys, Weisberg wanted figures who ha

“You should fight against tyranny in any form it takes. You’re not betraying the founding by standing up to tyranny — you’re following in their footsteps.” — Dennis Rasmussen After Lincoln, he was the best known man in nineteenth century America. And the most photographed too, some 160 portraits of the ex-slave’s unmistakable face still surviving. So there was nothing hidden about Frederick Douglass. And yet the more we know about this most remarkable American, the more enigmatic he becomes. At first, he was America’s fiercest critic. In the early 1840s he accused the founders of being “little better than a band of pirates” and described the Constitution as a “wicked compact.” By 1851, however, he radically revised his view of that same Constitution, eulogizing it as “a glorious liberty document” that outlawed slavery outright. So why did Douglass change his mind so radically? Is it really possible that he was simultaneously America’s fiercest critic and its greatest fan? That’s the riddle at the heart of Den