Keen On

Tom Brokaw famously described America’s World War II servicemen as the “Greatest Generation”. But according to the historian David Nasaw, the Americans who fought in the Second World War are better understood as The Wounded Generation. His eponymous new book describes the pain and hardships that 16 million veterans endured upon their return home - a tragic story of PTSD, racism and family breakup. Brokaw celebrated the nobility with which these ex-soldiers got on with civilian life without either complaining or even talking about the war. But for Nasaw, this silence wasn’t just stoicism—it was often undiagnosed and sometimes even untreatable trauma.1. WWII Was America’s Longest and Most Brutal War The average soldier served nearly three years in uniform (compared to less than one year in WWI), with 75% deployed overseas. Combat on the European front was relentless, especially in the final year, with severe manpower shortages keeping GIs on the front lines for weeks or months without relief.2. Millions Return

According to the platform economist Sangeet Paul Choudary, author of Reshuffle, today’s AI hype is a feature rather than a bug in Silicon Valley. It’s a deliberate mechanism to attract capital in an “attention-poor, capital-heavy economy” while distracting from the lack of short-term business results. So who will ultimately win and who will lose in today’s AI arms race? While Choudary predicts power will concentrate around infrastructure players like Nvidia and enterprise workflow companies like Microsoft and Google, he warns that OpenAI risks becoming “the Cisco of this revolution” unless it moves beyond the commoditizing model layer. More troubling, for Choudary, is AI’s societal impact. We cannot trust Big Tech with our “agentic future,” he cautions—particularly as technologies like OpenAI’s Pulse preview eliminate the last vestige of user agency that we still possess. While pessimistic about US and Chinese models built on data hoarding and state-backed monopolies, the Dubai-based Choudary sees promise in

It’s springtime for charlatans. At least according to Quico Toro, coauthor (with my old friend Moises Naim) of Charlatans, a new screed about how grifters, swindlers and hucksters are bamboozling the media, the markets and the masses. If you listen to Toro, you wouldn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. Everywhere - on our screens, in our churches, even in the White House - there lurk charlatans intent on stealing our souls. As you can tell from my rat-a-tat scepticism, I’m not totally convinced by such hysterical fearmongering. Though he’s probably right that social isolation and AI-powered scams are making us sitting ducks for scammers. Anyway, at least there’s no chapter about huckster podcasters in Charlatans. So you are safe here from bamboozlers of all stripes. 1. The Harm Standard Is Everything Quico’s core thesis: charlatans aren’t just persuasive people you disagree with - they leave a trail of destroyed lives. No harm = not a charlatan (even if you find them distasteful, like the astrology busi

Next Monday is Columbus Day. Or should it be Indigenous People’s Day? According to the historian Matthew Restall we should be celebrating both Columbus and Indigenous People on Monday. The author of the timely The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, Restall places Genoa’s most famous sailor as a prisoner of history - endlessly protean to reflect each era’s changing values. The many lives of Columbus, then, is a mirror of how we have thought differently about him over the last 500 years. As history’s greatest saint and sinner, Christopher Columbus might be the ultimate Rorschach test. Tell me what you’ll be celebrating next Monday and I’ll tell you who you are. Happy hols!1. Columbus Was a “Manic Narcissist” Who Believed He Was God’s Agent Restall discovered Columbus wasn’t likable—he descended into believing he was divinely chosen and could even be found in the Old Testament. This grandiosity was partly his undoing as a colonial administrator.2. Columbus Failed as a Colonizer and Administrator Unlike the conq

Last weekend, the English reggae band UB 40 played in the Orpheum in Los Angeles and included in the set their 1980 song “Tyler”. Tyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not soTyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not soTyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not soTyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not soIn the audience was the song’s muse Gary Tyler who, as a sixteen year old in 1974, was put on death row for a crime he didn’t commit:Appeal to the governor, of LouisianaYou may get an answer the process is slowFederal court won, too much to openHe’s been there for five years and they won’t let him goThis week, Tyler released his autobiography, Stitching Freedom, in which he tells the story of the 41 years he spent in Angola high security prison for his “crime”. Yes, the process was slow - shamefully slow. It’s the shockingly true story of injustice, defiance and hope in Louisiana’s blood

Just be yourself many career coaches tell us. But for the psychologist and entrepreneur Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, the reverse is true. Don’t Be Yourself Chamorro-Premuzic advises in his new book, arguing that authenticity Is overrated and what to do instead. Drawing from extensive behavioral science research, Chamorro-Premuzic contends that success comes not from unleashing your unfiltered self but from understanding where “the right to be you ends and your obligation to others begins.” Authenticity has not only become a privilege for the elite and a trap for everyone else, he argues, but increasingly impossible to distinguish from AI-generated fakery. So don’t be yourself, Chamorro-Premuzic suggests, in defiantly inauthentic advice for both our careers and our lives. 1. Strategic Self-Presentation Beats Radical HonestySuccess comes from “strategic impression management” rather than authentic self-expression. The person who confidently claims “I’ve done this a hundred times” gets the job over the honest cand

What unites America, it used to be said, is a common commitment to “freedom”. But in our disunited times, it's worth remembering that two incompatible versions of freedom have actually divided rather than brought the United States together. As the historian Nicholas Buccola notes in his intriguing new book One Man’s Freedom, these competing freedoms are represented in the thinking of the two icons of modern American conservatism and liberalism: Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King. For Goldwater, freedom meant liberation from government interference—the right to be left alone to pursue economic success without federal meddling. For King, it meant empowerment—ensuring people had genuine capacity to participate fully in society. And as Buccola demonstrates, these competing visions persist in today’s debates over everything from healthcare to voting rights. When conservatives champion ‘medical freedom’ to refuse vaccines while liberals demand ‘reproductive freedom’ through government-protected abortion access

We’ve done a couple (here and here) of shows recently about the war on cars. But we never discussed the connections, both literal and metaphorical, between the damage of “Big Car” and “Big University” . According to the tenured Emory law professor Deepa Das Acevedo, what she calls in her new book, The War on Tenure, is really an attempt to transform the modern university into an academic version of Uber. By getting rid of tenure, Acevedo argues, academia is creating a new precariat of adjunct professors who are living in their cars. What she calls the “uberification” of academia is, so to speak, driving an assault not just on tenure, but on free thought and intellectual innovation. The war on tenure, then, is part of the broader neo-liberal project to replace full-time jobs with precarious labor. Academics - you have nothing to lose but your cars!1. The Charlie Kirk Fallout is a Watershed MomentIn just one month, an estimated 40-60 professors have been fired over social media posts about the assassination - w

One of the most painful lessons of the Kirk assassination is that conservatives are running rings around progressives in political mobilization - especially of young Americans. So how to make the left relevant in America again? For the philosopher Michael Brownstein, co-author of Somebody Should Do Something, progressives need to learn to lose both cleverly and loudly. And they can learn from NRA on this. Despite holding positions unpopular with most Americans, Brownstein acknowledges that the NRA created a powerful social identity around gun ownership and leveraged it for decades of legislative victories through masterful political strategy and organization. Drawing from social science research on collective action, Brownstein argues that highly theatrical defeats—like the recent Texas Democrats’ walkout or John Lewis’ bloody fate on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965—can catalyze change by forcing opponents into untenable positions. The key isn’t winning every battle, but making individual actions visible eno

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” were, of course, the closing words from Polanski’s 1974 movie, Chinatown. But the point of Jeff Chang’s new biography of Bruce Lee, Water Mirror Echo, is that by 1973, when Lee died, Asian America was more than just Chinatown. Lee made Asian America, Chang argues, by giving Asian Americans dignity. Chang shows how Lee’s journey from segregated Seattle and San Francisco neighborhoods to global stardom paralleled the rise of Asian American political consciousness. His films weren’t just action movies but anti-colonial spectacles - kicking down “No Chinese and Dogs” signs, fighting for workers against bosses, defending communities against gentrification. After Bruce Lee, chinatown became more, so much more, than just chinatown.1. Lee was an “anchor baby” who embodied the immigrant struggle Born in San Francisco in 1940 during Chinese Exclusion, Lee lived in segregated neighborhoods and learned firsthand what it meant to be a racialized minority - making him a powerful symbol fo

Back in 1990, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur called Jim Fruchterman chose purpose over profit. In his new book, Technology for Good, Fruchterman explains how nonprofit leaders like him are using software and data to solve our most pressing social problems. Thirty five years ago, when his investors vetoed a reading machine for the blind because the market was only $1 million annually, Fruchterman walked away from his $25 million-funded AI company to start his first nonprofit. Today, he’s still on the front line of the battle to show that technology’s greatest potential lies not in making billionaires richer, but in serving the 90% of humanity that big tech conveniently ignores.1. When profit and purpose clash, profit usually wins Fruchterman argues that when companies face a choice between social good and making money, they “pretty much always pick making more.” His own experience—investors vetoing a reading machine for the blind despite having the technology ready—exemplifies this. Even OpenAI, which started w

It’s not exactly news that the Nazis didn’t like the Jews. But according to the Rutgers historian Jochen Hellbeck, author of World Enemy Number One, the Nazi obsession went so far as to believe that the Soviet Union was owned and operated by a global cabal of Jews. And so, Hellbeck argues, it was not the Western powers but Communist Russia that Nazi Germany viewed as an existential threat—in fact, “World Enemy No. 1.” Jewish revolutionaries, the Nazis believed, had seized power in 1917 and were preparing the Soviet state to destroy Germany and the world. This paranoid delusion drove Nazi Germany’s most catastrophic decision: launching Operation Barbarossa in 1941. While Hitler made tactical alliances and fought on multiple fronts, Hellbeck demonstrates through his meticulous archival research that the destruction of “Judeo-Bolshevism” remained the Nazis’ primary ideological mission. Drawing on overlooked Soviet sources, including war correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg’s writings, Hellbeck shows how this twisted wor

The numbers are mind blowing. According to Roadkill authors Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay, cars have killed more people than both world wars combined. That’s how toxic our relationship with cars has been over the last century, they argue. The UN figures they cite—60 to 80 million direct deaths since the automobile’s invention—don’t even include premature deaths from air pollution or the millions seriously injured. Yet we’ve become “car blind,” Moore and Kay contend, unable to see how we’ve surrendered 80% of urban public space to vehicles that sit idle 96% of the time, creating what they call a hidden “car industrial complex” that reshapes cities in its image. So what to do? They advocate for “choice not obligation”—redesigning cities so people can drive if they want but aren’t forced to. They point to successful experiments from Barcelona’s superblocks to Dallas’s highway cap parks, where reclaimed streets have actually increased business revenue by up to 34% in some cases. Their goal isn’t to ban cars but

It’s the $320,000 question both parents and students are asking themselves: Is that four-year liberal arts degree really worth it? According to Brandeis University President Arthur Levine, it’s a question they should, indeed, be asking. In his co-authored book The Great Upheaval, Levine argues that the United States is experiencing a profound transformation not seen since the Industrial Revolution—when America’s classical colleges adapted to meet the needs of an emerging industrial economy. So what, exactly, does that mean for a useful liberal arts education today? Should students really invest their time in women’s studies in our AI age of Claude and ChatGPT?1. America is experiencing its second great transformation in historyLevine argues we’re in a shift from national analog industrial economies to global digital knowledge economies—comparable only to the Industrial Revolution. This creates massive winners and losers, with educational level becoming the primary dividing line in society.2. The $320K liberal

Some liberals might shake their virtuous heads and tut-tut disapprovingly. But, as the Brookings scholar William Galston argues, Donald Trump’s Old Testament politics of retribution has exposed the limitations of liberal thought. In his new book, Anger, Fear, Domination, Galston argues that liberals must recognize the dark passions driving politics and incorporate them into their own language. The power of political speech, Galston reminds us, depends on the recognition and promise of human passion. Those passions don’t have to be so hatefully retributive as Trump’s, of course. But contemporary liberals, Galston argues, must recognize that humans aren’t simply calculating machines and shape their language accordingly. Only then, he warns, will they be able to take on and defeat the dark passions currently corroding American politics. 1. Liberals Have Been Politically Naive About Human Nature Galston argues liberals have expected “dark passions” (anger, fear, domination) to disappear through rational discourse

“It’s happening. The question is whether it’s a dream or a nightmare. This week, OpenAI introduced Pulse, an AI assistant that knows what we want to do and think before we do. That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare welcomes Pulse as a “habit” that will “shape your day.” Unlike the techno-teleological Keith, however, I’m less enamored by Pulse. Do we really want a proactive AI assistant that not only controls what Keith calls the “front door” but every other door (and window) in our lives? Keith describes this as the “consumer install moment” - Sam Altman’s $10 trillion bet on ‘Abundant Intelligence.’ But what, exactly, is so abundant about this personalized machine intelligence that installs itself into our lives? Having a smart assistant determine our daily calendar might actually make us dumber. Such an “agentic” future is certainly no friend of human agency. Yeah, it’s happening. The end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?* The “Front Door” Battle is On: OpenAI’s Pulse represents a strategic shi

“What Trump is doing is not popular”. For the This Old Democracy podcaster and veteran Democratic activist Micah Sifry, that’s the good news of Trump’s sub-40% approval rate. The bad news, Sifry warns, is that the Dems remained a weak, divided party struggling to counter the MAGA-controlled Republicans. Learning from the campus success of Charlie Kirk, he says, the Democrats need to rediscover what once made them a party of the vibrant counterculture. And that certainly isn’t going to happen if grey functionaries like Schumer and Jeffries retain control of an increasingly gerontocratic party. He favors economic populism over identity politics, arguing that progressives made a “gigantic mistake” by favoring the woke politics of the university over working-class concerns. And so the New York based Sifry is cautiously optimistic about Zohran Mamdani whose primary victory, he is convinced, demonstrated that young voters will turn out for dynamic candidates who offer both generational change and credible ways to

Jacob Ward warned us. Back in January 2022, the Oakland-based tech journalist published The Loop, a warning about how AI is creating a world without choices. He even came on this show to warn about AI’s threat to humanity. Three years later, we’ve all caught up with Ward. So where is he now on AI? Moderately vindicated but more pessimistic. His original thesis has proven disturbingly accurate - we’re outsourcing decisions to AI at an accelerating pace. But he admits his book’s weakest section was “how to fight back,” and he still lacks concrete solutions. His fear has evolved: less worried about robot overlords, he is now more concerned about an “Idiocracy” of AI human serfs. It’s a dystopian scenario where humans become so stupid that they won’t even be able to appreciate Gore Vidal’s quip that “I told you so” are the four most beautiful words in the English language. I couldn’t resist asking Anthropic’s Claude about Ward’s conclusions (not, of course, that I rely on it for anything). “Anecdotal” is how it c

So where exactly is Trump’s America? According to the Brookings fellow Jonathan Rauch, the world’s largest economic, military and cultural power is “half way to Hungary” - the small, landlocked Central European country run by an equally small and landlocked man called Viktor Orban. For Rauch, this suggests that America is on its way to becoming the sort of pathetically petty patrimonial state that the wannabe dictator Orban is trying to establish in Hungary. But the idea of the world’s dominant superpower being “halfway to Budapest” sounds more like the title of a characteristically absurd central European novel. It suggests that Trump’s America is, in fact, currently lost in the mid-Atlantic. It’s nowhere. And if making America great again really does require borrowing anything from a country as small and landlocked as Hungary, then I fear for the historical significance of both Trump and his MAGA movement. Surely they could come up with a more original playbook than that?1. America is Following the “Hungari

Donald Trump made his own controversial case against the United Nations at the UN today, lecturing world leaders that “the UN is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them.” But he was beaten to this anti-UN manifesto by the New York City based journalist Seth Barron, who wrote “The End of the UN ” cover story for Tablet magazine this month. While Barron’s historically grounded critique is more academically rigorous than Trump’s, it essentially makes the same realpolitik argument: that there’s an irreconcilable contradiction between American interests and multilateral governance. Barron blithely suggests it’s time for the United States to withdraw from the UN entirely. But as I pressed him, without success, in our conversation, what then would replace international institutions when it comes to resolving seemingly intractable conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and beyond? 1. The UN Is Already Dead in PracticeBarron argues the UN has lost all meaningful influence and relevance. He compares it to