Keen On

“Once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we’re starting to see that now.” — Jacob Mchangama The Jyllands-Posten editor who published those Mohammed cartoons in 2005 spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He’d commissioned artists to say it with their pens, but the mob came after him with AK-47s. Copenhagen-born Jacob Mchangama watched that happen in a country where free speech had been considered as natural as breathing, and has since dedicated his professional life to defending it. Thus The Future of Free Speech, Mchangama’s new book coauthored with Jeff Kosseff. It’s also the reasoning behind his Future of Free Speech Institute at Vanderbilt, where Mchangama runs the only serious academic program dedicated to the proposition that democracy’s most essential freedom is in global retreat. The Varieties of Democracy dataset agrees. The number of countries where free speech is declining has increased dramatically; those where

“The media has its own agenda, completely separate from anything going on in the real world, creating the story themselves.” — Keith TeareLast night, somebody hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion. I live a couple of hills over, but heard nothing. Meanwhile, the New Yorker hurled its own explosive cocktail at Sam, publishing a 15,000-word hit piece rhetorically entitled “Sam Altman May Control Our Future. Can He Be Trusted?” No, of course, he can’t be trusted. Not according to the New Yorker. Especially with something as precious as, gasp, our future.Not everyone, however, is sold on this media cult of personality. In his That Was The Week editorial, Keith Teare tells the media to take their hands off Sam. I don’t disagree. Although I’m a bit skeptical of Keith’s attempt to demonize what he defines as a “devious” Dario Amodei. Whether it’s Altman, Amodei or Google’s AI honcho Demis Hassabis, all these guys are prisoners of their company’s structures and cultures. They are also vict

“It’s ultra stable. Health care doesn’t move. If you biopsied American health care in 2010 and again in 2026, no one could figure out which slide was which.” — Robert Pearl, MDBad news. The patient, I’m afraid, is ultra-stable. Robert Pearl, former CEO of Kaiser Permanente for eighteen years and author of ChatGPT MD, returns with the bleakest diagnosis we’ve heard all month. American healthcare, Dr Pearl says, is “ultra stable.” That might sound good. But it’s actually very very bad.If you biopsied American healthcare in 2010 and again in 2026, Pearl says, no clinician could tell the slides apart. Both were and are overpriced. Both underperforming. Hospitals still represent between 30-35% of expenses. Costs continue to rise at between 7-9% a year. There remain four hundred thousand misdiagnosis deaths annually. Burnout is stuck at 50%. The numbers haven’t moved in fifteen years.Meanwhile, a stealth revolution is already underway. 40% of Americans use generative AI every month for medical questions. 70-80% of

“You can face your history and still love your country. This is my attempt at doing that.” — Beverly GageWhen the Yale Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage finished her almost nine-hundred-page biography of J. Edgar Hoover, she needed a little break before starting her next book on Ronald Reagan. So she got in her old Subaru and spent six months on the road driving across America to prepare for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The result of these thirteen separate road trips is This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through US History. Gage’s Subaru broke down constantly. So, from time to time, did her health. But the American history she uncovered is anything but broken down.Historians, Gage argues, don’t think enough about geography. Visiting the homes of the first four US Presidents from Virginia, she saw how closely America’s slaveholding elite actually lived. Driving through the small towns on the Erie Canal, she found the corridor where abolitionism, women’s rights, temper

“Doing science is like reading the mind of God.” — Demis Hassabis, quoted in The Infinity MachineThis week’s New Yorker uncomplimentary profile of OpenAI’s CEO is entitled “The Many Faces of Sam Altman.” But not all AI leaders are quite as many faced as slippery Sam. Take, for example, Demis Hassabis, the North London based co-founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind. In his new biography, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, the British journalist Sebastian Mallaby argues that Hassabis is, in contrast, one faced. And that face is not only decent, but informed by the enlightened ethics of Baruch Spinoza and Immanuel Kant.Mallaby presents Hassabis as the anti-Altman. He’s stayed at DeepMind for sixteen years, lived in the same London house, drives a decade-old car. Rather than power, Google’s AI supremo seeks scientific enlightenment. Like Spinoza, his God is the master watchmaker of the universe. And so doing science, Hassabis explained to Mallaby in one of their ma

“There are parts of the business and finance world that are invested in making these things seem intimidating and scary. We really enjoy making things more approachable.” — Alex MayyasiWhat’s the last taboo? The thing that we are totally embarrassed to discuss? No, not sex. It’s money. At least according to Alex Mayyasi — frequent contributor to NPR’s Planet Money — who has just published Planet Money: How to Live Richer, Spend Smarter, and Afford the Life You Want, a field guide to the big economic forces that shape our working, saving, loving and leisure lives.Mayyasi argues that money is the last taboo. We talk openly (perhaps too openly) about our sex lives now. But we still don’t talk about our money lives — not with spouses, not with parents, not with our children. Companies that have tried full salary transparency report uncomfortable conversations about race and gender. Thus the need for Mayyasi’s new book. It’s not exactly porn, but Planet Money is designed to liberate us from our last taboo. Five Ta

“Historically, when the college-educated become politically radicalised, that does tend to lead to real shifts.” — Noam ScheiberA university degree has always been seen as a passport out of the working class. But according to the New York Times’ Noam Scheiber, the reverse is now true. In his new book, Mutiny, Scheiber argues that the good white-collar jobs college once promised have been quietly disappearing over the last fifteen years. The result, he argues, is the rise and revolt of what he calls a “college-educated” working class.Scheiber chose mutiny because it’s a term to describe workers who have lost confidence in management. College graduates who once imagined themselves as management-adjacent now regard the people in charge with deep suspicion. The university itself has become extractive — charging the same tuition for an art history degree as for an engineering degree, marketing video game design programmes to thousands of students who will never make a living from them, lending federal money with n

“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