Keen On America
Episodes
Trump Finally Gets the Priceless Book He Deserves: Ben Fountain on How Rasputin Swims the Potomac
09 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“The hyperreal is the real. The surreal is the real in The United States. We’ve reached that point. The absurd is the real. And so that’s what I...
The Unexceptional Exceptionalism of the United States: Michael Mandelbaum on the American Way of Foreign Policy
08 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“The United States has conducted an unusually ideological foreign policy, an unusually economic foreign policy, and an unusually democratic foreign ...
The Jeffrey Epstein of Antiquities: Matthew Campbell on the Man Who Got Away With Stealing the Gods,
07 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Objects in museums have to come from somewhere. The stories of how they came to be in those collections often involve laws being broken, unethical ...
D-Day for AI: How to Create an End Game That Will Benefit Everyone
06 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“AI represents successful capitalism. What we have alongside that is unsuccessful government. Government has no plan — left or right.” — Keith...
Good Bobby, Bad Bobby: Evan Thomas on the Greatest Riddle in 20th Century American Politics
05 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“He didn’t just say it, he meant it, he felt it — and the combination of the power guy, the ruthless power guy, and the profound idealist was fa...
Why Football Saves Our Souls: Brian Bunk on the Collective Beauty of the World’s Most Popular Game
04 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“That kind of put soccer on my radar as a sport. I saw how deeply it meant to people, in a way I didn’t appreciate prior to that. And then I was i...
Get the F*** Out of Your House: Yotam Marom on How to Raise the Volume on the Politics of Powerlessness
03 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Get the f*** out of your house and join an organisation. Groups are how we make movements. They’re how we make political and social change. They’...
Around the World in One Long Depression: Liaquat Ahamed on 1873 & the Making of the Global Economy
02 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Be optimistic about the boom, but don’t buy the stock.” — Liaquat Ahamed on the AI bubble Yesterday, Alexander Starritt argued that the 2008...
Drayton and Mackenzie: Alexander Starritt on How the 2008 Crash Ruined Everything
01 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“To explain the lives of people living in this moment, to look at the historical forces that are shaping all of us, you have to look at business and...
Ecocivilization and Our Discontents: Jeremy Lent on Why TINA Is Wrong
31 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“When you’re in a world that is careening out of control, where we’ve broken through seven of the nine safe dimensions of safe operating space t...
Anthropic Trounces OpenAI with Its Papal Pivot: Value Investing in Our AI Age
30 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“I don’t look to companies to be moral guides. I want them to be good companies. When you invest in the stock market, you want them to be growing ...
1776 as 1917: Sarah Pearsall's World History of the American Revolution
30 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“The thirteen colonies that became the United States were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. We need to t...
To Love or Hate the United States? Dominic Erdozain on the Problem of American Patriotism
29 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” — Randolph Bourne, via Dominic Erdozain Should Americ...
Life of the Party: Joe Cunningham on How Democrats Lost America’s Trust and How They Can Win It Back
28 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“I deliver it with the credibility of having won a district that Trump carried by 13 points. Not only how to speak to these voters, but how to win...
Is America Unfinished or Just Getting Started? Alexandra Natapoff on 250 Years of Justice and Injustice in the United States
27 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“As long as democracy is a collective endeavour of all the people who belong to it, in some sense it can never be finished — because we are consta...
Beyond the Lean Startup: Eric Ries on Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Ones Stay Great,
26 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“I took it for granted that we were trying to make the world a better place. But I think in retrospect that was naïve. What kind of change? For who...
God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: Jasper Craven on the Damage West Point Has Done to American Boys
25 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“There is a pretty powerful strain in America today in which men feel some need to be violent and domineering to sort of prove their masculinity. An...
What Albert Camus Teaches Us About America: David Masciotra on a Country of Strangers,
24 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“We’ve learned how to tolerate acts of violence, acts of widespread death, disease — that other developed nations simply don’t tolerate. And t...
Boy Meets Girl Meets AI Therapist: Fred Lunzer on Sike, Fictional Realism, and the Future of Love
23 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“If you write something you think is really fanciful today, tomorrow’s news headlines might be telling the exact same story. That’s the challeng...
Unvaccinated Under God: Kira Ganga Kieffer on Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America
22 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression — not as the product of scientific misinformation. These debates have ...
How to Win a Trade War: Soumaya Keynes on Trump, China, and Her Great-Great-Uncle Maynard
21 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“The rules-based system just hasn’t worked. China’s system is so opaque that you can’t see the subsidies. And when you’ve got China not inte...
Bad Entrepreneurs and Even Worse Artists: Does Capitalism Have a Future in the AI Age?
20 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“The end of labor means the end of paid slavery. And the opening up of freedom — that is to say, choice of how to spend your time. The only questi...
When California Was an Island: Peter Keating on the Cartography That Maps How We See the World
19 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Maps are communicating vast quantities of new knowledge that was only estimated. They convey this imaginative energy — an imaginative energy that...
Don’t Use the F-Word: David Ost on Why the Red Pill, Not Fascism, Demystifies the Far Right
19 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Fascism is the term that is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary political discussions. We can talk about right-wing populism — but the type of...
Don't Retire, Rewire: Michael Clinton's Longevity Nation
18 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Retirement is a false construct created a hundred years ago by the government. It was basically created when Social Security was born. Prior to tha...
How to Watch the World Cup Like a Genius: Nick Greene on Why the Best Team Doesn’t Always Win
17 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Soccer matches are poorly designed experiments — you don’t necessarily find out which team was better. But any soccer fan will tell you that. O...
Can Keith Teare Convince Jonathan Rauch That AI Is Benign? That Was the Week, Special Edition
16 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“The dangers are human, not AI. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what the AI does itself. In fact, even the idea that there is s...
Athens vs Sparta: Adrian Goldsworthy on the Rivalry That Made the West
16 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“History is really interesting because it’s about people. And people are interesting. So there are plenty of different ways of doing this, and I t...
Sometimes Fixed Sometimes Fickle: Audun Dahl on Why Our Moral Judgements Are Always in Flux
16 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“We need to develop better theories of why the other side believes what they do. Having an accurate theory includes recognizing if somebody is a psy...
From SEAL Sniper to Puddle Jumper: Brandon Webb on How to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids
15 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Being a father is probably one of the toughest and most rewarding jobs I’ve ever had. A lot of the principles I used to teach snipers apply to ki...
The Sweatshop of the Meritocracy: Dylan Gottlieb on How the Yuppies Conquered America
14 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“As recently as the mid-seventies, under 5% of Ivy Leaguers are headed to Wall Street. It’s actually not that attractive. But as Wall Street’s d...
Where Are the Firefighters? Jonathan Vigliotti on How Los Angeles Was Left to Burn
13 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“All the warnings were there. It was almost a carbon copy — the same warnings that were ignored before Paradise, ignored again before the Palisade...
What Would You Do With the Last 19 Minutes of Your Life? Vincent Yu on an Apocalypse that Fizzled
13 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“They’re all me. Every single one. I see them almost as if they’re inoculated on various petri dishes, and the petri dishes are all put into t...
A Nation of Strangers: Ece Temelkuran on Rebuilding Home in a Homeless World
11 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“We’re losing home on so many different levels. Physically. Politically. Morally. And after AI, spiritually — because language, our spiritual ho...
That Sounds Incredibly Boring: Keith Teare's Vision of our Jobless AI Future
10 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“You can’t be confident about human decision-making. You can be confident on the potential of technology. Humans are quite capable of making both ...
Hong Kong Burning: Simon Elegant on the 2019 Protests
09 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“It was a completely unthinking exercise in cost-cutting that made no sense in terms of the newspaper. I think perhaps if you want to destroy the ne...
Is London Really Falling? Bethanne Patrick on Patrick Radden Keefe, Freya India and the Collapse of Book Reviewing
08 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“If criticism isn’t going to be written by one human mind, what else is it for? Criticism done by AI means nothing.” — Bethanne Patrick Is Lo...
Never Trust a Handsome Soldier: Becky Holmes on the Past, Present and Future of Fraud
08 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Fraud makes up between 40 and 50 percent of all crime in the UK. Police resource dedicated to fraud: 1 percent. No country is giving fraud the atte...
The Mysterious Mr Murdaugh: James Lasdun on Why a Father Annihilated His Son
07 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Justice may have been served, but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up.” — James Lasdun In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh — wea...
Why History Keeps Happening: Patrick Wyman on Human Failure and Success in Building Civilizations,
06 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Every single person that we meet was both the endpoint of thousands of years that brought them there, and the midpoint of some other process, and w...
How Politicians Broke Our World: Ian Shapiro on Raising Ourselves Up After the Fall
05 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“The current crisis was far from inevitable. Politicians made consistently bad choices. In doing so, they fostered a crisis of confidence in politic...
Why the Future of Europe Is Wales: Glyn Morgan on the Rise and Fall of American Europe
04 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Post-war Europe is essentially an American protectorate. Europeans don’t like to admit that. They only came to realize just how dependent they we...
Make Hungary (and America) Boring Again: Marc Loustau on Why Orbán Lost and How to Defeat Trump
03 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Orbán rigged the electoral system to highly benefit the winner. He thought he would never face the realistic possibility of losing. When someone a...
Do We Really Want a No-Hands Job From Silicon Valley? Who Holds the Power in the Age of AGI
02 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Anyone that’s properly using AI now knows that you tell it what you want, it gives you a plan, carries out the work, and you judge and tweak. You...
May Day, May Day: Jason Pack on the Unhappy War in Iran We All Want to Ignore
01 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Trump has no strategy and no endgame. No amount of success in tactics will win. No military campaign has ever been won solely from the air.” — ...
God Looks After Fools, Drunks and the United States: John Steele Gordon on How Information Technology United America
01 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Nobody has ever made money selling America short. We’re an extraordinary country.” — John Steele Gordon To honor America’s semiquincentenn...
We Know You Can Pay a Million: Anja Shortland Illuminates the Dark Screen of Ransomware
30 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“It’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses. The sunglasses are the ransom. The damage to the car is fifty to seventy-five billion dol...
The Deadliest of Plagues? Gary Slutkin on Violence as Our Most Contagious Disease
29 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Violence has been misdiagnosed. And there’s a misdiagnosis that has caused us to not be able to control it as we could.” — Dr. Gary Slutkin ...
How Iraq Turned Some American Soldiers into Monsters: Helen Benedict on the Unintended Consequences of War
29 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
America is once again at war. Helen Benedict is one of our most distinguished writers on the moral consequences of war. Her new novel, The Soldier’s...
The Too Many Führers Problem: Steven J. Ross on the History of American Neo-Nazism
28 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“All these groups from 1945 on said: we can resist any hate group in America, even the Ku Klux Klan, as long as we take them on one at a time. But o...
The Truth Is Paywalled and the Lies Are Free: Brewster Kahle on the Internet of Forgetting
27 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free.” — Current Affairs editor, quoted by Brewster Kahle The internet, we were promised, would remem...
Are White Men Really Smarter Than Everybody Else? Steve Phillips on Who Actually Runs America
26 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“White men are 29 percent of the population but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all m...
Adulting: The Week That AI Finally Grew Up
25 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Sam Altman’s best case scenario is that abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but it also exacerbates inequality. That was his f...
A Terrible, Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South
24 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“The burdens of slavery did crush some people. They elicited outright armed rebellion from others. And between those two extremes, there’s all man...
Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong: Peter Wehner on Trump's Unholy War
23 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“They weren’t interested in being on the side of God so much as they are insistent that God is on their side.” — Peter Wehner on Hegseth and T...
The Revolutionary Center: Adrian Wooldridge on the Lost Genius of Liberalism
22 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Liberalism was founded in the middle of the eighteenth century as a revolutionary philosophy — a philosophy that tried to subvert the old world. ...
How to Be a Dissident: Gal Beckerman on Why Pessimism Is the Most Important Human Quality
21 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Pessimism is not fatalism. Fatalism is the belief that things will always necessarily be worse. Pessimism is the belief that things will probably g...
The Eleventh Commandment: Jamie Metzl and GPT-5 Write a New Moral Code for Humanity
20 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“These technologies are morally agnostic. They could be the best things ever and the worst things ever, and the determinant is us.” — Jamie Metz...
Friending the Machine: Victoria Hetherington on How to Fall in Love with Your Bot
19 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“I felt sad after every interview. Because it’s not real. These AI are able to elicit a very convincing illusion of empathy — even love. But it’...
Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous
18 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Let’s just say it out loud,” Keith Teare, publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, says. “AI is not dangerous.” Not all of you will ...
Read Fifty Books a Year: Deborah Kenny on Nurturing a Well-Educated Child
18 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“A mark of an intelligent person is humility. If you have the right amount of humility, then you’re seeking out knowledge from others rather than ...
Cold Feet over the Cold War: Daniel Bessner on Why Cold War Liberalism Was Unamerican
17 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“If God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty-first. Could you actually imagine people dying for communism or for liberal demo...
From One Mad King to Another: Don Watson's Shortest History of the United States
16 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Politics is the systematic organisation of hatreds.” — Henry Adams, quoted by Don Watson America is celebrating its 250th anniversary this Jul...
Agency, Agency, Agency: Sophie Haigney on the Three Things All the Worst People Want
15 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“I find it very odd that agency is being promoted for its own sake rather than being connected to any kind of value system. Because without those th...
How Osama Bin Laden and Barron Trump Explain the World: Franklin Foer on Arsenal, the MAGA World Cup and an Unlikely Theory of Globalization
14 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Globalization has revived tribalism. Instead of destroying local cultures, as the left predicted, it has made them stronger. Far from the triumph o...
Biden’s Blue Authoritarianism: Stuart Schrader on How America’s Police Seized Power From Below
14 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“You don’t have enough money to pay all the bills? Well, cut the budget for parks and rec, cut the budget for libraries, cut the budget for fixing...
Forget Iran: Eyck Freymann on Taiwan, China, and Why America Keeps Hitting the Snooze Button,
13 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“We keep getting wake-up calls and snoozing the alarm. Now is the time to actually get out of bed and confront this problem before it is too late.”...
Can I Say It? Jacob Mchangama on Our Global Crisis of Free Speech
12 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we’re starting to see that now.” — Jacob Mchangama The J...
Slippery Sam, Devious Dario, Honest Hassabis: Blowing Up Silicon Valley’s Cult of Personality
11 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“The media has its own agenda, completely separate from anything going on in the real world, creating the story themselves.” — Keith TeareLast n...
The Failure of Ultra-Stability: Robert Pearl on Why American Healthcare is Quietly Rationing Us to Death
11 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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 slid...
Between Pride and Shame: Beverly Gage Gets in her Subaru & drives Across 250 Years of American History
10 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“You can face your history and still love your country. This is my attempt at doing that.” — Beverly GageWhen the Yale Pulitzer Prize-winning hi...
The Many Faces of AI: Sebastian Mallaby on Demis Hassabis and the Quest to Read God’s Mind
09 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Doing science is like reading the mind of God.” — Demis Hassabis, quoted in The Infinity MachineThis week’s New Yorker uncomplimentary profil...
More Embarrassing Than Sex: Alex Mayyasi on Why Money Talk Makes Us So Nervous
08 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“There are parts of the business and finance world that are invested in making these things seem intimidating and scary. We really enjoy making thin...
An Anticapitalist Mutiny: Noam Scheiber on the Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class
07 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Historically, when the college-educated become politically radicalised, that does tend to lead to real shifts.” — Noam ScheiberA university deg...
Truth is Dead: Steven Rosenbaum on AI as a Spectacularly Good Liar
06 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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 int...
The Joe Biden Tragedy: Julian Zelizer on the Last New Deal President
05 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“His ultimate failure is not simply losing. It’s his failure to stop Trumpism from being such a dominant force in America.” — Julian ZelizerOn...
We Shape Our AI, Thereafter It Shapes Us: How to Maintain Human Agency in Our Agentic Age
04 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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 Ma...
Stop, Don't Do That: Peter Edelman on What Bobby Kennedy Can Still Teach America
03 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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 ...
That's My Story, But Not Where It Ends: Robert Polito on Bob Dylan's Second Act
02 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“That’s my story, but not where it ends.” — Bob Dylan, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in the Ame...
Does God Love Haiti? Dimitri Elias Léger on the Haitian Scorer of the Greatest Goal in US History
01 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“When Haiti plays Brazil, Haitians will feel equal. Football gives even the weakest and the poorest a fighting chance. That is profound.” — Dimi...
One Life in Nine World Cups: Simon Kuper on Football Fever and Why the Beautiful Game Still Matters
31 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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 vic...
What If It’s a Bunch of Shit? Margaret Rutherford on the Relentless Camouflage of a Perfect Life
31 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“There is tremendous loneliness in the kind of life where you just don’t feel like anybody knows you.” — Margaret RutherfordYesterday, the Bro...
Perfection Is the Devil: Daniel Smith on Boredom, Envy, and Why Our Darkest Emotions Aren’t So Dark
30 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Perfection is the devil. Growth means a greater capaciousness, not a narrowing and an optimisation.” — Daniel SmithDon’t feel bad about feeli...
At the Heart of the American Center: Corey Nathan on How to Talk Politics and Religion Without Killing Each other
29 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“We can survive. Can we thrive? That’s a different question.” — Corey NathanRobert Mueller died last week. Educated at Princeton, this Vietnam...
Don’t Fight the Last War: Why Anthropic vs US Government Matters
28 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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 unhappi...
Excessive Wealth Disorder: Glen Galaich on the $2 Trillion That Could Save Democracy
28 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Why does someone need to be the first trillionaire? The damage it’s doing just to get to that level is extreme.” — Glen GalaichExcessive weal...
Bring the Friction Back: Stephen Balkam on Kids, Social Media, and Tech’s Big Tobacco Moment
27 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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.” — St...
How Stories Can Save Us: Colum McCann on Narrative Four, Einstein, Freud, and the Power of Empathy
26 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“The shortest distance between you and me is a story.” — Colum McCannIn 1932, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud asking if humanity could cu...
Politics in the Age of Total Control: Jacob Siegel on the Information State that Came Home
25 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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 accompli...
America's Suez Moment? Soli Özel on Why Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again
25 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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 anno...
How to Be Agreeably Disagreeable: Julia Minson on How to Argue with Your MAGA Father-in-Law
24 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“The problems start when I conclude that only an uninformed, unintelligent, or evil person could hold the view that you hold.” — Julia MinsonIn ...
Let’s Ban Billionaires: Noam Cohen on the Know-It-Alls 2.0
23 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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 i...
Was St. Francis of Assisi the First Silicon Valley Critic? Dan Turello on 800-Years of Tech Anxiety
22 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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, ...
A Willing Philadelphia Story: Richard Vague on the Wealthiest & Most Invisible American Founding Father
21 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Washington and Hamilton were governed by Willing.” — John Adams, 1813Thomas Willing voted against the Declaration of Independence. He was the w...
Symbolic Capitalism vs. Symbolic Democracy: Will the $10 Trillion AI Startup Change Everything?
20 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“I don’t know if any rational person ever became a billionaire running a disruptive company.” — Keith TeareIs capitalism by permission of demo...
Nature's Last Dance: Natalie Kyriacou on Ecocide, Oiled Penguins, and Why We Need to Watch the Birds
19 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“We do not exist without nature — unless Silicon Valley figures something out in their bunkers.” — Natalie KyriacouForget the Middle East for ...
What Came First: Stories or Language? Kevin Ashton on the Story of Stories
19 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Nobody’s reality is more or less real.” — Kevin AshtonIt’s the chicken and egg question. What came first: stories or language? For Kevin As...
Have our iPhones Eaten our Brains? Nelson Dellis on Hacks to Restore our Focus and Boost our Memory
18 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“I don’t like the idea of losing out to a machine because I feel like I’m losing a part of myself in the process.” — Nelson Dellis, six-time...
Hard Times Again? Jeff Boyd on Chicago, Charles Dickens and Curtis Mayfield
17 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“If we don’t fight, then what are we doing?” — Jeff BoydHow do you write fiction about contemporary America when reality itself is stranger th...
An Act of War? Brandeis President Arthur Levine on Trump’s University Policy
16 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“Had another nation done this, we would regard this as an act of war.” — Arthur Levine, President of Brandeis UniversityForget Iran for a moment...