Keen On America

Lindsey

06 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The great John Maynard Keynes explained it a century ago. In his 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," Keynes predicted that the...

The School of Misery: The Children of a Manufactured Miracle

05 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Back in 2018, the New York Times reporters Katie Benner and Erica L. Green exposed the disturbing reality of the T.M. Landry college prep school in ru...

WTF Will Happen in 2026? The Promise and Peril of the New Year

05 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

WTF will happen in 2026? Over the last week, we’ve been running a series of interviews about the promise and peril of the new year. And in this new ...

Why Smart People Still Believe in God

03 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

If Darwin’s evolutionary theories couldn’t kill America’s faith in God, then what could? That’s the message in Daniel K. William’s new book,...

The All-Collar Crisis: When White Collar Work Meets Blue-Collar Reality

02 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Hold onto your collars. The AI-generated crisis of work is here, and the storm will concentrate on white-collar workers from the professional economy....

Keen on America: Andrew Reflects on 2025 & 2026

01 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Happy New Year everyone! As the final show of 2025 and first for 2026, we turned the tables and had me interviewed by the formidable David Masciotra. ...

The Istanbul Perspective: A Time for Monsters and Middle Powers

31 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We live in transitional times. "The old is dead and the new cannot be born—this is the time of monsters," Antonio Gramsci famously wrote. But today,...

From Carney to Epstein: Orderers vs Disorderers in our Age of Upheaval

30 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For Jason Pack, presenter of the Disorder podcast, the person of the year for 2025 was the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney. But for 2026, Pack pr...

The China Paradox: Chris Schroeder on what America is Missing

29 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

According to the German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, China both goes to bed and wakes up thinking of China rather than America. How does the W...

That Was The Year in Tech: When Nothing Happened (except Everything, Everywhere, All at Once)

28 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

That was the year in tech. When nothing and yet everything happened. A year betwixt and between, simultaneously revolutionary and uneventful. That's t...

Morbid Symptoms Abundant: The Demolition of Pax Americana

27 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For all the talk of abundance, what’s really abundant these days are the morbid symptoms of a dying international system. According to Georgetown’...

From Munich to Mar-a-Lago: Is Trump Appeasing Putin in Ukraine?

26 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Lots of headlines today about "peace" negotiations in Ukraine. But does Putin really want to end the war — and is Trump able and willing to broker a...

Americans Actually Dislike Each Other: The Unsavory Truth Behind the Data

25 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What’s the data behind the data? According to data scientist Andrea Jones-Rooy, America-by-the-numbers doesn’t always add up to a pretty picture. ...

Cracked, Jagged and Leaderless: The World is No Longer Flat

24 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Did 2025 mark the formal end of the neoliberal age? Gary Gerstle, author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, has already written neoliberali...

2025: The AI Year Scripted by Gary Marcus in 2024

23 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gary Marcus claims to just be an AI “realist”. Some would describe the controversial AI sceptic otherwise. But whatever his moniker, Marcus’ war...

Justice is Round: Mussolini Couldn't Woo the World Cup, Neither Will Trump

22 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Could Trump woo the upcoming 2026 World Cup and subvert the world’s most beloved sport for his own ugly ends? Not according to Simon Kuper, the Angl...

Capitalism with a Nationalist Face: What Comes after Neoliberalism

21 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What comes after neoliberalism? According to Branko Milanovic, the World Bank’s former lead research economist, it’s capitalism with a nationalist...

Trump 0.2: The Failing Revolution

20 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The 2025 Trump was supposed to be a more refined version of the 2017 original. But according to National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn, Trump 2.0 ha...

The Arrival of the American Future: Stephen Marche on the Crisis in 2025 United States

19 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Whither America? For the Canadian writer Stephen Marche, that’s no longer the question. America in 2025, for Marche, has already withered. The Toron...

Bethanne's Best Books of 2025: Where Fact & Fiction Blur

18 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The best fiction seems real, the best non-fiction books read like fiction. That, at least, is Bethanne Patrick’s take on the best books of 2025. Sel...

2025 as the New 1925: Will Crypto be Trump's Teapot Dome Scandal?

17 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Might 2025 turn out to be the new 1925? In other words, are we currently in the Roaring Twenties and on the brink of another Great Depression? This hi...

Ray Suarez on 2025: America's Last Idealist Looks Back at a "Jaw-Dropping" Year

16 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“If they want to put on my tombstone ‘The Last Idealist’, that’s fine,” the iconic (and I don’t use that word lightly) American journalist...

Hollywood's Last Dance: Time Warner and the Death of the American Dream Machine

15 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

So what does the latest Time Warner brouhaha tell us about the state of America? According to Daniel Bessner, host of the American Prestige podcast, i...

Big Brother Down Under: Is it 1984 Already in Australia?

14 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It’s been quite a week in tech. The Australian social media ban, the Netflix vs Paramount fight over Warner Bros & the Disney-OpenAI deal. That Was ...

Mount Rushmore: America's Most Monumental Contradiction

13 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Mount Rushmore, with its images of four Presidents carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota, is America’s most identifiable monument. It might al...

George Packer's Emergency: When Facts Fail, Turn to Fiction

12 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

George Packer is one of the most celebrated non-fiction writers on contemporary America. So why, in his new book The Emergency, has he turned to fic...

How 9/11 Broke the News, Both Then and Now: CNN's Finest Hour Was Also Its Last

11 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The CNN anchor Carol Lin was on air on September 11, 2001 when the first plane hit the tower. So, in that now seemingly distant broadcast media age, s...

An Anglo-American Way of Troublemaking: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford

10 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Jessica was the good Mitford sister. The English aristocrat who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, then came to America and dedicated he...

How Capitalism Can Save Capitalism: The Case for Stakeholder Capitalism

09 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The American economy is a numbers game and those numbers are becoming more and more unfair. “30 years ago, if you were born in the bottom 25th perce...

2% of Americans are Homeless: America's Most Shameful Open Secret

08 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Numbers often tell the story best. Yesterday, we discussed today’s 95/5 reality in which 5% of Americans control 95% of the wealth. Today, in our c...

A Code RED For Humanity: For 80/20 - the 95/5 Rule of our AI Age

07 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Forget Pareto’s 80/20 rule. What AI is doing is producing a new rule in which 5% of society captures 95% of the value of this revolution. That Was T...

Why "Progress" is Ruling Class Propaganda: The Dangerous Idea that Built Civilization and is Now Destroying it

06 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Is the idea of “progress” the propaganda of the ruling class? Yes, according to Samuel Miller McDonald, author of Progress: How One Idea Built Civ...

Two VCs, No Filter: The Naked Truth about Elon Musk and Sam Altman

05 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

They certainly are an odd couple. Silicon Valley veterans Dave McClure and Aman Verjee have been friends and business partners for 25 years — first ...

From Mongolia to Silicon Valley: A Venture Capitalist's American Dream

04 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

If you think the American Dream is dead, then you probably don’t know the story of Lu Zhang. Born in Mongolia and educated in China, Zhang came to S...

The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism

03 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We all know about the broken American Dream. But according to the American-based China scholar Minxin Pei, China’s dream is equally broken. In his n...

A Tale of Two Kellys: Peter Wehner on the Intellectual and Moral Decline of the American Right

02 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For Peter Wehner, American politics is a tale of two Kellys. On the one hand, there’s the moral resistance of Arizona Senator Mark Kelly to what app...

Guantanamo: The Myth vs the Reality

02 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dick Cheney died four weeks ago, but his dark legacy lives on—quite literally—at Guantanamo Bay. The human rights lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan wa...

The AI Race is a Myth: Why "Who's Winning" is the Wrong Question

30 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Who’s winning and losing in AI plays like a wacky race in that every week there seems to be a new leader. But that’s actually the wrong way of thi...

Strategic Hibernation: A Business Survival Guide for Turbulent Times

29 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“May you live in interesting times,” is supposed to be a Chinese mantra. But according to Cambridge University China expert, Christopher Marquis, ...

Italian Football: The Art of Defense and The Soul of a Nation

28 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Few journalists, certainly non-Italians, know Italian football as intimately as The Athletic’ James Horncastle, co-author of The Soccer 100. For Hor...

From Feudal Lords to AI Billionaires: Capitalism's Thousand-Year Conquest of the World

27 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Should we be giving thanks today for our capitalist system? Maybe. But we should certainly be thankful for a 1100-page book about the history of capit...

Why Football's Greatest Player Might Be Its Most Boring: The Problem (Yawn) of Lionel Messi

26 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In The Soccer 100, the Athletic’s list of the greatest footballers in history, Lionel Messi is ranked number one. Perhaps. But he might also be its ...

Maradona, Pele or Messi: Who is the Greatest Footballer of All Times?

25 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Maradona, Pele or Messi? It’s the eternal debate. Who is the greatest footballer of all time? According to The Soccer 100, The Athletic’s new book...

All Sparta, No Athens: The Decline and Fall of Empires

24 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Whither America? It’s the question that the Swedish writer Johan Norberg examines in both a recent Washington Post op-ed as well as his new book, Pe...

Where Does Abundance Come From? How to Reinvent a Fairer Future in our AI Age

23 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I’ve spent this week in Washington DC where most people seem suspicious and sometimes even downright hostile about the future. Especially the suppos...

The Zakaria Paradox: Fareed Zakaria on the Triumph of Reactionary Politics in Our Revolutionary Post-Industrial Age

22 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Call it the Zakaria paradox. We live in revolutionary times, the CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria explains, and yet it’s the re...

How American Eugenics Fueled Nazi Euthanasia: Psychiatry's Forgotten Complicity in the Holocaust

21 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Did American eugenics really fuel the murderous euthanasia programs of the Nazis? Yes, according to Susanne Paola Antonetta, author of The Devil’s C...

Chris Matthews on Robert F. Kennedy: Ten Reasons Why Bobby Still Matters

20 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On November 20, 1925, Robert Francis Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. A hundred years later, Bobby might matter more than ever. Chris Ma...

One Battle After Another in Hollywood: Why Gen Z Has Abandoned Cinema and What It Says About American Culture

19 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

25 movies and 0 hits: it’s been a particularly rough quarter for Hollywood. But as I discuss with the cultural commentator David Masciotra, it’s a...

Student Debt as Modern American Serfdom: A Mother Stole $200,000 in Her Daughter's Name

18 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It’s the ultimate financial nightmare. Kristin Collier, a young student in Minnesota, woke up one morning to discover that her mother had taken out ...

Keen on Hispanic America: How Latino TV Networks Reshaped American Politics and Culture

17 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There are those who ask why so many Americans speak Spanish. But according to the Latino media entrepreneur and historian Javier Marin, you might as w...

Is There An Orchestrated Moral Panic Against AI? Or Is This Just Another Figment of a Paranoid Silicon Valley?

16 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The big news in Silicon Valley this week of a supposedly orchestrated “Panic Campaign” against AI. According to the researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt, ...

What Yogi Berra can teach Silicon Valley: From Tulip and Railway Manias to Dotcom and AI Bubbles

15 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“Predictions are hard,” Yogi Berra once quipped, “especially about the future”. Yes they are. But in today’s AI boom/bubble, how exactly can...

The Case for American Power: Why Hypocrisy is the Price of Idealism

14 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

America is not only a good country, but it can also make the world a better place. That’s the somewhat surprising conclusion of the progressive Wash...

Obama as Gorbachev and Trump as Yeltsin: How America is Like the Soviet Union Before Its Collapse

13 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We’ve done shows before on how contemporary America resembles late-stage Soviet society. But none quite as intriguing as with the Russian-born, US-b...

Dr Stranglove 2.0: Silicon Valley as the New Trillion Dollar Military-Industrial Complex

13 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The world is a remake. Yesterday’s show featured the MAGA remake of The Handmaid’s Tale. Today it’s Dr Strangelove 2.0 and the remaking of the t...

The Handmaid's Tale Is No Longer Fiction—Welcome to the Brave New MAGA World of Trad Wives and State Fecundity

12 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Back in 2021, Margaret Atwood came on the show to give her dark take on the American future. Four years later, Atwood’s prescience, particularly in ...

From Pigeons to Polyamory: A New Yorker Cartoonist's Fix For American Loneliness

11 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How to fix today’s epidemic of loneliness? For the New Yorker cartoonist and author Sophie Lucido Johnson, the answer involves both pigeons and poly...

How Lawyers Created a Can't Do America: The Tragedy of Too Many Laws and Not Enough Innovation

10 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Lawyers usually like the law. The more the better. But in addition to his life as a top corporate lawyer, Philip K. Howard has made a second career ou...

Enstatification Over Enshittification: America as the New China

09 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

My neologism-du-jour is “enstatification”. It’s what is happening in MAGA America with Trump’s Gaucho-style swaggering into the economy and h...

Six Books, One Story: The Closing of the American Century

08 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

One big story captures all six books selected by the Financial Times for their short list of best business books of 2025. As the FT’s Senior Busines...

Women Lie Too: A Smug San Francisco Intellectual Cross-Examines a Fearlessly Authentic Florida Psychologist

08 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We all have our roles. I’m the smug San Francisco intellectual and the Orlando-based Dr Chloe Carmichael is the fearlessly authentic psychologist. S...

Beyond the New Deal: How the Left Must Reinvent Itself in a Populist Age

07 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A week is a long time in American politics. I did this interview with Alex Zakaras last week, before the midterms and Trump’s slide in the polls. Bu...

Why Tech Billionaires Are So Angry: Elon Musk and the Gilded Rage of Silicon Valley

06 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

If money is supposed to make you happy, then why do tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen seem so miserably angry? That’...

The Bell Curve Author Takes God Seriously: But What if God Doesn't Take Him Seriously?

05 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Bell Curve author joins the intellectual mob (Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, Ross Douthat et al) and finds GodCharles Murray, the infamous co-author of...

Dignity Has Never Been Photographed: More Balkan Ghosts for our Indignant Times

04 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Lea Ypi’s new book about her Greek-Albanian grandmother is a philosophical meditation on dignity, a history of Ottoman collapse and Balkan nationali...

Democracy's Dangerous Flirtation with Autocracy: Michael McFaul on America's Abdication of Global Leadership

03 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A former US ambassador to Russia warns of America’s slide into autocracyAs American ambassador in Moscow between 2012 and 2014, Michael McFaul had a...

Nobel Laureate Peter Agre: Why Scientists Must succeed Where Politicians Fail

02 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A Nobel laureate on why we should sometimes trust scientists, and not politicians, to fix the futurePeter Agre won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 20...

Why Our Fear of Technology Is Nothing New—And Why That Should Give Us Hope: From Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT

01 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why our panic about AI is nothing new—and why history suggests we have far more creative agency over our technological future than either Silicon Va...

Not Even God Can Judge Tupac Shakur: How a White Suburban Sportswriter Found the Humanity and Tragedy Behind Hip-Hop’s Most Misunderstood Star

31 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

WHY LISTEN? Because Jeff Pearlman strips away the myth to reveal the real Tupac Shakur—a brilliant, wounded, and fiercely human artist whose story s...

Fighting to Tell the Truth: Why every Film about War is an Anti-War Film

30 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After almost two decades in limbo, Michael Pack’s once-rejected Iraq War film finds its moment — a reminder that even the most supposedly “patri...

Between the River and the Sea: American Jews and the Soiling of the Zionist Dream

29 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Perhaps the real question isn’t whether we can still talk about Israel, but whether we can afford not to. Silence, Daniel Sokatch warns, is complici...

The Vinci Code: How AI is Turning Everyone into James Bond

28 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As AI radically democratizes the world, we’re all about to become James Bond — or so says longtime spook watcher (and player) Anthony Vinci. In hi...

Huawei vs Ericsson: How Huawei Turned Sweden's "Neutral" Tech Advantage Into a Cold War Liability

27 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Huawei matters, not just because it’s the world’s largest telecommunications company, but because it reveals so much about contemporary Chinese ec...

How Smart is the MAGA Intelligentsia? The Professors, Philosophers, and Trolls who Transformed Rage into a Winning Political Ideology

26 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

So how smart is the MAGA intelligentsia? According to Laura K. Field — a longtime observer of the American right and author of Furious Minds — the...

This Is Not a Browser—Did René Magritte Really Predict the End of the Web Age?

25 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Belgian surrealist René Magritte was a smart artist, but could the 20th century futurist really have predicted the end of the Worldwide Web age? ...

The Panic of the Intellectuals: From Ezra Pound to the Trumpagies of Today

25 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

American intellectuals always seem to believe they are living through the end times. From the fascist poet Ezra Pound in the 1930s to the historian of...

How to Choke Your Enemy: Why America Turned the World Economy into its Weapon of Global Domination

24 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How should America choke enemies like Iran, Russia and China? Not on the battlefield—according to Edward Fishman, that’s yesterday’s game. Today...

All Religions Are Absurd Because We Are Absurd: How the Internet is Creating the First New Form of Religious Community in 250,000 Years

23 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Twenty years ago, the religious scholar Reza Aslan wrote his first book, There is No god but God, about the origins, evolution and future of Islam. It...

Why the Real Road to Serfdom Runs Through Silicon Valley: Tim Wu on the Extractive Economics of Platform Capitalism

22 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Last time the anti-monopoly crusader Tim Wu appeared on the show, he was warning broadly about the road to serfdom. But in his new book, The Age of Ex...

Are We Still Fighting the Hundred Years War? Why Joan of Arc, Agincourt, and the Black Death Aren't Quite Dead

22 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A couple of years ago, I asked the great military historian Richard Overy if World War Two had ended yet. Overy answered inconclusively, suggesting th...

From Cancelled Students to Coddled Autocrats: The Crisis of Free Speech in America

21 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Two years ago, free speech champion Greg Lukianoff came on the show to express his concerns about conservative students getting cancelled on college c...

The Deliveroo Effect: Why Instant Delivery Politics and Economics Is Harming Democracy and Making Us Miserable

20 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What the former Finance Minister of Chile Andres Velasco has called the Deliveroo effect is most evident in Poland. Despite unprecedented economic gro...

A Giant Crypto Grift: Xbox Chief on His New Blockchain Thriller and Why Web3 Still Matters

19 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the midst of today’s AI hysteria, have we forgotten about blockchain technology and the seductive Web3 promise of decentralization? Robbie Bach, ...

An American Epidemic of Speculation: Bubble Blowing in Silicon Valley and Washington DC

19 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Bubble or not? But the debate that’s been raging over the current AI exuberance might be missing the bigger point. Yes, of course, it’s a trillion...

Should a College be a Museum or a Startup? Why Universities Need to Teach Failure

18 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What’s the point of going to college? There used to be an obvious answer to this: to acquire the knowledge to get a better job. But in our AI age, w...

American Advocates of Foreign Devils: How Rudy Giuliani and Hunter Biden Sold Access to US Foreign Policy

17 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What unites Rudy Giuliani and Hunter Biden? According to the New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel, they are both on the payroll of corrupt foreign in...

Sometimes We Need a Calamity: How to Save the American Experiment

16 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How to Save the American experiment? That’s the question the Yale historian John Fabian Witt asks this week in both a New York Times feature and his...

The Frankenstein Version of Neo-Liberalism: When American Business Overtook Government

15 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For financial journalist Elizabeth MacBride, the New American economy is like the old one - only worse. Describing it as the “Frankenstein version o...

America as a Contradiction Trapped Inside an even Bigger Contradiction: Princeton Historian's Explanation for Everything, Everywhere All at Once

14 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Churchill described Communist Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. For Pulitzer Prize winning Princeton historian, Paul Starr, Am...

Jeffrey Archer: How Margaret Thatcher would have disciplined a Naughty Donald Trump

13 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At 85, the venerable Jeffrey Archer has lived through enough crises to stay calm and carry on whatever the stormy political weather. The best-selling...

Sam Altman's Rigged Imperial Gambit: Too Important to Fail & Too Well-Financed to Go Public

12 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

History rarely repeats itself, especially speculative bubbles. As it becomes increasingly obvious that today’s AI bubble will dramatically burst, th...

America's Most Wounded Generation: Returning Home after World War II

11 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Tom Brokaw famously described America’s World War II servicemen as the “Greatest Generation”. But according to the historian David Nasaw, the A...

AI Hype is a Feature, not a Bug: Why We Can't Trust Big Tech With Our Agentic Future

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Springtime for Charlatans: How Grifters, Swindlers and Hucksters are Bamboozling the Media, the Markets and the Masses

09 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 gr...

Navigating around Christopher Columbus: The Nine Lives of the Genoese Sailor Who Became History's Greatest Saint and Sinner

08 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Next Monday is Columbus Day. Or should it be Indigenous People’s Day? According to the historian Matthew Restall we should be celebrating both Colum...

41 Years for a Crime He Didn't Commit: Gary Tyler's Journey from Death Row to Freedom

07 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Don't Be Yourself: Why the Cult of Authenticity Is Killing Not Just Your Career but Your Life

06 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Just be yourself many career coaches tell us. But for the psychologist and entrepreneur Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, the reverse is true. Don’t Be Your...

Two Freedoms and Two Americas: Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King's Incompatible Versions of Liberty

05 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 incompa...

The Uberification of Academia: Why Adjunct Professors are Living in their Cars

04 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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, ...