Keen On America
Episodes
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, ...
How to Lose Loudly: What the Left can Learn from the NRA
04 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most painful lessons of the Kirk assassination is that conservatives are running rings around progressives in political mobilization - espe...
More Than Chinatown: Bruce Lee and the Invention of Asian American Identity
03 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“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 n...
The AI Pioneer Who Chose Purpose Over Profit: Jim Fruchterman on Why Big Tech Can't Be Trusted with Our Future
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Back in 1990, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur called Jim Fruchterman chose purpose over profit. In his new book, Technology for Good, Fruchterman explai...
World Enemy Number One: Nazi Germany's Obsession with 'Judeo-Bolshevism'
01 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 On...
The True Cost of Roadkill: Cars Have Caused 60 to 80 Million Deaths in the Last 100 Years
30 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The numbers are mind blowing. According to Roadkill authors Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay, cars have killed more people than both world wars combined...
Is that $320,000 College Degree Really Worth It? The President of Brandeis on why Colleges Must Adapt or Become Irrelevant
29 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 Bran...
The Dark Passions Driving American Politics: Why Liberals Must Acknowledge Anger, Fear, and the Lust for Domination
28 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Some liberals might shake their virtuous heads and tut-tut disapprovingly. But, as the Brookings scholar William Galston argues, Donald Trump’s Old ...
The AI Assistant That Knows Your Life Before You Do: The End of the Beginning or the Beginning of the End?
27 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“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 wan...
TRUMP IS NOT POPULAR: How a Sub 40% Approval Offers Hope for the Dems
26 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“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 ...
The Idiocracy Trap: Why Smart Machines are making Humans Dumb & Dumber
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 c...
Halfway to Hungary: Jonathan Rauch on the Authoritarian Playbook that Trump Borrowed from a Small, Landlocked Central European State
24 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
So where exactly is Trump’s America? According to the Brookings fellow Jonathan Rauch, the world’s largest economic, military and cultural power i...
The Case Against the United Nations: The Israel Obsession, Rwanda, and the Haiti Peacekeeping Scandal
24 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 in...
From Fentanyl to Fulfillment: How the Tuba Civil Rights Movement Can Save American Democracy
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As the prize-winning author of Dreamland and The Least of Us, Sam Quinones is one of the most acclaimed authorities on America’s deadly drug epidemi...
Kimmel-Kirk and the End of the Television Age: Why Free Speech Has Never Been Freer
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I suspect both left and right have the Kimmel-Kirk story wrong. Rather than being about free speech versus hate speech, it’s actually the story of t...
A 107 Reasons to Dislike 107 Days: Kamala Harris Throws Everyone, Including Herself, Under the Bus
21 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is there anyone who will defend Kamala Harris’ latest debacle, her 107 Days memoir that has irritated prominent Democrats like Josh Shapiro, Tim Wal...
Gutted and Glutted: The Dire Economics of Podcasting in the AI Age
20 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Gutted by AI larceny and glutted by an avalanche of shows, the podcast economy is in deep crisis. So says Marshall Poe, founder of The New Books Netwo...
The Innovation Paradox Undermining the Digital Revolution: How Magical Technology Isn't Translating into Miraculous Economic Progress
19 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the most curious paradox of today’s digital revolution. While the computers, the internet, smartphones and AI all appear magical, they haven’...
Should Billionaires Be Banned? Why Extreme Wealth Might Be Incompatible with Democracy and the Survival of the Earth
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Should being a billionaire be illegal? Or, at least, actively discouraged? That’s the argument at the heart of Ingrid Robeyns’ intriguing case aga...
Why Trump Might Be Right About Greenland: How a 57,000-Person Island Became Critical to 21st Century Geopolitics
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If Donald Trump is a broken clock only right twice daily, then one of those truths might be US policy toward Greenland. According to the Australian ba...
The Unluckiest Generation: Confessions of a Millennial
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
So are millennials really the unluckiest generation? Yes and no. At least according to their unofficial biographer, Charlie Wells, the energetic Lond...
Why Humans Have Such Big Brains (No, it's not Because of our Intelligence)
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
So why do we humans have such big brains? According to the NYU neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin, it’s because of language. In wanting to talk to one...
How Should Criminals be Punished? From Bentham's "Enlightened" Panopticon to the Universal Human Rights of Prisoners
14 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How should we punish criminals? In Impermissible Punishments, the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Judith Resnik, provides a historic...
Why Misogyny May Be America's Most Dangerous Ideology: The Role of the Manosphere in Political Assassinations and Mass Shootings
13 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In a week dominated by the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, Cynthia Miller-Idriss’ insights as the founding director of American University’...
Rational Exuberance: Why $3 Trillion in AI Investment is Mathematical Certainty, not Madness
12 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s $3 trillion investment in AI is not only rational and beyond inevitable - it’s “predestined”. At least according to That Was The Week ...
From Dodgers Top Draft Pick to Harvard Trained Middle Eastern Maven: Does the American Dream Still Exist?
12 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
David Lesch is a poster child for something. I’m just not sure what. On the one hand, given his personal reinvention from Los Angeles Dodgers first-...
We're Burning 500 Million Years of Earth's History in a Few Decades: So Stop Pretending Recycling Will Save the Planet
11 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Things aren’t quite as sunny on the environmental front as some recent guests suggest. According to the award winning science writer Peter Brannen, ...
The Godfather of Security, Bruce Schneier, Rewires Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government and Citizenship
10 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If Geoffrey Hinton is the Godfather of AI, then Bruce Schneier might be described as the Godfather of Security. A celebrated cryptographer and compute...
Here Comes the Sunstein: Cass Sunstein on Why American Liberalism Now Needs Defending More Than Ever
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There are few more prolific Americans than the Harvard scholar, activist and athlete Cass Sunstein. The author of almost 30 books (including the best-...
Can We Get To 2125? Humanity's Most Existential Threats Over the Next 100 Years
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Can we humans make it to 2125? According to Gary F. Bengier, author of Journey to 2125, our species faces three existential threats over the next 100 ...
The Art of a Deal with the Devil: on Faustian Bargains from Shakespeare and Goethe to Thomas Mann and Donald Trump
08 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For anyone who has seen Michael B. Jordan’s excellent new movie Sinners, it’s clear that any sort of deal with the devil - what has become known a...
When the United Nations Actually Mattered: Remembering the Burmese Schoolteacher who Ran the U.N. in its Glory Days
07 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How to bring peace to Gaza and Ukraine? Maybe the United Nations can help. Or, sadly, maybe not. But there really was a time, in the second half of th...
How Evil 'Big Car' Has Killed More People Than World War II
06 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Lead in gasoline powered cars have killed more people than those that died in World War Two. That’s the astonishing claim of David Obst who, in his ...
The Double Life of Robert McNamara: How America's 'Best and Brightest' Led the Nation into Vietnam While Knowing the War Was Unwinnable
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There is no more shakespearean parable of the tragic rise and fall of the postwar American meritocratic elite than Robert Strange McNamara. War hero, ...
The World's Worst Bet: How America Gambled Dumbly on Globalization and Lost
04 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dumb globalization: America’s worst bet. That, at least, is the view of the Washington Post financial writer David J Lynch and author of The World’...
Demystify Science and Humanize Scientists: How to Rebuild Scientific Trust in our Angry MAHA Times
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In our angry MAHA times, how can we get people trusting science and scientists again. According to MIT’s Alan Lightman, one of America’s greatest ...
From Borges to Brain Scans: How our Minds Invent Reality
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The human brain is so unbelievably complex that we barely understand its most basic functions. According to the British neuroscientist Daniel Yon, our...
The Hypocrisy of Trump's War on Universities: How Wealthy Families Game the College Admission Process
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
According to former college president Beverly Daniel Tatum, Trump’s war on university admissions is deeply hypocritical. On the one hand, she argue...
Borders are Back, Baby: From Trump and Transylvania to Brexit and Bolivia's Navy
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Globalization is dying, maybe even dead. Borders are back, baby. That’s the message in Jonn Elledge’s sparkling Brief History of the World in 47 B...
Beware of another Silicon Valley Win-Win-Win: Can users, publishers and tech companies really all benefit from the AI revolution?
31 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When somebody says “win-win” in Silicon Valley, check your pockets. It’s usually some elaborate prelude to a sales pitch. And the only thing dod...
Every Day, Computers are Making People Easier to Use: The Return of IN FORMATION
30 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s only been a quarter century, but IN FORMATION magazine is now back. Published by David Temkin with the tagline “Every Day, Computers are Maki...
Is Roman Polanski really worth defending?
30 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is the convicted sex criminal Roman Polanski worth defending? Particularly in the context of “An Officer and a Spy”, his vaguely autobiographical ...
How Parents Have Become the Social Media in Their Kids' Lives: So Taking Away Phones Won't Alone Fix the Teen Mental Health Crisis
29 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It's become the new orthodoxy: social media is the cause of the epidemic of anxiety amongst adolescents. So the way to fix this is by taking away thei...
From Solitary to Silicon Valley: Shaka Senghor on America's Hidden Prisons
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Shaka Senghor is one of America’s great survivors. Having spent 19 years in high-security prison, he has reinvented himself as a best-selling writer...
Why Even Sam Altman Wants to be Gary Marcus: From Son of Sam to Son of Gary in a single ChatGPT Release
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It hasn’t always been easy being Gary Marcus these last few years. OpenAI’s most persistently outspoken AI sceptic has been in minority, sometimes...
Dr Strangelove Returns: Palantir and the New Military-Industrial-Digital Complex
26 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Maybe he never went away. But Dr Strangelove is back now at the heart of America’s new military-industrial-digital complex. And Strangelove 2.0 migh...
MAGA Voters Aren't Stupid: That's Why They Don't Care What Right-Wing Podcasters Think
25 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What’s the matter with America? We’ve been told for years about the dumb working class MAGA voter. That they are exploited by Trump, that their in...
Getting Queerer Quicker: No, The Literary Man Isn't Disappearing—He's Just Not Longer White or Straight
24 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For lonely young men who have forgotten how to read, the LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick some some simple advice: Get Queer Quicker. And to make...
Who Owns The Front Door? The Multi-Trillion Dollar Battle to Assemble the AI Jigsaw
23 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Those who do win. Those are Keith Teare’s immortal words to describe the winners of today’s Silicon Valley battle to control tomorrow’s AI world...
From Mean Streets to Wall Street: How Trump, Koch, and the other Gods of New York Remade America
22 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is the history of New York City the heart of the American story? Or does it exist in parallel, perhaps even independently, from the main American narr...
Move Fast and Fix the World: Here Comes the Sun in the Nick of Time
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s not often that there’s sunny news on the environmental front, especially from grizzled activists like the great Bill McKibben. But in his new...
The Redistricting Apocalypse: How Chief Justice Roberts Let All the Evil Spirits out of American Democracy
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Who is to blame for the redistricting farce that many fear is breaking American democracy? There’s Trump, of course, and his gang of MAGA crazies. B...
Back to the Digital Future: Why the Future of AI Healthcare Might be a Return to the Gig Economy
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Might the supposedly revolutionary future of AI healthcare actually be a return to the gig economics of Uber and Airbnb? That’s the intriguing prop...
From Scrubbing Toilets to Talking around the Water Cooler: Why AI Won't Kill the Jobs of Those Who Clean Up Our Mess
18 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Anyone lucky enough to have seen Wim Wenders’ 2023 masterpiece Perfect Days is familiar with the dignity of professional Japanese toilet cleaners. M...
Nostalgia vs. Progress: The Left's Dilemma in Post-Industrial America
17 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Once upon a time, it was very easy for the American left to determine progress. The working class was good, the traditional left knew, and so progress...
When AI Breaks Your Heart: The Week Nothing Changed in Silicon Valley
16 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Tech nostalgia. Winner-take-all economics. The cult of "storytelling". A Stanford educated aristocratic elite. This was the week that nothing changed ...
From Brazilian Model to Nuclear Advocate: How one Woman's Radical Climate Anxiety is Generating a "Rad Future"
15 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I’m not sure on this one. On the one hand, Isabelle Boemeke is a pin-up of an environmentally activist generation - going from superstar Brazilian m...
Forget AI—How Bio-Threats and Network Collapse Are the Real Existential Threats to Humanity
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Few of the world’s great scientists have given more thought to the existential threats to humanity than the irrepressible British cosmologist and as...
AI Godfather Geoffrey Hinton warns that We're Creating 'Alien Beings that "Could Take Over"
13 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
So will AI wipe us out? According to Geoffrey Hinton, the 2024 Nobel laureate in physics, there's about a 10-20% chance of AI being humanity's final i...
A Black Moses: The Quest for a Promised African-American Land in Oklahoma
12 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We all are familiar, of course, with Robert Altman’s classic 1971 movie about the settling of the west, McCabe and Mrs Miller. But most of us, I’m...
America Never Was a Democracy—And That's Why It's Dying Now
11 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Should we be defending American democracy if it never really existed? That’s the controversial thesis at the heart of Osita Nwanevu’s new book, Th...
That Frog in the Boiling Water is Us: Why Progress Won't Save Us From Climate Catastrophe
11 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In what climate pessimists define as our environmentally apocalyptic times, we’ve become the metaphorical frog in the boiling water. That, at least,...
The Week AI Began to Act: The Dawn of an AI Stone Age in Which Machines Have Their Own Tools
09 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How many more times can we report on a week in tech that changed the world? But here we go again…. We just had a week in Silicon Valley where everyt...
Trump's Hot Summer of Disorder: How Short-Term Chaos is America's Long-Term Global Strategy
08 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Like it or not, Trump and his surreal version of a libertarian patrimonial America is reshaping the world. At least in what the FT’s Janan Ganesh du...
Why Julius Caesar was anything but Trumpian: How Rome's 'Dictator' Actually Saved Roman Democracy
08 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Are we Rome yet? It’s become all too easy to compare contemporary America's woes with those of late republican Rome. And even easier to argue that t...
The Resurrection of God: Why Europe's Bestselling Science Book Proves Materialism is Dead
06 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For five hundred years, scientists as credible as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin and Freud chipped away at the scientific existence of God. So, b...
Why Reports on the Death of the American Dream are Greatly Exaggerated
05 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For all its multiple obituary notices, the American Dream is alive and kicking. That, at least, is the view of Matson Money CEO and founder, Mark Mats...
Why Podcasts Are Ruining Our Lives: On the Insidious Charm of Chat
04 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Podcasts are ruining our lives. That, at least, is the thesis of the sometime podcaster, Liel Leibovitz. It’s the insidious charm of chat, Leibovitz...
The Chinese Communist School of Hard Knocks: How Xi Jinping's Father Shaped China's Current Tough Guy Leader
03 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Yesterday, the Canadian writer Diane Francis argued that Donald Trump should consider Xi Jinping’s China a competitor rather than an enemy. Perhaps....
Going Soft on China: Is Xi Jinping really a Competitor, not an Enemy, of the United States?
02 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Should America go soft on China? According to the Toronto based foreign affairs writer Diane Francis, the United States ought to consider Xi Jinping’...
Tech Insider Claims OpenAI Will Be Worth $10 Trillion: Has Silicon Valley Finally Gone Totally Bonkers?
01 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I’ve always considered my friend Keith Teare a bit weird. Maybe it’s living in Palo Alto amidst the tech plutocracy. But I wonder if the That Was ...
Can Democrats Really Pull a Reagan? How the GOP's 1980 Playbook Could Work for Progressives in 2028
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Can Democrats pull a Ronald Reagan? That's the provocative question at the heart of Peter Wehner and Jonathan Rauch's New York Times intriguing piece ...
From Six Days of the Condor to American Sky: James Grady on Nostalgia and the American Dream
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How to write about the kaleidoscopic Sixties in the gloom of 2025? According to James Grady, author of the classic Six Days of the Condor and the new ...
The Revolting Elites: How Christopher Lasch Predicted Trump and the Crisis of American Democracy
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Both the American left and right are revolted by elites. But whereas the right has channeled its distaste for the powers-that-be into Trump and MAGA, ...
Confessions of a Meme Queen: I Created an Instagram Following to Trick People Into Letting Me Write a Book
28 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dubbed the Meme Queen of Depression by Mashable, Aiden Arata's real goal on Instagram was to build a big enough following to convince traditional publ...
The charming gay racist who invented modern American conservatism: Sam Tanenhaus on William F. Buckley's absurdly implausible contradictions
27 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The troubling thing about William F. Buckley, the media savvy founder of modern American conservatism, isn’t so much his politics, but his likabilit...
"AI Is Too Busy to Take Your Job: The Electrifying Truth about our AIgorithmic Future
26 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Yesterday, we focused on the death of the American way of work. But today the news on the AI front isn’t quite as dire. According to the New York ba...
The Death of the American Way of Work: How the United States Lost Its Grip on the Future
24 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1963, Jessica Mitford published her remarkable account of the American funeral industry, An American Way of Death. Over sixty years later, another ...
How Capitalism Turned Money into God: Paul Vigna on Buying the Almighty
22 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s an old thesis - that capitalism has created a religion out of money. But nobody, not even Marx, has been quite as theologically explicit as Pau...
AI as Dumb Waiter 2.0: Douglas Rushkoff on How Smart Technology Isn't Quite as Smart as It Claims
21 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Douglas Rushkoff has spent decades warning how each new digital technological “revolution” has promised liberation but actually only compounds soc...
From Luther to Zuckerberg: Who killed Privacy?
19 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
So who killed privacy? It's the central question of Tiffany Jenkins' provocative new history of private life, Strangers and Intimates. The answer, acc...
Is Mohammed bin Salman a Tyrant or an Enlightened Despot? Karen Elliott House on MBS's Transformation of Saudi Arabia
16 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is Mohammed bin Salman a tyrant or an enlightened despot? According to the former Wall Street Journal publisher Karen Elliott House, Pulitzer Prize-wi...
Why America is Destroying Itself: Charles Derber on Sociocide and America's Social Suicide
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sociocide is a chilling word. Coined by the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, it means the deliberate destruction of a society's social infrastruct...
A Satirist's Revenge on Wall Street: From Trading Hedge Funds to Telling Stories
13 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the fantasy of countless Wall Street analysts. Amran Gowani traded his lucrative career in hedge funds for the scarily solitary world of novel ...
Living in Teddy's Shadow: How Roosevelt's Sons Found Redemption—and Regret—in Their Quest for the Giant Panda
11 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How can anyone forget those photos of Trump’s sons celebrating over the carcasses of dead animals that they shot in Africa? Fortunately, not all son...
America's Heart of Moral Darkness: Peter Wehner on Trump's Apocalyptic Assault on African AIDS Victims
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The last time Peter Wehner, who I’ve always imagined as America’s conscience, appeared on the show to talk about the “ethical darkness” that h...
Breaking Down America's Everyday Walls: From Swimming Pools and SUVs to White Lives Matter Rallies
09 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From suburban swimming pools and SUVs to White Lives Matter rallies, the Johns Hopkins anthropologist Anand Pandian has been exploring the everyday wa...
The AI Wedge: It's as Painful as it Sounds
07 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
So what, exactly, is the AI wedge? According to Ewan Morrison, author of For Emma, an already acclaimed novel about our dystopian biotech future, it m...
Scale or Die: Why 2025 really is the Inflection Point That Changes Everything
05 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
You've heard it before and you'll hear it again. AI is a gold rush. It will change everything. But 2025 is different, That Was The Week tech newslette...
249 Years Later: Is America Still Worth the Fireworks?
04 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On July 4, 2025, is America still worth the fireworks? For Paul Orgel, producer of America 250, C-SPAN's upcoming celebration of 250 years of independ...
The Nazi Mind: 12 Warnings from History
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Few people have spent more of their lives thinking about the Nazis than the English filmmaker and writer Laurence Rees. In his new book, The Nazi Mind...
Death of the American Dream: Terrence McCauley on why the Mob was behind the JFK Assassination
02 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If the American dream died in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, then who killed it? According to the crime novelist Terrence McCauley, the JFK assass...
Why Everything is Propaganda: Connor Boyack's Libertarian Manifesto for July 4
02 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If everything is propaganda (even this show), then we are forever engaged in a war to control other people's minds. That, at least, is the view of the...
From the Internet of Trolls to the Internet of Tolls: Has the Publishing Apocalypse Finally Arrived?
29 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As we transition from the social media age (the internet of trolls) to the AI epoch (the internet of tolls), has the publishing apocalypse finally arr...
From Ghana to Goldman Sachs: Rachel Laryea on a Blueprint for Black Capitalism
28 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Yesterday’s show was on the Great White Hoax of manufactured racism in America. Today’s is on Black Capitalists, the title of a provocative new bo...
The Great White Hoax: Two Centuries of Manufactured Racism in America
27 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There’s something fishy about what Philip Kadish calls The Great White Hoax. It’s his new book about America's long con - how racist scientific ho...
The Real Monkey Business: What the 1925 Scopes Trial was actually all about
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Next month, America will celebrate the centenary of the Scopes Trial, the so-called 1925 “Monkey Trial” on evolution that riveted a nation. Althou...
The Michael Douglas Trap: What Is Wrong with Men
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Don’t blame women. Men are failing spectacularly and it’s totally their own fault. In What Is Wrong with Men, cultural critic Jessica Crispin borr...
The $200 billion dilemma: Is Bill Gates helping or harming Africa?
24 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
So I get why Jeff Bezos isn’t popular in Venice this week. But why would Africans in general, and Kenyans in particular, not love Bill Gates after t...
The Architecture of Terror: Rafia Zakaria on Trump, Miller, Israel, Iran and Gaza
23 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Are Donald Trump and Steven Miller terrorists? Pakistani-American lawyer and author Rafia Zakaria argues that their willfully cruel immigration polici...