Keen On America

Episode 2471: Dan Brooks reveals the MAGA aesthetic

19 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What is the MAGA movement’s aesthetic? According to the New York Times’ Dan Brooks, it’s an aesthetic captured by the generative AI video “Tru...

Episode 2470: Andrew Keen on the current state of American journalism

18 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Andrew Checchia, a young journalist at NewsJunkie.net, requested an interview with me about the current state of American journalism. So here are my t...

Episode 2469: Daryl Davis on His Life with the Klu Klux Klan

18 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The musician and actor Daryl Davis probably knows more about the Klu Klux Klan than any other living African-American. As the author of Klan-Destine R...

Episode 2468: David Masciotra on Trump's ravenous bigotry toward the trans community

16 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Long-time views of the show know that I’ve always been skeptical of equating Trump/MAGA with European fascism. I’ve always thought it historically...

Episode 2467: Will AI kill Apple?

15 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Will AI kill Apple? That’s the (absurd) question with which Keith Teare and I begin our THAT WAS THE WEEK tech summary. We conclude that their failu...

Episode 2466: Sarah Vowell tells the Untold Story of Public Service

14 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

So who, exactly is government. It’s the question that Michael Lewis and an all-star team of writers address in a particularly timely new volume of e...

Episode 2464: Marc Dunkelman on Why Nothing Works

14 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As MAGA continues to vandalize the Federal bureaucracy, some progressives are beginning to publicly acknowledge their role in the historic undermining...

Episode 2263: David Enrich on a secret campaign to murder the truth in America

12 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The New York Times’ David Enrich is one of America’s most tenacious investigative journalists. So when he comes out with a book entitled Murder th...

Episode 2262: Jessica Pishko explains how the Democrats Built Trump's Police State

11 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Not everyone, especially mainstream Democrats, are going to agree with Jessica Pishko on this one. In Liberties, she argues that it was the Democrats ...

Episode 2261: Thor Hanson on why virtual reality can never replicate the natural world

10 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There’s a story today about how a VR headset can make us more empathetic toward nature. But according to the Pacific Northwest based author and biol...

Episode 2260: Felipe Torres Medina laughs and cries about the American immigration system

09 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Here are the 4 KEEN ON AMERICA take-aways in our conversation about the dysfunctional American immigration system with Felipe Torres Medina1) Backgrou...

Episode 2259: Why AI is about to transform everyone (yes, even you) into a coder

08 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We are back to AI (actually it never left us). In this THAT WAS THE WEEK tech show, Keith and Andrew talk about how AI is now enabling anyone - even n...

Episode 2258: Joyce Chaplin on how Benjamin Franklin warmed up America

08 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

So what’s the most revolutionary invention in the history of the American Republic? The internet, maybe? Or the electric bulb or the motor car? Perh...

Episode 2257: Kevin Fagan on a San Francisco story of homelessness that will break your heart

07 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Award-winning reporter Kevin Fagan is one of San Francisco’s great treasures. In his much acclaimed new book, The Lost and Found, Fagan tells his hi...

Episode 2256: Meenakshi Ahamed on the meteoric rise of Indians in America

06 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What do Fareed Zakaria, Nikki Haley, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Vinod Khosla and Kamala Harris all have in common? They ar...

Episode 2255: Nicholas Lalla on Reviving the American Dream in Tulsa, Oklahoma

05 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

America, to borrow a word from last week’s guest Yoni Appelbaum, is “stuck”. And so the American Dream, for most stuck Americans, is dead. Our g...

Episode 2254: Why Trump wants to be the Godfather

04 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What one word describes how Donald Trump thinks about the world? According to both the Atlantic writer Jonathan Rauch and UC Irvine professor Jeffrey ...

Episode 2253: John Lechner on the deadly role of Russian Mercenaries in Ukraine

03 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The international war reporter John Lechner is a brave man. For his new book Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private War...

Episode 2252: How to Unstick the Future

01 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In today’s THAT WAS THE WEEK tech newsletter, Keith Teare asks what “civilization” is good for. Triggered by David Brooks’ “We Can Achieve G...

Episode 2251: Kristian Ronn on why, in the short term, we all might be dead

28 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the long run, Keynes famously quipped, we are all dead. But Swedish entrepreneur Kristian Ronn reverses Keynes to argue that in the short term we, ...

Episode 2250 Rebecca Haw Allensworth on America's Cult of the Professional

27 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Should lawyers, home alarm fitters, hairdressers and plumbers all have to get a license to do their business? And what about dog walkers and surgeons?...

Episode 2249: Caroline Fleck on the Skill Set that will Change your Life

26 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Who wants to change their life? Who want to transform their relationships and increase their influence? If that’s you, then Stanford based psycholog...

Episode 2248: Yoni Applebaum on why America is STUCK in a Crisis of Immobility

25 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

According to the Atlantic’s Yoni Applebaum, America is STUCK - literally and otherwise. In his new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied...

Episode 2247: Andrew Cockburn on Trump and Musk's Futile War Against the Deep State

24 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Not everyone sees Trump or Musk as an existential threat to the American federal bureaucracy. In the March cover story of Harper’s, their Washington...

Episode 2246: Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a carnival of hypocrisy

23 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Given the shameful American sacrifice of Ukraine, there will be few timelier movies than Anna Kryvenko’s upcoming “This House is Undamaged”,. It...

Episode 2245: Is it really "not hard" to be a billionaire these days?

22 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Lots of healthy disagreement in this week’s THAT WAS THE WEEK tech show with Keith Teare. We debate the impact of AI on coding jobs, with Keith sugg...

Episode 2244: Tim Wu on how to decentralize capitalism

21 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why is reforming capitalism so essential? In the latest issue of Liberties Quarterly, Tim Wu argues that unregulated capitalism not only leads to econ...

Episode 2243: Nick Bryant on why Trump 2.0 is as historic as the Fall of the Berlin Wall

20 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How historic are Trump 2.0’s first few weeks? For the veteran correspondent, Nick Bryant, the longtime BBC man in Washington DC, what the Trump regi...

Episode 2242: Ian Goldin on the past, present and future of migration

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Few books are timelier than Ian Goldin’s new The Shortest History of Migration. Drawing from his personal history as a South African emigrant and hi...

Episode 2241: Gaia Bernstein on the Threat of AI Companions to Children

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

No, social media might no longer be the greatest danger to our children’s well-being. According to the writer and digital activist Gaia Bernstein, t...

Episode 2240: Ray Brescia on how our private lives have been politicized by social media

17 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Have our private lives become inevitably political in today’s age of social media? Ray Brescia certainly thinks so. His new book, The Private is Pol...

Episode 2239: Frank Vogl on why Trump's financial deregulation is likely to lead to another global economic crash

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The zealously anti-regulatory Trump is back and anti-corruption activist Frank Vogl is very worried. Vogl warns that MAGA’s increasingly deregulated...

Episode 2238: What to make of J.D. Vance's speech at the Paris AI Summit

15 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

So what to J.D. Vance's highly controversial speech at the Paris AI Summit this week? According to That Was The Week’s Keith Teare, it was “a brea...

Episode 2237: Matthew Karp explains how progressives can successfully bulldoze America

14 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“Expect More Bulldozings”, the Princeton historian Matthew Karp predicts in this month’s Harpers magazine about MAGA America. In his analysis of...

Episode 2236: Colum McCann and Dianne Foley on what a mother said to her son's ISIS executioner

13 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What can a mother say to the cold-blooded executioner of her son? In American Mother, the heartrending story of the murdered American journalist Jim F...

Episodes 2235: Jeffrey Toobin on whether we all deserve second chances

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

If there’s anyone who knows the value of a pardon, it’s Jeffrey Toobin, the publicly shamed and now rehabilitated CNN legal analyst. In his latest...

Episode 2234: Walter Mosley on Easy Rawlins, King Oliver and the history of fictional black American detectives

11 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The acclaimed American writer Walter Mosley has a new King Oliver book out: Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right, a novel that follows Oliver's sear...

Episode 2233: John Kay on why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong

10 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

According to the Scottish economist Sir John Kay, author of The Corporation in the 21st Century, the Magnificent Seven tech companies that supposedly ...

Episode 2332: Greg Beato on what could go possibly RIGHT with our AI future

09 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

So what’s it like co-authoring a book with Reid Hoffman, the multi-billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and amongst Silicon Valley’s most prominent ...

Episode 2331: The Week that Silicon Valley went from Woke to DOGE

08 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It’s been quite a few days in Silicon Valley. "There are decades where nothing happens,” Lenin famously observed, “and there are weeks where dec...

Episode 2330: Eoin Higgins on how reactionary tech billionaires bought Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Wow. According to the journalist and historian Eoin Higgins, right wing tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and Peter Thiel have “bo...

Episode 2329: Ethan Zuckerman on how the United States learned to love online censorship

06 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Internet scholar and activist Ethan Zuckerman is horrified by the American ban on TikTok. As a self-described “progressive” with a long and distin...

Episode 2328: A gay Jewish atheist rides to the rescue of American Christianity

05 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Trust a gay Jewish atheist to defend the value of American Christianity. In his new book Cross-Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy,...

Episode 2327: John Lee Hooker Jr explains who gets to go to Heaven and who doesn't

04 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Who gets to go to heaven and who doesn’t? According to John Lee Hooker Jr., son of the legendary bluesman and author of From The Shadow of the Blues...

Episode 2326: Mike Colias assesses the impact of Trump's Tariffs on the US Auto Industry

03 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Few people know the U.S. car industry more intimately than the Wall Street Journal deputy auto editor Mike Colias. His new book, Inevitable, offers an...

Episode 2325: Charles Piller on Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's

02 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

More than 6 million Americans now suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease. So the stakes in find a cure for this neurological illness are huge. Too large, i...

Episode 2324: Why we need some Sputnik Thinking on Wealth Redistribution in our AI Age

01 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A week is certainly a long time in tech. On last week’s That Was the Week roundup, Keith Teare and I were asking if Trump’s America was a tech oli...

Episode 2223: Sophia Rosenfeld asks if our age of choice might also be an age of tyranny

31 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In an era where even toothpaste shopping can trigger an existential crisis, intellectual historian Sophia Rosenfeld explore how we became both impriso...

Episode 2322: Andrew Lipstein on how to reinvent American masculinity

30 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

According to Andrew Lipstein, here are 3 questions at the heart of his acclaimed new novel Something Rotten: a) What do we want masculinity to look li...

Episode 2321: Michael Ignatieff on why he's still (half) in love with the United States

29 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From Dylan to democracy, from Bobby Kennedy to Putin's Russia - this wide-ranging conversation with Michael Ignatieff riffs off “The Adults in the R...

Episode 2320: Nicholas Carr on how technologies of connection are tearing us apart

28 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A new book by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Nicholas Carr is always a major event. And today’s release of SUPERBLOOM: How Technologies of Connection T...

Episode 2319: Christopher DiCarlo on AI as the latest chapter in our long history of building an all-knowing God

27 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Is AI the latest chapter in our long history of creating an all-knowing God? AI ethicist Christopher DiCarlo certainly suspects it is. In his new book...

Episode 2318: Mike Pepi on how to escape from the digital dystopia of platform capitalism

26 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it’s another anti tech book. In Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, digital activist Mike Pepi argues tha...

Episode 2317: Is Trump's America now an Oligarchy?

25 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Keith Teare’s That Was the Week newsletter for this week, he categorically asserts that there is no oligarchy in Trump’s America. Instead there...

Episode 2316: Agnes Callard on how to learn from Socrates about questioning everything

24 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

So what, exactly, is a philosophical life? According the University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard, author of the much acclaimed new book Open S...

Episode 2315: Andrew McAfee finds reasons to be cheerful about the next 20 years of our tech century

23 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is the last and amongst the liveliest of my interviews at Munich’s DLD Conference this year. An old friend who has appeared on KEEN ON several ...

Episode 2314: Richard Socher on why AI might be good for humanity

22 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Most of the breathless talk in snowy Munich at this year’s DLD conference, of course, was about the generative AI revolution. But amongst all the h...

Episode 2313: Esther Dyson on being the Aunt and Court jEsther of the Tech Industry

22 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

If anyone should be anointed “aunt” or “court jEsther” of the tech industry, it’s long time journalist, investor and philanthropist Esther D...

Episode 2312: Robert D. Kaplan on the decadence of Trump's America

21 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

With Trump’s inauguration today, are we really about experience a new “golden age” in America? No. Not at least according to the best selling wr...

Episode 2311: Martin Puchner looks forward to 2045 when the whole world will have access to high quality education

20 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Amidst all the doom and gloom of the current zeitgeist, Harvard University literature professor & DLD 2025 speaker Martin Puchner remains cautiously o...

Episode 2310: Why Progressives must become "Yes People" on Technology

19 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this week’s That Was The Week round up of tech news, Andrew and Keith Teare discuss the need for progressives to become what Keith calls “yes p...

Episode 2309: Michal Kosinski on the corrosive impact of social media on democracy and freedom

19 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Stanford Business School professor Michal Kosinski has spent his career warning about the corrosive impact of technology, and particularly social ...

Episode 2308: Kenneth Cukier mourns the biliousness of our Big Data age

18 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Few people have a better perch to observe technological change than Kenneth Cukier, deputy executive editor at The Economist and co-author of the best...

Episode 2307: Ece Temelkuran on why she still retains faith in the future

17 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

One person I didn’t expect to see at DLD is the feted Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran. Not exactly a regular on the tech circuit, Temelkuran is best k...

Episode 2306: Albert Wenger on how to save the Internet, Capitalism and the Planet

17 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We are back in Munich at the DLD Conference, Europe’s foremost tech gathering. DLD is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and, to mark this o...

Episode 2305: Kurt Gray explains why we fight about morality and politics

16 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Published on the eve of you-know-who’s second inauguration, Kurt Gray’s new book Outraged focuses on why Americans are so divided and how they mig...

Episode 2304: Lisa Genova on the connection between bipolar disorder and standup comedy

15 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A new book by the acclaimed neuroscientist Lisa Genova is always a big event. Genova, best known for her best-selling 2007 novel, Still Alice, has a ...

Episode 2303: Isaac Stanley-Becker on a Europe without Borders

14 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The world is shutting its borders to immigrants. Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Laurie Trautman who dates the Covid crisis of 2020 as the ...

Episode 2302: Laurie Trautman on the Covid-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders

13 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From MAGA and the UK’s Reform Party to the German AfD, aggressively nationalist borders controls are back in political fashion. According to Laurie ...

Episode 2301: Nicholas Carr on how the Arc of Innovation Bends Towards Decadence

12 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Nicholas Carr has been amongst the most persistently prescient observers of the digital revolution over the last quarter century. Take, for example, ...

Episode 2300: Sandra Matz makes the Case for a Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior

11 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Is there really a data-driven science that enables us to predict and change human behavior?Mind Masters author and Columbia Business School professor ...

Episode 2299: Jill Kastner explains why everything old is new again in international politics

11 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Everything old is new again in international politics. According to Jill Kastner, co-author of A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power ...

Episode 2298: Adam Chandler on the fatal contradiction at the heart of American capitalism

09 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What’s wrong with the U.S. economy? Not much according to Wall Street. But according to Adam Chandler, author of 99% Perspiration: A New Working His...

Episode 2297: Louis Ferrante on why the Mafia Killed JFK

08 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is a good one. Former mobster Louis Ferrante discusses the second volume of his history of the American mafia, Borgata: Clash of Titans, coverin...

Episode 2296: Adi Jaffe on how to free yourself from addiction forever

07 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Addiction specialist and former meth addict Dr. Adi Jaffe challenges everything we take for granted about addiction and recovery. Opening our KEEN ON ...

Episode 2295: Paula Whyman on how to save the American environment - one wild mountaintop at a time

06 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Paula Whyman's journey from bug-obsessed city kid to mountaintop conservationist is an inspiring environmental tale. Now the owner of a 200-acre Virgi...

Episode 2294: Larry Downes' non-MAGA plan to shrink the Federal bureaucracy

06 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It’s not just the MAGA crowd who are concerned with government waste and inefficiency. In a convincing Wall Street Journal op-ed, best-selling tech ...

Episode 2293: David Masciotra on why Kamala Harris should have gone on the Joe Rogan show

04 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Remember that time in 1977 when Jesse Jackson debated KKK grand wizard David Duke on national tv? As David Masciotra reminds us, it was one of those n...

Episode 2292: Chris Schroeder on how America now swims in an ocean of black swans

03 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Avid reader, global investor and German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, who devoured around 150 books in 2024, engages in a spirited New Year dis...

Episode 2291: Michael Scott-Baumann on the hopelessness of the Palestinian situation

02 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

While most of us can at least hope for a happy new year in 2025, the same can’t be true for the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. That, at lea...

Episode 2290: Marshall Poe on why 2024 was a bad year for most podcasters

01 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Marshall Poe runs the New Books Network, a podcasting platform incorporating over 25,000 individual podcasts from thousands of podcasters and many mil...

Episode 2289: Gary Marcus on how Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is, in the long run, inevitable

31 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Gary Marcus is amongst the world’s leading skeptics on the AI revolution. So it’s worth taking note when Marcus admits that “of course we are ge...

Episode 2288: Simon Kuper on the chilling parallels between MAGA America and Apartheid South Africa

30 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Is it entirely coincidental that some of the leading figures in the MAGA movement - including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks - all grew up in ...

Episode 2287: Joseph O'Neill explains how to resist contemporary Fascism

29 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Our job is to make Trump fail. That, at least, is the view of the writer Joseph O’Neill, whose essays in the New York Review of Books offer not jus...

Episode 2286: Seth Rogovoy on why A Complete Unknown, the new Dylan biopic, is a complete failure

28 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As the author of the well-received Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet, Seth Rogovoy knows his Dylan. So his critical review of the A Complete Unknown, the...

Episode 2285: Toby Walsh on the revolutionary promise and peril of AI in 2025

27 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Artificial Intelligence revolution has dwarfed everything else in tech during 2024. But according to Toby Walsh, author of the upcoming The Shorte...

Episode 2284: Soli Ozel on the possibility of a 2025 "Pax Hebraica" in the Middle East

26 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

So what’s it to be in the Middle East in 2025: Mad Max style anarchy or a "Pax Hebraica" orchestrated from Israel? According to regional expert Soli...

Episode 2283: Jonathan Rauch's six key moments of 2024

25 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Time waits for no one. As 2024 winds down, what are the key moments of a year that perhaps overpromised and underdelivered? According to the Brookings...

Episode 2282: Adam Kirsch on the nonsense of "Settler Colonialism"

24 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As both a much published poet and cultural critic, Adam Kirsch brings an etymological sensibility to the great issues of our day. In his new book, On ...

Episode 2281: Parmy Olson on why Google DeepMind will trump OpenAI in 2025

23 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Bloomberg columnist, Parmy Olson, won the FT Business Book of 2024 for Supremacy, her story of the race between Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Demis Hassab...

Episode 2280: Who will win the multi trillion dollar race for AI supremacy in 2025?

22 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Yesterday, we featured a conversation between Andrew and That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare looking back at the major tech events of ...

Episode 2279: Why 2024 will be remembered as the year before 2025

21 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

So how will future historians think about 2024? In tech terms, 2024 will probably be remembered as the year when AI began to become ubiquitous. Althou...

Episode 2278: Max Stier on the Essential Value of the American Federal Government

20 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As Elon Musk continues to plot, with Trumpian glee, against the American Federal government, it is important to remind ourselves of the essential valu...

Episode 2277: From “Science” to Atrocity - The Seductive History of Eugenics

19 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The supposed “science” of eugenics is one of the most dangerous myths of the modern age. As Erik Peterson, author of The Shortest History of Eugen...

Episode 2276: Byrne Hobart on Booms, Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

18 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There is a counter intuitive school of thought - represented by Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen - which suggests that America, for all it...

Episode 2275: Jeff Jarvis on how the world has changed over the last 20 years

17 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The iconic DLD conference will be holding its twentieth annual event in Munich next month. Founded in January 2005, DLD has hosted many of the world’...

Episode 2274: Bethanne Patrick's Favorite Non-Fiction Books of 2024

16 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Yesterday, we ran Bethanne Patrick’s five best novels of 2024. Today, we feature her top non-fiction of the year including new books about reality t...

Episode 2273: Bethanne Patrick's Best Five Favorite Novels of 2024

15 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Pity the novelist. In a year which brought us the unbelievable non-fiction of a second Trump victory and the establishment of Luigi Mangione as an Ame...

Episode 2272: Mark Lilla on why ignorance is bliss

14 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For all the hysteria about misinformation and disinformation, maybe we prefer ignorance. That’s the intriguing thesis of the illustrious Columbia Un...

Episode 2271: Keith Teare on why he's fallen in love with Elon Musk

13 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It’s been coming a while. But now it’s official. Keith Teare has declared his love for Elon Musk. In this week’s THAT WAS THE WEEK newsletter, s...