Keen On America

“It’s too easy to look back at sciences of the past and say they were all fools. The exact same thing is gonna happen two hundred years from now when people look back at us.” — Paul Stob on the lessons of phrenology

Step right up. Over the road from P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in 19th century New York stood the city’s more metaphorical circus — the Phrenological Cabinet, where admission wa...

“There is the burden of being homeless and the burden of being judged for it.” — Saumya Roy on poverty in America

How does the world look at America in the MAGA age? This is our third conversation drawn from How We See It, a collection of essays about America from the excellent new publication The Dial. In the first, The Dial’s Paris-based editor Madeleine Schwartz offered a very French version about the oddi...

“It’s a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” — Keith Teare on the book he wrote with AI in a week

Welcome to episode 2984 of the show. A week is certainly an age in AI time. Since last week’s “Who Owns Intelligence” show, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare has used AI to write an entire book entitled, surprise surprise, Who Owns Intelligence. No wonder, as Keith&...

What has made this moment feel different is not the anxiety about incivility, which has always been there, but rather the performance of it. It’s relentless.” — Molly Brady on incivility in the age of the smartphone

Whatever happened to the American front porch? Builders killed it to save money, says the Harvard law professor Molly Brady — and with this death went one of the key stages on which Americans have...

“It’s like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.” — Ricardo Semler on why bosses won’t let their workers vote on them

Ricardo Semler might be the most anti-boss boss in the history of corporate bosses. Thrown into his Austrian immigrant father’s São Paulo manufacturing firm at seventeen, the young Brazilian ripped up the rulebook — no dress codes, no time clocks, a ten-page cartoon manual in...

“I could not get under oath and swear that I know exactly how Kennedy died in Dallas.” — Ben Barnes, who helped advance JFK’s fatal Texas trip

In Texas, there’s nothing in the middle of the road, Jim Hightower famously quipped, but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. But Ben Barnes has spent seven decades disproving him. Elected as a Democratic moderate to the Texas legislature at 21, Speaker of...

“You didn’t have to look someone in the eye while you extinguished their life, and you could do it from a distance.” — Mike McIntire on what the gun changed

Is there an American way of violence? Earlier this month, the film critic David Thomson blamed gory Hollywood movies, like Coppola’s Godfather, for glorifying it. Today’s guest has an even more brutal answer. According to Mike McIntire...

“Theory said, it doesn’t matter what you’ve read. It’s how you read.” — Emily Eakin on the seduction of the Frenchmen

When I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the Eighties, there was a bewildering rage for Frenchmen. Foucault in history, Derrida in literature, Althusser in political philosophy, Lacan in psychology. Not that anybody could quite explain what any of them meant — whi...

We’ve done plenty of abstract shows on American Christian nationalism. But this one is about a single family: the Greens of Oklahoma City, owners of the Hobby Lobby retail empire, and probably the wealthiest Christian nationalist family you’ve never heard of.

According to investigative writer Michael Blanding, the Greens have amassed a $14 billion fortune from selling glitter glue and popsicle sticks. In his new book The...

“I want someone who has regrets. I want someone who’s learned the hard way. I want someone who understands that life is made of those messy compromises.” — Joel Christensen on the Odysseus he hopes to see in Matt Damon

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is out — the controversial movie of the year, much of the controversy raging before anyone had seen a frame. So, before either of us had seen the epi...

In 1776 — that same year America declared its independence — Adam Smith published the equally revolutionary The Wealth of Nations, his founding explanation of national economic value. Two hundred and fifty years later, Tim O’Reilly argues in the free-market Economist that Elon Musk and his fellow tech barons are building a monarchical form of capitalism that the proto-democratic Smith would have hated. Musk, O&rsq...

“We have a Justice Department which is now 100% the political pawn of the president,” warns Brookings senior fellow Jonathan Rauch. “He points, and they shoot.”

Point and shoot. Like an old Kodak camera. Not exactly assuring words, you might think, from a man who begins our conversation looking back at the first six months of 2026 by announcing that he’s significantly less alarmed than he was a year ago...

“If you can only explain the arguments of the other side because they’re mad or dangerous or dumb, the problem is with you.” — Turi Munthe

On yesterday’s show, the psychiatrist Sally Satel described how Americans imagine their own mental condition differently, depending on their politics and age. Which is a nice segue for today’s conversation with the Anglo-French journalist turned media entrepren...

“You can do as many brain scans as you want, but you’ll never be able to distinguish an impulse that wasn’t resisted from one that’s irresistible.” — Sally Satel on why social media addiction can’t be proven in court

When Meta and YouTube lost the so-called landmark social media addiction trial back in March, there was jubilation inside and outside the courtroom. Finally, Big Tech seemed a b...

The Israeli art restorer and spy Gabriel Allon is as real as George Smiley or Hercule Poirot. He even has his own Wikipedia page. The CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel describes herself on X as a friend of Gabriel Allon before she gets around to mentioning her husband, the best-selling thriller writer Daniel Silva who, of course, is the creator of Allon. As with all successful literary inventions, of course, Silva is as much A...

The leftist cultural critic David Masciotra isn’t happy with the state of America in the first half of 2026. His dislike of the MAGA crowd goes without saying. But his anger at the state of progressive politics is more noteworthy. So far, he says, 2026 has been — to borrow from Antonio Gramsci — a time for monsters both on the left and right. With its “Epstein class” vocabulary, knee-jerk Luddism and A...

Will 2026 be one of those grand historical years that change the world — like 1917, 1789 or 1968? Not according to Keith Teare, publisher of That Was The Week newsletter and co-host of our weekly tech roundup. For Keith, the best historical analogy is 1905, the year of the first abortive Russian revolution. The year that didn’t change the world.

Keith’s latest tech newsletter asks “What Time Is It?” His...

“Someone said, oh, you look like Steve Bannon, and I love you for that… No, I just shaved my hair and lost some pounds.” — Kaya Genç on Trumpism’s global fanbase

The NATO circus rumbled into the Turkish capital of Ankara this week resembling more of a gun show than an alliance summit. Ringmaster Donald J. Trump promised Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the F-35s and lifted the very sanctions that Trump himself had...

“A place that doesn’t have great philosophers will not have great technologists either.” — Mehran Gul on Europe’s inexplicable underperformance

The digital revolution, we were promised, would mean the end of geography. From Beijing to Birmingham to Berlin to Barcelona, anyone could invent anything anywhere, and so the geography of innovation would no longer matter. But that’s not the way it has wo...