Keen On America

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 Washington DC based Schroeder know? Because, unlike almost all Americans, he actually made the effort of visiting China this year and seeing this vast and paradoxical country for himself. “Curiosity has never been more valuable,” Schroeder warns. “If you are not on the ground, you hav...

That was the year in tech. When nothing and yet everything happened. A year betwixt and between, simultaneously revolutionary and uneventful. That's the ironic conclusion Keith Teare and I reach about Silicon Valley in 2025. It's as if the AI revolution is changing the world without us fully noticing. AI has become electricity—ubiquitous and essential, yet barely noticed. So what will happen on the tech front (or not happen) in 202...

For all the talk of abundance, what’s really abundant these days are the morbid symptoms of a dying international system. According to Georgetown’s Charles Kupchan, these symptoms include the endless wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Trump’s frenetic demolition-man act, and the rise not just of China but of India and Turkey. As the Pax Americana of the post-World War Two era withers away, the key question is what comes next. “The old is dy...

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 real peace? According to the longtime Russia watcher Jim Goldgeier, Putin isn't interested in ending the war on anything other than complete Russian control over Ukraine. Putin, Goldgeier bleakly concludes, "just doesn't believe Ukraine should be an independent country." So if this is ...

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. Take, for example, the political divisions in American society, the fabled ideological cleavages that have supposedly splintered America into warring tribes. “We don’t really disagree,” Jones-Rooy says about her fellow Americans, “we just dislike each other.” That’s the rather uncharitabl...

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 neoliberalism’s official obituary, so he’s quite comfortable with a post neoliberal world. But Trump 2.0, Gerstle suggests, marks the formal beginning of America’s place in this new cracked, jagged and leaderless world. What most defines it, Gerstle suggests, is its absence of “flatness” - Tom F...

Gary Marcus claims to just be an AI “realist”. Some would describe the controversial AI sceptic otherwise. But whatever his moniker, Marcus’ warnings about AI have been eerily accurate. In fact, 2025 could be described as the year scripted by Gary Marcus in 2024. He warned us about the limitations of LLMs, the bubbly economics of Sam Altman’s OpenAI, and the AGI hype. So what does Marcus predict about 2026? Is he really the Cassand...

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 Anglo-Dutch-French football writer whose adventures at the last nine World Cups are documented in his upcoming book World Cup Fever. Mussolini failed to control the 1934 World Cup in Italy, Kuper reminds us, and Trump won’t have any more success manipulating the 2026 competition in America....

What comes after neoliberalism? According to Branko Milanovic, the World Bank’s former lead research economist, it’s capitalism with a nationalist face. In his new book, The Great Global Transformation, Milanovic argues that globalization of the neoliberal age has been replaced by state-centric Chinese and American capitalism. Greed still drives these twin models, he argues, but they are dominated by what he calls “homoploutia” - a...

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 has fizzled into Trump 0.2. 2025 will be remembered, Heilbrunn argues, as the beginning of the end of Trump’s authoritarian aspirations. MAGA has fractured, the administration is incompetent, and Trump himself is running what Heilbrunn calls an "absentee landlord" presidency. And things...

Whither America? For the Canadian writer Stephen Marche, that’s no longer the question. America in 2025, for Marche, has already withered. The Toronto-based author of The Next Civil War argues that the future has already arrived in the United States. And it’s a violent, regressive future - which is only going to get more dismal in 2026. That’s the view from Toronto where Marche is enjoying a front seat on the arrival of the America...

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. Selecting her favorite four fiction and four non-fiction books, the LA Times book critic suggests that all eight of these books brilliantly blur the line between fact and fiction. Take, for example, Murderland, Caroline Fraser’s new non-fiction linking 1970s serial killers to environmental...

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 historical analogy, according to the Financial Times’ chief economics commentator Martin Wolf, isn’t entirely fanciful. Economic history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, Wolf acknowledges, but it has a rhythmic quality. We are living, he suggests, in a “slow-motion” interwar moment. And ...

“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 Ray Suarez tells me. But even Suarez’s idealism was tested by Trump’s America in 2025. It was a “jaw-dropping” year, he tells me, astonishing for a veteran journalist like Suarez. In some senses, he says, America has reverted to being a 19th century colonial power. So what happens when you “repe...

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, it reflects the imminent death of Hollywood itself. Having written a recent Harper’s cover story about “The Life and Death of Hollywood”, Bessner is no stranger to the existential struggle of America’s dream machine. And for Bessner, the latest Netflix-Paramount drama is just one pro...

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 The Week’s Keith Teare and I try to explain all this in the broader context of the future of media in 2026 and beyond. Has Australia really gone Orwellian in its teen social media ban, who should own Warner and will movie theaters & serious journalism have a future in the AI age? Our an...

Mount Rushmore, with its images of four Presidents carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota, is America’s most identifiable monument. It might also be its most monumental contradiction — which is saying a lot, given the country’s gaping contradictions. According to Matthew Davis, the mountain’s biographer, the history of the Rushmore project captures both the remarkable engineering achievements of early 20th-century America and ...

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 fiction? You’d think, after all, that MAGA America’s surrealism would be an ideal nonfictional canvas for a writer with Packer’s observational gifts. But, as Packer explains, when facts fail a society, then - like Orwell or Atwood - a writer might be obliged to turn to fiction. This emer...

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, she was the world’s first television journalist to break the news. But as Lin notes in her new memoir, When New Breaks, 9/11 broke traditional news media, both then and now. That morning was CNN’s finest hour — a network built for exactly this moment, with deep resources, high standar...