Keen On America

“We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods, and we are not.” — John West

Back in 2006, at the height of Web 2.0 optimism, Time made YOU person of the year. The user-generated technology of the internet, Time implied, would make all of us into digital gods of memory and forgetting. Twenty years later, the script has been totally flipped. Now we know that the internet is all-too-human. And so are we...

“It’s a dying gasp of white supremacy — and I say dying with a caveat, because that part depends on us.” — Sonali Kolhatkar

Yesterday, Wendy Lesser suggested that Americans can learn much from the anti-fascist history of Berlin in the 1930s. Today, Rising Up With Sonali host Sonali Kolhatkar is even more explicit. Yes, she argues in her new book, Breaking ICE, the 2020s are eerily similar to the 1930s, ...

“Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” — Wendy Lesser

“Ich bin ein Berliner” (I Am a Berliner), JFK famously said in West Berlin on June 26, 1963, in the face of Soviet imperial tyranny. Today, Wendy Lesser is offering the same defiance in her new book Berlin Before and After. Only Lesser offers a cautionary mirror for our times of not just post-Soviet Putin but also wannabe-tyrants like...

“There’s no exit in capitalism.” — Jeremy Adelman

Is that ongoing quarrel of modern politics, the battle over capitalism, just a storm in a teacup? Economic historian Jeremy Adelman thinks it might be. In The Capitalist Era, Adelman argues that all camps — left and right, Keynesian and Hayekian, socialist and libertarian — accept the unavoidability of global capitalism. There is no alternative, as...

“Seward had all the money and Seward had all the bullies. Lincoln didn’t have money or bullies, but by God, he had the people.” — Jonathan Earle

Yesterday, Kurt Andersen fictionalized a 21st-century broken America without an Abe Lincoln as savior. Today we talk about the man himself with Jonathan Earle, author of He Has the People, a new history of the 1860 election that made Lincoln president and probably sa...

“We are the beginning of a bright and shiny dark age.” — Kurt Andersen, from The Breakup

It’s 2045 and America has got divorced. That’s the premise of The Breakup, by the historian and novelist Kurt Andersen. “The future is fiction. It hasn’t happened yet,” the historian in Andersen reminds us. But his near-term fictional future, an America of civil war and national divorce, certainly ...

Grandfathers, grandfathers. Yesterday, David Baerwald talked about his grandfather, Ernst Baerwald, an American spy in Second World War Japan. Today, Katie S. Sanders talks about her grandfather, Murray Simon, whose life was saved by an American spy in Second World War France. In Ortiz’s War, co-authored with historian Nicholas Reynolds, Sanders writes about Peter Ortiz, who became the Allies’ secret weapon against the ...

“That’s how I would picture fascists: this never-satisfied, dissonant climb to nothing… to ruin.” — David Baerwald

Earlier this month, the historian James M. Scott came on the show to talk about those three deadly days in August 1945 when the Americans dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Today we return to that war in the skies above Japan. Only with a fictional twist.

Behind this fiction, however, is t...

What’s the truth about our AI future? Our guests have different takes. On the one hand, Dave McClure and Aman Verjee predict a $7 trillion future for just three AI startups in 2027. On the other, Salima Bhimani doesn’t believe that Silicon Valley has the imagination to create the moonshot to address our jobless future.

For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, it’s a time for what he calls “champions.&rdqu...

“Just because I think something is dumb doesn’t mean I think it should be illegal.” — Nicholas Anthony on meme coins

Earlier this month, Elizabeth Warren called for an SEC investigation of Donald Trump’s meme coin. Is the Pope Catholic? No surprise there. More revealing are other critics of the “presidential” token which netted our Grifter-in-Chief $636 million last year. Take, for example, ...

“If we continue to build for people and not with people, we won’t have a say in what this technology will look like or do in ten or twenty years.” — Salima Bhimani

Finally some inventive news in our summer of Luddite discontent. Salima Bhimani spent six and a half years at Google X’s moonshot factory as its first Chief Strategist for Responsible Tech. So thank her for the (responsible) magic of Alphabet...

“When will be the end of thus exhausting the earth, and how far will avarice finally penetrate?” the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder asked in 77 AD. Two thousand years later, the answer seems clear. At least according to the contemporary Scottish natural historian James Crawford. In his new book, The Vanishing Earth, the Edinburgh-based Crawford provides dispatches from what he calls the “frontiers of extr...

“Our language is valuable, and we’ve gotta hold on to that. That’s the most human thing we have.” — Jeff Jarvis

Last week, to celebrate episode 3,000 of the show, the New York Times’ Sam Roberts articulated the art of the obituary. Borrowing from Citizen Kane, he described it as the Rosebud method. Obits are all about life (death only figuring as an afterthought), Roberts explained, so hunt for th...

“Most people do not understand that this attempted coup was a religious event.” — Congressman Jared Huffman on January 6

We’ve featured many stark warnings about the threat of American Christian nationalism from journalists, activists, and religious scholars. Today, that warning comes from inside the government. In No Prophets, Californian congressman Jared Huffman warns that the threat of Christian nationali...

“Anthropic will be a $3 trillion company, SpaceX $2 trillion, and OpenAI $1 to $1.5 trillion by Q2 of next year.” — Dave McClure

Yesterday, Keith Teare and I debated the circularity of the AI economy. Today, two of Silicon Valley’s most experienced investors, Dave McClure and Aman Verjee, not only straighten out this supposed “circularity” but also burst the pessimism bubble that envelops so many ...

“I don’t feel any shame at all recruiting an army of AI agents to help me accomplish my goals. But I think society is trying to make me feel shame.” — Keith Teare

Welcome to the summer of America’s luddite discontent. Not only are left and right calling for an AI ban, but tech loathing has even infiltrated Silicon Valley in the form of Anthropic’s decision to watermark Claude’s output. That,...

“The machines today are like toddlers learning how to walk. They stumble. They’re not very good. They make mistakes.” — Anmol Madan

One in three American adults are already using AI for health information — with or without their doctors’ permission. The machines, in other words, are already seeing us. This will chill some Americans in our summer of luddite discontent. For others, however, like the...

“The Romans did that many, many times — until normal had changed so radically that there was nothing left of the republic to protect.” — Michelle Berenfeld on getting “back to normal”

Are we Rome (yet)? Michelle Berenfeld fears we are. Back in April of last year, the professor of classics at Pitzer College published “The Roman Way to Trash a Republic” in the Atlantic. And now Berenfeld...

“He’s not a trustworthy witness to his own story. Everything is ten times bigger and better than it really was — except when he was accused of crimes, in which case he can’t really remember anymore.” — Joby Warrick on Carlos the Jackal

Yesterday, WOLA’s Adam Isacson and John Walsh described how the US government has appropriated the term “narco-terrorism” to justify their Latin A...