Keen On

Yesterday, we were in rural Virginia interviewing the pioneering regenerative farmer, Joel Salatin. Today, we are on an equally innovative farm in Houston, Texas, in conversation with Kimberley Meyer, author of Accidental Sisters. It’s called Shamba Ya Amani (Farm of Peace) and, as Meyer explains in her new book, it’s a place where five immigrant women are attempting to build their own American dream. As Meyer notes, American inven...

As one of America’s most outspoken pioneers of regenerative agriculture, Joel Salatin is popularly known as The Lunatic Farmer. Others have accused him of being a bio-terrorist, Typhoid Mary, a charlatan, and starvation advocate. Less of a lunatic and more of an agricultural visionary, however, Salatin has transformed his family’s Polyface Farms in idyllic western Virginia into one of America’s leading laboratories for non-industri...

A hundred episodes ago, we had the author of Second Class, Batya Ungar-Sargon, on the show to talk specifically about how America’s elites have betrayed the country’s working men and women. So when I bumped into her at the recent Braver Angels convention in Wisconsin, we talked more broadly about her identity as an American and how she would like America to reinvent itself in the 21st century. What I admire about Ungar-Sargon is th...

In the wake of Biden’s resignation and the coronation of Kamala Harris, it’s likely that this year’s election will be particularly divisive and vitriolic. We will hear endless hysteria about the election being the most important in American history, blah blah blah. But while I certainly don’t believe that American democracy is under existential threat, there clearly is a problem with the ugliness of political discourse. So what to ...

As CEO of the AI start-up DoNotPay, Joshua Browder is one of Silicon Valley’s rising young entrepreneurs. Born in the UK and educated at Stanford, Browder is from a remarkable family of American innovators and activists. His great grandfather, Earl Browder, was head of the US Communist Party. His grandfather, Felix Browder, was one of America’s most brilliant mathematicians. And his father, Bill Browder, is an American investor, ac...

Lauded by KEEN ON favorites like Dave Eggers & Dale Maharidge, J. Malcolm Garcia might be the Studs Terkel of contemporary American literature. Having worked as a social worker with San Francisco’s homeless community for 14 years, he then became an acclaimed journalist and winner of the Studs Terkel prize for writing about the American working classes. And now Garcia is publishing his first fiction, Out of the Rain, a novel about t...

I was at the Liberalism for the 21st Century conference last week in DC where I bumped into an old friend and KEEN ON regular Jonathan Rauch. A Brookings Fellow and prolific author, Rauch is amongst America’s most thoughtful commentators on the contemporary crisis of liberalism and the rising popularity of “post-liberalism”. So, in the wake of Trump’s choice of JD Vance, a politician who has openly embraced the “post-liberal” monik...

For all the “progress” in civil rights front over the last couple of generations, the wealth gap between white and black Americans hasn’t changed much. As Ebony Reed, co-author of best selling new book, Fifteen Cents on the Dollar, whites on average have 85% more wealth than blacks, a shockingly inegalitarian fact about a supposedly color blind democracy. Reed’s book is subtitled How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap and, ...

In the wake of the failed Trump assassination attempt by what seems to be a conventionally lonely and bullied young man, more and more Americans are asking what has gone wrong. According to CNN correspondent Elle Reeve, online Americans - particularly lonely, alienated young men on networks like Discord and 4Chan - have swallowed the Black Pill of QAnon style conspiracy theories, neo-nazi racism & antisemitism, and a fascist celebr...

Trust a French literary theorist to think creatively about whether AI can think creatively. Laurent Dubreuil is a professor of French literature at Cornell and the author of the intriguing Harper’s piece, Metal Machine Music, which asks both if AI and we humans can think creatively. Using ChatGPT, Dubreuil ran a test at Cornell asking a bot and humans to compete poems written in English and then invited people to guess which were a...

I’m just back from the Liberalism for the 21st Century conference in DC which featured a lively discussion about digital misinformation between KEEN ON regular Jonathan Rauch and Renee DiResta, the author of Invisible Rulers. As the former manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, DiResta has been on the front lines of the disinformation wars and understands the chillingly close relationship between making something trend on s...

Does America have problem with its boys and men? Yes, says author of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves, a previous guest on KEEN ON. Today’s guest, Niobe Way, a NYU professor of developmental psychology, give a more nuanced answer. The author of the Rebels With a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves and our Culture, Way argues that the crisis is one of a culture of “masculinity”. It’s our stereotyped “boy” culture which particularly troub...

Few Americans know contemporary China better than Peter Hessler. The author of four prize winning books about life in China as well as the former China correspondent of the New Yorker, Hessler originally came to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996 and has been writing about the day-to-day life of the country ever since. In contrast with the geopolitical crowd with their bellicose nonsense about the totalitarian evils of Xi’s C...

What a treat. LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick and I got the opportunity to talk today with the great Andrew O’Hagan, author of Caledonian Road, his new blockbuster novel about the state of contemporary Britain. It’s a fabulous read and O’Hagan was no less fab, generously dedicating an hour to our questions. As O’Hagan explained, for all his horror at the Dickensian squalor of contemporary Britain, Caledonian Road remains his ...

Spy novelists often make excellent moralists and the American writer Daniel Silva, author of the Gabriel Allon series of best-selling thrillers, is a particularly sharp critic of contemporary morals. His new Allon thriller, A Death in Cornwall, focuses on money laundering, murder and mayhem in the art world. The novel is set in the contemporary United Kingdom of the (once) ruling Tory party where international criminals use expensi...

Earlier this week, I visited the offices of Floodgate Partners in Menlo Park to talk with its co-founding partner Mike Maples. As an early investor in Twitter, Twitch.tv and many other successful start-ups, Maples is one of Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capitalists. He is, to borrow the title of his new book, an investor in “Pattern Breakers” - entrepreneurs whose radical innovations challenge preexisting conventions and,...

In episode 2022, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare and I violently disagreed about the current AI boom. Keith, the eternal techno-optimist, thinks AI is about to radically change everything; as the perennial techno-pessimist, I argued that much of the current Wall St AI insanity is a 21st version of 17th century Dutch tulip mania. But if we were to split the baby and come up with a more carefully reasoned & reasonable analysi...

The seductive promise of microfinance might have conveniently died in the Western media, but Muhammad Yunis’ alluring economic idea has actually wreaked unintentional havoc around the world. Mara Kardas-Nelson’s important new book, We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky, reveals the damage done by microfinance loans in developing world countries like Sierra Leone and Bangladesh because their predatory interest rates. As too often with ...

Last week, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare and I discussed whether Silicon Valley has an AI Bubble Problem. And we return to the same subject today, comparing today’s AI driven Wall Street techno-mania with the automotive centric Wall Street madness of the roaring 1920s. As usual, Keith is the optimistic, arguing that stock market booms are always founded on some new technological reality. And, as always, I’m the pessimist,...