Keen on America: Andrew Reflects on 2025 & 2026
Happy New Year everyone! As the final show of 2025 and first for 2026, we turned the tables and had me interviewed by the formidable David Masciotra. As you will see, my reading of 2025 is more optimistic than many of my guests. And my sense about 2026 is that it will be a happier year for America than 2025 (which isn’t saying much). As I explain to David, I suspect the zeitgeist is shifting back to a cautious optimism about the American future. Despite all the doom-mongering, 2025 was actually an exciting year for movies, books, and music — the artistic world being at least as vibrant and diverse as it was twenty years ago. That said, I warn about the medieval wealth gap between rich and poor, Trump’s pride in willful cruelty to immigrants, and the increasingly chasmic divide between young and older Americans.
This is all speculative, of course. But what I can promise is that this show will remain a daily broadcast featuring America’s leading commentators. So stay tuned. I can guarantee that 2026 will be an exciting year for all KEEN ON AMERICA viewers, listeners and readers.
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Episode 2027: Marc Hauser on giving children second chances to overcome trauma and lead happy lives
Episode 2026: Dr Damon Tweedy on today's struggle to center psychiatry and mental healthcare into the mainstream of the medical community
Episode 2025: On the eve of the eclipse, Christopher Cokinos illuminates the sun and moon's history and their future
Episode 2024: Sheryl Kaskowitz on how FDR and his New Deal team saved America from the Great Depression - one folk song at a time
Episode 2023: How the AI "bubble" isn't really a bubble and why Keith Teare might be emigrating to China
Episode 2022: Henk de Berg on the many similarities tying Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler
Episode 2021: Norman Ohler on Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age
Episode 2020: KEEN ON AMERICA featuring Arlie Russell Hochschild
Episode 2019: Ismar Volic explains how mathematics can save American democracy from the Trump/Biden gerontocratic duopoly
Episode 2018: Becca Rothfeld's celebration of mess, appetite and sexual desire
Episode 2017: David Masciotra finds the pathologies of American Totalitarianism in Exurbia
Episode 2016: Stefan Simchowitz on why he may be the most loathed man in the contemporary art world
Episode 2015: Is Apple about to pull out of the European Union and did Sam Bankman-Fried really deserve his 25 year jail sentence?