That Was the Week in Tech: Why Substack Is a Bust, How Apple Can't Do AI, and Why China Is Thrashing the U.S. in Clean Tech Innovation

Which countries are best positioned to thrive in the 21st century? No, it’s not Denmark. Nor China. According to Parag Khanna, the Singapore based geo-strategist, the three countries that top what he calls The Periodic T…

The writer Daniel Oppenheimer and his wife, Jessica, have been going to marriage therapy for many years. But, as he confessed in a recent New York Times magazine piece, he had to go to a superstar councillor to finally r…

Few observers are more insightful than the critic William Deresiewicz at identifying the changing landscape of American culture. In my latest conversation with Deresiewicz, best known for his book Excellent Sheep, we exp…

How to achieve BIG change with small acts? According to the Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton, this requires what, in his new book, he dubs Ordinary Magic. Small psychological interventions , Walton argues, can create…

On Thursday, we featured a conversation with Red Scare author Clay Risen about Joe McCarthy, Donald Trump and the Paranoid Style of American History. Today our subject is one of the best known victims of McCarthyism - th…

Is Europe about to become the World's Third Tech Superpower? In our regular That Was The Week round-up of tech news, Keith Teare says NO!, arguing that the EU’s increasingly aggressive regulation of Apple and Google will…

American history, Clay Risen reminds us, has an uncanny knack of repeating itself. In Red Scare, his important new book about blacklists, McCarthyism and the making of modern America, Risen suggests that Trump and MAGA h…

What is the MAGA movement’s aesthetic? According to the New York Times’ Dan Brooks, it’s an aesthetic captured by the generative AI video “Trump Gaza”. Childishly absurd, it’s an aesthetic, Brooks suggests, of “bearded b…

Andrew Checchia, a young journalist at NewsJunkie.net, requested an interview with me about the current state of American journalism. So here are my thoughts about the Fourth Estate’s role in democracy, our supposedly dw…

The musician and actor Daryl Davis probably knows more about the Klu Klux Klan than any other living African-American. As the author of Klan-Destine Relationships and his latest The Klan Whisperer, Davis has written abou…

Long-time views of the show know that I’ve always been skeptical of equating Trump/MAGA with European fascism. I’ve always thought it historically facile and misleading. But I’m beginning to change my mind. Take, for exa…

Will AI kill Apple? That’s the (absurd) question with which Keith Teare and I begin our THAT WAS THE WEEK tech summary. We conclude that their failure to develop an in-house LLM or introduce a timely intelligence applica…

So who, exactly is government. It’s the question that Michael Lewis and an all-star team of writers address in a particularly timely new volume of essays. Who is Government? According to the Montana based Sarah Vowell, a…

As MAGA continues to vandalize the Federal bureaucracy, some progressives are beginning to publicly acknowledge their role in the historic undermining of the US government. In his provocative new book Why Nothing Works,…

The New York Times’ David Enrich is one of America’s most tenacious investigative journalists. So when he comes out with a book entitled Murder the Truth, we should take note. There’s a campaign, Enrich warns, sometimes…