The Revolt against Humanity: Adam Kirsch Imagines a Future Without Humanity"

From MAGA and the UK’s Reform Party to the German AfD, aggressively nationalist borders controls are back in political fashion. According to Laurie Trautman, an expert on immigration at Western Washington University, we…

Nicholas Carr has been amongst the most persistently prescient observers of the digital revolution over the last quarter century. Take, for example, his 2012 essay "The Arc of Innovation Bends Towards Decadence," which,…

Is there really a data-driven science that enables us to predict and change human behavior?Mind Masters author and Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz certainly is a believer. But I wonder whether Matz’s obser…

Everything old is new again in international politics. According to Jill Kastner, co-author of A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion, today's international tensions over Ukraine, Taiwan and Gr…

What’s wrong with the U.S. economy? Not much according to Wall Street. But according to Adam Chandler, author of 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life, there’s a fundamental contradiction at…

This is a good one. Former mobster Louis Ferrante discusses the second volume of his history of the American mafia, Borgata: Clash of Titans, covering the critical period between 1960 and 1985 when the mob was at its hei…

Addiction specialist and former meth addict Dr. Adi Jaffe challenges everything we take for granted about addiction and recovery. Opening our KEEN ON conversation with his own dramatic story of a SWAT team arrest that tu…

Paula Whyman's journey from bug-obsessed city kid to mountaintop conservationist is an inspiring environmental tale. Now the owner of a 200-acre Virginia mountaintop, she's traded her childhood fascination with cicadas f…

It’s not just the MAGA crowd who are concerned with government waste and inefficiency. In a convincing Wall Street Journal op-ed, best-selling tech author Larry Downes questions the need for a thousand Social Security of…

Remember that time in 1977 when Jesse Jackson debated KKK grand wizard David Duke on national tv? As David Masciotra reminds us, it was one of those now forgotten moments from the recent past that can help bring some cla…

Avid reader, global investor and German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, who devoured around 150 books in 2024, engages in a spirited New Year discussion about literacy, geopolitics, and the power of deep reading. De…

While most of us can at least hope for a happy new year in 2025, the same can’t be true for the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. That, at least, is the view of Michael Scott-Baumann, author of The Shortest History…

Marshall Poe runs the New Books Network, a podcasting platform incorporating over 25,000 individual podcasts from thousands of podcasters and many millions of downloads. 2024, he acknowledges, was a bad year for podcasti…

Gary Marcus is amongst the world’s leading skeptics on the AI revolution. So it’s worth taking note when Marcus admits that “of course we are getting to AGI eventually”. No, he says, artificial general intelligence (AGI)…

Is it entirely coincidental that some of the leading figures in the MAGA movement - including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks - all grew up in Apartheid South Africa? Not according to Simon Kuper who raised the al…