Why the Best Lessons in Life are Experienced rather than Learned

It’s a small world. The great David Rieff came to my San Francisco studio today for in person interview about his new anti-woke polemic Desire and Fate. And half way through our conversation, he brought up Daniel Bessner…

Liberals won’t like it, but according to the Seattle based historian and podcaster Daniel Bessner, Trump’s wannabe imperial presidency is a “natural outgrowth” of the centralized power of the FDR presidency. In a provoca…

Question: What was the position of 19th century American Jews to the Civil War and Slavery? Answer: Complicated. Very complicated.Painfully and, in some ways, shamefully complicated, according to the historian Richard Kr…

Stephen Witt’s last book was entitled How Music Got Free. His latest, The Thinking Machine, a history of NVIDIA and its CEO Jensen Huang, might have been called How Intelligence Got Expensive. It’s about NVIDIA’s role in…

Should death row prisoners have the right to demand to be executed? In her debut book The Volunteer, Bay Area journalist Gianna Toboni exposes the absurd bureaucratization of the American death penalty system through the…

How to measure the good life? According to Cambridge University’s Professor of Public Policy, Diane Coyle, quantifying progress doesn’t involve traditional economic metrics. In her new book, Measure of Progress, Coyle di…

Keach Hagey’s upcoming new biography of OpenAI's Sam Altman is entitled The Optimist. But it could alternatively be called The Salesman. The Wall Street Journal reporter describes Altman as an exceptional salesman whose…

According to the LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick, every generation gets the Gatsby it deserves. And our generation, the social media generation, has gotten it with Careless People, by the Sarah Wynne Williams, Face…

It might be Liberation Day today, but according to Paul Rice, founder of US Fair Trade and author of Every Purchase Matters, Trump’s tariffs are dumb. Rice firmly distances Fair Trade from Trump's controversial trade pol…

Happy April Fools, everyone! Although, according to cultural critic David Masciotra every day in Trump 2.0 America is now April Fool's Day. KEEN ON AMERICA regular Masciotra argues that the new Trump's administration rep…

This is an important interview. I’ve always thought of the political essayist Peter Wehner as representing the conscience of conservative, religious America. Wehner, who writes both for the Atlantic and the New York Time…

That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare believes that the publishing industry is about to be dramatically swept away by AI. I’m not sure. Here, for example, is Anthropic ‘s (Claude) 100 word summary of this week’s KEEN O…

Has Signalgate triggered a credible resistance movement to Trump 2.0? Brookings scholar and Atlantic columnist Jonathan Rauch isn’t particularly optimistic. He discusses the emerging resistance from law firms, media, and…

This isn’t exactly the radical message one would expect from a primary physician from Columbia, Maryland. But according to Dr Andy Lazris, co-author of A Return to Healing, Big Pharma wields an iron grip on the American…

Amidst all the chaos and hysteria of Trump 2.0, some things in America never change. As the Atlanta based journalist Brian Goldstone notes in There Is No Place For Us, America’s “invisible” working homeless population ha…