Why the Best Lessons in Life are Experienced rather than Learned

In Keith Teare’s That Was the Week newsletter for this week, he categorically asserts that there is no oligarchy in Trump’s America. Instead there are “just technologists with a passion for change and, of course, self-in…

So what, exactly, is a philosophical life? According the University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard, author of the much acclaimed new book Open Socrates, it means being able to ask questions with the intuitive fluen…

This is the last and amongst the liveliest of my interviews at Munich’s DLD Conference this year. An old friend who has appeared on KEEN ON several times before, Andrew McAfee is a MIT professor who co-wrote the 2014 cla…

Most of the breathless talk in snowy Munich at this year’s DLD conference, of course, was about the generative AI revolution. But amongst all the hype and glitz about our brave new AI future, Richard Socher stands out. B…

If anyone should be anointed “aunt” or “court jEsther” of the tech industry, it’s long time journalist, investor and philanthropist Esther Dyson. When I caught up with Dyson at DLD, she reflected on her 40+ year career i…

With Trump’s inauguration today, are we really about experience a new “golden age” in America? No. Not at least according to the best selling writer Robert D. Kaplan, author of Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis (ou…

Amidst all the doom and gloom of the current zeitgeist, Harvard University literature professor & DLD 2025 speaker Martin Puchner remains cautiously optimistic about our high tech future. Reflecting on cultural and techn…

In this week’s That Was The Week round up of tech news, Andrew and Keith Teare discuss the need for progressives to become what Keith calls “yes people” on technology. At the moment, he argues, their reactionary “no” on…

The Stanford Business School professor Michal Kosinski has spent his career warning about the corrosive impact of technology, and particularly social media, on democratic institutions and individual freedom. The Polish b…

Few people have a better perch to observe technological change than Kenneth Cukier, deputy executive editor at The Economist and co-author of the best-selling book Big Data. I caught up with Cukier at DLD this year to ge…

One person I didn’t expect to see at DLD is the feted Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran. Not exactly a regular on the tech circuit, Temelkuran is best known as a critic of the Erdogan regime and author of the influential 201…

We are back in Munich at the DLD Conference, Europe’s foremost tech gathering. DLD is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and, to mark this occasion, we spoke to some of the leading DLD’ers about the tumultuous la…

Published on the eve of you-know-who’s second inauguration, Kurt Gray’s new book Outraged focuses on why Americans are so divided and how they might find common ground despite their political differences. Gray argues tha…

A new book by the acclaimed neuroscientist Lisa Genova is always a big event. Genova, best known for her best-selling 2007 novel, Still Alice, has a new novel out this week, More or Less Maddy, which follows a 20-year-ol…

The world is shutting its borders to immigrants. Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Laurie Trautman who dates the Covid crisis of 2020 as the tragic moment when the entire world closed its doors to immigrants. Bu…