Why the Best Lessons in Life are Experienced rather than Learned

It’s ironic that Keith Teare, editor of That Was The Week newsletter, just spent two idyllic weeks in Europe, enjoying the Paris Olympics and London theater. Because his first newsletter on his return to the United State…

We are living in interesting political times. A month ago, the Presidential election appeared over. Today, however, it appears as if it’s barely begun. So in my conversation today with the prolific columnist David Mascio…

What do Hum, Hitler’s People and The Hypocrite have in common? They are all recommended new books from KEEN ON’s best read regular guest, Los Angeles Times book critic Bethanne Patrick. As usual, she recommends six books…

Last month, we were in western Virginia talking to the pioneering regenerative farmer Joel Salatin about how American can fix itself one bite at a time. Today we are on the other coast, in western Oregon, talking to anot…

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he wrote in 1948,George Orwell imagined the “Ministry of Truth” to be the central institution that Big Brother used to reinvent reality and make war on the recent past. Three quarters of a…

As author of the authoritative three volume Third Reich Trilogy, Richard J. Evans is probably the most respected scholar of Hitler’s Third Reich in the world today. And his latest book, Hitler’s People, is an attempt to…

In her new book, Freeman’s Challenge, the Harvard historian Robin Bernstein reveals the early 19th century origins of America’s for profit prisons. Telling the tragic story of William Freeman, an Afro-Native teenager gui…

In an America riven with both civic discord and ignorance, how can we nurture a next generation of responsibly informed citizens? That’s the all important question Lindsey Cormack addresses in her new book, How to Raise…

There are two core critiques of AI. The first is that it is an existential threat because it replaces humans with algorithms. The second is that AI is a mirror that only compounds preexisting injustices. James Muldoon, a…

How democratic is American “democracy”. Dramatically less so that it was. That’s at least the rather worrying conclusion of David Daley, the author of ANTIDEMOCRATIC, a new book which exposes what he says is “the far rig…

Shad White has an uncanny resemblance to J.D. Vance. Born in a tiny town in Mississippi, White went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then Harvard Law School and is now the State Auditor of Mississippi. Like Vance, the life…

If it’s lunchtime, it must be KEEN ON time. At least that’s what it seems, given the long menu of food guests recently on the show. First there was the lunatic regenerative farmer, Joel Salatin, fixing America one bite a…

Peter Wehner is the conscience of American conservatism. Having worked in three Republican administrations, the ex Republican is now a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Atlantic, writing compelling moral…

Were politics chess, liberals had white; they moved first. Conservatives had black; they countered liberalism’s opening moves. In time, the initiative changed hands. Conservatives, who began as anti-moderns, came to mast…

So what’s exceptional about America? According to the writer, film producer and scholar Jonathan Taplin, American exceptionalism lies its uniquely global cultural influence. For Taplin - the tour manager for Bob Dylan &…