Why the Best Lessons in Life are Experienced rather than Learned

So what does the latest Time Warner brouhaha tell us about the state of America? According to Daniel Bessner, host of the American Prestige podcast, it reflects the imminent death of Hollywood itself. Having written a re…

It’s been quite a week in tech. The Australian social media ban, the Netflix vs Paramount fight over Warner Bros & the Disney-OpenAI deal. That Was The Week’s Keith Teare and I try to explain all this in the broader cont…

Mount Rushmore, with its images of four Presidents carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota, is America’s most identifiable monument. It might also be its most monumental contradiction — which is saying a lot, given t…

George Packer is one of the most celebrated non-fiction writers on contemporary America. So why, in his new book The Emergency, has he turned to fiction? You’d think, after all, that MAGA America’s surrealism would be an…

The CNN anchor Carol Lin was on air on September 11, 2001 when the first plane hit the tower. So, in that now seemingly distant broadcast media age, she was the world’s first television journalist to break the news. But…

Jessica was the good Mitford sister. The English aristocrat who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, then came to America and dedicated her life to social justice. According to her biographer Carla Kaplan, Mi…

The American economy is a numbers game and those numbers are becoming more and more unfair. “30 years ago, if you were born in the bottom 25th percentile of wealth, you had about a 25% chance of dying in the top 25th per…

Numbers often tell the story best. Yesterday, we discussed today’s 95/5 reality in which 5% of Americans control 95% of the wealth. Today, in our conversation with Patrick Markee, author of Placeless, the key number is 2…

Forget Pareto’s 80/20 rule. What AI is doing is producing a new rule in which 5% of society captures 95% of the value of this revolution. That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare calls this the “Great Compression”, descri…

Is the idea of “progress” the propaganda of the ruling class? Yes, according to Samuel Miller McDonald, author of Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy it. McDonald traces this “narrative…

They certainly are an odd couple. Silicon Valley veterans Dave McClure and Aman Verjee have been friends and business partners for 25 years — first at PayPal, then at 500 Startups, and now at Practical Venture Capital. Y…

If you think the American Dream is dead, then you probably don’t know the story of Lu Zhang. Born in Mongolia and educated in China, Zhang came to Stanford as a graduate student, struck it rich as a young tech entreprene…

We all know about the broken American Dream. But according to the American-based China scholar Minxin Pei, China’s dream is equally broken. In his new book, The Broken China Dream, Pie argues that the party-centric refor…

For Peter Wehner, American politics is a tale of two Kellys. On the one hand, there’s the moral resistance of Arizona Senator Mark Kelly to what appears to be the gratuitous violence of American forces overseas. On the o…

Dick Cheney died four weeks ago, but his dark legacy lives on—quite literally—at Guantanamo Bay. The human rights lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan was among the first attorneys to enter the notorious prison in 2004, and wha…