Keen On

Becca Rothfeld’s much heralded new collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, challenges the American Puritan values of self-control and abstinence. Why have one meal when you can three, she asks, praising the New York City diner who orders and eats several plates of the same pasta dish. On the one hand, Rothfeld’s embrace of mess is a polemic against Marie Kondo and her fetishization of tidiness and order; on the other, it’s a challenge to the stuffiness of an American coastal intelligentsia for whom smallness and moderation have become not just moral but also political virtues. Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post’s Book World. Before joining The Washington Post, she served as assistant literary editor of the New Republic and worked toward her PhD in philosophy at Harvard, where she focused on aesthetics and the history of philosophy. Her debut essay collection, ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL, is now out. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ mag

According to David Masciotra, the real battleground for the future of American democracy lies in that no-man’s land between suburban and rural America - what he calls the “exurb”. It’s here, Masciotra argues in his new book EXURBIA NOW, that we can find the pathologies of a 21st century American totalitarianism. The America that Masciotra finds in these outer suburbs is the antithesis of Tocqueville’s small town America - a fragmented, alienating place without public space or communal interaction. What Masciotra uncovers is Marjorie Taylor Greene’s America and this grey often overlooked zone between suburb and countryside, he suggests is the Gettysburg of American democracy, the battleground which will determine the fate of the Republic in the 2020’s and beyond.David Masciotra is an author, lecturer, and journalist. He is the author of I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (I.B. Tauris, 2020), Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky), Barack Obama: Invisible Man (Eyewear Publishers,

The Daily Mail called him the “Sith Lord” of the art world, the New York Times annointed him as the art world’s Patron Satan”, while the Wall Street Journal described him as the dealer the art world “loves to hate”. Californian voters aren’t too keen on him either, with only 0.24% voting for him in January as the Republican candidate for Diane Feinstein’s Senate seat. Yes, we’re talking about Stefan Simchowitz, the notoriously disruptive Los Angeles based entrepreneur who has built an enormously controversial art empire. So why, I asked Malibu’s self-styled enfant terrible, does almost everyone in the art world seem to hate him so much? And does he really believe, as he supposedly told another interviewer recently, that the US government should round up 150,000 homeless people in California and stick them into military camps?Stefan Simchowitz (born October 8, 1970) is the Los Angeles based art collector, art curator and art advisor who runs Simchowitz Gallery. He is a vocal proponent of social media as a leg

Is it really conceivable that Apple will withdraw its products and services from the entire European Union? What might sound absurd is actually conceivable, That Was the Week’s Keith Teare says, because of what he sees as the EU’s increasingly autocratic behavior toward big tech US companies like Apple. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, has been doing the math, Keith warns EU bureaucrats, and is recognizing that it’s simply not worth being in a market where regulatory fines are making its European Union presence unprofitable. In other tech news of the week, Keith evaluates Sam Bankman-Friedman’s 25 year prison sentence and Amazon’s latest $4 billion investment in AI “startup” Anthropic. Keith Teare is a Founder and CEO at SignalRank Corporation. Previously he was Executive Chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd - A UK-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. He was also previously the founder at the Palo Alto incubator, Archimedes Labs. Archimedes was the original incubator for TechCrunch

On the front page of her website, the family therapist and psychologist B. Janet Hibbs quotes Kierkegaard’s observation that “we live our lives forward, but understand them backwards.” But her coauthored You’re Not Done Yet: Parenting Young Adults in an Age of Uncertainty seems to reverse that Kierkegaardian narrative. Many contemporary young Americans, Hibbs explains, are living their lives backwards by retreating home to live with their parents and surround themselves with all the certainties of their former childhood. It’s an odd paradox that, in supposedly the most “advanced” country in the world, American kids are unlearning how to grow up. Parents, Hibbs tells us in her new book, should understand and welcome these adult-children back to their nests with open arms. But Hibbs, who sports an M.F.T. (Marriage Family Therapy) and the obligatory Ph.D, is part of that growing therapy-anxiety complex which, some might argue, are both the cause and beneficiary of our “age of uncertainty” (which is, of course,

In his 1887 polemic, On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche suggested that the idea of good and evil, of morality itself, might have been born by slaves. Candida Moss, who holds the Edward Cadbury Chair of Theology at the University of Birmingham, riffs off this Nietzchean idea by suggesting that enslaved Christians, as well as artisans and women, might have actually written (or, at least, transcribed) the Bible. This precariat of antiquity were, Moss argues in her new God’s Ghostwriters, not much different to the Amazon delivery men and Uber drivers who now make up the labor force of our digital economy. It’s an intriguing argument especially, as Moss gleefully acknowledges, because it will offend many American evangelicals who assume that the Bible was written by white men like Luke, Peter, Mark, Paul, John and Ringo. Happy Easter everyone. Enjoy your Cadbury chocolate eggs and the Resurrection/Passover. Candida Moss is Edward Cadbury Chair of Theology at the University of Birmingham, prior to which she ta

Surveillance capitalism is ubiquitous. If we’re not being watched by Google or Facebook, then we are watching movies warning about how these digital platforms are watching us. David Donnelly’s new documentary, COST OF CONVENIENCE, trots all the familiar charges that we’ve heard over the years from KEEN ON guests like Shoshana Zuboff , Jaron Lanier, Nick Carr and Roger McNamee. It’s good stuff, I guess, even if we’ve heard these existential warnings many times before. The problem is what to do about it. Like most Silicon Valley critics, Donnelly’s fixes - from more education and regulation to greater self control - aren’t very realistic. Ultimately, I guess, we’ll find something else to worry about. The real question, however, is if we forget about the screen, will the screen forget about us? DAVID DONNELLY is an American filmmaker renowned for his impactful documentaries in the classical music realm, notably his award-winning debut, Maestro, featuring stars like Paavo Järvi, Joshua Bell, Hilary Hahn, and Lang

Few conservatives or Christians have stood up to Donald Trump with the coherence and bravery of The New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner. “I think morality is to Trump what color is to a person who is colorblind”, Wehner told me. And, in contrast with the ethically monochromatic Trump, Peter Wehner’s moral palette is akin to a sophisticated painter. In a wide ranging KEEN ON AMERICA conversation about his life in and out of Republican politics, Wehner explains why there is nothing “conservative” about Trump or “Christian” about many right-wing evangelicals, and how the Republican party is now flirting with ethical bankruptcy. Regular KEEN ON viewers know that I don’t care much for the Trump-Hitler comparison, but if there’s any truth to it, then Peter Wehner could be the Dietrich Bonhoeffer of conservative Christian resistance to Trumpism. Peter Wehner is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and the Atlantic. He is a senior fellow at the the Trinity Forum who served in Ronald R

Do we really need more jeremiads exposing the Randian greed of Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg & Travis Kalanick? Rob Lalka’s THE VENTURE ALCHEMISTS is about how big tech turned profits into power. but this has been the alchemy of American economic life for two hundred years. What isn’t clear to me is how we are supposed to distinguish good big tech guys like Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, & Reid Hoffman from the evil Peter Thiel, Travis Kalanick and Elon Musk. Lalka’s fetishization of “ordinary people” might be well meaning, but it doesn’t really address today’s alchemic challenge of democratizing the economic benefits of technological innovation. Rob Lalka is Professor of Practice in Management and the Albert R. Lepage Professor in Business at Tulane University’s A.B. Freeman School of Business and the Executive Director of the Albert Lepage Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He has twice received the A.B. Freeman School’s Excellence in Intellectual Contributions Award and is the

All the tech news this week seems to be about how Big Tech is, for better or worse, getting BIGGER. There’s the Department of Justice anti-trust case against Apple, a hail-Mary attempt by Biden’s DOJ to transform to the high-end iPhone into a lower-end Android device. There’s Microsoft’s “acquisition” of InflectionAI, orchestrated by Reid Hoffman, both a co-founder of InflectionAI and a Microsoft board member. There’s a new Saudi $40 billion AI fund. There’s Elon Musk’s Neuralink announcement of an astonishing breakthrough in brain implants. So what becomes of the little guy, the genuine innovator, in this top-down world of titanic capitalism? That Was The Week’s Keith Teare still thinks there’s hope for start-ups without billions of dollars of backing from Musk, Hoffman or some Saudi prince. I’m not sure. My sense is that Big Tech isn’t much different now from Big Pharma or Big Oil. The glory days of the tech start-up are probably over. Tech superpowers now have the economic and political power to mostly elu

As we approach Easter and Passover, it’s worth noting that our mainstream monotheistic creeds are based on a belief in what Professor Chris French, the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths college at London University, would call “weird s**t”. So as French, the author of new MIT press book THE SCIENCE OF WEIRD S**T, explained to me, maybe we shouldn’t be that surprised with all the weird s**t about pizza parlors and extraterrestrial invasions that seems to have invaded all but the most scientific minds. Nobody seems to believe anything anymore, French explains. But it’s an anti skeptical science of the networked 21st century rather than the skeptical science of the 18th century Enlightenment. Happy Easter and Passover, everyone!Professor Chris French is the Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and of the Committee for Skeptical

We would all be way more ignorant without omnivorous book critic and regular KEEN ON guest Bethanne Patrick. This month she recommends six new books by Russell Banks, Adam Philips, Percival Everett, Andrew Dubus III, Marie Mutsuki Mockett & Adelle Waldman. So don’t complain you’ve got nothing to read. No excuses. Bethanne Patrick maintains a storied place in the publishing industry as a critic and as @TheBookMaven on Twitter, where she created the popular #FridayReads and regularly comments on books and literary ideas to over 200,000 followers. Her work appears frequently in the Los Angeles Times as well as in The Washington Post, NPR Books, and Literary Hub. She sits on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the host of the Missing Pages podcast. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host

Warning: this is an adults-only show. David Baker, the Australian based author of The Shortest History of Sex, takes us through two billion years of sexual evolution. And, from the first microbial exchanges of DNA to Darwin and Freud, Tinder and sexbots, it’s not a pretty story. The good news, however, is that neither Baker nor I took off our clothes or confessed to any unusual fetishes. But we did talk about the sexual significance of Baker’s mustache which, I suspect, represents a kind of climax to two billion years of procreation and recreation. David Baker is a history and science writer who holds the world’s first PhD in Big History (the field that explores patterns in deep time and across the natural and social sciences). He is an award-winning lecturer, has written educational videos seen by millions of people, and is the author of The Shortest History of Our Universe. He lives in Tropical North Queensland, Australia.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst th

Even if it isn’t quite Spring, the professional baseball season begins today in, of all places, Korea. And to celebrate this premature rite, I spoke with Keith O’Brien, the author of CHARLIE HUSTLE, the new Pete Rose biography already acclaimed as a “masterpiece”. Rose himself, O’Brien reveals, was anything but a masterpiece - a gambling addict who reflected all the gendered, class and racial realities of late 20th century America. Far more than a baseball story, O’Brien explains, the Pete Rose story is as much about the rise and fall of 20th century America as it is about the fate of Cincinnati’s Charlie Hustle. KEITH O’BRIEN is the New York Times bestselling author of Paradise Falls, Fly Girls, and Outside Shot, a finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting, and an award-winning journalist. O’Brien has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico, and his stories have also appeared on National Public Radio and This American Life. He lives in New Hampshire.Named as one of

In his new book AMERICA LAST: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, Jacob Heilbrunn argues that American conservatives have always had the hots for foreign dictators like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Mussolini, Franco and Pinochet. And so, he argues, it’s no great surprise that contemporary rightists like Ron DeSantis, Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson have all fallen so heavily for contemporary European enemies of democracy. It’s a fatal attraction, Heilbrunn describes this illiberal infatuation with autocrats like Orban and Putin. And it reflects the weakness, rather than the strength, of many on the American right. Jacob Heilbrunn is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and editor of the National Interest, a foreign policy magazine that was founded by Irving Kristol in 1985. He began his career as an assistant editor at the magazine, where his first issue was one featuring Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” essay. He went on to become a senior editor at the New

Did history ever go away? For the former BBC Russia correspondent, Martin Sixsmith, there was a few euphoric years, in the early 1990’s, when history promised to end. That time, of course, was the post-Soviet Russia of Boris Yeltsin and the promise that “they” could become like “us” and embrace both democracy and a Chicago school market capitalism. In his new book, PUTIN AND THE RETURN OF HISTORY, Sixsmith tells the story of the transition from this euphoria about the end of history into the Ukraine fueled pessimism of today. But Sixsmith doesn’t blame everything on Putin, who he describes as a Russian Zelig, a Machiavellian opportunist who simultaneously was made by and has made history. Yes, he argues, the Kremlin has rekindled the Cold War. But we in the West also have some responsibility for not understanding the historic Russian paranoia about being invaded by western powers. Martin Sixsmith is a bestselling author, television and radio presenter and journalist. He began working at the BBC in 1980 as a f

Once-upon-a-time, there was the “Silent Generation” - the self-sacrificing generation of WW2 vets who won the war and built America into a Cold War superpower. But Elaine Lin Hering, the author of UNLEARNING SILENCE, isn’t sold on this stoically self-sacrificing generation. Rather than silence, she believes that speaking our minds, both at work and at home, will unleash our talent and enable us to live more fully. Speak up, she says, and unleash your inner Ariana Huffington or Elon Musk. What could possibly go wrong?Elaine Lin Hering is a facilitator, speaker, and writer. She works with organizations and individuals to build skills in communication, collaboration, and conflict management. Elaine has worked on six continents and with a wide range of corporate, government, and nonprofit clients. She has trained mental health professionals, political officials, religious communities, and leaders at companies including American Express, Capital One, Google, Nike, Novartis, Shell, Pixar, and the Red Cross. Elaine

To celebrate over two thousand episodes of the show, we are launching KEEN ON AMERICA - a special series of personal conversations with prominent Americans about their now almost 250 year-old Republic. First up is Adam Hochschild, the co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, author of American Midnight and many other important books about the modern world. As Hochschild told me when I sat down with him in his Berkeley home, his life has been fused by activism: at first, the rebellious activism of a son and young citizen in the early Sixties; and now the more cerebral activism of father, grandfather and acclaimed writer. Such activism, I think, make Adam’s story very much of an American story and an ideal first chapter in the KEEN ON AMERICA series. Adam Hochschild is the author of eleven books. American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis is his most recent. His preceding book, the biography Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor St

I usually hate agreeing with Keith Teare, my libertarian-conservative friend from Palo Alto/Yorkshire. But on TikTok, we are in violent agreement. As Keith explains, TikTok isn’t a Chinese company and even it was, there’s absolutely no reason to ban it or force a US sale. That such self-serving stupidity is being peddled by the Biden administration is particularly worrying. Where are the grown-ups (except Keith and I) when it comes to talking sense about TikTok? Keith Teare is a Founder and CEO at SignalRank Corporation. Previously he was Executive Chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd - A UK-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. He was also previously the founder at the Palo Alto incubator, Archimedes Labs. Archimedes was the original incubator for TechCrunch and since 2011 has invested, accelerated or incubated many Silicon Valley startups including Around (sold to Miro), Millicast (Sold to Dolby), InFarm, Miles, Quixey; M.dot (sold to GoDaddy); chat.center; Loop Surveys;

The most troubling casualty of today’s social media age is our shared sense of reality. Perceptions of reality still exist, but they often come packaged, mirroring a priori assumptions about the world. So how to win democratic elections in this age of multiple informations? How to promote/peddle truths that will get people to vote for your candidate? That’s the story Sasha Issenberg writes about in his new book, THE LIE DETECTIVES, a kind of Moneyball for our disinformation age. One of America’s smartest political journalists, Issenberg explains, with bracing clarity, how to win elections in a democracy awash with lies and liars. Sasha Issenberg is the author of three previous books, on topics ranging from the global sushi business to medical tourism and the science of political campaigns. He covered the 2008 election as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, the 2012 election for Slate, the 2016 election for Bloomberg Politics and Businessweek, and 2020 for The Recount.