Keen On Democracy

According to our favorite literary reviewer, Bethanne Patrick, these are the seven books that “will really matter” in 2026:* Land by Maggie O'Farrell — The Hamnet author returns with a luminous novel set in 1865 Ireland, two decades after the Great Famine. A father and son survey their region for the British—mapping the land in English when their hearts speak Gaelic. O'Farrell explores post-famine trauma, colonialism, and the mysterious pull of place, weaving in neolithic history and Irish wolfhounds that feel almost magical. As some characters emigrate to the New World, the novel asks what it means when land becomes identity, when a nation is defined not by commerce but by the places that feed our souls.* The Fire Agent by David Baerwald — A stunning debut from the Grammy-winning songwriter behind Sheryl Crow's Tuesday Night Music Club. This 600-page thriller is based on Baerwald's own family history: his grandfather Ernst was sent to Tokyo as the purported sales director for IG Farben, the company complicit in the Holocaust. The novel spans continents and decades, from a 1920s throuple to Wild Bill Donovan's OSS becoming the CIA, complete with family photographs. Patrick calls it “a knockout”—not a potboiler, but a wild, scary ride where almost everything actually happened.* A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee — The Pulitzer finalist delivers what his publisher calls “a spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics.” Through an unforgettable Asian-American protagonist, Lee examines what it means to grow up with “double consciousness”—always aware of how the dominant culture perceives you, your family, your chances. Patrick places him alongside Jesmyn Ward as one of America's finest novelists.* Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward — The two-time National Book Award winner collects her nonfiction, including the devastating Vanity Fair essay about her husband's death from COVID at 33. “Respair” is Ward's resurrection of an archaic word: the repair that comes after despair. These crystalline essays on the American South, racism, and grief reveal the deep thought behind her remarkable fiction. Patrick sees it as essential reading for 2026—a creative grappling with everything America must face.* Backtalker by Kimberlé Crenshaw — A memoir from the architect of “intersectionality” and “critical race theory,” now under attack in the current administration. Structured in three parts—raising a back talker, becoming a back talker, being a back talker—it begins with young Kimberlé desperate to play Thornrose in a classroom fairy tale, passed over week after week. When she's finally chosen on the last day and the bell rings, her mother marches back to school and demands justice. That's where Crenshaw learned to speak truth to power.* American Struggle edited by Jon Meacham — For the 250th anniversary, the historian assembles primary documents proving that struggle is constant and non-linear in American history. Abolitionists spoke out in the nineteenth century; civil rights activists had to speak out again in the twentieth. From Abigail Adams's “remember the ladies” letter to Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony at the 1964 Democratic Convention, Meacham—no fan of the current administration—shows that the fight never stays won. Patrick sees it as essential for librarians, teachers, and younger readers.* John of John by Douglas Stuart — Patrick's sneaky seventh pick (I originally only allowed her six). The Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain returns to Scotland, this time the Isle of Harris, where men weave Harris Tweed on licensed looms. John McLeod is a fire-and-brimstone church elder; his son Cal returns from Glasgow art college with dyed hair and queer identity. What looks like prodigal son territory becomes something richer—father and son have more in common than either knows. Stuart captures a community tied to sheep farming and craft practices that feel centuries old, even as modernity crashes against the shore.Enjoy!Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Pay attention to this interview. Because, you see, attention is seriously expensive — the Silicon Valley industry being worth $17 trillion, at least according to the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett, co-editor of a new manifesto entitled Attensity. For Burnett and his friends in the Attention Liberation Movement, the attention industry is "fracking" the human out of us. Liberating ourselves from its exploitative grasp, then, is an existential challenge. "If we take our attention away," he warns, "it collapses into sand." And so will we. So paying attention involves more than simply putting down our phones. It means joining the Attensity movement and challenging the central attention economy principles of 21st century capitalism.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

New books are like London buses. You wait and wait and then a handful comes at the same time. Take, for example, histories of the New York City vigilante Bernie Goetz. Last week, we featured the CNN legal analyst Elliott Williams who has a new book out on Goetz. And now we have another uncannily timely book on Goetz. This one from the Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, Heather Ann Thompson. Entitled Fear and Fury, Thompson focuses on the 1984 New York City case in the genealogy of white rage in America, tracing the Goetz shootings back to the Reagan Eighties as well as white vigilantes in the Trump era like Kyle Rittenhouse. What ties Goetz and Rittenhouse together, Thompson argues, is the inversion of victim and villain in a brutal haze of violence. And, of course, we can now see this tragic narrative repeated on the streets of Minneapolis. It's as if Bernie Goetz and Kyle Rittenhouse are now working for ICE. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

This is the final conversation from DLD. And the most optimistic - at least from a European perspective. John Thornhill, the FT's Innovation Editor and founder of Sifted, has a quite different take on Europe's tech scene from our other guests. Yes, he acknowledges, the regulatory environment is complex. And, yes, late-stage capital is thin. But Thornhill sees something the doomsayers miss: resilience. A new generation of founders isn't building “European champions” — they're building global ones. Innovation hot spots are popping up across the continent: London, Berlin, Stockholm, Tallinn, Lisbon. Paris (of all places) is enjoying a renaissance. And deep tech — biological computing, synthetic biology, materials science — may finally give Europe's research strength a viable path to commercialization. So who needs Silicon Valley Goliaths when you have an army of European Davids?Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

For media moguls, we are living, to borrow from Dickens, in the best and worst of times. As Nicholas Thompson confessed to me at DLD, The Atlantic CEO is simultaneously “excited” and “terrified” by the power of AI to revolutionize his media industry. On the one hand, Thompson explains, AI represents the best tool journalism has ever had for locating needles in haystacks. On the other hand, AI has the potential to obliterate traditional media's entire business model. So what's it to be: extinction or renaissance? For Thompson, a lot depends on the fate of copyright. If our Silicon Valley leviathans pay for the original content that powers their intelligence, then media companies can prosper in the age of AI. If not, then it really will turn out to be the worst of times for high quality, curated publications like The Atlantic. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

One of the most bracing presentations at DLD this year was given by Crunchbase's data queen Gene Teare. Breaking down America's VC dominance, Teare's speech might have been entitled "64% and Counting." As Teare told Keith and me in a special Teare family edition of our regular That Was The Week show, the VC gap between Europe and America is only getting wider. From 2014 to 2023, US share of global venture dipped below 50%. But in 2025, it roared back — with nearly two-thirds of all global VC flowing to America. The foundation model funding disparity tells the story: OpenAI raised $40 billion last year, Anthropic $17.5 billion. The top French AI company? $2 billion. Oh mon Dieu.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Not everything at DLD this year was on the growing US-European economic and technological divide. There were many speeches on the environment including from heavyweights like Kate Raworth. And I had the opportunity to catch up with my favorite advocate of regenerative agriculture, the managing partner at Acton Capital, Jan-Gisbert Schultze. According to Schultze, today's deepest problem is our spiritual disconnection from nature. We've lost 50% of our soil carbon, he notes, and with it the fertility that sustains us. We can save ourselves, he says, from the soil up — by embracing regenerative agricultural practices that prioritize local community activation and sustainable farming. Schultze is putting this into practice at Lake Constance, Germany's largest lake, where his Regenerate Forum is working to transform an entire county into what he calls a "climate landscape" — retraining farmers, rebuilding soil, and relocalizing the food system.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Few speakers at DLD this year were more sombre than The Economist's deputy executive editor Kenneth Cukier. “Civilizations aren't killed,” Cukier says, “they commit suicide.” It's now "three minutes to midnight" in Europe, he warns, and what he called the priceless "vase" of the liberal order is about to shatter. Borrowing from Hemingway's description of personal bankruptcy, Cukier argues that civilizational suicide comes "slowly, then suddenly". So can anything avert this collapse? Cukier isn't particularly optimistic, but nor is he hopeless. The vase hasn't shattered yet. The hope, he suggests, is with new peaceful technologies that can help reinvent democracy. But if the European clock really is teetering at three minutes to midnight, it's hard to be persuaded by Kenneth Cukier's abstract promises of ethical technology.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Few people experienced the Dot-Com bubble with more vertiginous intensity than Bill Gross, the Pasadena-based founder of Idealab and many many other internet startups over the last 30 years. So when I sat down with Gross at DLD, I couldn't resist opening with the boom/bubble gambit. How, I asked him, does today's AI hysteria compare with the Web 1.0 madness of the Nineties? While Gross - whose current ProRata.ai play is focused on protecting creativity in the age of generative AI - doesn't believe that today's boom is akin to the Dot-Com bubble, there are similarities. We are at what Gross calls a “Napster moment” in terms of making the big LLMs accountable for all the content they are illegally crawling (ie: stealing). And to get beyond this moment, he says, everyone from Google and OpenAI to Perplexity and Anthropic, needs to move to a “Spotify model” that fairly shares revenue with the human creators of knowledge. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Yesterday's show from the DLD conference was about the need for Europe to relearn the language of power. Today, things get even more dire for our European friends. I asked another DLD speaker, Carl Benedikt Frey, a Swedish economic historian who teaches at Oxford, whether it's “game over” for Europe in terms of its ability to compete with American and Chinese big tech. His answer: not yet—but close. Frey's last book, shortlisted for the 2025 Financial Times business book of the year, is entitled How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation and the Fate of Nations. But it's specifically Europe's economic progress and the fate of European nations that most concerns Frey. Unless Europeans create a true single market for services, he warns, it really could be the end of the European dream of continent-wide progress. So no more crossroads for a continent perennially at a crossroads. And that single market, Frey explains, is ultimately a matter of political rather than economic will.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

I'm just back from another stimulating Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich where all the talk was about the growing technological and political gap with the United States and China. From Machiavelli and Hobbes to Napoleon and Bismarck, Europe invented the modern concept of state power. But decades of outsourcing security to NATO and the US have left the continent dangerously rusty both in the language and execution of power. According to Marta Mucznik, a senior analyst at the Brussels-based left-leaning International Crisis Group, "projecting power is the language of today's world." And unless European politicians relearn it, Mucznik warns, that growing gap between Europe and the bipolar reality of a US-China centric world will only continue to dramatically widen.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

For a country forever flirting with amnesia about its racial history, America sure struggles to forget. Take, for example, Bernie Goetz, the white subway vigilante, who shot four black teenagers on a NYC subway in December 1984. There's not just one - but two major new books about the anything but colorblind Goetz case which we'll be discussing over the next couple of weeks. The first is by the CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams who presents it as a Rashomon style narrative in which there is no single undisputed truth. There might not be quite five truths in Williams' Five Bullets, but interpreting this story all depends on your political and racial perspective. “If a black man had shot four white teens,” Williams reimagines, “this would be a totally different story.”Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In his new co-authored book It's On You, the English behavioral scientist Nick Chater exposes how the rich and powerful - the THEM - have convinced us that we're to blame for society's deepest problems. Can't lose weight? That's because YOU lack willpower—or so THEY would have you believe. But willpower, Chater argues, is a convenient myth. And that means the behavioral economists got it wrong too. Nudge theory doesn't work because human beings are far messier than the utilitarians assume. The answer isn't self-discipline. It's systemic change—and that requires politics, not self-help or even self-discipline. It's transferring power back from THEM to YOU. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

According to the New Yorker writer Nicholas Niarchos, Africa is rich in both raw materials and tragic paradox. We know about the continent's wealth in the rare earth minerals that enable our global transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. But it's contemporary African paradoxes that Niarchos describes in his important new book, The Elements of Power. There's the paradox of clean energy's dirty secret — the horrifying cost in African suffering of our insatiable thirst for the minerals that power our electric vehicles and solar panels. Then there's the paradox of the new scramble for Africa between what he calls the "amoral" Chinese and the "immoral" Americans. And finally there's Niarchos' own personal paradox (which he doesn't disguise) of being the scion of two of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Europe while writing a book about some of the poorest and most exploited people on the planet.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

We all have our own favorite Robert Redford movie. But what's Redford's most prescient film about today's America? His Seventies trilogy about American politics — The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and All the President's Men — are all, in their own profound ways, lasting meditations on the United States. But of the three, it might be Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975) which has the eeriest relevance to contemporary America. For James Grady, whose equally classic 1974 thriller Six Days of the Condor inspired the movie, Three Days of the Condor speaks to both the all-encompassing paranoia and isolation of our age. It's the anti-James Bond film for our anti-James Bond age. "For a movie that was made fifty years ago to unearth the emotions we felt then, and the emotions we're feeling now — that's extraordinary," James Grady says. Yes. After a half century, the Condor has landed. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Can Swiftynomics save America? That's the intriguing thesis at the heart of Misty Heggeness' new book about Swift's impact on the American economy. Entitled Swiftynomics, it's as much about Taylor Swift's fans as it is about the megastar herself. “Taylor Swift is not moving mountains in local communities,” Heggeness acknowledges. “Her fans are. They are willing to fork out thousands of dollars, travel to another city, stay in hotels, get their hair done - that's the real economic engine.” So Swiftynomics is really about what Taylor Swift unleashes, not who she is. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

The Music Man was a 1957 Broadway show written by Meredith Willson, a musician from the small Iowa town of Mason City. The popular play (and later movie) featured a con man called Harold Hill who ripped off the naive people of River City, a fictional small town based on Mason City. Nearly seventy years later, Josiah Hesse, another Iowan from Mason City, sees the Music Man narrative replaying itself. As Hesse notes in his autobiographical new book, On Fire For God, today's Harold Hills are the megachurch salesmen who descend on small American towns to rip off the local community with their religious claptrap. "They know how to prey on people's fears," Hesse argues about these evangelical preachers, "how to locate the thing that's changing, that's new, and offer something that hearkens back to another era, a pure era of American wholesomeness." As another observant American midwesterner, Mark Twain, once quipped: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Few biographers can claim to know what it feels like to be Thomas Jefferson more than the Charlottesville-based historian Andrew Burstein. The author of many books about Jefferson, Burstein's latest, Being Thomas Jefferson, offers an “intimate history” of the great man. From Jefferson's views on love and race to his take on mortality, Andrew Burstein gets inside America's most controversial and misunderstood Founding Father. And what he finds at the end of his voyage inside Jefferson is an intellectual Don Juan. “Jefferson's language is his legacy,” Burstein concludes. “He wrote with a musical cadence, poetically, at a time when most political writers did not understand what he did about seducing the reader”.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

There was a time in the mid 20th century, the literary historian Gayle Feldman reminds us, when the book business was cool. Back then, New York publishing resembled Silicon Valley tech and the Mark Zuckerberg of his day was the Random House founder Bennett Cerf. In her new biography of Cerf, Nothing Random, Feldman tells the story of this celebrity entrepreneur, noting that he helped pioneer the publishing industry's venture capitalist style business model which enabled hit authors like Ayn Rand or Dr Seuss to finance start-up writers like Cormac McCarthy. Those were the days, a slightly wistful Feldman reminisces. She's right. If only today's corporate publishing industry could recapture some of that Cerfian magic. Then books might become cool again. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Trump's Gazan dream is to overlay the complex human history with his own narcissistic real-estate fantasy. But for Maia Carter Hallward, co-author of a new contemporary history of Gaza, this once vibrant Mediterranean entrepôt linking Africa, Asia and Europe is now defined more by nightmare than dreams. “In peace studies, we talk about positive peace, which has rights, liberties, the ability to reach human potential - and we talk about negative peace, which is the absence of war,” Carter Hallward says. “I would say we have none of those in Gaza right now.” No negative peace, no absence of war. For Carter Hallward, that - alongside the more than 70,000 dead Palestinians - captures today's Gazan tragedy. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

What if the right isn't wrong - or, at least, totally wrong, about education? That seems to be the conclusion of James Traub, a liberal educationalist, who has spent the last year visiting the civics programs of American high schools. Neither the 1619 Project nor Trump's 1776 Report seems to be the message of Traub's account of these travels, The Cradle of Citizenship. Schools can help save our democracy, Traub concludes, by equipping American students to think their way through the complexities of their nation's history. The point of a good education, he concludes, is to foster thinking rather than moral outrage or virtue seeking. More Homer in the classroom, and less social media. Those are James Traub's old school principles for our new century. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Timing is everything. The versatile American journalist Kenneth Rosen was last on the show in early 2021 talking about troubled teens. Since then, Rosen has travelled extensively in the Arctic and has just published Polar War, a narrative about the chilling costs to both America and the world of the new Cold War in the Arctic. Timing is, indeed, everything, especially in the book business. But Rosen's travelogue of melting icecaps and vanishing indigenous cultures offers an alternative take on the media's current geo-strategic obsession with Greenland. "I worry most about the indigenous communities and their ways of life. This is the sustenance lifestyle that will be eradicated—something that we'll lose as a country and as humanity,” Rosen warns. “It's only a matter of time before the snow and ice melts forever." And when it's gone, it's gone. Then timing will be nothing. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Will Trump be removed by the 25th Amendment? No, it's never going to happen - not after Jan 6 or Venezuela or Greenland or any other mad foreign or domestic adventure. That, at least, seems the conclusion of Rebecca Lubot, author of Keeping a Finger on the Button, a timely new analysis of the 25th Amendment. But the real question isn't about the nuclear button—it's about who controls the White House. And the way to do that is through new Congressional or judicial initiatives. The 25th Amendment was passed in what now feels like the halcyon 1960s. Trump has created an entirely new political reality in America. Congress needs to respond accordingly with a new Constitutional Amendment for our 21st century Imperial Presidential age. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

The great John Maynard Keynes explained it a century ago. In his 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," Keynes predicted that the future would be defined by economic abundance rather than scarcity. But such a cornucopian future, Keynes warned, would create societies teetering perpetually on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Keynes' vision has been updated by Niskanen Center SVP Brink Lindsey in his new book, The Permanent Problem. Today's societies, the Thailand-based Lindsey observes, are all on the verge of nervous breakdowns triggered by economic prosperity rather than poverty. So the challenge today, he notes with his own Keynesian flourish, is transforming this mass plenty into mass human flourishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Back in 2018, the New York Times reporters Katie Benner and Erica L. Green exposed the disturbing reality of the T.M. Landry college prep school in rural Louisiana. Celebrated as a “miracle” institution that successfully sent underprivileged black students to elite colleges, Benner and Green uncovered a miserable school that doctored college applications and bullied its students. Seven years later, Benner and Green have written Miracle Children, a book as much about race, education and false promises in contemporary America as it is about T.M. Landry itself. While Benner and Green's narrative won't please everyone, it should be required reading for those on both the left and right who peddle magical educational solutions to historically complex social problems.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

WTF will happen in 2026? Over the last week, we've been running a series of interviews about the promise and peril of the new year. And in this new weekly magazine-style KEEN ON AMERICA show, we feature highlights of conversations with Charles Kupchan, Julia Hobsbawm, Keith Teare, Jason Pack, Jim Goldgeier, Chris Schroeder and Soli Ozel. And I end the show with some thoughts from the David Masciotra interview about my own thoughts on the upcoming year. That's it for previews of 2026. Now let's see what really happens. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

If Darwin's evolutionary theories couldn't kill America's faith in God, then what could? That's the message in Daniel K. William's new book, The Search for a Rational Faith. Americans, Williams argues, have always sought to combine scientific knowledge with Christian apologetics. From the Founding Puritans to John Adams, Harriet Beecher and Martin Luther King, Americans have clung to the idea that enlightenment doesn't undermine faith. That's why thoughtful people - or, at least, thoughtful Americans - believe in God. “Without religion as a moral constraint, any sort of moral anarchy would be theoretically possible. In the world of the atomic bomb, there had to be some form of transcendent thinking,” Williams argues. “Religion has not been simply an anti-liberal reactionary force, but actually has been central to the American story and to America's human rights project.”Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Hold onto your collars. The AI-generated crisis of work is here, and the storm will concentrate on white-collar workers from the professional economy. According to Julia Hobsbawm, founder of Workathon.io, these workers are about to experience the dismal reality of blue-collar redundancy. 50% of the US workforce will be freelance by 2030, some experts warn, making this transition the biggest shift in the nature of work since the Industrial Revolution. Humans can't be completely replaced by machines, Hobsbawm says. But enough will be replaced to create mass suffering — the same conditions that generated the revolutionary movements of the 19th century.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Happy New Year everyone! As the final show of 2025 and first for 2026, we turned the tables and had me interviewed by the formidable David Masciotra. As you will see, my reading of 2025 is more optimistic than many of my guests. And my sense about 2026 is that it will be a happier year for America than 2025 (which isn't saying much). As I explain to David, I suspect the zeitgeist is shifting back to a cautious optimism about the American future. Despite all the doom-mongering, 2025 was actually an exciting year for movies, books, and music — the artistic world being at least as vibrant and diverse as it was twenty years ago. That said, I warn about the medieval wealth gap between rich and poor, Trump's pride in willful cruelty to immigrants, and the increasingly chasmic divide between young and older Americans.This is all speculative, of course. But what I can promise is that this show will remain a daily broadcast featuring America's leading commentators. So stay tuned. I can guarantee that 2026 will be an exciting year for all KEEN ON AMERICA viewers, listeners and readers. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

We live in transitional times. "The old is dead and the new cannot be born—this is the time of monsters," Antonio Gramsci famously wrote. But today, as the West declines and the East rises, these may equally be times for middle powers like Turkey. That, at least, is the view from Istanbul of the Turkish commentator Soli Özel, who sees an opportunity for regional powers to become more influential players in the international system. Expect more international empowerment of states like Turkey, Brazil, and India in 2026, Özel suggests. Today's emerging multipolar world is, indeed, not just a time for monsters, but also for middle-ranked powers.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

For Jason Pack, presenter of the Disorder podcast, the person of the year for 2025 was the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney. But for 2026, Pack predicts, the person of the year will be a resurrected Jeffrey Epstein (or, at least, the Epstein scandal). Orderers vs Disorderers: the dialectic driving our age of upheaval. The Canadian Prime Minister, for Pack, is a hero. "Carney stood up to Trump and said, Great, you want to punish us? Punish us," Pack says. Whereas the conspiracy theorists stoking the Epstein paranoia are the bad guys. "The more that we in the mainstream attempt to say it was just a sex scandal, the more that people on the extreme left and right are gonna gain in power," Pack warns. So it's Carney vs Epstein. The hard center vs the extreme left and right. Order vs disorder. If only the future was that dialectically simple.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

According to the German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, China both goes to bed and wakes up thinking of China rather than America. How does the Washington DC based Schroeder know? Because, unlike almost all Americans, he actually made the effort of visiting China this year and seeing this vast and paradoxical country for himself. “Curiosity has never been more valuable,” Schroeder warns. “If you are not on the ground, you have no sense of nuance. You get caught in a narrative which is much more macro." And that's exactly what the global investor and entrepreneur did. He got on the ground - talked to young Chinese entrepreneurs, traveled on high speed rail, saw an entire car assembled in twenty seconds. Americans might not want to obsess over the China paradox. But they should probably occasionally spare a thought for this remarkable country before going to bed or waking up in the morning.According to German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, China goes to bed and wakes up thinking about China — not America. How does the Washington, DC-based Schroeder know? Because, unlike almost all Americans, he actually made the effort of visiting China this year and seeing this vast and paradoxical country for himself. “Curiosity has never been more valuable,” he warns. “If you are not on the ground, you have no sense of nuance. You get caught in a narrative which is much more macro.” And that's exactly what the global investor and entrepreneur did — he talked to young Chinese entrepreneurs, traveled on high-speed rail, saw an entire car assembled in 20 seconds. Americans don't need to think about China every night or morning. But they would be advised to listen to nuanced and on-the-ground stories of curious travelers like Chris Schroeder. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

That was the year in tech. When nothing and yet everything happened. A year betwixt and between, simultaneously revolutionary and uneventful. That's the ironic conclusion Keith Teare and I reach about Silicon Valley in 2025. It's as if the AI revolution is changing the world without us fully noticing. AI has become electricity—ubiquitous and essential, yet barely noticed. So what will happen on the tech front (or not happen) in 2026? Will it be another year in which nothing happened (except everything, everywhere, all at once). Or are we reaching 1789 or 1917 or 1989—a grand historical year where the logjam breaks and tech formally takes over the world? A true end and beginning of history. The first real year of the tech 21st century.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

For all the talk of abundance, what's really abundant these days are the morbid symptoms of a dying international system. According to Georgetown's Charles Kupchan, these symptoms include the endless wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Trump's frenetic demolition-man act, and the rise not just of China but of India and Turkey. As the Pax Americana of the post-World War Two era withers away, the key question is what comes next. “The old is dying and the new cannot be born,” Kupchan quotes the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci. “In this interregnum,” Gramsci explains, “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” But for all the abundance of symptoms, there's an acute scarcity of cures in our post-Pax Americana world. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Lots of headlines today about "peace" negotiations in Ukraine. But does Putin really want to end the war — and is Trump able and willing to broker a real peace? According to the longtime Russia watcher Jim Goldgeier, Putin isn't interested in ending the war on anything other than complete Russian control over Ukraine. Putin, Goldgeier bleakly concludes, "just doesn't believe Ukraine should be an independent country." So if this is true, what should Trump do? Is sitting down with Putin a classic case study in appeasing tyranny? Is the real "civilizational erasure" happening in Washington rather than Brussels? And will historians one day memorialize this shabby chapter in American foreign policy as "From Munich to Mar-a-Lago"?Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

What's the data behind the data? According to data scientist Andrea Jones-Rooy, America-by-the-numbers doesn't always add up to a pretty picture. Take, for example, the political divisions in American society, the fabled ideological cleavages that have supposedly splintered America into warring tribes. “We don't really disagree,” Jones-Rooy says about her fellow Americans, “we just dislike each other.” That's the rather uncharitable truth that Jones-Rooy extracts from the data. But not all her numbers represent bad news. On immigration, another hot button issue, the data suggests that the undocumented population is actually far smaller than most people think. And Americans mostly agree on immigration, she says, even if those conclusions won't exactly thrill proponents of a more liberal immigration policy. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Did 2025 mark the formal end of the neoliberal age? Gary Gerstle, author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, has already written neoliberalism's official obituary, so he's quite comfortable with a post neoliberal world. But Trump 2.0, Gerstle suggests, marks the formal beginning of America's place in this new cracked, jagged and leaderless world. What most defines it, Gerstle suggests, is its absence of “flatness” - Tom Friedman's term to describe a world simultaneously “flat” and yet dominated by singularly American ideas, economics and power. The ironic thing about Trump 2.0 is that, for all his bluster, his America is just another player in this post Pax Americana economic and political system. His “place in the history books is secure,” Gerstle says about Trump. But it may not exactly be the place that the MAGA leader wants to be. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Gary Marcus claims to just be an AI “realist”. Some would describe the controversial AI sceptic otherwise. But whatever his moniker, Marcus' warnings about AI have been eerily accurate. In fact, 2025 could be described as the year scripted by Gary Marcus in 2024. He warned us about the limitations of LLMs, the bubbly economics of Sam Altman's OpenAI, and the AGI hype. So what does Marcus predict about 2026? Is he really the Cassandra who glimpses the AI future before the rest of Silicon Valley? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Could Trump woo the upcoming 2026 World Cup and subvert the world's most beloved sport for his own ugly ends? Not according to Simon Kuper, the Anglo-Dutch-French football writer whose adventures at the last nine World Cups are documented in his upcoming book World Cup Fever. Mussolini failed to control the 1934 World Cup in Italy, Kuper reminds us, and Trump won't have any more success manipulating the 2026 competition in America. Rather than a stage for political power, he argues, the World Cup represents the greatest of all communal sporting experiences. The Beautiful Game 1 Authoritarians 0. Justice is round. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

What comes after neoliberalism? According to Branko Milanovic, the World Bank's former lead research economist, it's capitalism with a nationalist face. In his new book, The Great Global Transformation, Milanovic argues that globalization of the neoliberal age has been replaced by state-centric Chinese and American capitalism. Greed still drives these twin models, he argues, but they are dominated by what he calls “homoploutia” - a new elite economic class rich in both capital and labor income. Marx's 19th century bourgeoisie, then, has metastasized into Milanovic's 21st century homoploutia. So who are the 21st century version of the proletariat? What humans (or machines) now have nothing to lose but their chains? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

The 2025 Trump was supposed to be a more refined version of the 2017 original. But according to National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn, Trump 2.0 has fizzled into Trump 0.2. 2025 will be remembered, Heilbrunn argues, as the beginning of the end of Trump's authoritarian aspirations. MAGA has fractured, the administration is incompetent, and Trump himself is running what Heilbrunn calls an "absentee landlord" presidency. And things, Heilbrunn predicts, are only going to get worse. In 2026, he suspects, there will be a serious economic downturn—even an AI-triggered 1929-style crash—that will only formalize the dismal failure of Trump's second regime. Perhaps. Although Trump always seems most resilient after being written off by DC pundits like Heilbrunn. The old pugilist, albeit only a “quasi-Caesar”, still has a few more rounds in him. Three more years, to be exact. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Whither America? For the Canadian writer Stephen Marche, that's no longer the question. America in 2025, for Marche, has already withered. The Toronto-based author of The Next Civil War argues that the future has already arrived in the United States. And it's a violent, regressive future - which is only going to get more dismal in 2026. That's the view from Toronto where Marche is enjoying a front seat on the arrival of the American future. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

The best fiction seems real, the best non-fiction books read like fiction. That, at least, is Bethanne Patrick's take on the best books of 2025. Selecting her favorite four fiction and four non-fiction books, the LA Times book critic suggests that all eight of these books brilliantly blur the line between fact and fiction. Take, for example, Murderland, Caroline Fraser's new non-fiction linking 1970s serial killers to environmental toxins from mining. “People love true crime as if there's something called untrue crime”, Patrick notes. “Fraser shows that what really happened and the way it blows up in our minds—that's where fact and fiction blur.”Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Might 2025 turn out to be the new 1925? In other words, are we currently in the Roaring Twenties and on the brink of another Great Depression? This historical analogy, according to the Financial Times' chief economics commentator Martin Wolf, isn't entirely fanciful. Economic history doesn't exactly repeat itself, Wolf acknowledges, but it has a rhythmic quality. We are living, he suggests, in a “slow-motion” interwar moment. And while FDR is Donald Trump's mirror image, perhaps the most similar President to Trump was Warren Harding whose administration was deeply tarnished by the Teapot Dome scandal. Crypto, Wolf suggests, might turn out to be Trump's Teapot Dome. And 2026, Martin Wolf warns, might turn out to be significantly more turbulent for both the US and global economies than 2025.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

“If they want to put on my tombstone ‘The Last Idealist', that's fine,” the iconic (and I don't use that word lightly) American journalist Ray Suarez tells me. But even Suarez's idealism was tested by Trump's America in 2025. It was a “jaw-dropping” year, he tells me, astonishing for a veteran journalist like Suarez. In some senses, he says, America has reverted to being a 19th century colonial power. So what happens when you “repeal” the 20th century? For all his idealism, Suarez is a realist, particularly in economics. So it's worth noting his warnings about the “devils of inflation” in 2026 which he sees as a likely consequence of Trump's economic populism. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 recent Harper's cover story about “The Life and Death of Hollywood”, Bessner is no stranger to the existential struggle of America's dream machine. And for Bessner, the latest Netflix-Paramount drama is just one proof point not just of Hollywood's last dance, but also the imminent crisis of American capitalism. It's the canary in the coal mine, he argues, about the future of every industry. His apocalyptic take would, of course, make a great movie. The only problem is that Hollywood won't be around to make it. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 context of the future of media in 2026 and beyond. Has Australia really gone Orwellian in its teen social media ban, who should own Warner and will movie theaters & serious journalism have a future in the AI age? Our answers aren't always what you'd expect. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 the country's gaping contradictions. According to Matthew Davis, the mountain's biographer, the history of the Rushmore project captures both the remarkable engineering achievements of early 20th-century America and the country's bloody colonial and racist past. So Mount Rushmore, Davis suggests, is indeed as American as cherry pie. Only that pie and those cherries aren't quite as sweet as the MAGA crowd might like to think. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 ideal nonfictional canvas for a writer with Packer's observational gifts. But, as Packer explains, when facts fail a society, then - like Orwell or Atwood - a writer might be obliged to turn to fiction. This emergency, then, begot The Emergency. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 as Lin notes in her new memoir, When New Breaks, 9/11 broke traditional news media, both then and now. That morning was CNN's finest hour — a network built for exactly this moment, with deep resources, high standards, and global reach. Yet it was also the beginning of the end - both for Lin's career in journalism and for the mainstream television news industry. What followed was the rise of opinion panels, personality-driven shows, ubiquitous social media and the slow erosion of trust that leaves us asking: who do we believe anymore?Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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, Mitford had the fierce, unruly life of a great muckraker. She was a Troublemaker in the best sense of the word. Unlike prudes like Upton Sinclair or Ralph Nader, she was hysterically funny—her voice as distinctive as Jane Austen's or Virginia Woolf's. She understood that bullies are driven by insecurity and paranoia, and she knew exactly how to punch them in the nose with her sharp upper-class English humor. So where are you now, Jessica Mitford? When the left desperately requires a good dose of humor and the right needs to be laughed at?Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe