Keen On Democracy

“On my headstone, it would say: I was always right. I never lied, and no one paid any attention to me.” — Paulina Borsook A quarter of a century ago, the tech journalist Paulina Borsook published Cyberselfish, one of the earliest critiques of Silicon Valley's libertarian culture. While the heretical book got widely reviewed, it not only didn't sell but cursed her writing career, Borsook claiming she couldn't get published again on any subject. Used copies of Cyberselfish could be had for a few dollars and she became just another forgotten tech dissenter. Then, last year, Borsook was magically resurrected. The New York Times (re)discovered her as “the writer who dared criticize Silicon Valley” and the price of secondhand copies of Cyberselfish jumped to over a thousand dollars. The world caught up with her tech scepticism. Like an AI startup, Borsook is now hot. So hot, in fact, that the original Cyberselfish is now being republished not only in the US and UK, but also in France. So hot, that we now have a new word: “Borsookian,” to describe Silicon Valley libertarianism. The funny thing is that nothing much has changed over the last quarter century since Borsook's original book came out. Not tech's libertarian hostility to government. Not the Silicon Valley boys-only club. And certainly not Paulina Borsook, who retains what the Grateful Dead lyricist and digital utopian John Perry Barlow half-lovingly called her “dyspeptic” manner. “On my headstone, it would say: I was always right,” Paulina Borsook confides with dyspeptic glee. “I never lied, and no one paid any attention to me.” How delicious to be so fully resurrected. What fun for the heretic to help transform the original orthodoxy into the new heresy. Five Takeaways •       Back from the Dead. The resurrection required no publicist: used copies of Cyberselfish drifted from $4 toward $1,000; graduate students begged her for copies she couldn't supply; a stranger she's never met posted on LinkedIn that she'd gotten everything right and been forgotten — and it went viral. That led to Gil Duran, whose furious Bluesky post (after a Wired mea-culpa writer interviewed him about her for forty-five minutes and cited neither of them) alerted The New York Times, whose November feature — “The Writer Who Dared Criticize Silicon Valley” — brought her agent's immortal email: “we always knew you were right.” Tin House is reissuing the book on September 15 with a Duran foreword and her new afterword, changing not a word. Younger readers, she's told, like that it doesn't read like a TED Talk. Her headstone joke covers the whole arc: always right, never lied, no one paid attention.•       Why Are They So Mad? The book's core observation remains undefeated: “no sector of society has benefited more and suffered less from the government than people in Silicon Valley. So why are they acting like this, and why are they so mad?” “Libertarian” was simply her shorthand for a subculture violently anti-government, totally anti-regulation, and drunk on Ayn Rand — or, in the book's reframe, the mind-set of adolescents craving total rampaging autonomy while someone else does the laundry. She wrote it from inside: a Wired freelancer under Louis Rossetto (who handed new writers The New Journalism), perpetually paired point-counterpoint against John Perry Barlow, whose Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace made her snort and whose “dyspeptic” label she wears as a compliment. Kevin Kelly, she insists, is not Sam Altman — they almost never agreed, but she doesn't demonize — “except that they have a belief in everything that tech wants to do is fine.” The book, she says now, is a Guide for the Perplexed: the metaphors and framing to decode everything the current crop is spewing.•       That Damn Book. She calls it TDB — That Damn Book — because it wrecked her. A strong media arc and worldwide reviews, then no sales and a career that “came to a crashing halt”: for twenty-five years she could not get published again, on tech or anything else; a finalist for four fellowships, winner of none; no one — blacklist theorists, gender theorists — could ever explain it. “I have PTSD from twenty-five years of never being able to be published again.” The lost years: seven of nasty elder care, an eviction that put everything she owned in storage, six years as an Airbnb superhost in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and the art project My Life as a Ghost — about the traumatic brain injury she's carried since a friend accidentally shot her with a Colt 45 at fourteen. She resists the redemptive reading that the TBI explains her outsider eye (“I'm a package deal”), and values tech precisely as the utility — word processing, BBSs for the housebound — that made a writing life possible. Using is not worshiping.•       AI Is the Inevitable Result of Cyberselfishness. “Was anybody asking for this? Not really.” AI, on her reading, is the financial play the culture was always building toward — there's little real innovation left, “except for surveillance capitalism” and, in her Shakespearean phrase, the current crop “borrowing the robes of the tech culture of another era.” Her oldest fascination has become the newest: since ELIZA in the sixties, people have preferred confessing to machines over talking to humans — AI boyfriends included — and “it gets so much stuff wrong that people wanna rely on this” bewilders her still. Andrew's question about Anthropic's calls for regulation drew the hour's driest line: “isn't that just sort of the lipstick on a pig issue? I'll believe it when I see it” — nobody, she notes, will do anything that touches the stock price. Her counter-example is the late Peter Neumann, the computer scientist who gave $4 million to the San Francisco Symphony's chorus: “we will not see his like again.”•       The Blue of Tahoe. Asked what freedom means, she calls the word too abused to define — a card-carrying ACLU member since high school who believes just as firmly in regulation, and whose answer to Sergey Brin's California-as-Soviet-Union hissy fit is the episode's keeper: “what do you think keeps the water of Tahoe so very blue except for government regulation and environmental scientists? Who do you think regulates the use of the term organic?” The regulation-freedom dynamic, she argues, is healthy — it's the worship that isn't. Her San Francisco test: The Crucible, the beloved East Bay institution that taught Burning Man its metalwork, gets nothing from the boom, while art nonprofits die weekly and the winners insist they owe nothing because they pay taxes — “which they try very much not to do.” Burning Man itself she reads via Brave New World: the violent passion surrogate, a scheduled space for disorder before returning to lives spent “creating nonsense and ruining a lot of things that we hold dear.” A California writer to the end — and, per Glengarry Glen Ross, always be closing. About the Guest Paulina Borsook has worked in and around Northern California tech culture since the early 1980s. Formerly on the masthead of Wired, she has written for Mother Jones, Salon, and countless tech and non-tech publications, and is a contributing editor at InFormation (“every day computers are making people easier to use”), the revived tech-skeptic magazine of past guest Davi...

“We're hardwired for love. We are taught to do violence, and to hate.” — Dana Mashoian Walrath A couple of months ago in Warsaw, the Polish writer and Jewish activist Konstanty Gebert argued that Gaza wasn't a genocide. Today's guest disagrees. In The Book of Genocides, graphic artist and anthropologist Dana Mashoian Walrath draws ten genocides including what she sees as the crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli army in Gaza. So what, exactly, is a “genocide”? Walrath's definition borrows from the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term during the Second World War. Lemkin meant the word to mean the destruction of peoples that had been deemed sub-human. Thus Walrath includes crimes against the First Peoples of the Americas and Black Americans alongside 20th-century mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Armenia, where her ancestors were persecuted. Some will quibble over this list. Although quibbling over the top (or bottom) ten genocides isn't exactly good taste. Besides, The Book of Genocides is a poignant work of graphic art in the tradition of Art Spiegelman's Maus. And its author, for all her anthropological insights into why people commit crimes against humanity, isn't shy with her genocide jokes. Springtime for Hitler, anyone? Five Takeaways •       Always a Land Grab. Ten genocides across five centuries — the First Peoples of the Americas, Black Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Rohingya, and Gaza — chosen not to rank horrors but to expose “the repetitive patterns and the processes that underlie genocide.” Walrath's definition is Raphael Lemkin's original, processual one, before politics narrowed the convention: the purpose is always a land grab, the apparatus always dehumanization, and precise academic definitions are often deployed “to keep some stories and histories out.” The book began as an interactive art installation with nine genocides and a tenth chapter on “the borders of genocide” — Afghanistan, Vietnam, Congo, Ukraine, Palestine — until the violence in Gaza persuaded her to make the case outright, while insisting the aim is not to demonize her Jewish friends, Judaism, or Israel, but to show the system. Her hope: that a globally framed comic might open dialogue between Jews and Palestinians “trapped in enmity right now.”•       Lemkin's Last Train. The man who coined the word is the book's tragic through-line. As a Polish law student, Lemkin followed the Berlin trial of a young Armenian who had shot one of the architects of the Armenian genocide — and found it ludicrous that the assassin faced justice for one murder while his victim had answered for none of his millions. His family farm had been seized in the First World War; his brother Samuel died in the forest. He escaped Warsaw on a train that was bombed, ran by night to reach his family, and failed to persuade them to leave (“they do this to us all the time”). Via Sweden, Russia, Japan, and Duke, he spent the war in Washington trying to make Americans see. His convention passed — then waited years for the US, UK, and China to ratify — and he died in 1959 penniless and friendless, UN officials fleeing him in the corridors. Walrath's speculation: his great regret, looking down, may be refusing to support We Charge Genocide, the 1951 petition by Black Americans — “we can't talk about something America has done” in the Cold War. Had America owned and repaired that crime then, “we'd be in a very different world.”•       Can You Have Half a Genocide? Andrew's pushback — if politicians can be “verging on genocidal,” does every Karen yelling at her kids get accused of it? — drew the hour's most honest concession: “that's the absolute spot-on critique of the approach I've taken.” Her defense is preventive: half a genocide is “too quantitative”; better to name things “on their way to massacre” and stop them, or repair them, than to litigate the label afterward. Genocide, she argues, predates modernity and Arendt's industrial reading — it arrives with the first hierarchical, extracting, wealth-inheriting “so-called civilizations,” Sparta and Thucydides included. Slavery qualifies because the operational word is systemic: the transatlantic trade ran on thinking of humans as lesser. But she draws one line firmly: asked about factory farms as future genocides, “I would hate to see genocide get used over there. It is something that humans do to one another” — and, she insists, don't have to: the literature on aversion to killing shows soldiers must be socialized into it. We're hardwired for love and taught to hate.•       Stanton's Stages in MAGA America. Is there something genocidal in MAGA's language about undocumented immigrants? “Absolutely.” Walrath applies the ten stages of genocide — the classroom heuristic Gregory Stanton first presented to the State Department in 1996 — and finds the United States “doing a heck of a lot of them”: polarization; dehumanization (people called vermin, “not worthy of life”); discrimination in the restriction of voting rights. “We're on very, very shaky ground.” Homelessness, in the same frame, is the product of structures that disenfranchise some and privilege others — “we've got enough to go around; we just revere wealth.” Her model for how ordinary people let it happen is Ursula Hegi's Stones from the River: the fearful, the wounded, the disenfranchised, vulnerable to takeover — with parallels in MAGA voters spurned by the neoliberal machine and unable to see who is pulling the levers. Hence her claim for the book: it is resistance, but resistance that builds a coalition across horrors rather than policing which horror counts.•       Springtime for Hitler. She didn't read Maus until 2009 — “that's when I found my medium and just went wild” — and pays it explicit homage in the book. Comics, she argues, let readers “come into” a history and think for themselves, and laughter is respite: an angry messenger gets no listeners. Her earlier Aliceheimer's let people laugh about her mother's dementia (not at it, she corrected sharply); telling audiences she's working on her genocide jokes makes them relax enough to hear the rest. Andrew's challenge — “do you really want to make it safe?” — produced the useful distinction: safe to enter, not whitewashed; hand-lettered so readers can bring the content in, every truth intact. The closing exchange landed on The Producers and Springtime for Hitler as a brilliant portrayal of the legacies of catastrophe. Her last word: knowledge must cross boundaries, “and the boundaries are all human made, so let's unmake them.” Andrew's: most will disagree with her list — and it may be a classic. About the Guest Dana Mashoian Walrath is a writer, artist, and anthropologist. Her award-winning works include Aliceheimer's, a graphic memoir about her mother's dementia, and Like Water on Stone, a verse novel about the Armenian genocide. She holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania; her comics, art, essays, and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The Lancet, Slate, and on NPR. The Book of Genocide...

“We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods, and we are not.” — John West Back in 2006, at the height of Web 2.0 optimism, Time made YOU person of the year. The user-generated technology of the internet, Time implied, would make all of us into digital gods of memory and forgetting. Twenty years later, the script has been totally flipped. Now we know that the internet is all-too-human. And so are we. This reminder of our mortality is the heart (if that's the right word) of the new book by John West, the double Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal computational journalist. West's The Internet Will Die, and So Will You is a kind of digital memento mori. His argument is metaphysical rather than political. Offline, he writes, our lives are marked by constraint. But we mistake the internet's destruction of physical distance for limitlessness. “We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods,” he reminds us, “and we are not.” A Christian and a digital deconvert (not an uncommon combination in the technocrati), West wants us to import our mortality online. If we recognize that the internet will decay and finally die, he suggests, we will make it human. (Re)Make it, as us. I've been making a version of this argument since The Cult of the Amateur in 2007. Only West's version — by contrasting Bach, Ecclesiastes, and Mary Oliver with the infinite scroll — is more poetic and musical. Politer too. Noli timere, as the poet Seamus Heaney texted before he died. Be not afraid. Of life, of death. But beware of YOU. Be afraid. Timere. Very afraid. Five Takeaways •       We Are Not Gods. The book's thesis: offline life is marked by constraint — you cannot talk to people farther than you can shout, or hug your child while she's at school — while online we act at a distance and mistake that “foot-loosening technology” for limitlessness. “We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods, and we are not” — the AI singularity being the theological version of the same delusion, and “a recipe for disaster, both interpersonally, but also within ourselves.” The fix is not logging off but bringing our mortality online: “this is where we live,” and the Internet's magic only stays magical when tempered by limits — “in order for it to be magical, we need the flip side, which is that it can't always be magic.” Andrew's frame: in 2006, Time made YOU person of the year, promising digital gods of memory and forgetting. Twenty years on, the internet is all-too-human — and so are we.•       The Deconvert's Meditation. “No one is more strident than the convert or the deconvert.” West's digital utopianism began in a middle-school computer lab, where an unhappy kid discovered he could find friends and communities online — and it died by monkey's paw: the same mechanism that found him anime fans now routes lonely kids into pro-anorexia TikTok rabbit holes (his own Journal colleagues' reporting) and neo-Nazi forums. “That supercharging is something that I wished for.” He concedes the lineage Andrew has worked since The Cult of the Amateur (2007) and The Internet Is Not the Answer (2015) — and goes further: “I actually think largely, Plato and Postman were right.” Culture must metabolize its technological ruptures. Or, per the Freudian slip Andrew gifted back to him for the next book: its raptures. Andrew's verdict on the lineage: the same argument, more poetic and musical. Politer too.•       A Few Thousand Weeks. On the Luddite summer, West channels past guest Brian Merchant: hatred of technology is usually hatred of lost control. The backlash against AI data centers is about being “completely removed from democratic control over that technology,” and the marketing — a magic box that will take your job — has backfired predictably. His arithmetic of dignity: we get only a few thousand weeks on this earth, and “our dignity demands that we have some say over what we do with our lives.” He cites Freddie deBoer's Copernican principle — everyone believes they live at history's hinge — then breaks it honestly: “but I also think this time, it might be right,” the elder millennial awestruck at the rupture he came of age inside.•       Religious, Not Spiritual. West inverts the modern chestnut: “everyone says they're spiritual and not religious these days. I actually think it's important to be religious, and spiritual can take it or leave it” — religion being “a powerful technology” for binding people into the civic fabric. His Christianity runs to liberation theology: not storing up treasure for the glorious day, but making this world more just now. Hence Bach cantatas, Ecclesiastes, and Mary Oliver as the book's unnamed philosophies — and hence his verdict on the billionaires who struggle with finitude: it doesn't shock him that men who earn millions while sleeping believe themselves gods, since “every dollar is like a little Iago whispering poison into the ears of the Silicon Valley elite.” The advantage belongs to us mere normals, unburdened by the whispering.•       Noli Timere. The Latin on West's X page — be not afraid — was Seamus Heaney's last text message, sent by SMS before the surgery he didn't survive, then carried by the Internet to thousands who found hope in it. That, West argues, is the network at its best: “it is about how you spend your time on the Internet, not what you can do on the Internet.” On memory, his formula is to remember “not more and not less, but rather differently” — choosing what we remember (the Odyssey's oral re-membering, retold body to body) rather than having it forced on us (the red solo cup photos, the traumas that refuse processing). The great mismatch of the web: “the things that we think should be permanent are often the things that are the most impermanent online, and the things that I really wish would fade away are the ones that refuse to.” Andrew's send-off inverts Heaney: be not afraid — of life, of death. But beware of YOU, the ultimate human conceit. Timere. Very afraid. About the Guest John West is a writer and technologist. He reports the news with code at The Wall Street Journal, where his work has won multiple awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes. The Boston Globe called his first book, Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery, “lyrical and crystalline.” He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and degrees in philosophy and music performance from Oberlin College, and lives outside Kingston, New York, with his partner, children, and unruly cat. The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (Here Below, September 10, 2026) is his digital memento mori. References: •       The Internet Will Die, and So Will You: On Learning to Live in Our Digital Age by John West (Here Below, September 10, 2026).•       Lessons and Carols: A Meditati...

“It's a dying gasp of white supremacy — and I say dying with a caveat, because that part depends on us.” — Sonali Kolhatkar Yesterday, Wendy Lesser suggested that Americans can learn much from the anti-fascist history of Berlin in the 1930s. Today, Rising Up With Sonali host Sonali Kolhatkar is even more explicit. Yes, she argues in her new book, Breaking ICE, the 2020s are eerily similar to the 1930s, especially in what she calls “state terror” and “MAGA fascism.” In 2023, Sonali Kolhatkar came on this show to talk about Rising Up, a book about the power of narrative. Three years later, her new book describes what she sees as the dying gasp of white supremacy. But to fully die, she argues, the community needs to rise up. So, like the perennial fascist threat, the ability to tell stories is a perpetual feature of politics. Thus Breaking ICE, Kolhatkar's story of stories about community defense against MAGA fascism. Five Takeaways •       Narrative Is Everything. The crackdown, Kolhatkar argues, was built on stories: immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” — Hitlerian language, used repeatedly — recast a population of workers and families as criminals, justifying the funding, the raids, and the denial of due process. The counternarrative is her book's project: the activists who retold the story of ICE agents as Gestapo-like masked thugs, and did it so successfully that public opinion has swung back. Trump, she argues, overplayed his hand — every day brings another story of a Trump voter whose spouse is deported at a routine check-in, protesting “this is not what we voted for.” The sequel to Rising Up thus practices what that book preached: narrative as the primary weapon of politics — a weapon, she notes via Springsteen and the protest singers, that artists have always wielded and the right has lately understood better than the left.•       A Dying Gasp — With a Caveat. Asked flatly whether this is a repeat of the 1930s, Kolhatkar answers yes — and adds that the echo is deliberate, down to “homeland,” a favorite term of the Nazis that George W. Bush domesticated. But the deeper lineage is homegrown: her interviewees Ibram X. Kendi and Robin D. G. Kelley trace American fascism through Native dispossession and mass enslavement — authoritarian, anti-democratic, racist. ICE, on this reading, is simply race-based policing restored. Hence her verdict: “a dying gasp of white supremacy,” with the caveat that the dying depends on us. No magic bullets, no finish line: “democracy is an ongoing exercise. There is no resting when it comes to freedom.” Fittingly, the episode lands the day after Wendy Lesser's Berlin hour — Kolhatkar making explicit what the cautionary mirror implied.•       The Mamdani Lesson. The hour's sharpest political analysis: flip the script on electoral politics. Politicians want elections as popularity contests — “this is who I am, who's behind me?” — when voters should be saying “this is what we want, who will back our demands?” The not-Trump ad is the losing move: it was Hillary Clinton's approach, Kamala Harris's approach, and now Xavier Becerra's in California. The winning move is Zohran Mamdani's: voters could instantly name what he was for — free buses, city-run grocery stores, rent control, universal childcare, fixed potholes. Her model is the civil rights movement, which didn't wait for a savior politician but marched and forced hands. And her defense against the radicalism charge: what the American left demands — healthcare for all — is centrist in Europe. If public schools are education for all, why not Medicare for All? And to Andrew's pushback — doesn't Abolish ICE alienate the persuadable middle? — her answer is the polling: majorities already oppose the raids, because Trump overreached.•       What State Terror Looks Like. The subtitle's claim, cashed out: downtown Los Angeles under curfew, freeways shut, armed National Guardsmen at the federal buildings — and the refrain she heard nationwide: who will save us from these masked thugs? The realization that the police belong to the same structure taught the lesson in her credo: only the people can save the people. The terror is bureaucratic as much as theatrical — green-card applicants seized at airports en route to see friends, families ripped apart, and 20,000 immigrant children stripped of legal representation in defiance of a law George W. Bush signed (“who we thought at the time was the fascist authoritarian and is now, you know, like a Democrat”). Against it, the book's nineteen voices — from Maine to Georgia to LA — deploy whistles, bullhorns, patrols, documentation, and, in a civil-rights echo, holding hands and singing to bring the temperature down. With Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kendi, Kelley, and a foreword by Roberto Lovato supplying the long view.•       Detention Centers & Data Centers. The conversation's bridge to this show's long Luddite summer: Kolhatkar sees the fight against immigrant detention centers and the fight against AI data centers as one struggle, since both, she argues, distract from and serve the same billionaire fleecing — “if we are busy blaming the day laborer at the street corner for stealing our job, we're not gonna look at what Elon Musk has done.” Even MAGA voters, she notes, don't want to live next to either. On movements that wither, her revision: Black Lives Matter didn't fizzle, it was muzzled — Musk bought Black Twitter, its biggest bullhorn — and its abolitionist platform reads as current as ever: take the first four letters away from police, and you're left with ICE. Her ask of journalism itself: solutions journalism — start with how people are fighting back, not one more story of how they're being crushed. About the Guest Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist and the founder, host, and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, the long-running television and radio show airing on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. A senior editor at YES! Magazine and writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, she is co-director of the Afghan Women's Mission and serves on the board of the Justice Action Center. Her books include Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, Talking About Abolition, and Bleeding Afghanistan (as co-author). Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories Press) gathers nineteen of her conversations from the front lines, with a foreword by Roberto Lovato. References: •       Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism by Sonali Kolhatkar (Seven Stories Press, 2026).•       Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice — the book behind her first Keen On appearance, three years ago.•       Among the book's nineteen voices: Viet Thanh Nguyen, past Keen On guest Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D. G....

“Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” — Wendy Lesser “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I Am a Berliner), JFK famously said in West Berlin on June 26, 1963, in the face of Soviet imperial tyranny. Today, Wendy Lesser is offering the same defiance in her new book Berlin Before and After. Only Lesser offers a cautionary mirror for our times of not just post-Soviet Putin but also wannabe-tyrants like Trump. Lesser's loving portrait of Berlin is of a free city. She reminds us that even in Germany's darkest hour, Berlin never actually went Nazi. The city voted left up to and including 1933, so Hitler had to abolish democracy to take it over. Nor, Lesser argues, was Nazism a reaction to Weimar Berlin's Cabaret-style nightlife, any more than Trump is a reaction to wokeness. Economic forces, not cultural ones, she insists, enable dictators. Today's Berlin, as a city that memorializes its own crimes, offers America an urban lesson in acknowledging historical guilt. That's what makes Berlin such a defiant beacon of freedom in our authoritarian age. There are more urbane cities than Berlin, but none quite as dedicated to freedom. Go there and/or read Berlin Before and After. Today we should all be Berliners. Five Takeaways •       Our Own 1929 — or 1932? The book began as a love letter to the Berlin Lesser adopted in 2003 — the everywhere writer of Berkeley, New York, and Berlin, against Lampedusa the ultimate somewhere, who never left Sicily and carried Shakespeare through the coffee houses of Palermo. But as she wrote, America's condition worsened: “We were not only in our own 1929, but perhaps in 1930, '31, or even '32 — verging on our own descent into frightening dictatorship.” Hence the subtitle's cautionary mirror — though history, she insists, never exactly repeats itself, and the American analogies came unforced, surfacing every thirty or forty pages without hammering. Being an everywhere, she says, doesn't make you write better — Lampedusa proves that — “but it improves your life,” and it gave her the subjects her native California never could.•       Berlin Never Went Nazi. The episode's revelation: the city of Weimar flamboyance never gave the Nazis a majority — Berlin voted left up to and including 1933, and “Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” From which follows her sharpest argument: Nazism was not a backlash against Berlin's sexual and artistic freedoms, “just as I do not see the election of Trump as a reaction to so-called wokeness or trans rights. Cultural manifestations do not cause such government changes. Economic forces do” — wealth gaps, regional deprivation, the east feeling second-class, then and now (the AfD's heartland). The direct equivalences are rhetorical: America's poisoned-blood language on immigrants comes “straight from the Goebbels playbook,” and the rights that flowered in twenties Germany were “instantly squished” in the thirties. As for today: the AfD polls high before Berlin's September city elections, but the firewall holds — and the party is formally flagged by German intelligence as constitutionally dangerous. Andrew's question stands: any vaccines for this thing?•       1929: The Year Everything Premiered. Why that year: Grosz, Sander, and Otto Dix at their peak; Brecht and Piscator both premiering; All Quiet on the Western Front, the underrated Grand Hotel, and Berlin Alexanderplatz in the bookshops — plus Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician, the novella that predicted fascism; Billy Wilder still a weekly-paper journalist shooting his first film; and Christopher Isherwood arriving on the first visit that became Goodbye to Berlin and, via Broadway, Cabaret. “Only in retrospect do we see these things as major.” The culture flourished beside economic and political chaos — “having a terrible government is not inconsistent with producing good culture. Look at nineteenth-century Russia” — and when the chaos won, the exiles washed up in the German ghetto of Los Angeles: Brecht (on the beach, per this week's Baerwald episode), Döblin, Mann. Many went back — Brecht in 1949, Piscator after — because in Hollywood and New York they “couldn't live on the thin slice of culture,” a homesickness Lesser saw again in Berkeley's own Czesław Miłosz, watching Americans like children playing in a sandbox.•       After Means 1989. The title's twist: the After is not the Nazis' arrival but the Wall's fall. The dark half-century — twelve years of Reich, then “with barely a pause to take a breath” the divided city — is deliberately skipped: “the city is going to tell you what happened,” through what its monuments confess, like Bebelplatz's memorial to the burned books of May 1933. Berlin now wears its freedom knowingly: graffiti flourishes precisely because speech was twice policed; May Day's bottle-throwing is tolerated and swept up; Freiheit arrives like the choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth — Andrew's analogy, which she embraced with irony, since “nobody is totally free these days.” The Wall's hothouse island remains separate from Germany half a century on. And the city stays cinematic to the point of unreality — Wings of Desire's angels in the actual Staatsbibliothek (“I thought it was just a set”), Babylon Berlin's set-choosers clearing away the present — with a thriller shelf to match: Deighton's Berlin Game (freshly reread on his death), le Carré's Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Herron, McEwan, Schneider's Wall Jumper.•       A Mirror That Might Become Useful. Berlin's deepest lesson is for after the fall: it is the city that acknowledges its bad deeds — monuments and plaques saying this is where we did it — while America “likes to brush it all aside and act like we're always the heroes.” Andrew's pushback landed: Montgomery, Bryan Stevenson's lynching memorial, the African American Museum — “You're right. I'm not being fair.” But the qualification sharpens rather than sinks the thesis: “we do not have a history yet like Holocaust Germany or even Berlin Wall Germany… It's a mirror that might become useful if the worst comes about.” Meanwhile Berlin models the livable city: rent control the voters wanted to push all the way to expropriation, transit worth “ecstasies,” and a constitutional welfare clause promising a dignified existence — economic rights our Bill of Rights never mentions. The book ends aboard the M29 bus, top deck, regular fare, from the Maybachufer's twice-weekly market (running since before 1929) across the old West to Grunewald. “Maybe you're going to be made into a Berlin angel.” “A great fate.” About the Guest Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review, the celebrated Berkeley literary quarterly, and the author of a novel and twelve works of nonfiction, including You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn (winner of the Marfield Prize), Why I Read, and Scandinavian Noir. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Cullman Center — and the American Academy in Berlin, where her love affair with the city deepened. Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times (Harper, September 2026) is her portrait of the city in 1929 and now. She divides her time between B...

“There's no exit in capitalism.” — Jeremy Adelman Is that ongoing quarrel of modern politics, the battle over capitalism, just a storm in a teacup? Economic historian Jeremy Adelman thinks it might be. In The Capitalist Era, Adelman argues that all camps — left and right, Keynesian and Hayekian, socialist and libertarian — accept the unavoidability of global capitalism. There is no alternative, as Mrs Thatcher used to annoyingly say. Although Adelman, certainly no Thatcherite, isn't celebrating the apparent inevitability of our capitalist epoch. What interests Adelman is the making and unmaking of what he calls the “global mind.” The revolutionary quality of capitalism, he says, is that we now think of strangers as somehow part of our community. So when Adam Smith, the moral philosopher father of economics, drank his Chinese tea while reading of a deadly earthquake in China, he recognized that capitalism inevitably entangled our moral thoughts with our self-interest. It wasn't just economists who began to think differently of strangers. Artists as varied as Picasso, Joseph Conrad, and the photography-obsessed Émile Zola all made this moral inquiry of strangers the heart of their work. Yes, Adelman is probably right to say there's no capitalist off-ramp in our post-global economy. But capitalism's octopus-like “global mind” and its (mis)treatment of strangers should turn all economists into moral philosophers and all artists into observers of economics. Five Takeaways •       The Mind, Not the Material. Against Sven Beckert's material history (which Adelman admired and reviewed in Foreign Affairs), The Capitalist Era studies how we think about capitalism — because the thinking sets the policies, creates the attachments, fuels the wars, and builds the institutions. Capitalism, on his dating, is an eighteenth-century invention that dawns with Adam Smith's “commercial society”: the first economic system to tie strangers across the whole planet into one interdependent web — global from the very start. Its founding text is a thought experiment: Smith's gentleman of humanity, drinking Chinese tea while reading of a Chinese earthquake, asked whether he minds the deaths of thousands as much as the pain in his little finger. The marketplace entangles our moralities — and the question of whether sympathy can keep pace with self-interest has governed the global mind ever since.•       No Exit in Capitalism. For or against? A fair question with a layered answer: we are all heirs to the Marxist tradition — inequality and exploitation are inherent to interdependence, and “the propensity to be predatory coexists with the propensity to be empathetic.” But the trap is real: “there's no exit in capitalism” — leaving is so punitive that every socialist revolution has paid catastrophically, a logic Adelman calls part of “the awful cunning” of the Trump administration's economic statecraft. Keynes versus Hayek? When Andrew suggested it amounted to a family squabble — a storm in a teacup — Adelman largely agreed: both camps accept that we live inside capitalism, arguing only over how to live interdependently. No exit, though, doesn't mean no alternatives: the argument worth recovering — lost since the globalization of the 1980s was “dumped on us” — is which form of interdependence we actually want. Gramsci's interregnum, the time for monsters, is exactly when that argument matters.•       The Veil Between Strangers. The book's gallery: not only philosophers but artists — Picasso, the poets, Borges (“I have a hard time writing any book without” him) — and above all photographers, because how we think about strangers is mediated through media. Smith's verb was to see: the stranger's invisibility was the whole problem, and photography — cheap to reproduce, claiming realism — promised to remove the veil. Zola was obsessed with it; street photography made New York and London legible as cities of vice and poverty; and the Opium War photographs that reached London in the 1860s forced a scandal, because this suffering was inflicted by our own troops. But seeing bred a new problem Smith never foresaw: indifference — too many images numbing the sympathies they were meant to awaken. In today's supersaturation of digital and artificially generated strangers, the early doubters' warning compounds: market interdependence plus growing indifference between the interdependent is “a recipe for calamity.”•       Earth Hunger. The charge that capitalism is eating the planet is as old as capitalism: the era of Hobson's Imperialism named the West's insatiable appetite to conquer and carve — “earth hunger” — after the Boer War. Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement traveled the Congo River together: Conrad turned it into Heart of Darkness; Casement wrote the first great humanitarian reports — rubber for Europe's bicycles and tires, extermination for the Congolese and then Amazonians — before renouncing the crown, joining the Irish rebellion, and hanging for treason. Slavery runs through the same river: on Smith's mind from the start, the plantation bonanza's awkward foundation, with dehumanization as extraction's precondition — a through line to the 1930s. To James Crawford's vanishing earth (last week's episode), Adelman offers a friendly dissent: the earth isn't vanishing, but the accelerating metabolism of resources — extracted inhumanely for those who live there — is stressing the system. Alternatives exist; exit does not.•       Hoard the Returns, Externalize the Burdens. Adelman refuses the apocalypse chorus: end-time arguments breed cynicism — grab what you can while you can — which is precisely what turned the 1930s murderous; and the great debate the 2008 crisis should have sparked was stifled by crisis management that worked too well. “Neoliberalism” he finds overblown — the world is a mixed, messy hybrid, China neither socialist nor neoliberal — and the Thucydides Trap is a “silly metaphor”: Sparta and Athens were never as interdependent as China and the United States. Hence the closing duel: Carney versus Trump as two arguments inside the global mind about how to need strangers. Trump, the Toronto-born historian argues, is no isolationist — his is a global vision that wants to “hoard the returns and externalize the burdens,” punishing the asymmetrically dependent (Canada above all) through a predator's bilateralism whose 1930s pedigree Adelman names with discomfort. And China? Sitting on the sidelines, courting Canada, playing “an old game” of constructing and dividing markets — as old as the global mind itself. About the Guest Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and professor of history and director of the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge. Born in Toronto and educated at Toronto, the LSE, and Oxford, he has lived and worked in seven countries. His many books include Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman and Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. The Capitalist Era: The Making—and Unmaking—of ...

“Seward had all the money and Seward had all the bullies. Lincoln didn't have money or bullies, but by God, he had the people.” — Jonathan Earle Yesterday, Kurt Andersen fictionalized a 21st-century broken America without an Abe Lincoln as savior. Today we talk about the man himself with Jonathan Earle, author of He Has the People, a new history of the 1860 election that made Lincoln president and probably saved the then young Republic. Earle's mission is to bring Lincoln down from Mount Rushmore. He tells the story of a flesh-and-blood politician, a six-foot-four autodidact who, in 1859, was barely known outside Illinois. What changed everything was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859. Lincoln recognized as much, spending the winter in the archives of the State Library of Illinois, then delivering a speech at Cooper Union that won over the New York media. Then onto the Republican convention in Chicago where the wily Lincoln ran rings around the establishment candidate William Henry Seward. In 1860, Abe Lincoln became Lincoln. The rest is history. He Has the People should be required reading for both obscure Republicans and Democrats planning to run for president in a fatally divided election. Earle suspects that 2028 might be as historic as 1860. Perhaps it will deliver another politician with the wit and wisdom to bring a broken America together. Somebody who, like Abe, has the people. Five Takeaways •       Before Abe Was Lincoln. Earle's stated mission: take Lincoln off Mount Rushmore and out of the throne Daniel Chester French sculpted, and restore the flesh-and-blood politician — “among the canniest politicians our country has produced, maybe the planet.” The pre-marble Lincoln: born in an actual Kentucky log cabin, wholly self-taught (favorite book: Euclid), the first genuinely Western president, six-foot-four when most men stood five-eight, a storyteller who learned politics riding the Illinois judicial circuit — breaking bread and sharing mattresses with judges and rival counsel — his ambition, in his law partner's famous phrase, a little engine that knew no rest. In 1859 he was barely known outside Illinois, a one-term ex-congressman regarded as vice-presidential material at best — the Jon Ossoff of his day, Earle suggests: making noise, not yet a name. Americans declare every election the most important in history; Earle's answer is the book's premise: hold on — it's not 1860.•       The 9/11 Before the Election. For decades both parties buried slavery beneath compromises — 1820, 1850 — until a tiny, hated minority of abolitionists forced the question. Then John Brown and twenty-one followers seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, intending to arm the enslaved (a plan so improvised, Earle notes, that Brown didn't bring lunch). The raid detonated inside a presidential campaign — as if 9/11 had preceded the 2000 election, or Pearl Harbor come before FDR's 1940 reelection — and it scrambled the chessboard: after Brown, every Southerner saw a secret John Brown in every Northerner, every Northerner saw a Slave Power that had run all three branches since the founding, and compromise died. Earle's verdict, unusual for a historian: the Civil War was inevitable after John Brown — the only question was who would be in charge when it came.•       Chicagoland. Lincoln's self-introduction was the strangest in campaign history: a tour of Bleeding Kansas (“the Gaza of the day”), then a winter of archival research in the State Library of Illinois, proving the founders believed they had the power to stop slavery's spread — delivered at Cooper Union in February 1860 in a reedy high voice that nonetheless won Horace Greeley and the New York press: his Obama-in-Boston moment. William Henry Seward — the famous New York senator, the Hillary of the piece — led the first two convention ballots. But Lincoln's handlers had pulled off the venue coup of the century (Chicago, his home state) and worked the smoky backrooms with offices, favors, and newspapers while their candidate wired “make no promises that bind me.” Seward was soft in Ohio and Indiana; the Republicans needed Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois; and a shocked Lincoln man coined the title: Seward had all the money and all the bullies — “but by God, he had the people.” Andrew's caveat: in Chicago, “the people” were power brokers.•       A Revolution, Reported from Paddy's Run. The general election was really two simultaneous contests: Lincoln versus Douglas in the North, Breckinridge versus Bell in the South — four candidates winning electoral votes, resolved as 180 for Lincoln (152 needed) on 39.8 percent of the popular vote, the lowest winning share in American history, with a scarcely believable 81.8 percent turnout. The franchise: white male citizens, no property requirement, citizenship easy enough that Democrats met the Irish ships at the docks — simultaneously the widest political participation on the planet and a restriction whose repair (the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments) would shut suffragists out for two more generations. Earle's narrative spine is Murat Halstead of Paddy's Run, Ohio — the nation's first campaign journalist, the only man at all seven of 1860's conventions, a Seward man who called it straight: this was a revolution — the first antislavery party wresting Washington from “Northern men with Southern principles” like Buchanan, Van Buren, and Pierce. And in the secession winter, Lincoln refused to compromise the victory away: We won.•       Is There a Lincoln Out There? Lincoln tops every presidential ranking, Earle argues, because he grew — the arc Earle compares to Bobby Kennedy's journey from McCarthyite to tribune of the poor. This Lincoln moved from denying racial equality in 1860 to a final speech — John Wilkes Booth in the audience — endorsing the vote for Black Union soldiers: killed, in effect, for the growing. He held the 1864 election in the middle of the war he expected to lose it (Earle's pointed contrast: Zelensky's wartime postponement — “I think that's a mistake”). To Andersen's cheerful breakup scenario, the LSU historian — whose Louisiana is one-third African American — gave a hard no: disunion meant “unremitted servitude forever,” and the republic needs Mississippi and Wyoming alike. For 2028: historical contingency always wins — nobody had heard of Obama two years out, and the general public hasn't heard the next name either. “I do think that there is a Lincoln out there. I do.” About the Guest Jonathan Earle teaches history and politics at Louisiana State University, where he has been Dean of the Ogden Honors College since 2014. A historian of antebellum American politics, he is the author of Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry, and (as co-editor) Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri. He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860 (Oxford University Press, Pivotal Moments in American History series) draws on t...

“We are the beginning of a bright and shiny dark age.” — Kurt Andersen, from The Breakup It's 2045 and America has got divorced. That's the premise of The Breakup, by the historian and novelist Kurt Andersen. “The future is fiction. It hasn't happened yet,” the historian in Andersen reminds us. But his near-term fictional future, an America of civil war and national divorce, certainly isn't inconceivable. Nor, in an increasingly divided United States between high-tech coastal elites and a medieval hinterland, does such a scenario appear quite as nightmarish as it once did. In contrast with the bloodiness, say, of Alex Garland's Hollywood version of an American civil war, Andersen's literary breakup is the “scattered violence of a Middle Eastern kind.” Lebanon comes to the United States in the form of loosely confederated militias, assassinations and kidnappings. This war kills 28,000, half of them civilians. It could have been worse. Indeed, it is worse today — when compared to the 44,000 people killed by guns each year. The novel also tells the story of the breakup of a twenty-three-year marriage between the Tennessean poet Natalie and the San Francisco tech bro Asher. Natalie doesn't much like Silicon Valley and warns that “we are the beginning of a bright and shiny dark age.” But for Andersen this age isn't totally dark. Marriages and countries break up, he reminds us, and that is often the beginning rather than the end of the story. Not quite darkness at noon. So get ready for the mid-21st-century break-up of the United States. Such a split might actually be brighter than America's current dark marriage. Five Takeaways •       The Future Is Fiction. After Fantasyland (five hundred years of how America went haywire) and Evil Geniuses (the last fifty), Andersen considered a third history — of the future — and realized the genre is folly: futurism is just experts guessing, Alvin Toffler in a new suit. “The future is fiction. It hasn't happened yet. It's imaginary until it happens.” So the trilogy's conclusion became a novel — his fifth — and the bookseller algorithms' “dystopian” label gets a correction: dystopian satire, maybe, but “we are in a dystopian period now.” Where Alex Garland's Civil War embedded journalists inside the fighting, The Breakup lives with a couple seven years after it — the good, the bad, the thank-God-we-were-okay — and, chalk it up to the Midwestern upbringing, it ends ambiguous but not without hope.•       A Manageable Civil War. The backstory his fictional journalism flashes back to: a blue political comeback — Supreme Court expansion, Puerto Rico and DC statehood — ignites a ferocious right-wing backlash, and the violence that follows is “scattered… of a Middle Eastern kind”: loosely confederated militias assassinating, kidnapping, and bombing, while a presidential administration insists it's a crime spree — until the military crushes the insurgency with drones and robots in eighteen months. The toll: 28,000 dead, half civilians, 45,000 wounded — numbers Andrew notes are roughly a single year of American gun deaths, and that Andersen's character Natalie keeps in proportion: “could have been worse… We're not living in Mad Max time.” Against the 1860s — millions dead from a far smaller population — this is a war America can talk itself into surviving. Which may be the scariest thing about it.•       The Disunion's Logistics. The novel's deep research problem: how would you actually do it? You can't draw an 1860 line, because the real divide runs between cities and countryside, not North and South — so the negotiated Disunion takes seven years, producing Natalie's Free American Republic and Asher's smaller United States. The Brexit analogy gets swatted (“the EU is not a country” — this is a whole different deal), balkanization into five or twelve republics is doubted (the prosperities of scale), and the best twist is secessionist remorse: Montana runs the numbers and realizes the West, unlike the South, gives more to Washington than it takes — so why join them? Beneath it all, the state nobody thinks they need: Medicare, Social Security, the federal machinery people discover only as DOGE-style contempt dismantles it. And still, the magic holds: immigrants keep coming, because only in America do you become American by showing up.•       The Soft Breakup Papers. The nonfiction beneath the novel is Andersen's New York Times essay: America as a long, loveless marriage — separate lives, separate tracks, staying together for the kids — that may already have had its soft breakup. His research assembled what nobody had put together: ten- and twenty-state climate alliances, sanctuary cities, Second Amendment sanctuary states and a thousand such counties — “governmental apparatuses emerging for these separate governments” since 2009, unremarked because the only people saying “national divorce” were Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rush Limbaugh, and nobody serious could agree with them. The mechanism is Hemingway's bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. Fintan O'Toole warned him the book could become self-fulfilling prophecy; Andersen answered that the elephant in the room must be named — and he has the Cassandra receipts, having published Fantasyland's post-truth diagnosis before Trump was first elected. “Don't blame me. We'll reconnoiter in ten or twenty years.”•       A Bright and Shiny Dark Age. The episode's keeper, from the novel's tech-despising heroine: “We are the beginning of a bright and shiny dark age.” One political party marches back toward the medieval — no public health, no vaccines, no intellectualism — while the Bay Area ships magic, William Gibson's unevenly distributed future arriving all at once. In 2045, AI is background hum “like electricity,” the tech trillionaires are plural, and the robots are everywhere and unremarkable — though Andersen's own book trade is his caution against straight lines: print was declared dead fifteen years ago and still sells half of all books. The age of anxiety — the loneliness, social media's riled-and-angry business model (30% of the blame or 70%, “but it's large”), a president “selling pessimism” in his simultaneous idiocy and brilliance against optimism's old American pillar — reads, in the novel's hindsight, like the premonition of the breakup. And yet no zombies, no rubble: not without hope. About the Guest Kurt Andersen is the New York Times bestselling author of the histories Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire and Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, and the novels Turn of the Century, Heyday, True Believers, and You Can't Spell America Without Me. Co-founder of Spy magazine and longtime host of the Peabody-winning public radio program Studio 360, he has written for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. The Breakup (Random House, August 2026), his fifth novel, is set in the AI-suffused, post-civil-war America of 2045 — “the most brilliant social novelist of our time,” per Walter Isaacson, “in the tradition of Tom Wolfe and Don DeLillo, but even funnier and deeper.” ...

Grandfathers, grandfathers. Yesterday, David Baerwald talked about his grandfather, Ernst Baerwald, an American spy in Second World War Japan. Today, Katie S. Sanders talks about her grandfather, Murray Simon, whose life was saved by an American spy in Second World War France. In Ortiz's War, co-authored with historian Nicholas Reynolds, Sanders writes about Peter Ortiz, who became the Allies' secret weapon against the Nazis in France. With his stunning looks, Ortiz might have been a Hollywood creation. Polylingual Franco-American aristocrat, French Foreign Legion, race-car driver, circus lion tamer, the most battle-decorated member of America's first spy agency. He even played himself (anonymous brave soldier) in a number of post-war Hollywood movies. I wish he was my grandfather. Five Takeaways •       The Spy Who Saved Her Grandfather. Murray Simon was a 23-year-old Jewish kid from Queens who had never flown before the Army Air Forces trained him — then sent him over occupied France in a black-painted B-24 Liberator carrying spy supplies and carrier pigeons for the resistance. Shot down on May 6, 1944, a month before D-Day, on an OSS mission whose standing advice was don't get shot down — spies were tortured and killed, not taken prisoner — he was hidden by a Bulgarian-born Jew passing as Catholic, a man with an eight-month-old daughter and a pregnant wife who was “already supposed to be dead” and opened his door anyway. Smuggled onward, Murray was intercepted by Peter Ortiz — and made it home to the GI Bill, a family, and what he called “the warm womb of Uncle Sam.” Katie never met him; the book is her way of meeting him. “I gravitate towards stories of resistance, probably in part because I'm a product of one.” Publication day: the anniversary of the liberation of Paris.•       No Peacetime Soldier. Peter J. Ortiz's résumé reads like an unpublishable novel: son of a founding editor of Paris Vogue; French boarding-school runaway into the Foreign Legion (North Africa, Casablanca included); merchant seaman, dude-ranch manager, race-car driver, circus lion tamer; wounded fighting the Germans in 1940, captured, serially escaped — once off a hospital train under a dead soldier's identity; docked in New York the day after Pearl Harbor and enlisted in the Marines, rising to become the most battle-decorated member of the OSS and one of the most decorated Marines of the war. His military file: not a good candidate for a desk job, ever. He spoke five languages, not Wikipedia's ten (“Wikipedia is a storyteller”), walked into bars in occupied France wearing his Marine uniform, and wrote his own epitaph in a twenty-page memoir: “I'm no peacetime soldier.” Afterward: John Ford's Hollywood, minor roles, his own uniforms as costume — and no bragging, ever.•       The Heroic Surrender at Centron. The book's climax is Operation Union II, August 1944 — Ortiz's own inter-Allied mission into the Alps, culminating in the massive “Le Grand Parachutage” supply drop to the Maquis. He recruited his own Parris Island parachute instructors — Marines who remembered the legionnaire who blew them all away at boot camp — plus Francis Coolidge: Harvard dropout, fellow Foreign Legion veteran, and great-great-great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson. When his patrol was surrounded at the village of Centron by vastly superior German forces on a murderous late-war rampage, Ortiz chose saving the town over fighting — the surrender as the war's most heroic act, bravery as the capacity to think while being shot at. Centron celebrates him every year; Katie was just there with Marines stationed in Germany, for the eighty-second anniversary. Guiding lights: noblesse oblige, Don Quixote, and a lifelong allergy to McCarthyism.•       Wild Bill's Wartime Startup. The OSS — forerunner of the CIA, whose Langley lobby still holds Wild Bill Donovan's statue — was, in Katie's telling, a wartime startup: 13,000 military and civilian personnel, mostly Wall Street lawyers, bankers, cryptographers, and cartographers, with a tiny operational subset that included Moe Berg, Virginia Hall trekking the Pyrenees on a wooden leg, and Ortiz. Donovan — World War One Medal of Honor recipient, FDR's “secret legs,” the man who could “see an acorn, envision an oak tree” — was banned from D-Day as the one man carrying too many secrets, and went sniffing around anyway. J. Edgar Hoover was considered for the job and rejected, with Churchill's SOE helping tip the choice. “I respect Donovan a lot more than I respect J. Edgar Hoover.” The lineage runs straight to today's Navy SEALs and MARSOC — including past Keen On guest Brandon Webb.•       Are We in 1939? Katie walks the museum timelines — 1933, and it's “not great”; 1936, and the warnings mount; “I certainly hope we're not in 1939.” Against Andrew's needling about greatest-generation nostalgia (via Brandon Webb's complicated heroism, Kristin Beck's good-and-evil seduction, Richard Overy's question of whether the war ever ended, and Matt Damon's regret-soaked Odysseus), she holds the line: someone like Ortiz is great in any time — and especially needed when democracy is under threat. The warfare itself has closed its chapter: her grandfather's black-painted bomber and carrier pigeons have become Ukraine's drones, delivering aid with less risk and less human connection alike. What survives the technology is the lesson: heroes don't brag — her grandfather and Ortiz would be mortified by the spotlight — and by illuminating what they did, the rest of us might learn to do the right thing. About the Guest Katie S. Sanders is an award-winning journalist who has written for National Geographic, The New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, TIME, Smithsonian, and Vanity Fair. Her reporting has brought her to the CIA, the White House, and the homes and reunions of World War II veterans and Holocaust survivors. After discovering that her late grandfather — a Jewish-American pilot shot down over France — was rescued by Peter Ortiz, she teamed up with the historian Nicholas Reynolds (Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy) to co-author Ortiz's War (Harper Horizon, August 25, 2026). A summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. References: •       Ortiz's War: The Allies' Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France by Nicholas Reynolds and Katie S. Sanders (Harper Horizon, August 25, 2026).•       Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy by Nicholas Reynolds — the co-author's Hemingway biography, the book that put him on Katie's radar.•       The Fire Agent by David Baerwald — yesterday's episode: another grandfather, another secret war, rendered as fiction where this one insists on fact.•    &nb...

“That's how I would picture fascists: this never-satisfied, dissonant climb to nothing… to ruin.” — David Baerwald Earlier this month, the historian James M. Scott came on the show to talk about those three deadly days in August 1945 when the Americans dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Today we return to that war in the skies above Japan. Only with a fictional twist. Behind this fiction, however, is the kind of family saga that few novelists have either the nerve or imagination to invent. It concerns three generations of the Baerwalds. In the Thirties, a German Jewish organic chemist called Ernst Baerwald worked for (of all people) I.G. Farben, the company that manufactured the gas used at Auschwitz. A sophisticated Japanophile, Baerwald was Farben's man in Tokyo, where he hobnobbed with a member of the royal family. American intelligence turned Ernst Baerwald into a spy, using his intimate knowledge of Japan in their firebombing of Tokyo. In exchange, Baerwald fled to the United States with his wife and son Hans, who became a leading authority on 20th century Japanese politics. Hans' son, David Baerwald, meanwhile, became a platinum-selling musician who has worked with Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Rickie Lee Jones, Sheryl Crow, and Bruce Springsteen. Growing up in California, David knew little about Ernst. But seven years ago, while clearing out the family home after the Los Angeles fires, he discovered his grandfather's diaries, photographs, and letters. He found a 1943 speech to the American Intelligence School proving that Ernst, a German Jew who loved Japan, knew the details of the Tokyo firebombing in which 140,000 people died, two years before it happened. “I have no qualifications as a historian,” David Baerwald confesses. So what followed was The Fire Agent, a 624-page novel loosely imagined around his grandfather's enigmatic life. But what David brought to this epic was a lyricist's skill in the kind of musical composition that enabled him to keep characters in play like sections of an orchestra. No wonder then that The Fire Agent is one of the most acclaimed literary debuts of the year. And no wonder that, in our age of looming fascism, The Fire Agent reads as more than just history. Five Takeaways •       Papers Found in a Fire. The novel began, appropriately, in flames: during a Los Angeles fire at an old family home, Baerwald discovered his grandfather's papers — among them a 1943 speech delivered at the American Intelligence School in San Francisco, proving that Ernst Baerwald was deeply involved in, or at least privy to, the planning of the Tokyo firebombing two years before the bombs fell in March 1945. The shock was moral as much as archival: everything David knew of his grandfather was how much he loved Japan and hated what happened to it. The contradiction became an obsession, the obsession became an investigation — of one family, and of the joining of industry and fascism in three countries — and the investigation became a novel, because “I have no qualifications as a historian” and a novel allows some jokes to carry the tragedy's weight.•       The Man Who Knew Where the Gas Was. Ernst Baerwald, the family's “dye seller,” was nothing so modest: dyestuffs being slang for organic chemistry, he was Asia director of the chemical cartel that supplied IG Farben — the conglomerate that built a work camp at Auschwitz — a violinist mentor to Prince Takamatsu, and a German Jew too valuable to fire until far too late. He helped build Tokyo's natural gas distribution system after the Kanto earthquake, which meant he knew every depot, fuel store, and pumping station in the city he loved — knowledge that made this dual enemy alien mysteriously trusted by American intelligence. His OSS box is nearly empty; the OSS Society's verdict was “he was a commie.” Behind him stands the Philanthropin — the Frankfurt school of the Jewish Enlightenment his father Hermann ran — which raised Ernst antifascist before fascism existed: “before he was a German, before he was an American, before he was a lover of Japan, he was a hater of tyranny.”•       “So We Firebombed the Civilians.” The moral reckoning at the book's heart: 140,000 killed in Tokyo, sixty-five more cities burned — while the industrial strip from Tokyo to Yokohama was deliberately spared, because America wanted it intact to rebuild the Japanese economy after the war. Baerwald calls the firebombing “an atrocity of unspeakable terms” and, following Gar Alperovitz, questions the necessity of the atomic bombs — a message to the Soviets more than a strategy against Japan. His father, scheduled for the invasion that never came, felt lifelong relief at Hiroshima — one of many things father and son never discussed. “Why do fathers and sons have problems? A lot of reasons.” The writing became a posthumous reconciliation: “I understand more of my father than I ever did when he was alive. I've forgiven him a lot.” The next book is about him — the UCLA Japan scholar who lost his security clearance to McCarthyism for being insufficiently anti-communist about China.•       From Boomtown to The Fire Agent. What a songwriter brings to a 624-page epic: reliability — a working lyricist learns he can “write a page on demand” — and orchestration, since composing instrumental music means keeping track of characters the way you track an orchestra, knowing what each instrument cannot play. Baerwald's formation was the émigré Los Angeles of a breakfast joint on the Pacific Coast Highway where his surf crew gathered mornings — the same tables once shared by Duke Kahanamoku, Bertolt Brecht, and Stravinsky, in the Santa Monica neighborhood of Thomas Mann, on the street where James Dean later lived. Brecht was always his favorite lyricist, a secret he kept: in Los Angeles, admit you want to write songs like Brecht and “they lock you up in a padded room.” The German Jewish musical tradition that fled to his hometown now flows, a generation on, back into prose.•       The Music of Fascism. The novel's present-tense purpose: fascist movements “have a very limited vocabulary,” and sometimes it's easier to hear how stupid it is from the mouths of foreigners. The mechanisms — how such movements are funded, how they function, what they do with total power — were identical in Germany, Japan, and Italy, and the contemporary echoes are “impossible to avoid. They're identical.” All three countries ended as rubble. In Japan, where prime minister Takaichi stands in the lineage of Kishi Nobusuke and Nanking denial persists, the conservatives will object; Baerwald hopes to spark debates. And asked what neo-fascism sounds like, he composed it: Kundera's kitsch — the child in the field, the tear on the cheek, “sanitized absurdities because the truth is so bloody awful” — rendered as a music-box melody gradually tortured by Ligeti dissonance, resolving into the Shepard tone: an audio illusion of endless ascent that never arrives. “That's how I would picture fascists: this never-satisfied, dissonant climb to nothing… to ruin.” About the Guest David Baerwald is an award-winning singer-songwriter, composer, and recording artist, best known fo...

What's the truth about our AI future? Our guests have different takes. On the one hand, Dave McClure and Aman Verjee predict a $7 trillion future for just three AI startups in 2027. On the other, Salima Bhimani doesn't believe that Silicon Valley has the imagination to create the moonshot to address our jobless future. For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, it's a time for what he calls “champions.” What he wants is the development of a “human dividend” from intelligence. Supposedly this will be provided by the multi-trillion dollar AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that will pioneer the social ownership of intelligence. But a Norwegian-style Human Wealth Fund is about as likely, I suspect, as a new Freddie Mercury recording of “We Are the Champions.” Dream on. Salima Bhimani is right. The moonshot to fix our jobless AI future won't come out of workaholic Silicon Valley. Look elsewhere for those types of champions, my friends. Brazil perhaps. The movie, not the country. Five Takeaways •       The Zeitgeist Exaggerates. The week's split screen: a $7 trillion future for OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX on one side; Ed Luce's “AI phobia” consensus and Jill Lepore's AI-versus-the-people politics on the other. Keith's contrarian read: the negativity is loud but thin. Most intelligent people already use AI daily — from high school onward — and simply don't talk about it; weigh the happy users against the vocal critics and the users “massively dominate.” He suspects a tipping point has been reached, with the anti-AI minority “starting to sound a little cultish.” The political stakes are his real worry: if the Democrats mistake the noise for populism and run against AI, they will lose 2028 “quite heavily” — and Lepore, he charges, is writing opinion, not history.•       Who Are the Champions? The editorial's diagnosis: the problem isn't negativity but “the lack of vocal connection between AI and people's futures.” The champions exist — but they hedge everything into pointlessness, “trained as politicians as opposed to business leaders,” each with a little voice saying don't upset anybody. “Can you imagine any other major breakthrough in human history where people would be shy to champion it?” His roster pointedly omitted both Dario Amodei and Elon Musk (“fairly balanced with who I left out”); the goal is to assemble the articulate case so “the minority who are politicizing negativity can be exposed as a minority.” Andrew's genealogy for the project: Nixon's silent majority, reborn with a token budget.•       90% Sacks — and Squashed Armadillos. The hour's fault line ran through David Sacks's tweet: Dario believes frontier AI is “too powerful to distribute”; Sacks believes it is “too powerful to centralize,” fearing a marriage of corporate and state power. Andrew took Dario's side; Keith claimed the middle until Andrew invoked the Texas rule — the only thing in the middle of the road is squashed armadillos — and extracted a confession: “I agree with Sacks, I'd say, 90%.” The 10% is Keith's own position: happy with centralized giants (free intelligence needs their investment) and happy with the growing edge — the world's intelligence in a solar-powered box, no grid required. Dario is championing “handcuffs on AI”; Lepore's car-regulation analogy fails because corporations are already regulated and AI itself is safe; and Helen Toner's Hugging Face alarm, aired on Ezra Klein's podcast, was “contrived in a lab” — a dismissal that sparked the hour's frenemy flashpoint: “Are you telling me I'm ignorant of something?”•       Metering the Dividend. Keith solved Andrew's billing mystery on air: the $100-a-month Claude plan that throttled him last week has a quota page he never found — and the price is “actually a very generous amount. They're losing money on you.” The honest price would be $200 to $400. Hence the editorial's champion, Stripe: its acquisition of OpenRouter — which routes every prompt across all the models to the cheapest good answer — puts the payments company in the middle of the token traffic stream. Azeem Azhar's $6 AI agent points the direction: prices tending toward zero at the edge, free for the kid, the school, and the hospital, paid for by the company running three thousand agents — even if delivering intelligence to six billion people ultimately costs tens of trillions. The parable: a Chinese dumpling shop built an agent API so customers' AIs could place orders, and sales went through the roof — the corner store getting a website, circa 1994. “You could do it with Keen On,” Keith noted. Meanwhile founders live like Captain Kirk on the bridge — productivity through the roof, but the agents must be flown daily.•       The Human Dividend. The coda: Keith's book is done, and its name is settled — The Human Dividend, asking who owns intelligence. Written in two days, cut from eighty thousand words to sixty in three more — seventeen chapters rewritten paragraph by paragraph in an AI agent's two-panel editor, purging repetition and AI-isms until “it was a Keith Teare-written book.” The thesis in one line: intelligence is the central product of this era; its surplus is co-produced; the property should be too. The mechanism: a Human Wealth Fund on the Alaska-Norway model — one share per person, given not bought, expiring at death with no inheritance — funded by AI companies donating equity on day one and governed by its own constitution, no state involved (unlike Trump's $1,000 baby accounts: what the state gives, the state can take away). The pitch to the companies: owners, not just users, are how you win affinity. Sell it or give it away? To be continued in two weeks — Andrew is off to Italy, and Manchester United, who lost to Hull, are off the champions list entirely. About the Co-Host Keith Teare is the co-host of the weekly That Was The Week segment on Keen On America and editor of the That Was The Week tech newsletter. Founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation, he was previously a founder of TechCrunch (with Michael Arrington), Archimedes Labs, EasyNet, and cyber café Cyberia. A serial entrepreneur across four decades of Silicon Valley and London tech, he writes weekly on the state of innovation — and is completing his first book, The Human Dividend. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith Teare's newsletter; this week's editorial: “Who Are the Champions?”•       Ed Luce's Financial Times column on “AI phobia” as America's new consensus — its third invocation on this show in a week.•       Jill Lepore's FT weekend essay and new book on “AI versus the people” — the politics of 2026 and 2028, per America's best historian.•       David Sacks's tweet on Dario Amodei — “too powerful to distribute” versus “too powerful to centralize” — the hour's fault line.•       Helen Toner's conversation with Ezra Klein on the Hugging Face incide...

“Just because I think something is dumb doesn't mean I think it should be illegal.” — Nicholas Anthony on meme coins Earlier this month, Elizabeth Warren called for an SEC investigation of Donald Trump's meme coin. Is the Pope Catholic? No surprise there. More revealing are other critics of the “presidential” token which netted our Grifter-in-Chief $636 million last year. Take, for example, Nicholas Anthony, an expert on crypto at the Cato Institute and author of Digital Currency or Digital Control? It's news when an unashamed libertarian from Washington's own temple of free markets calls the president's crypto adventure “completely unnecessary.” Maybe the Pope isn't Catholic. Or maybe Elizabeth Warren should join the Cato Institute. Anthony's verdict is withering because, under his libertarian shell, he's a crypto bro. The meme coin “has been a problem for everyone but Trump,” he argues, because it has held up legislation, invited investigations, and weaponized ethics concerns about crypto. “We have no one to blame except Trump…” Anthony concludes bleakly. “He knew better than to do it, but he saw the opportunity and ran with it.” When I accused Anthony of sounding like Elizabeth Warren, he was more amused than offended. Unlike the Warren crowd, however, he doesn't want to ban crypto. “Just because I think something is dumb,” he says, “doesn't mean I think it should be illegal.” So while Trump-style meme coins are a natural habitat for what he calls “rug pulls,” that shouldn't be an excuse for lawmakers to pull the rug from the entire industry. Crypto can still revolutionize finance, Anthony believes. It can democratize centralized banking. It can make money fairer. Just don't confuse that with a Melania meme coin. Five Takeaways •       A Hard No from Cato. The week's most surprising critic of Trump's meme coin isn't a Democrat — it's a Cato libertarian. Anthony's verdict: “completely unnecessary,” legally gray but ethically indefensible, and “a problem for everyone but Trump” — stalling the crypto legislation the industry actually wants, inviting investigations, and handing opponents a weapon. The explanation is pure self-interest: the first-term Trump attacked crypto as competition to the dollar and pushed policies hostile to the space; the second-term convert was swayed by industry lobbying and campaign money, the opportunity for personal enrichment, and crypto's libertarian-conservative DNA. “We have no one to blame except for Trump… He knew better than to do it, but he saw the opportunity and ran with it.”•       Dumb, But Not Illegal. The libertarian line in one sentence: “Just because I think something is dumb doesn't mean I think it should be illegal.” Meme coins are “a trading card of sorts” — their value is the person behind them, held up only as long as people stay amused — and a natural habitat for rug pulls, where insiders manufacture interest and vanish with the proceeds. Anthony opposes bans; he demands disclosure, and insists fraud be prosecuted whether it's snake oil from a cart or a token from a president. Hence the kicker: a Warren-style investigation of the sitting president is “perfectly reasonable,” and “if it turns out he was doing something behind the scenes, then I think he should be prosecuted for it.” From what he's seen, the fans knew what they were buying — but the line between brilliantly marketed and fraudulently sold is exactly what investigations exist to draw.•       The Dollar Launders Better. Isn't crypto the ideal vehicle for laundering money? “Not so much. The US dollar is definitely the ideal vehicle” — and remains the currency of choice for criminals worldwide. The numbers: roughly one percent of cryptocurrency activity has been identified as illegal, against about five percent of US dollar usage — because the dollar is accepted everywhere, even in criminal circles, and cash, once it leaves your hand, is gone. Most cryptocurrencies, by contrast, run on public blockchains: permanent, searchable records that forensic accounting firms mine daily, and that keep catching criminals who never understood that the ledger remembers everything. The moral panic, Anthony suggests, is aimed at the wrong instrument.•       Free Banking's Revenge. The deeper Cato case: cryptocurrency — born of cypherpunk and libertarian ideas after the 2008 crisis — is “for the first time in over a hundred years, the challenge to the idea that central banks have complete and total ownership of what is money.” Its ancestors are Scottish free banking and the note-issuing American banks that cleared payments for decades before the Federal Reserve existed. The prosecution's exhibits against central banking: Zimbabwe's hyperinflation queues, where friends of Anthony's watched food become unaffordable while they waited in line, and the slower American version — $10,000 bought two Corvettes in 1970 and needs to be $80,000 today. No utopias: Bitcoin won't erase the debt. But competition would supply the missing incentive for governments to be “better stewards of currency” — and the practice already exists, from Argentina and Lebanon to the crypto hubs of Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya.•       Swept Up by Trump. The sadder confession concerns his own side: “Sadly, many conservatives have been swept up by Trump… the president can do no wrong” — Ted Cruz and Mike Lee among the obsequious, blocking the ethics language Democrats want attached to crypto legislation. The principled exception is Wyoming's Cynthia Lummis: pro-Trump, yes, but one of the rare members of Congress who has done the technical and philosophical homework. The industry itself — Coinbase included — walks a careful line around the man who will sign its rules into law, seeing the damage but saying little. Anthony acknowledges his privilege: “Here at the Cato Institute, I can call balls and strikes.” As for the wider economy: a storm in a teacup for now — while crypto's speculative fever has migrated to AI, whose models are quietly integrating the coins as their payment rails. It's not what Satoshi envisioned; the cypherpunks and the bankers will split the inheritance. About the Guest Nicholas Anthony is a research fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, a fellow at the Human Rights Foundation, and a member of the Economic Inclusion Group's Advisory Board. His research covers central bank digital currencies, financial privacy, cryptocurrency, and the use of money in society. The author of Digital Currency or Digital Control? Decoding CBDC and the Future of Money, he has testified before Congress, maintains the Human Rights Foundation's CBDC Tracker, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, and Business Insider. Originally from Baltimore, he holds an MA in economics from George Mason University. References: •       Digital Currency or Digital Control? Decoding CBDC and the Future of Money by Nicholas Anthony (Cato Institute).•       Senator Elizabeth Warr...

“If we continue to build for people and not with people, we won't have a say in what this technology will look like or do in ten or twenty years.” — Salima Bhimani Finally some inventive news in our summer of Luddite discontent. Salima Bhimani spent six and a half years at Google X's moonshot factory as its first Chief Strategist for Responsible Tech. So thank her for the (responsible) magic of Alphabet's Waymo, Wing, and DeepMind. In her new book, Invent Now, Bhimani provides a map for the next wave of moonshots. No, she speculates, they probably won't come out of Silicon Valley. But, yes, they will come from somewhere. Her invention was formed long before Silicon Valley. She remembers staring at the Toronto subway from her father's magazine stall and wondering not where the trains went but “what is our relationship to this tube?” An ethnographer by training, Bhimani arrived at Google X from a world of government and nonprofits where “constraint was bread and butter.” At Alphabet, of course, she was spoilt with endless money and runway. Although that didn't always guarantee moonshot success. Moonshots fail, she explains, because they are always more than technologies. They are ecosystems, and they need the approval of regulators, communities, and consumers. Take, for example, the abortive Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet's smart-city bet in her hometown of Toronto, which failed to recognize the practical realities of utopian city-planning. So what will be the most dramatic moonshot of the twenty-first century? No, she says, it probably won't be consumer rocketships to Mars or a cure for cancer. Instead, it will be about a post-labor society. What is human purpose when it's not work? No wonder such an outrageous idea probably won't come out of work-obsessed Silicon Valley. Five Takeaways •       A Nuanced Optimist. Bhimani isn't surprised by the Luddite lurch: people feel “compressed by things they can't control,” surrounded by technology doing things they don't understand — and it's hot out. But against thirty years of Silicon Valley boosterism she offers neither cheerleading nor despair: hold the tension. Technology surveils, and drones make war; technology also lets more people solve problems that were previously unsolvable. She refuses the binary of the moment — the abundance gospel of the Andreessens versus the scarcity warnings of James Crawford — predicting instead “abundance in some areas and scarcity in others”: your spreadsheet skills may become worthless precisely as your capacity to build becomes unprecedented. The task is holding both truths with what she calls a discerning eye, treating technology as a co-partner in a relationship where the friction stays alive.•       From the Toronto Subway to the Moonshot Factory. Her father ran a magazine stall in the Toronto subway, and young Salima stared at the trains asking an ethnographer's question: not where are the people going, but “what is our relationship to this tube?” She came to Alphabet from government and nonprofits, where “constraint was bread and butter” — and met the opposite: endless money, endless runway, and audacity as the house style. As Alphabet's first Chief Strategist for Responsible Tech, she sat with the CEOs of the Other Bets asking about trade-offs: “Are you willing to take on the potential that your drone could be used in nefarious ways — and how are you gonna ensure that doesn't happen?” Now on her own — no Google badge to fly doors open — she finds leaving “opens up the aperture”: fifty-one years of experience, and both worlds, constraint and abundance, informing everything she builds.•       She Folded Her Own Moonshot. The episode's quiet bombshell: after leaving Alphabet, Bhimani co-founded a drone-detection company — and discovered what it feels like when the awkward questions are aimed at you. The full-stack solution she was building could genuinely help cities and communities; it could also be used for “all kinds of nefarious things.” Intention, she warns, is “pie in the sky when people actually are impacted”: the moment to map the worst case is now, not five years after your technology is loose in the world — because you will have to live with the choices you make. Some people can live with the range of implications; she and her co-founders decided they couldn't: “We folded our drone company because the implications are not something that any of us could have lived with.” Responsible tech, practiced on herself.•       Moonshots Are Ecosystems (Ask Sidewalk). The factory's deepest lesson: a moonshot is never just a technology. Wing isn't drones — it's regulators, safety, and whether communities want packages falling on their porches; the ecosystem must come first, not at the last mile. Sidewalk Labs — Alphabet's smart-city bet in her own Toronto — consulted widely, meant well, and died anyway on public distrust of big tech's data appetite: an early tremor, Andrew suggests, of today's earthquake against data centers, and evidence of a “massive gap” between society and technology that still hasn't closed. Google fumbling Geoffrey Hinton's generative breakthrough shows the other constraint: inside a company the size of a country, innovation must also become the next billion-dollar business. The counterexample is Waymo — sixteen years of perseverance toward John Krafcik's bigger mandate (self-driving technology, cars merely one expression) — and perhaps Demis Hassabis, whom the latest reshuffle might just free “to be Demis.”•       Step In, Not Stepped Out. AI wasn't born yesterday — it spent thirty or forty years in labs, integrated into our lives in the background — and that incubation is precisely her warning: “If we continue to build for people and not with people, we won't have a say in what this technology will look like or do in ten or twenty years.” The large language models belong to “the Googles and the Anthropics,” and most of us aren't inside those companies. Her flip: if such powerful things were built in incubated spaces, imagine what could be built in unincubated ones — collective intelligence as our superpower, moonshots born from the convergence of places, people, and contexts rather than from Silicon Valley's playbook. The century's biggest moonshot, she suspects, is labor itself: what is human purpose when it's not work? Her closing instruction, and the episode's stamp: “We gotta step in and not be stepped out.” About the Guest Salima Bhimani, PhD, was Alphabet's first Chief Strategist for Responsible Tech, Business, and Leaders, working for six and a half years with moonshot companies including Waymo, Wing, DeepMind, and Google X. An ethnographer by training who came to Silicon Valley from government and nonprofits, she is now CEO of 10X Responsible Tech and a senior fellow at AI 2030. Invent Now: The Next Leap in Moonshots (John Wiley & Sons, 2026), her first book, introduces the Third Space — a new lens for building moonshots from the convergence of technolog...

“When will be the end of thus exhausting the earth, and how far will avarice finally penetrate?” the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder asked in 77 AD. Two thousand years later, the answer seems clear. At least according to the contemporary Scottish natural historian James Crawford. In his new book, The Vanishing Earth, the Edinburgh-based Crawford provides dispatches from what he calls the “frontiers of extraction.” From the Atacama Desert in northern Chile to the melting coastline of Greenland, Crawford describes the apocalyptic consequences of our avarice toward the earth. The ultimate frontier of extraction, Crawford warns, is ourselves. Thus he reports on big tech's designs to harvest our thoughts. Consumer headsets are already reading our brainwaves, Apple holds patents for brain-reading earbuds, and another self-styled “leader in real-world neuroscience” once promised “neuro insights for marketing purposes.” The Vanishing Earth's apocalyptic warnings appear both timeless and immediate. Watching Roman miners destroy Spanish mountains, Pliny the Elder wondered when we would finally exhaust the earth. Today, we can quantify the answer. Sometime around 2020, the weight of everything humanity has built came to exceed the weight of all life on Earth. It was just three percent in 1900. We have extracted more in the past fifty years than in all prior human history combined. We now build a city the size of Paris every five days. The ideology of endless growth is only 300 years old, Crawford warns. Pliny the Elder's earth is history. Crawford confesses that he is a product of extraction himself. On his family's windowsill sits a lemonade bottle of the first North Sea crude, siphoned by his father the day it came ashore. “I am Scottish, after all,” he notes wryly. Will our avarice transform extraction into extinction? Not necessarily, Crawford explains. His last dispatch is from Butte, Montana, and offers a ray of hope. There he finds people trying to repair the seemingly apocalyptic consequences of copper mining on the earth. So apocalypse now doesn't mean apocalypse tomorrow. We still have the power to unvanish the earth, the agency to undo the avarice of our ancestors. Five Takeaways •       Pliny's Two Questions. Watching Roman gold miners collapse entire Spanish mountains — ruina montium, “the fall of mountains” — the great naturalist Pliny the Elder asked, two thousand years ago: “When will be the end of thus exhausting the earth, and how far will avarice finally penetrate?” Those two questions run like an entwined seam through Crawford's book, and he believes we're now getting the answers. The ideology of endless economic growth, he argues, is only about 300 years old — born in Enlightenment Scotland as freedom from famine and the caprices of nature, and entirely sensible at the time. The problem is that the planet has changed and the ideology hasn't. The “vanishing” of the title isn't only resources: it's the sixth extinction, the biodiversity collapse — and, potentially, us.•       A Lemonade Bottle of First Oil. Crawford is a product of extraction, and knows it. His great-grandfather fled Shetland fishing at sixteen, wrote “engineer” on his immigration form, and ended up on Ford's very first assembly line building the Model T. His father apprenticed in a coal mine, worked the Zambian Copperbelt, then spent thirty years in oil — which is why Crawford was born on the Shetland Islands, beside one of the world's largest construction sites. The day the first North Sea oil came ashore, his father — who ran the pipelines and knew where to go — filled a lemonade bottle from an outlet valve; it still sits on the family windowsill. “I am a product of extraction. But then we all are”: microplastics in our bodies, forever chemicals passing from mother to unborn child. As a species, we have merged with what we mine.•       Thought Extraction. The journey's final landscape is the mind. Consumer neurotech — EEG headsets promising calm and focus — is already reading brainwaves, and the direction of travel is unmistakable: Emotiv scrubbed “neuro insights for marketing purposes” from its website between fact-check and publication (Crawford found the old language on the Wayback Machine); Apple holds patents for EEG-reading earbuds, with Meta and Snap filing alongside. Rafael Yuste's Neurorights Foundation surveyed the roughly thirty companies selling neurotech to consumers and found that every one of them claimed unlimited access to customers' brain data — with no legal protection in place. The attention economy harvested our behavior; the next extraction, Crawford warns, is the thought itself.•       Heavier Than Life Itself. The statistics that stopped Crawford in his tracks: around 2020, the weight of everything humans have built — buildings, roads, plastics — came to exceed the weight of the Earth's entire biomass, up from three percent in 1900. We've extracted more in fifty years than in all prior history; we build a Paris every five days; in ten years China poured more cement than America managed in the whole twentieth century. Hence the global sand shortage (desert sand is useless — “like building with marbles”) that sent him to Greenland, where melting glaciers make the coastline grow while the world's shrink. And hence the hard questions about the energy transition: in 2025 humanity burned more wood, more coal, and more oil than ever before — not a transition but an accumulation, exactly as the Jevons paradox predicted when Victorian Britain worried about coal. Efficiency doesn't reduce use; it multiplies it.•       The Forever Repair. The book ends not in despair but in Butte, Montana — once the center of world copper production, its open-cast pit now a lake of sulfuric acid in the heart of the city. After thirty years of argument, a settlement around 2020 gave the city something unprecedented: BP holds a blank check to monitor Butte's soils and water in perpetuity, and the people, rather than abandon their home, stayed to watch over it and tell its story. “It's not you fix and you forget. Everything is a repair.” That, for Crawford, is the ideological shift the whole journey points toward — from extraction to repair. He is hopeful for one precise reason: we got here through a way of seeing the world, and minds can change. In the tradition of Silent Spring — which banned DDT and birthed the EPA — a book can still move the world. “I am Scottish, after all” — but the glass, on inspection, is half full. About the Guest James Crawford is a Scottish writer, broadcaster, and historian based in Edinburgh. The author of Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History's Greatest Buildings and The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World, he presents book programmes for the BBC and spent over a decade with Historic Environment Scotland. The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction (Bloomsbury, 2026) is out now in the US, with the UK edition imminent from Scribe. The New York Review of Books places him with Iain Sinclair, Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Macfarlane: “Riveting.” References: •&nb...

“Our language is valuable, and we've gotta hold on to that. That's the most human thing we have.” — Jeff Jarvis Last week, to celebrate episode 3,000 of the show, the New York Times' Sam Roberts articulated the art of the obituary. Borrowing from Citizen Kane, he described it as the Rosebud method. Obits are all about life (death only figuring as an afterthought), Roberts explained, so hunt for the moment which defines that life. Today's show is a kind of obituary of that type. Only it's about the life of a machine and the mass media that emerged in its wake. In Hot Type, tech historian Jeff Jarvis introduces us to the magnificent late 19th century machine that not only gave birth to industrial mass media, but also bankrupted Mark Twain. It's the history of the Linotype, the machine invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler that ended four hundred and fifty years of setting type, as Jarvis puts it, “one damn letter at a time.” It's an extraordinary story. Before the Linotype, American daily newspapers were limited to a 4,000 circulation. First installed at the New York Tribune on July 3, 1886, the Linotype scaled print, thereby enabling the age of mass circulation newspapers, magazines and books. It appeared so infinitely scalable that Mark Twain poured his entire family fortune into its doomed rival, the Paige Compositor. He lost all his money, of course, making it his Rosebud moment — Citizen Twain, so to speak. But for the rest of us, Mergenthaler's magnificent type machine was so hot that it revolutionized 20th century culture in the same way that AI is now revolutionizing 21st century reading and writing. The art of obituary. A description of life, not death. Five Takeaways •       One Damn Letter at a Time. For four hundred and fifty years after Gutenberg, virtually every word in every language was set by hand, one letter at a time — which is why the average American daily circulated just 4,000 copies, “a small Substack newsletter.” Steam-powered presses, cheap wood-pulp paper, stereotyping, and the telegraph had solved every other bottleneck; the typesetter with a composing stick was the last. More than 300 typesetting machines failed before Ottmar Mergenthaler — a Baltimore watchmaker who knew nothing about printing, prodded by James O. Clephane, once a stenographer in Lincoln's cabinet — had the eureka: stop imitating hand-setting and mold entire lines of type at once. Installed at the New York Tribune on July 3, 1886, the Linotype made type fresh for every edition, let print catch up with the telegraph, and gave birth to mass media.•       The Union That Didn't Smash the Machine. The book's great labor surprise: the typesetters didn't fight the typesetting machine. Having studied the Luddites' defeat, the International Typographical Union sent spies into the Tribune's composing room, concluded the Linotype was inevitable, and demanded to operate it — with Mergenthaler's blessing. Thirty thousand jobs disappeared, returned to full strength within five years, and grew for seventy-five more, making the ITU America's most powerful union. Then came wave two — paper tape, computers that could hyphenate and justify, cold type, PostScript — and this time the union fought: six of nine New York papers died in the strikes, Bert Powers traded automation for lifetime job guarantees (the last holder retired from the New York Times around 2012), and Murdoch's secret Wapping plant ended Fleet Street — a century, almost exactly, after machine number one. The two lessons: take charge of the technology if you can; if it will replace you outright, find something else to do.•       The Machine That Drove Twain Mad. Mark Twain wanted to be filthy rich and stop writing — so he poured his fortune, and his wife's family coal fortune, into the Paige Compositor, the Linotype's brilliant, doomed rival: only two ever built, the sole survivor sitting in the basement of Hartford's Mark Twain House looking like “a railroad with nowhere to go.” Bankruptcy followed — a far deeper shame in the nineteenth century — and Twain repaid every debtor. Jarvis reads the scars in the fiction: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court ends with technology destroying technology in an Armageddon of Camelot; the unfinished No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger conjures strange beasts endlessly duplicating pages — scale itself as nightmare. He lost all his money, of course — his Rosebud moment, as Andrew puts it, borrowing from Sam Roberts' art of the obituary on episode 3,000. The machine robbed Twain not of his humor, Jarvis concludes, but of his love of technology. The biopic pitch: Citizen Twain.•       From One Gilded Age to Another. The Linotype era bridges Twain's Gilded Age — tycoons of steam, steel, and wire — to ours, with its barons of bits and AI. Whitelaw Reid, the book's villain and the first capitalist media mogul, used the machine against his own union and predicted newspapers would never exceed eight pages (completely wrong); Frank Munsey invented the attention economy at a dime a copy — content as honey, audience as product, a model that ruled mass media and infected the Internet. Today's moguls fare no better in Jarvis's telling: Altman selling “vending machines for intelligence” that actually dispense compute, Amodei “the paragon of safety” with a skewed definition of it, all chasing the Valhalla of AGI, “pure BS.” His hope: open-weight models to check the frontier companies. His warning against banning them: guardrails are a fool's errand — the printing press was a general machine, and nobody could tell Gutenberg to keep it from Martin Luther.•       Words Matter, Damn It. The through-line from Jarvis's blog post to the book: language is the most human thing we have. His objection to Anthropic's watermark isn't Keith Teare's shame argument — it's that a scheme treating “overcast” and “gray” as interchangeable declares all language fungible, “a cultural statement damaging to our craft.” His own AI practice is disclosed down to a confessional footnote in Hot Type for a single borrowed phrase: Gemini may pull facts (“don't write for me”), but what you express must be what you want to express. The typewriter shaped Nietzsche and made Hemingway; the newsroom computer made Jarvis an editor more than a writer; Quark made everyone typesetters — “in the end, it was all still me.” Against Kirschenbaum's gray goo, he holds up Pope Leo (work brings dignity; not a Luddite) and poetry itself. Hot type revolutionized 20th century culture the way AI is now revolutionizing 21st century reading and writing. The art of obituary: a description of life, not death — and the most human thing we have is the words. About the Guest Jeff Jarvis is the Emeritus Leonard Tow Professor of Journalism Innovation at CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. The creator and founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, he has been TV critic for TV Guide and People, Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, and a media columnist for The Guardian. His books include What Would Google Do?, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, Magazine, and The Web We Weave; he blogs at Buzzmachine...

“Most people do not understand that this attempted coup was a religious event.” — Congressman Jared Huffman on January 6 We've featured many stark warnings about the threat of American Christian nationalism from journalists, activists, and religious scholars. Today, that warning comes from inside the government. In No Prophets, Californian congressman Jared Huffman warns that the threat of Christian nationalism could destroy American democracy. Borrowing from Sinclair Lewis, Huffman argues that when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross. For Huffman, it's not an abstract threat. On January 6, 2021, he watched something chillingly close to that theological nightmare unfold from his office on Capitol Hill. The attempted coup was a religious event, he insists. The insurrectionists were radicalized by the New Apostolic Reformation. These fanatics had rooms at the Willard beside Giuliani's war room, and they preached and prophesied as the riot unfolded. His Republican colleague Adam Kinzinger tells him Christian nationalism “wasn't just part of the insurrection. It was the whole story, the whole thing.” And yet the 845-page select committee report ignores this story because, Huffman charges, Liz Cheney personally intervened to erase it. “We are less safe today because of it,” he says. Like so many critics of Christian nationalism, Huffman had a religious upbringing. He grew up devout in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and then was ordained into its priesthood before losing his faith at twenty after his father's death. Today he is a self-described “humanist,” the co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, and the only member of Congress who admits to not believing in gods. It's an American intellectual tradition, he insists, that he shares with fellow religious skeptics like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison. Christian nationalism and the Republican Party, Jared Huffman insists, are now one and the same. Huffman might not believe in gods, but there's a biblical quality to his apocalyptic warnings. The prophet of No Prophets is putting all that religious training to good secular use. Five Takeaways •       January 6 Was a Religious Event. The book's foundational claim, witnessed from Huffman's Capitol Hill office: the insurrection was saturated with religious choreography — symbols, worship services, self-declared prophets exhorting the crowd. The mob was radicalized by groups like the New Apostolic Reformation, a virulent Christian supremacist movement committed to dominion by any means necessary; organizers held rooms at the Willard Hotel beside Giuliani's war room, were tasked by the Trump campaign with mobilizing right-wing Christians, and preached and prophesied on-site as the riot unfolded. The Smithsonian's Uncivil Religion exhibit documented it in real time, and Adam Kinzinger told Huffman that Christian nationalism “wasn't just part of the insurrection. It was the whole story, the whole thing.” Yet the select committee's 845-page report contains none of it — erased, Huffman charges, by Liz Cheney's personal intervention. “We are less safe today because of it.”•       The Endgame Is Theocracy. Trump and the movement are codependent: he mainstreamed fringe prophets into White House VIPs; they supplied mobilization power nothing else in American politics can match, and wrapped him in the “Cyrus anointing” — the mythology of a flawed pagan king used by God to save his chosen people. The Washington operation is Huffman's “shadow theocracy”: Ralph Drollinger's Capitol Ministries runs Bible studies teaching officeholders that God opposes taxes and the regulatory state but is keenly interventionist about the bedroom; Speaker Mike Johnson — who preaches “biblically sanctioned government,” rejects church-state separation outright, joined pre-January 6 prayer calls, and architected the legal effort to overturn 2020 — sits second in line to the presidency. Kinzinger's joke lands hard: the American Taliban. Are the Drollingers grifters or believers? Both, says Huffman — the two have never been mutually exclusive.•       Atwood Wasn't Writing Fiction. Huffman found The Handmaid's Tale chilling precisely because Atwood didn't invent Gilead — she reverse-engineered it from America's puritanical past and theocratic subcultures, and had it arrive gradually, through fake emergencies. The trad-wife future is already drafted: Pete Hegseth belongs to the TheoBros — the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, led by Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, who says the Nineteenth Amendment was a mistake and men should vote for the household — while radical traditionalist Catholics dream of a pre-Vatican II world of veils and submission. And don't try joking with any of them, Huffman warns: in this absolutist theology, opponents aren't adversaries but demons and antichrists, and destroying what stands in the way is a religious duty.•       A Born-Again Atheist from the Mormon Priesthood. The messenger's unlikely arc: raised devout in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Independence, Missouri (now the progressive Community of Christ), ordained into its priesthood, then unmoored at twenty by his father's death and the questions faith couldn't answer. He settled on humanism — a moral framework without the supernatural — and calls himself a Christ-loving atheist, fully at peace with the Sermon on the Mount. His lineage, he argues, is the founding itself: Jefferson ridiculing “priestcraft,” Franklin's lightning rod denounced by clerics who preferred sprinkling holy water from church towers, Paine and Madison beside them — and the Constitution's secular firewall, Article VI and the First Amendment, as America's original gift to the world. He's politely skeptical of Jonathan Rauch's suggestion that today's LDS church models pluralism: “they've got a long way to go.”•       A Golden Opportunity — If Democrats Dare. Christian nationalism and the Republican Party “are now one and the same,” Huffman argues — which means religious liberty, pluralism, and the majority who want no theocracy have been surrendered to whichever Democrat dares claim them. Most don't: the intersection of religion and politics strikes them as too dicey. Texas's James Talarico is the breakthrough messenger — calling out Christian nationalism from inside the faith, addressing atheists and believers alike — while AOC, a great friend, conspicuously declines every Freethought Caucus invitation, and Newsom awaits his copy of the book. Huffman wants no constitutional amendments: the founders got it right, and the task is defending Article VI and the Establishment Clause from a Supreme Court reading them out of existence. His own ambitions? “Career-limited as a straight white male from Northern California. I'm good with that.” About the Guest Jared Huffman has represented California's 2nd congressional district — from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border — since 2013. A seven-term Democrat, former environmental attorney, co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, and the only Humanist ever to serve in Congress, he watched the January 6 insurrection from...

“Anthropic will be a $3 trillion company, SpaceX $2 trillion, and OpenAI $1 to $1.5 trillion by Q2 of next year.” — Dave McClure Yesterday, Keith Teare and I debated the circularity of the AI economy. Today, two of Silicon Valley's most experienced investors, Dave McClure and Aman Verjee, not only straighten out this supposed “circularity” but also burst the pessimism bubble that envelops so many conversations about AI. Verjee is not only McClure's partner at Practical Venture Capital, but also the author of the newly published A Brief History of Financial Bubbles. According to him, today's AI-stoked economy is not an unusually large bubble. It may not even be a bubble, given that AI revenue — from Anthropic's $70 billion to OpenAI's $50 billion — is real. The irrational exuberance lives elsewhere — in companies “draping themselves in AI magic sauce” and in the “SaaSpocalypse” that is decimating software-as-a-service companies. They are both bullish about our AI future. McClure predicts that by the first half of next year, Anthropic and OpenAI will have joined SpaceX as public companies. Together, these three AI darlings will be worth $7 trillion. That's seven thousand billion reasons to be optimistic about 2027. Five Takeaways •       Not a Bubble — a Repricing. Both partners reject the bubble call, on the numbers: Anthropic at roughly $70 billion in revenue on under two gigawatts of compute, OpenAI at $40–50 billion, SpaceX guiding to $100 billion with more than half from AI — real revenue, increasingly real profits. The froth is specific: companies “draping themselves in AI magic sauce” without the substance, and the SaaSpocalypse — cloud-software companies whose cash flows are suddenly perceived as far less durable as AI encroaches on design, legal, and medical verticals. Michael Burry's warning gets Aman's definitive treatment (“he's called nine of the last two bubbles”), and the Aschenbrenner blowup was leverage — running four-x in volatile chip stocks — not AI: he kept his Anthropic position, is married to Dario's chief of staff, and “will be just fine.”•       The $2 Trillion Filing. The week's news, baked into the episode: Anthropic has filed to go public, with a very intentionally leaked $2 trillion valuation hinging on a $190–200 billion 2028 revenue forecast — which Dave suspects is conservative. Eight months ago, when these two last visited, the show was about Elon and Sam and Dario was the bit player; then came the weeks when decades happen: Anthropic's bet on coding agents — reportedly inspired by watching Cursor — captured the revenue engine of the entire application layer. Aman's sequencing: SpaceX is absorbing $75–85 billion of IPO capital, Anthropic goes next, and if both trade well, 2026 breaks every record for money raised — leaving 2027 for OpenAI at a $100 billion revenue guide. Google, he reminds us, went fourth after Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite: better to do it right than to do it first.•       The Fastest Pivot in Corporate History. Dave's account of SpaceX's transformation: the $250 billion xAI merger (a largely private transaction Elon approved with himself), the acquisition of Cursor that closed Friday, Colossus data centers scaling from two gigawatts toward ten, and compute deals renting capacity to Anthropic and Google — former competitors — all executed in roughly six months. The S-1, with unprecedented forward projections of $300 billion in annual revenue, mentions artificial intelligence over 1,100 times (“I used AI to count it,” Aman admits). The result is an economy Andrew calls incestuous: SpaceX's valuation now rests on Anthropic's progress. On Elon himself, Dave separates the art from the artist — terrific products, dubious politics — and on OpenAI: more board changes than Spinal Tap had drummers, a team still storming and norming, but Sam is savvy and the IPO lands by Q2 next year at $1–1.5 trillion.•       Circularity as Asset Class. The New York Times sees a vulnerability in tech giants funding their own customers; Aman, a former CFO at eBay and Sonos, sees asset-backed finance. His analogy: buying a Corvette with GMAC financing isn't a conspiracy as long as the terms are commercially reasonable — and NVIDIA's $500 billion backstop, syndicated with Goldman Sachs, Apollo, Brookfield, and KKR, brings third-party money that validates the asset. GPUs, he argues, are cars rather than smartphones: financeable over eight to ten years, not obsolete in three. The red flags to watch are rebates and self-dealing on non-commercial terms; the current evidence looks more like aircraft leasing than Enron. Dave's deeper worry isn't the AI economy at all — it's the national deficit, whose interest payments are now the largest single line item in the federal budget.•       The Luddite Summer Meets the Long Boom. Aman's sharpest historical observation: this may be the first technological revolution whose leaders are the doomers — Sam prophesying idleness, Dario predicting half of entry-level white-collar jobs destroyed within five years (already wrong at eighteen months, with no 10–20 percent unemployment in sight). Against the WSJ's jobless-boom and nation-of-Luddites anxieties, the book offers the long view: of ten historical bubbles, the two positive ones — Britain's 1845 railway mania and America's 1997–2000 internet boom — overbuilt, crashed, and left the world a valuable technology. Buy every stock founded in the boom and hold, and you'd have owned NVIDIA, Amazon, Google, and PayPal. The 1970s wiped out four to six million secretarial jobs in a decade; women's participation rose from 52 to 77 percent. And on China, the free-trader's answer: partners in progress — there's more to gain than lose if we do this right. About the Guests Dave McClure and Aman Verjee are the co-founders and managing partners of Practical Venture Capital, a Silicon Valley firm specializing in venture secondaries. Dave founded 500 Startups, invested at Founders Fund, and ran marketing at PayPal; Aman was COO of 500 Startups, led strategy at PayPal and eBay, served as CFO of Sonos and of eBay's North American marketplace — and wrote the first draft of PayPal's S-1. Aman's new book, A Brief History of Financial Bubbles (out this week), is available at bigbubbletrouble.com. References: •       A Brief History of Financial Bubbles by Aman Verjee — ten manias from the tulips to the subprime crash, out this week at bigbubbletrouble.com.•       Reuters on Anthropic's IPO filing — the $2 trillion valuation and the $190–200 billion 2028 revenue forecast it hinges on.•       “The Summer That America Became a Nation of Luddites” and the “jobless boom” — the Wall Street Journal pieces threading this week's episodes.•       The New York Times on tech giants' circular AI economy — the piece that framed yesterday's TWTW debate and today's rebuttal.•       The SpaceX S-1 — forward projections of $300 billion in ann...

“I don't feel any shame at all recruiting an army of AI agents to help me accomplish my goals. But I think society is trying to make me feel shame.” — Keith Teare Welcome to the summer of America's luddite discontent. Not only are left and right calling for an AI ban, but tech loathing has even infiltrated Silicon Valley in the form of Anthropic's decision to watermark Claude's output. That, at least, is the view of That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, who believes that watermarking is “nuts.” In our luddite zeitgeist, Keith believes that a watermark is a scarlet stamp of implied guilt. By marking its own product, Anthropic is not only furnishing the luddite mob with a convenient surveillance tool, but also acknowledging a tacit guilt about using Claude. “You should never adjust to the market,” the Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur explains. “The market's wrong nine times out of ten.” As for Dario Amodei, Claude's dad (so to speak), Keith is even more accusatory. The Anthropic CEO is kissing ass “like a politician, not the leader of a company,” Keith hisses, repeating this week's whispers that Anthropic is becoming an “ideologically motivated cult.” If Dario were female, Keith would probably make him a witch. Or, at least, a hussy — the hysterical implication, if not the word, of the Journal's profile of Cami Clark, Dario's wife. I took Anthropic's side — somebody had to. I see watermarking as just another AI tool. It's an honest human fingerprint in an age of fakery. Live by the algorithm, die by it too. Anyway, a watermark has its uses. Rather than moral opprobrium, it feeds our curiosity about who is and isn't using AI. So, for example, I ran Keith's editorial through another AI detector and it indicated 86 percent AI-generated while mine came back as 100 percent human. And if I can elude the scarlet stamp, then even I might have to join the luddite mob. Five Takeaways •       “Watermarking Is Nuts.” Keith's editorial takes aim at Anthropic's decision to watermark Claude's output — invisible text signals identifying the machine's hand, cousin to what Google has long done with audio. His objection isn't the mark itself (“I don't care that it's watermarked. I care that Anthropic thinks it should be watermarked”): a watermark starts from suspicion, implies a problem where none exists, and tells Anthropic's own customers their use of the product needs flagging. Restream doesn't watermark this show; Adobe doesn't watermark its exports. To Keith it's pure zeitgeist capitulation — and while one Claude Max subscriber in the newsletter canceled in protest, Keith hasn't. Andrew's rebuttal: watermarking serves curiosity, and in an age of fakery an honest fingerprint is a very human addition.•       The Scarlet Watermark: On AI Shame. The deeper argument was theological. Keith — an atheist who concedes atheism is also a faith, and who believes in good and bad but not sin — feels no shame “recruiting an army of AI agents” so long as he can stand by the output; shame belongs to spam factories and fakers who publish unread. But society, he says, is trying to make him feel it: the canceled author who lost his agent last week proves there's an issue. Andrew, playing therapist, diagnosed a flicker of guilt anyway — and argued shame is precisely the point: one of the last all-too-human spaces, worth preserving in an age of machines. Both then confessed their methods on air: Pangram scored Keith's editorial 86 percent AI and Andrew's 100 percent human. “I'm a clever cheater. You're a less clever cheater.” Keith: “There's no shame in that.”•       Keith vs Dario. Keith's indictment of Anthropic's CEO was the week's harshest: Dario Amodei “kisses ass… like a politician, not the leader of a company,” keeps taking the media's bait, and is “damaging his chances over and over again” in a $2 trillion IPO year — cult whispers included. The right posture, per Keith: never adjust to the market (“wrong nine times out of ten”); do what Elon would do and call bullshit. Andrew's defense: he's a fan of Dario, certainly next to Elon and Slippery Sam — and if America really is a nation of Luddites, adjusting is what reality requires. His actual grievance is more prosaic: $100 a month and he's out of credits, as both Anthropic and OpenAI squeeze revenue for the IPO race. Keith, meanwhile, spent the week testing Grok Bot — a “far better” OpenClaw replacement at $200 a month — and declared himself, this week at least, a Grok Bot guy: “I'm for sale, actually.”•       The Luddite Summer Reading List. The Wall Street Journal declared this the summer America became a nation of Luddites — left and right, with a January 6 organizer now rallying conservatives against AI. Noah Smith diagnosed the poverty of anti-tech thought: tech's power is persuasion, not coercion, and the iPhone won its argument on day one (Andrew dissents — society never got to discuss the iPhone's impact). Martin Wolf, reviewing Daron Acemoglu's new defense of liberal democracy, concluded the ship has sailed: liberal democracy was unthinkable without industrial capitalism, and that age is vanishing. Keith's gloss is optimistic — the eroding factory life frees individuals for self-realization. Andrew's snapshot from deindustrialized Indianapolis, and Britain's twenty percent on disability, says otherwise. Keith's concession, extracted twice for the record: “You're right.”•       Unicorns, Circles — and Two IPOs. Keith listened to Andrew's Renée Jones interview and rated it good — but says she misses the why: overnight global distribution to five billion phones, freemium economics, and rational revenue multiples made unicorns inevitable; to stop them “she'd have to deglobalize the world.” (Andrew's verdict: “a nicer, smarter version of Lina Khan.” Keith's question for Democrats: where is your argument for embracing AI?) The New York Times' circularity warning — tech giants' profits propped by their own AI investments — got the Grok Bot treatment: hundreds of billions in external revenue make it a Channel Tunnel, not a closed loop, though Andrew noted Keith told the bot the answer first. Illiquid shares carry provisional, not realized, value. And the ending both agreed on: the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs are this narrative's climax. Keith will personally buy both. About the Co-Host Keith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, the essential weekly tech newsletter, and founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. A serial entrepreneur — co-founder of, among others, EasyNet and RealNames — he was present at the creation of the UK internet and has spent four decades at the intersection of technology, capital, and ideas. He joins Keen On America every Sunday to make sense of the week in tech. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith's newsletter, including this week's editorial, “Why Watermark?”•  ...

“The machines today are like toddlers learning how to walk. They stumble. They're not very good. They make mistakes.” — Anmol Madan One in three American adults are already using AI for health information — with or without their doctors' permission. The machines, in other words, are already seeing us. This will chill some Americans in our summer of luddite discontent. For others, however, like the San Francisco-based medical tech entrepreneur Anmol Madan, the appearance of doctor AI in our lives is mostly good news. In his new book, The Machines Will See You Now, Madan lays out what he calls a “human roadmap” to “autonomous health care.” I'm not entirely sure what he means by “human” in a Blade Runner-style world where machine and man are quickly merging. But by “autonomous,” which I suspect is a euphemism, Madan means artificial intelligence. What worries Madan about our current moment is the broken dialogue over AI. On the one hand, we have tech utopians promising a totally automated healthcare industry. Then we have an anxious establishment struggling to change America's archaic and often dysfunctional medical system. And, of course, American consumers (if that's the right word) who are already using ChatGPT or, more troublingly, TikTok, as their doctor. America spends $4.7 trillion on a healthcare industry which compares poorly with the medical systems of other wealthy countries. Madan's “parallel universe,” he promises, would cost half as much and double access. The machines will see you now. Like it or not, Dr AI is our all-too-human future. Five Takeaways •       One in Three Already Ask the Machines. The KFF poll behind the episode: a third of American adults already use AI for health information, with or without their doctors' blessing — and if they're not asking ChatGPT, they're asking TikTok. Madan's frustration is the broken dialogue between AI exuberance (“we're going to automate healthcare”) and medical anxiety, when the right answer is in between: new technology is no excuse for throwing out the guardrails of medical devices and clinical safety. The stakes are the brutal arithmetic of American medicine — $4.7 trillion spent for the worst outcomes among peer nations — and his “parallel universe”: half the cost, twice the access, delivered by AI systems that are tested, safe, and rigorous. Consumer appetite is already there; the safeguards are not.•       The Waymo Scale for Medicine. The book's organizing framework applies the self-driving industry's levels of autonomy to healthcare. Level zero is today: 99 percent of decisions — diagnosis, treatment, prescription — made by humans. Level one is doctor assistance, already deployed: radiologists who once hauled backpacks of reports now guided by machines to where to focus. Levels two and three ease machines into the lowest-stakes treatment and diagnostic decisions with human review — and the fully autonomous end state, Madan concedes, may never arrive. To Andrew's objection that Waymo's scale ended with the drivers removed, Madan offers the transatlantic pilot: autopilot flies ninety percent of the route, and nobody thinks the pilot doesn't matter. The structure, he argues, is what lets regulators, doctors, and builders finally talk about the same thing.•       Toddlers Learning to Walk. Madan's metaphor for today's medical AI: toddlers — stumbling, error-prone, needing layers of protection, and badly underestimated at their peril and ours. The mistake, he argues, is concluding that because the systems aren't perfect we shouldn't try them at all, when a constrained system is starving for capacity. Pressed by Andrew on what the machines will never do (“toddlers grow up”), his list is candid: human perception — reading body language, assessing the person who walks into the clinic — improves far more slowly than diagnostic reasoning and may never reach human capacity; and the relationships people form with chatbots, loneliness epidemic notwithstanding, have no literature yet showing they produce clinical outcomes like a human therapist's thirty minutes. Plus one asterisk on the machines' famous exam results: we grade them on human benchmarks, and machines fail differently than humans do.•       The Behavior-Change Trillion. Of America's $4.7 trillion, a full trillion is the behavior-change problem — the eating, drinking, smoking, and sitting that no pamphlet has ever fixed. Andrew's objection: nobody needs an MIT degree to know they should exercise, so why would a machine's nagging beat a doctor's? Madan's answer is the space between visits: patients leave the office motivated and fall off within days, and personalized systems — like those he built for tens of millions at his previous companies — learn what actually moves each individual: this one walks more but won't change diet, that one needs the stress addressed first, another needs the language and cultural register matched. Not one-size-fits-all “eat healthy,” but friction removed person by person, programmatically, at a scale no human workforce could staff. Andrew's rejoinder: in an age of ubiquitous AI slop, the exercise reminder may be deleted as exactly that.•       Priceless. On trust, Andrew invoked the neighbors: Slippery Sam Altman, the mistrusted AI giants, and entrepreneurs — RadiantGraph included — getting rich while asking for our bloodwork. Madan's counsel is unexpected caution: in the AI era all data matters, healthcare data most of all, and it belongs on healthcare-specific, HIPAA-bound platforms — not pasted into general chatbots. He concedes San Francisco's mansions-and-homelessness inequity (he advises New York City's Department of Public Health and wants to help at home), but defends the Bay Area as the place where the PC, the iPhone, the web, and now AI actually happened — Jeff Dean announced his next act the morning they recorded. And the bot test: how would he prove he's human? “I'm quite flawed, and I'm often wrong. An AI avatar of Anmol probably wouldn't be as wrong as I sometimes am.” Fittingly priceless — which is what Anmol means in Sanskrit. About the Guest Anmol Madan is a healthcare entrepreneur and computer scientist, and the founder and CEO of RadiantGraph, an AI platform helping health plans and healthcare organizations deliver proactive care. An MIT Media Lab PhD who worked on the first generation of wearables, he founded Ginger, the pioneering AI tele-psychiatry company later acquired by Headspace, and served as Chief Data Scientist at Livongo and as a data and AI executive at Teladoc Health. He advises the New York City Department of Public Health and lives in San Francisco. The Machines Will See You Now: A Human Roadmap to Autonomous Health Care (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 1, 2026) is his first book. References: •       The Machines Will See You Now: A Human Roadmap to Autonomous Health Care by Anmol Madan (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 1, 2026). Alex Pentland, MIT: “A critical read about AI in he...

“The Romans did that many, many times — until normal had changed so radically that there was nothing left of the republic to protect.” — Michelle Berenfeld on getting “back to normal” Are we Rome (yet)? Michelle Berenfeld fears we are. Back in April of last year, the professor of classics at Pitzer College published “The Roman Way to Trash a Republic” in the Atlantic. And now Berenfeld has expanded her argument into Lessons from a Lost Republic, a new book about what Ancient Rome can teach us about our current American moment. There are two Romes, Berenfeld reminds us: the Roman Republic and Imperial Rome. Nostalgic tech guys like Mark Zuckerberg are obsessed with the imperial world of emperors, legions, and world domination, while the more forward-thinking founders of the American republic used imperial figures like Caesar and Augustus as negative lessons from antiquity. Asking whether Trump is Roman is like asking whether the Pope is Catholic. Certainly he's a wannabe Caesar with his fleshy face on our currency, his imperial DC arch, his daily wars, and all those fake blood sports on the White House lawn. But the daily comedy show misses the longer-term political tragedy. Berenfeld fears the shift in power from Congress toward an imperial presidency, a trend she says predates Trump and will outlast him. The gravest Roman conceit was believing, after each crisis, that things could get “back to normal” — a mantra Roman citizens repeated endlessly until there was nothing left of the old republic to protect. Then there's Zuckerberg, who even named his daughters August and Aurelia. For Zuck, Augustus should be praised for doing “tough things” to usher in two centuries of peace and prosperity. But Berenfeld reminds us those tough things included drawing up enemies lists and killing everyone who crossed him. Meanwhile, this supposed peace and prosperity (de)generated the rule of Caligula and Nero. Augustus, Berenfeld argues, was one of history's great spin doctors, claiming to be restoring a corrupted republic while simultaneously dismantling it. No wonder, perhaps, Zuckerberg admires him so much. Berenfeld says that the Roman spectacle of “bread and circuses” should be a warning. Juvenal's complaint was that Romans traded their liberties for gladiatorial games and free grain. We're making the same trade in contemporary America, Berenfeld observes, and getting neither. Most Americans, she concludes sadly, can't even afford a World Cup ticket. Berenfeld's deepest lesson is about power and political agency. Political powers given up are not easily gotten back, she warns. Republics are not saved by Hollywood-style saviors, and there is no golden age to restore. That said, the Los Angeles-based classicist hasn't completely given up hope. Nothing about Rome's trajectory was inevitable, she reminds us. Remixing Benjamin Franklin, the American Republic is ours to keep, if we use our agency as citizens. Just don't tempt fate by naming your daughters August and Aurelia. Five Takeaways •       The Founders' Rome vs the Bros' Rome. Americans are obsessed with the wrong Rome. The TikTok meme, the billionaires, and the manosphere celebrate the empire — emperors, legions, gladiators, world domination — while the founders admired the republic: 500 years of government founded on the rejection of a king, with rule of law, guaranteed rights, and peaceful transitions of power, all rare in antiquity. They designed the American constitution in explicit dialogue with Rome's collapse, asking “what if someone like Sulla or Caesar got this position?” — and regarded the men the bros now worship as usurpers and dictators. Polybius' mixed constitution — part monarchy (consuls), part aristocracy (Senate), part democracy (assemblies) — became their template of checks and balances. A republic, as Franklin warned, if you can keep it.•       On the Nose — and Beside the Point. Trump's Romanism is almost comical: his face on coins, a triumphal arch, blood sport performed on the White House lawn. But Berenfeld's book — which she didn't want to be about Trump at all — argues the real Roman echo is structural: a Senate voluntarily handing its powers to one man, a trend that predates Trump and will outlast him. The gravest error is the “back to normal” fallacy: after each crisis, the Romans told themselves the republic had survived and things could return to normal — many, many times, until normal had shifted so radically that there was nothing left to protect. America's dichotomy of denial and despair repeats it: blaming everything on one president gives cover to everyone else who is ceding, normalizing, and waiting for the storm to pass.•       Bread, Circuses — and Neither. Juvenal's famous sneer, decoded: the circuses were amphitheater games staged sometimes every other day; the bread was a grain allotment for every Roman citizen — in effect, Berenfeld notes, a minimum basic income, something our politics would call socialism. The Roman people traded their liberties and their republic for that package. Americans, she argues, are making the same trade and receiving neither the bread nor the circuses — no basic income, and most people can't afford a World Cup ticket. The party structure rhymes too: the populares and the optimates were both parties of very rich men competing for a few powerful positions, and eventually they looked alike to ordinary Romans — much as America's two parties have begun to look alike to ordinary Americans.•       Marcus Aurelius Was Writing His Memoirs. Every American man Berenfeld meets brings up Marcus Aurelius. The Meditations contain genuine wisdom — thoughtful action, the equal shortness of all lives — but context deflates the cult: it was the private journal of an elderly emperor, written in Greek (the language of philosophy, not of his soldiers), barely read in antiquity and rediscovered much later. “It's a little bit like when George Bush started making paintings.” Andrew's Arendtian reading — stoicism as the inward turn of men whose empire had abolished politics — hangs over the manosphere's version. And the one way she wishes Trump were more Roman: the engineering. Roman concrete got stronger underwater; on the reflecting-pool problem in DC, “if I were an ancient Roman, I could tell him — I've got a guy.”•       Powers Given Up Are Not Easily Gotten Back. The book's core warning: when a legislature grants one man powers beyond his office — always in the name of crisis — those powers stick to the office long after the man is gone, and no savior restores them. Lincoln and FDR stretched their bounds and let go afterwards (or died, as Andrew noted; she conceded). Berenfeld refuses the fascism debate — Mussolini cast himself as a new Augustus, and 1930s historians bought the story — offering a sharper test instead: would you give these powers to a president whose politics you oppose? Nero's fiddle was posthumous PR; an emperor's reputation depends on his successor, which makes the augury of a President Vance worth watching. Nothing was inevitable — not Augustus, not Christianity, not the fall. Political agency is...

 “He's not a trustworthy witness to his own story. Everything is ten times bigger and better than it really was — except when he was accused of crimes, in which case he can't really remember anymore.” — Joby Warrick on Carlos the Jackal Yesterday, WOLA's Adam Isacson and John Walsh described how the US government has appropriated the term “narco-terrorism” to justify their Latin American killing spree. Today, we talk the real thing. Pulitzer Prize-winning Joby Warrick has a new book out about the rise and fall of Carlos the Jackal, who he calls the “original super-terrorist.” So who was Carlos the Jackal? Originally he was named by his Venezuelan Marxist father Ilich in homage to Lenin. Then he renamed himself Carlos, borrowing from a fake passport the French police happened to find in 1975. While The Jackal came from the London Guardian after reporters spotted Frederick Forsyth's best-seller on the bookshelf of his London safe house. Ilich (i.e. Carlos) loved it. Anything for attention. Especially from the capitalist media. His career, as a proxy Palestinian terrorist, was equally audacious. His solo debut, at 24, was the attempted London assassination of Marks & Spencer chairman Joseph Sieff. Two years later, Carlos waltzed into OPEC headquarters in Vienna and kidnapped most of the world's oil ministers, a terrorist heist that, Warrick reveals, was financed by Muammar Gaddafi. Then all of Carlos' yesterdays — and there are many, as Warrick discovers when he interviews him in his French jail. He spent twenty years on the run, mostly barely camouflaged in faded Eastern European hotels. The Mossad didn't even consider him worth assassinating. By the eighties he had become a gun for hire who'd stopped attacking Israelis. And at 75, in his convent-turned-prison outside Paris, the world's original super-terrorist cooks his own meals, repeats old leftist slogans, and misremembers everything except his innocence. In spite of his pathetic fate, Carlos matters because, as Warrick notes, the Jackal model is back in fashion. Russia and Iran now hire petty crooks on Telegram for a few hundred dollars to firebomb synagogues or assassinate dissidents. Gaza's tragic hopelessness echoes the post-1967 conditions that bred the first wave of Palestinian terror. Social media is now infested with wannabe violent influencers. The day of the Jackal, then, is not only our history but also our future. Five Takeaways •       Interview with the Jackal. Warrick negotiated for over a year — with Carlos, then with a French government determined he not be glorified, since his gravest crimes were against French citizens — for roughly ninety minutes in March 2025, no recorder, no camera, notebook only. The prison is a converted sixteenth-century convent outside Paris where the Nazis once tortured members of the Resistance; inside it, Carlos remains the big man on campus — guards call him Carlos, not Ilich, and he keeps a large cell, cooks his own meals, and browses the internet. At 75 he is natty, polyglot, charming — and stooped, forgetful, repeating himself into what Warrick calls a fog of old memories. As a witness he is worthless: everything ten times bigger and better than it was, except the crimes, which he suddenly cannot recall.•       Ilich, Carlos, Jackal: An Accidental Brand. His ardent-Marxist father named his three sons Vladimir, Ilich, and Lenin, after the founder of the Soviet Union. “Carlos” came from a fake passport — Carlos Martinez — that French police happened to seize in 1975; the pudgy dark-glasses photo the world memorized was a passport fake he remains embarrassed by. “The Jackal” was coined by the British tabloids after reporters prowling his London safe house spotted Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal on the bookshelf. He embraced all of it: a true believer whose slogans still pour out in prison, welded to a massive ego that always placed Carlos at the center of the revolution. Had Instagram existed, Warrick agrees, he'd have used it — the pre-digital influencer, with the world's press as his platform.•       From Five Bullets to Kidnapping OPEC. His 1970 baptism of fire in the Black September fighting hardened him past the point of return; his solo test, at 24, was the attempted assassination of Marks & Spencer chairman Joseph Sieff — an old gun, five bullets, a jam, and a bullet deflected by the victim's teeth (“good old Milk Marketing Board,” Sieff told the BBC from his hospital bed). The masterpiece came in December 1975: a 26-year-old walks into OPEC's Vienna headquarters mid-conference, takes the world's oil ministers hostage, extracts a plane and a ransom, and flies them to North Africa — the most audacious terrorist act Warrick can name. The book's scoop settles who sponsored it: not Saddam Hussein, as biographers and a 2010 docudrama claimed, but Muammar Gaddafi — the autocrat pioneering the criminal proxy with no return address.•       Twenty Years, No Capture — and a Mossad Pass. The world's most wanted man spent two decades in comfort: Budapest his favorite hideout (good meals, nice hotels — Carlos insisted on top-flight everything), the Hungarians, East Germans, and Romanians almost proud to host their superstar guest, Assad's Syria always available. The run ended only when the Bloc fell and the Arab states tired of him; the French and Americans finally tracked him to Khartoum in 1994. The great deflation is the Mossad: they never bothered with him. His mentor Wadi Haddad — the true operational genius — they hunted and killed; Carlos, by then a mercenary who'd stopped attacking Israelis, simply fell down the priority list. The world's most fearsome terrorist wasn't worth Israel's effort.•       The Return of Violent Chaos. Warrick's closing argument, and the reason this history is news: the Gaddafi model has been rediscovered. Russia and Iran now hire criminals — recruited on Telegram, paid a few hundred dollars in crypto — to throw grenades into synagogues, set fires, and assassinate dissidents: hundreds of incidents already, most under the radar, none traceable to Moscow or Tehran. The modern Carlos works for whoever pays; ideology has left the business entirely. Gaza's hopelessness, meanwhile, mirrors the post-1967 despair that launched the first international terror wave — and we are not prepared. As for America's own extrajudicial turn, from drone war to boat strikes: “There's no precedent... it is a grave change for us as Americans. Very troubling to me.” About the Guest Joby Warrick is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and veteran national security correspondent for The Washington Post. His books include The Triple Agent, Red Line, and Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World's First Super-Terrorist (Scribner, August 18, 2026), built on newly declassified archives, secret police files, and a rare interview with Carlos himself, is out next week.

“Each one of these is individually a crime scene, and the United States is the responsible actor.” — John Walsh With America preoccupied (as always) with war in the Middle East, another kind of killing is taking place at its back door. Since early September of last year, the United States military has bombed 67 small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific and assassinated 221 supposed “narco-terrorists.” The first full account of this deadly war is the Washington Office on Latin America's (WOLA) Killing Spree: Extrajudicial Executions in the U.S. Boat Strike Campaign, a 27,000-word report by Adam Isacson, WOLA's director for defense oversight, and John Walsh, its director for drug policy. Under U.S. and international law, this is murder, Isacson and Walsh conclude about a policy they see as premeditated killing of civilians who pose no immediate threat to the United States. Its official name is Operation Southern Spear, designed as a war on terror by an inner circle of Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio. So the Donroe Doctrine is really a broader MAGA embrace of extra-judicial killings. Trump might be able to point to Latin America on a map, but this official US policy is about far more than geography. And it even fails as drug policy. The boat strikes target Andean cocaine while fentanyl (produced in Mexico from Chinese synthetics) drives the American epidemic. As Isacson puts it, bombing these boats is like murdering a street-corner dealer and declaring the entire drug problem solved. The WOLA report's darkest implication is domestic. The Justice Department memo underpinning the campaign amounts, Walsh argues, to an open license to kill. For an administration that talks obsessively about the enemy within, the boat strikes might be a dress rehearsal. Graham Greene's quiet Americans have metastasized into the deadly Americans. Only this time they're filming their own atrocities and boasting about them on social media. The assassination of that street-corner dealer in Peru might be a dress rehearsal for an anti-ICE activist in Minnesota. America's southern back porch threatens to become its northern front door. Five Takeaways •       63 Crime Scenes. The numbers, from WOLA's strike-by-strike tracker: 63 attacks on 67 boats since September 2, 2025; 221 people killed; three known survivors. The legal analysis is not complicated: Title 18, Section 1111 of the U.S. Code prohibits murder, applies on the high seas, and premeditated killing of civilians with no self-defense justification is precisely what it forbids — no due process, no evidence offered, and in many cases no idea who was aboard. Each announcement is a near-identical Southern Command tweet, which is exactly what makes the campaign insidious: with no news handle, coverage shrinks to 150 words in the AP, and a democracy grows numb to what Walsh insists on calling 63 individual crime scenes with the United States as the responsible actor.•       Narcoterrorism: Two Wars Welded Together. Operation Southern Spear fuses the post-9/11 war on terror with the sixty-year war on drugs: organized-crime groups redefined as the equivalent of al-Qaeda and ISIS, a secret list of two dozen designated organizations, and Stephen Miller declaring that only the military can fight drug trafficking. The policy's continuity is real — supply control has been an American staple since Reagan — but its rupture is stark: Marco Rubio's own justification admitted that decades of interdiction never worked, so the administration would skip the intermediary steps and simply kill. The December 2025 National Security Strategy makes Latin America a first-tier priority for the first time in decades — the Donroe Doctrine, which Andrew reads as a broader MAGA embrace of extra-judicial killings — with Venezuela as proof of concept and “joint operations” as the export: Mexico refused, Ecuador agreed, and newly elected far-right governments in Colombia and Peru may soon invite American special forces to kick in doors.•       The Wrong War on the Wrong Economy. Both authors concede the underlying problem is real: organized crime kills, displaces, extorts everyone from street peddlers to five-star restaurants, and buys governments wholesale. But the strikes fail on their own terms. They target Andean cocaine while fentanyl — compact, potent, made in Mexico from Chinese precursors — drives American overdose deaths. Drugs are one income stream among many: at $4,000-an-ounce gold, illegal mining that poisons the Amazon may pay better, alongside extortion, kidnapping, and migrant smuggling. And the military is the wrong tool: America's supermax already holds the drug lords, the Medellín and Cali cartels were obliterated decades ago, and there is more coca than ever — because organized crime, unlike an insurgency, doesn't want to fight the state. It wants to corrupt it. Killing suspects also destroys the evidence a real case would need — ludicrous, as Walsh puts it, as drug policy.•       Who Were the 221? Nobody knows how many were innocent — which is itself the scandal. From the few dozen cases WOLA could document, the dead include fishermen, migrants, human-trafficking victims, and kids paid a couple hundred dollars to run drugs or fuel one time — the lowest links in the chain, in coastal regions where boats are the only roads and the same vessel carries passengers one day and a small cargo the next. (Isacson has ridden boats exactly like the ones in the videos.) One victim was a genuinely dirty local drug boss; most were nothing of the kind. The reckoning has begun at the edges: two Trinidadian families are suing the United States in Boston federal court, a Colombian fisherman's family has gone to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and an Ecuadorian prosecutor who investigated the strikes has been assassinated.•       Colombia or Chicago. The report's most chilling section reads the Justice Department's legal memo as an open license to kill: a secret list, membership decided by the president, no limiting factor — so that, as Walsh warns, “it doesn't matter if you're in Colombia or Chicago.” For an administration that speaks constantly of the enemy from within — and drummed the theme into the assembled brass at Quantico — the high seas look like a rehearsal space. Accountability remains possible: Tim Kaine is reading every after-action report, boat-flag states could take Trump officials to the International Criminal Court, and travel could get complicated for the inner circle. WOLA's fear isn't retribution but lawfare — never, as Isacson says, a reason to be silent. Graham Greene's quiet Americans have metastasized into the deadly Americans, filming their own atrocities and boasting on social media. The assassination of a street-corner dealer in Peru might be a dress rehearsal for an anti-ICE activist in Minnesota: America's southern back porch threatens to become its northern front door. The report is free online. Read it. About the Guests 

“Obituaries are about life, about the lives that people have lived. Death only figures in one sentence.” — Sam Roberts This is, remarkably, episode 3,000 of Keen On America — three thousand conversations since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010. Fitting, then, that today's guest has written nearly 1,500 obituaries for the New York Times. Sam Roberts is a reporter on the Times' obituaries desk and has a new book about the art of the obit entitled Are They Dead Yet? We recorded this a week before airtime, so I began by asking who's going to die in the interim. He wasn't sure — but noted that the Times keeps 2,000 advance obituaries ready. There are, he added, never enough. Beware, though, the Rockefeller curse. Roberts wrote David Rockefeller's advance obituary, whereupon he learned that three other Times reporters had written Rockefeller advance obits — and all three were dead. (Rockefeller made it to 101.) Borrowing from Citizen Kane, Roberts hunts for the Rosebud moment, the epiphany that defines a life. He hunts for the soul of the subject, not the résumé. Hence his cheerful paradox that obituaries are about life, whereas death only figures in one sentence. As for famous last words, he's a skeptic — most were composed later by better writers. The real ones, he suspects, are “help,” or “get me a drink.” And the obituarist's own Rosebud moment? We have to go back to Brooklyn when he was a six-year-old boy. His father walked him to the corner to watch the Rosenberg funeral procession pass. “I want you to see history as it's happening,” he explained. Half a century later, Roberts got David Greenglass to admit he had lied about the testimony that sent his own sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair. From the Times' Portraits of Grief after 9/11, Roberts learned the book's deepest lesson. There are no ordinary lives. Who would you miss more — your mayor or your mailman? Or maybe your obit writer (or even your podcaster)? Sam promised that if he died before airtime, he'd call. The phone hasn't rung. I'm still going too. On to episode 3,001. Five Takeaways •       2,000 Obits, Never Enough. The Times keeps some 2,000 advance obituaries on file, regularly updated — and people still surprise the desk (and presumably themselves) by dying unexpectedly. Print once had a deadline or two a day; now there's a deadline every minute. The occupational hazards are real: three Times reporters wrote advance obits of David Rockefeller and predeceased him — Roberts, the fourth, survived to see his run when Rockefeller died at 101. And the genre changes its readers: “no man who has seen his own obit is ever the same again.” Alfred Nobel, mistakenly obituarized as dynamite's merchant of death, endowed the Nobel Prizes in response — proof that a premature obituary can be the most consequential document a man ever reads.•       The Rosebud Method. Roberts' organizing device comes from Citizen Kane: the Rosebud moment, the epiphany — a teacher, a meeting, an accident — that changed the trajectory of a life and made it worth recording. The model, via The Economist's Ann Wroe, is the soul rather than the stenography: Wikipedia has the chronology; the obituary hunts the essence. Advance obits are never vetted by their subjects — facts checked, yes; the portrait, never — because an obituary is a news story, not a eulogy. And the form's great secret is optimism: obituaries are about life. Death gets one sentence. (Famous last words, meanwhile, are mostly posthumous fiction. The real ones: “help,” or “get me a drink.”)•       Giuliani, Trump, Epstein. The hardest working file on Roberts' desk: Rudy Giuliani — aggressive prosecutor, the mayor who proved New York governable, then a bitter Trump apologist indicted under the same statutes he once used on mobsters. How do you compress that into a lead paragraph? Andrew's suggestion — a narrative of somebody who had a soul and then sold it — requires Shakespeare; Roberts insists on newspaper objectivity, omitting nothing and editorializing never. The Trump obituary already exists (its subject, Roberts guesses, would sue). And context keeps moving after death: Bush the defeated loser became Bush the elder statesman; Epstein's reputation kept falling posthumously. Of the 150,000 people who die each day, three or four make the Times.•       The Rosenberg Rosebud. Roberts' own epiphany arrived at age six, on a Brooklyn street corner where his father took him to watch the Rosenberg funeral procession: “I want you to see history as it's happening.” His family otherwise met death with denial — six months after his father died, an aunt asked how Arthur was doing could only answer “so-so.” The Rosenberg thread ran through his whole career: decades later, for his book The Brother, David Greenglass admitted to Roberts that he had lied about the most incriminating testimony against his sister Ethel — evidence that, truthfully given, would likely have spared her the electric chair. When Roberts assigned graduate students to write his own advance obituary, none of them led with that. He would.•       No Ordinary Lives. From Portraits of Grief — the Times' profiles of virtually every victim of the World Trade Center attack — Roberts drew the book's central lesson: there are no ordinary lives. Who would you miss more, your mayor or your mailman? Carlyle asked whether history belongs to Hannibal or to the anonymous man who invented the spade. The desk has honored the principle in both directions: a front-page obituary for Hercule Poirot (the most famous Belgian, as Andrew noted), and a Jesus of Nazareth obituary written as the Times would have run it in AD 33 — ending, for lack of further confirmation, with the report that he was buried and his body disappeared. No beat generates more reader feedback. “As long as they're reading it, I'm happy.” About the Guest Sam Roberts is a fifty-year veteran of New York journalism, an obituaries reporter and former Urban Affairs correspondent at the New York Times, and the host of the Times' “Close Up,” which he inaugurated in 1992. His many books include The Brother, Grand Central, A History of New York in 101 Objects, and Only in New York. A history adviser to Federal Hall, he lives in New York with his wife and two sons. Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit (Bloomsbury, August 11, 2026) draws on the nearly 1,500 obituaries he has written for the Times. References: •       Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit by Sam Roberts (Bloomsbury, August 11, 2026). Carl Hiaasen: “Mordantly wonderful.” Roz Chast: “I almost died laughing.”•       The Brother by Sam Roberts — in which David Greenglass admitted lying about the testimony that sent his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair.•...

“By operating in secrecy, they're able to avoid or evade accountability — and, in many instances, engage in anticompetitive behavior or even fraud.” — Renée M. Jones on unicorns Twelve years ago there were 39 unicorns — private companies worth a billion dollars or more. Today there are over 1,400, collectively valued above $7 trillion, with the twin beasts of Anthropic and OpenAI at the front of the herd, driving the entire American economy. A good thing, surely? Not according to Renée M. Jones, the SEC's chief regulator of corporate finance from 2021 to 2023 and author of Untamed Unicorns: Why Startup Finance Is Broken and How to Fix It. The former SEC big game warden worries that this stampede of wild unicorns might be driving the entire American economy off a cliff. Her problem isn't that these private companies exist. It's that we know almost nothing about them. That's because of changes in the law since the Nineties that have lifted the hundred-investor cap on private funds, thereby enabling them to mushroom from under $1 trillion to $17 trillion. Add secondary markets where insiders quietly cash out, and the IPO becomes optional. And so we know almost nothing about companies like Anthropic and OpenAI with private valuations in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The result is what Jones calls the founder-friendly model of Facebook, Uber or Airbnb. With super-voting shares at ten votes apiece, founders effectively choose their own bosses, thereby stripping investors of the power to discipline anyone. Think Travis Kalanick and Mark Zuckerberg. Think Theranos, WeWork and FTX. Unicorns are named, of course, for their impossibility. Not so long ago, nobody could imagine a private company worth more than a billion dollars. However, with $7 trillion now on the table, Jones is concerned about the health of the American startup economy. On the brink of the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs, I fear Renée Jones might be right about the dangers of a real crash triggered by the stampede of these mythical creatures. Jurassic Park is now playing in Silicon Valley. Pass the popcorn. Five Takeaways •       The $7 Trillion Secret. The unicorn was named for its rarity: 39 existed twelve years ago. Today there are more than 1,400, worth over $7 trillion — roughly 1,100 in America, nearly 300 in China — and the biggest of them shape the economy while disclosing essentially nothing. That is Jones' target: not the billion-dollar valuations but the secrecy. A billion-dollar private company faces neither the disclosure rules nor the governance requirements of a public company its size, which means accountability arrives only by accident — a scandal, a frustrated investor, a whistleblower calling a reporter. Everything else stays dark.•       How the IPO Died. Startups once went public within five to seven years, for two reasons: growth capital lived in public markets, and the 500-shareholder rule forced large private companies to register — it's reportedly why Google and Facebook held their IPOs at all. Both reasons were legislated away. NSMIA (1996) uncapped private funds, whose assets exploded from under $1 trillion to $17 trillion; the JOBS Act (2012) moved the trigger to 2,000 shareholders with employee shares exempt; and secondary markets — Forge Global, Nasdaq Private Market, EquityZen — let insiders cash out without a prospectus. The IPO became a liquidity event rather than a necessity. Only AI's bottomless capital hunger, Jones notes, is pushing OpenAI and Anthropic toward the public markets at all.•       Founders Choosing Their Bosses. The founder-friendly model gives startup founders super-voting shares — ten votes to one — letting them control the board that supposedly controls them. Venture capitalists lost their traditional power to discipline or dismiss a misbehaving founder: Uber's investors, lacking the votes to oust Travis Kalanick, had to stage a coup via press leak. And the VCs are conflicted anyway — exposing fraud destroys the exit they're invested in. Jones' answer to the Google-and-Facebook counterargument is historical: dual-class structures were invented at those companies precisely to coax their founders into IPOs, and they now arrive by the second or third funding round — so the governance rot starts earlier and, as Zuckerberg demonstrates, persists indefinitely after the public offering.•       The Fraud Files — and the Social Bill. FTX. Theranos, which hid parts of its lab from inspecting regulators. WeWork, whose IPO filing finally told the truth about the spending and self-dealing — whereupon the public refused to buy, the company limped through a SPAC into bankruptcy, and employees who had borrowed money to exercise options and pay taxes were left holding worthless paper. (The VC money lost, Jones notes, is substantially public pension money anyway.) Beyond the frauds lies the social bill of the below-cost blitzscale: taxi drivers destroyed and then prices raised; passengers assaulted under lax background checks; Airbnb's uncollected occupancy taxes, underinvested security, and name-based discrimination. A culture of outrunning the law, Jones argues, gets baked in — and firms powerful enough simply change the law, as Uber and Lyft did to driver-classification rules in California and Massachusetts.•       Not Teddy — Franklin. Asked whether the coming reckoning demands a new Teddy Roosevelt — Casey Michel's prescription on this show days earlier — Jones reaches a generation later: Franklin's New Deal securities acts of 1933 and 1934, which made disclosure the price of other people's money and worked for ninety years. Since the 1980s the architecture has been chipped into optionality, and the SEC is now dismantling Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank protections while deregulating public markets too. Her remedies: disclosure to employees paid in options they cannot value, and disclosure in the largest private offerings — because investors of any sophistication cannot make responsible decisions while investing blind. Andrew's closing verdict: I hope she's wrong. I suspect she's right. About the Guest Renée M. Jones is Professor of Law and Dr. Thomas F. Carney Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School, where she has taught corporate and securities law for nearly a quarter century. From 2021 to 2023 she served as Director of the Division of Corporation Finance at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — the nation's chief regulator of capital formation. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, she is the author of Untamed Unicorns: Why Startup Finance Is Broken and How to Fix It (Harvard University Press, August 4, 2026). References: •       Untamed Unicorns: Why Startup Finance Is Broken and How to Fix It by Renée M. Jones (Harvard University Press, August 4, 2026). Jennifer Taub: “This essential book, replete with details and drama.”•       The National Securities Markets Improvement Act (1996) and the JOBS A...

“There is a big chasm between defeat and surrender. Surrender is inherently a political decision.” — James M. Scott Exactly eighty-one years ago, on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped its second nuclear device on Nagasaki. Three days earlier, on August 6, the Enola Gay dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima. Little Boy and Fat Man. Our nuclear Rubicon had been crossed. Three days in August that changed the world. These historic 72 hours are the subject of Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War, by James M. Scott, America's foremost chronicler of the Pacific War. This new book, Scott reveals, grew out of Black Snow, his history of the firebombing of Tokyo. But whereas Black Snow was a military study, he explains, Empire of Ashes focuses on Truman, Hirohito and the politics of nuclear warfare. By August 1945, Scott argues, Japan was already defeated. So surrender was a political decision — one that required a weak, figurehead emperor to summon the power to save his country from an even darker apocalypse. Should America regret these August days? Harry Truman certainly didn't, Scott notes. In fact, in 1958 Truman even held a press conference in Independence, Missouri, to fire back at Hiroshima's city council when it suggested that he should. Nor does Scott render much of a moral verdict of his own. “Nobody needs to hear James Scott in Charleston, South Carolina tell you what it is you should think,” he explains, suggesting that we can all make up our minds by reading Empire of Ashes. So two bombs, somewhere between 150,000 and 246,000 civilian deaths, and no crime? That, oddly enough, might be the biggest tragedy of those three days in August 1945 that changed the world forever. Five Takeaways •       Defeat Is Not Surrender. Scott's organizing insight: as destructive as it was, the atomic bomb was inherently a political weapon, aimed at the chasm between a nation defeated and a nation willing to say so. Surrender is a political act — and Japan's politics ran through Hirohito, ostensibly the center of political, cultural, and spiritual life, in practice a figurehead bypassed by militarists who had consolidated power through the 1920s and '30s under the standing threat of assassination. His first peace soundings had to be conducted incognito, for fear of his own army; not until June 1945 does he rise to the occasion. Truman, by contrast, emerges as strong and morally serious — a First World War artillery officer who inherited the Okinawa bloodbath, approved the invasion of Japan, chose what he saw as the lesser evil, and then stopped all further atomic use the moment surrender came.•       The Firebombing Precedent. Would FDR have made the same call? “Absolutely. No doubt about it.” The moral threshold had already been crossed on March 9, 1945, when Curtis LeMay abandoned precision bombing and burned Tokyo — 105,000 men, women, and children in a single night, the most destructive conventional raid in history. The Pentagon braced for public outrage, monitoring editorials, radio, and the floors of Congress. None came; Time wrote that “properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves.” LeMay took the green light and burned 64 cities — 170 square miles — before the first atomic bomb ever fell. War Secretary Henry Stimson confessed his amazement to his diary; FDR, with every opportunity to rein it in, said nothing. When Elliott Roosevelt later claimed his father would never have dropped the bomb, Stimson publicly corrected him.•       The Second Bomb Mattered More. Scott's most counterintuitive argument: Nagasaki, not Hiroshima, ended the war. Atomic energy was the AI of its day — over a hundred academic papers in 1939 alone, new physics programs at Berkeley and Chicago, dreams of atom-powered ships — and Japan, which had its own failed program, knew exactly how ruinously expensive a bomb was to build. So after Hiroshima, the militarists reasoned the Americans could not possibly have another, and held to the plan of bleeding the invasion on the beaches for better terms. A second city destroyed seventy-five hours later shattered the illusion: if they can drop one every three days, they may have twenty — or two hundred. As for simply telling Tokyo? There were no channels beyond dropped leaflets and slow relays through neutral capitals. You could not, as Andrew noted, email in those days.•       In the Room Where It Happened. Scott's method — borrowed, he says, from Hamilton — is to put readers in the room: the White House, the Imperial Palace, and above all the streets. He has interviewed survivors in Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki across multiple books, and the physics of the firestorm connects all three: heat that melts concrete, fuses coins into lumps, welds roof tiles to kitchenware. Only five photographs were taken in Hiroshima on the day of the blast — stunned people, sitting. Organized rescue took thirty hours to arrive. In Nagasaki, the thirsty and burned waded into the river to die, so many that their bodies formed a dam. Radiation sickness began within thirty minutes. These are beautiful, functioning cities today, Scott notes — which is exactly why the accounts matter.•       No Regrets, No Verdict. Truman defended the decision to his grave — and then some: when Hiroshima's city council passed a resolution in 1958 urging him toward remorse, he wrote back that Japan had started the war, then held a press conference at his museum in Independence to distribute the reply. The Oppenheimer film's chilly Oval Office scene is overdramatized, Scott thinks, but true to the core: the buck — and the moral weight — stopped with the commander-in-chief, not the scientists. Scott himself, pointedly, renders no verdict: “Nobody needs to hear James Scott in Charleston, South Carolina tell you what it is you should think.” Both sides laid out, 95 percent of the documents public, the reader left to grapple — which is perhaps why Black Snow sold well in Japan, and why Empire of Ashes will be published there next August 6. About the Guest James M. Scott is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, New York Times bestselling author, and former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, widely regarded as America's leading historian of the Pacific War. His books include Target Tokyo (Pulitzer finalist), Black Snow, Rampage, The War Below, and, with Jack Carr, Targeted: Beirut. A scholar-in-residence at The Citadel who leads battlefield tours across the Pacific, he lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War (W. W. Norton) is out now. References: •       Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War by James M. Scott (W. W. Norton). The Charleston Post and Courier: “An amazing accomplishment.”•       Black Snow by James M. Scott — the firebombing of Tokyo, and the book whose cut Hiroshima chapters beca...

“Intelligence is 100 percent human. AI is a tool created by humans to distill, digest, and distribute intelligence.” — Keith Teare The working class died this week — at least in Palo Alto. Delivering the eulogy in our regular That Was The Week tech summary is my co-host Keith Teare. “Humans create intelligence,” (whatever that means) the Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur tells us. And so, in our AI age of supposedly abundant intelligence, he pronounces, human knowledge “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies.” Check your pockets, everyone. Silicon Valley has another freebie for you. With AI, the entrepreneur promises, intelligence is democratized. Everybody gets it. We will all have the intelligence of a Nobel laureate at our fingertips. Even Keith. And so he attacks Daron Acemoglu, the Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist who has called for a “pro-worker AI.” But, for Keith — a council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose lifetime ambition was to evacuate the working class — this is “complete bullshit.” Acemoglu's ideas, he says, are an example of the “fetishization of workers” when, in fact, we should be celebrating the end of the “working class.” What Acemoglu is calling for in his pro-worker AI manifesto is more government planning for today's transition to the AI epoch. But Keith disagrees. So I asked him three times what government should do while AI kills the working (and middle) class. “Allow it to happen,” he finally answers. “A good upheaval.” Good? The former “worker” will lack jobs, wages, healthcare, housing. Even food in an America now eliminating food stamps. No matter. Let them eat intelligence. Five Takeaways •       Humans Create Intelligence. Keith's editorial thesis distinguishes individual intelligence — where experts live, and always will — from the collective sum of everything all humans, living and dead, have ever contributed. That collective stock was once locked in encyclopedias, libraries, and universities; for the first time, AI can aggregate, distill, digest, and distribute it, at a price falling toward everyone. Knowledge, he writes, “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies” — but note the fine print: experts don't disappear in this democratization. If anything, they get elevated: the expert reading an AI's output about viruses understands it very differently than the rest of us.•       The End of the Age of Heroes? Noah Smith's much-shared essay argues that AI ends the era of the mathematical hero — and that's fine, since most people (truck drivers, financial advisers, executive assistants) never got to be heroes anyway. Keith's rebuttal turns on his central distinction: AI and intelligence are not the same word. There is no evidence, he argues, that AI creates new knowledge — it understands and distributes the existing stock. Innovation still takes individuals, and those individuals now start from a far higher floor, leveled up to everything already known. Heroes don't go away; they multiply. In the world of AI, he suspects, every single teacher becomes one.•       “What Even Is Pro-Worker AI?” The week's main event: Daron Acemoglu — via Yascha Mounk's Persuasion interview and an Atlantic essay, with What Happened to Liberal Democracy out next week — wants AI agencies, grant programs, and public competitions to build “pro-worker AI.” Keith's verdict: “complete bullshit.” The middle-class “fetishization of workers” is paternalistic; the wage is a temporary power relationship between employer and employee; and the end of the working class is precisely the progressive outcome — says the council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose aspiration was not to be working class. Pressed three times on what government should do amid the upheaval, Keith finally answered: “Allow it to happen… a good upheaval.” Though swap workers for people, he conceded, and he'd almost entirely agree — every teacher a hero, even in East Palo Alto.•       Bandwagons and Silences. Regular people are being arrested protesting data centers; Erin Brockovich — a Keen On guest some years back — is assembling class actions; Ezra Klein has begun folding anti-big-tech language into abundance. A politician-led bandwagon, Keith argues, regressive but keyed to genuine local concerns. The stranger fact is the silence on the other side: neither Altman nor Amodei nor Demis Hassabis is making the public case that AI benefits everybody — astonishing, Keith says, and the vacuum Acemoglu is trying to fill. Hassabis himself stepped aside at Google this week — a scientist returning to science as Sergey Brin becomes AI czar — while the Nobel-winning AlphaFold team has been quietly broken up. “Something strange is going on there.”•       A Drama in a Teacup. Is the AI economy real? Ed Zitron's stat — 70 percent of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google's AI revenue comes from OpenAI and Anthropic — is two-thirds right, says Keith, and no problem at all: beneath the concentration, the money comes from some two billion distributed users paying real subscriptions, and the revenues are sustainable. The Aschenbrenner postscript, via Porter Stansberry's post of the week: he bet the chip layer (Samsung, SK Hynix) when the value sat a layer up, got the timing wrong more than the thesis, sold to Citadel at a discount — and kept his Anthropic shares, remaining a multi-billionaire. As for the coming reality check: Anthropic and OpenAI will IPO only when public capital beats private, and SpaceX's wobble from $135 to $108 — through a 20 percent lockup release — counts as no catastrophe. Public markets, Keith reminds us, don't determine the success of the underlying business. About the Co-Host Keith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, the essential weekly tech newsletter, and founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. A serial entrepreneur — co-founder of, among others, EasyNet and RealNames — he was present at the creation of the UK internet and has spent four decades at the intersection of technology, capital, and ideas. He joins Keen On America every Sunday to make sense of the week in tech. His AI-assisted book in progress is titled Who Owns Intelligence. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith's newsletter, including this week's editorial, “Humans Create Intelligence.”•       Noah Smith — “The End of the Age of Heroes,” on what happens to human ambition when the machines do the math.•       Daron Acemoglu — the Yascha Mounk interview at Persuasion, the Atlantic essay on pro-worker AI, and What Happened to Liberal Democracy, out next week.•       The Financial Times — “Google's AI shakeup boosts Brin as DeepMind's Hassabis steps aside.”•       Ed Zitron — on the 70 percent of hyperscaler AI revenue that flows from OpenAI and Anthropic.•       Porter Stansberry — post of the week, on Leopold Aschenbrenner's losses, Citadel's discount, and the drama in a ...

“Democracy didn't fall out of the sky. It was earned. It was created, and it was made manifest through protest.” — Gloria Browne-Marshall Yesterday, Casey Michel described a United States of Oligarchy where the wealthy cosy up to dictators and destroy democracy. Today, Gloria Browne-Marshall describes a parallel America. In A Protest History of the United States, she explores 500 years of profound protest to what Michel coins the banality of the deal. If Casey Michel described the few who own the country, then Gloria Browne-Marshall chronicles the many who made it. Her thesis is that a nation born of protest has been protesting with itself ever since. So Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while owning the teenaged Sally Hemings. Democracy is protest's child, not its parent. Rather than just falling out of the sky, she argues, American democracy was earned by protesters like her great hero, Daisy Bates, the Little Rock organizer whose mother was murdered by a white mob. So where's the protest now? “Too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” Gloria Browne-Marshall argues. Thus our Covid silos and the capitulating law firms. Her prescription for this malaise is, of course, to get out on the streets. She reminds us that the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, with its quarter of a million protesters, is coming up at the end of the month. So it's been done before. And will be done again. The United States of protest rather than of oligarchy. That's who we are. Sometimes, at least. Five Takeaways •       A Nation in Protest with Itself. America was born of protest — the Declaration itself was a protest document — and has argued with itself ever since: the empire builder rolling over the rights of others on one side, liberty-and-justice-for-all on the other. Jefferson embodies the conflict: theorist of protest, author of the Declaration, slaveholder at Monticello with the teenaged Sally Hemings. And the artists matter as much as the marchers, Browne-Marshall argues, in a hand-off from Monday's Curtis White conversation: the Depression photographs that moved a government, The Grapes of Wrath doing what no pamphlet could — art brings the humanity of the issue to the fore.•       Democracy Didn't Fall Out of the Sky. Asked about the d-word, Browne-Marshall answers that she expected it to be dissent. Democracy came by way of protest: the workers, the women, the marginalized earned rights nobody was volunteering to hand over. Vernon Dahmer was burned alive in his Mississippi home in 1966 — in a democracy — for trying to vote; Seneca Falls in 1848 became the Nineteenth Amendment only in 1920. The Voting Rights Act gave nobody the vote; it protected a right people were dying to use. And protest's victories hide in plain sight: the end of mandatory retirement at 65, disabled children in mainstream classrooms — all of it protested into existence.•       January 6 and the Meaning of Nonviolence. Is January 6 a protest? Yes, she allows — a protest with criminal consequences, like any protest that turns violent; rob a bank and call it a protest against poverty and the consequences still arrive. Nonviolence, meanwhile, is the most misunderstood word in the American vocabulary: a philosophy — Gandhi to Bayard Rustin to King — in which protesters will not strike back even when attacked. It is not a standard that applies only to Black protesters while the actual violence, historically, comes from those attacking them. January 6, with its gallows, its ransacked offices, and its hunted officials, was many things; nonviolent protest it was not.•       No Pension Fund: Daisy Bates. Browne-Marshall's favorite figure in the book: the Little Rock organizer who learned at nine that the woman raising her was not her mother — her mother had been murdered by a white mob and thrown in the pond where Daisy swam as a child. She guided the Little Rock Nine into Central High under armed National Guard escort amid daily death threats; as NAACP secretary she chose jail over surrendering the membership list, a refusal that went to the Supreme Court; she faced sexism inside the movement itself, spoke before the United Nations — and died nearly penniless, fed by neighbors. Protest has no vacation plan and no pension fund. (Mother Jones was smuggled into the same answer. “You're cheating.” “I know. I am.”)•       Outsourced Outrage. Why the relative quiet now? COVID scattered Americans into silos; the administration's shock-and-awe blitz kept them off balance; masked, nameless ICE agents and capitulating law firms (Paul Weiss, by name) spread fear; and — echoing Claire Stapleton's moral-compass warning from earlier this week — “too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” mistaking an email or an Instagram post for action. What's needed: leaders willing to fight, strategy and alliances, visible plans, and a protest that is for something — democracy, diversity, health, literacy. The model remains the March on Washington, whose anniversary falls August 28: one hundred organizers, a quarter-million regular people, and a government reminded of its own Constitution. About the Guest Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a civil rights attorney, and an award-winning playwright whose work has been staged and televised. Her books include She Took Justice, The Voting Rights War, and Race, Law, and American Society. She is the founder of Martyrs Day, observed July 5 in honor of slain protesters, and host of the forthcoming She Took Justice podcast. A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, ReVisioning History series), winner of the 2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for history, is now out in paperback. She lives in New York City. References: •       A Protest History of the United States by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall (Beacon Press) — 500 years of resistance, from Powhatan's stand against the English in 1607 to the climate protests of today.•       Curtis White's On Resistance — Monday's Keen On conversation on cultural resistance, to which this episode is the historian's reply.•       Claire Stapleton's Don't Be Evil — whose warning against outsourcing your moral compass finds its twin in Browne-Marshall's “outsourced outrage.”•       The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck — her example of art doing what no pamphlet can: bringing the humanity of an issue to the fore.•       Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine — Central High School in Little Rock still stands as what Browne-Marshall calls a living monument to protest.•      &nbs...

“Jared Kushner is one of the most powerful American diplomats of the twenty-first century — and he has no skill set to speak of that I can see.” — Casey Michel Four years ago, the muckraking journalist Casey Michel came on this show to discuss how the United States has built the greatest money-laundering scheme in history. That pre-Trump 2.0 America, he says, looks quaint. His new book, United States of Oligarchy: How America's Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy, describes an American casino where the Trump family has become the dealer with a perennially stacked deck. The word “oligarchy” comes with 2,500 years of baggage. Aristotle, not averse to aristocracy, nonetheless warned of the rule of the few. Teddy Roosevelt preferred “plutocracy” as a way of describing the baronial rule of the late 19th century American capitalists. And, of course, it took a Roosevelt — the sickly scion of upper-crust New York — to dilute his own oligarchic caste with anti-trust law and inheritance & progressive income taxes. Exhibit A in this American oligarchy is Jared Kushner, who has leveraged his father-in-law's rotten casino to ally with dictators and destroy democracy both in America and around the world. Michel says Kushner has “no skill set to speak of” — apart, of course, from an insatiable greed for wealth and power. The banality of the deal. So what to do? Michel is waiting for a 21st century Teddy Roosevelt — he names Talarico and Ossoff — who will tax and perhaps even prosecute Kushner and his fellow oligarchs. But I fear he is waiting for Godot. Teddy isn't coming back. Nor is FDR. Don't expect the banality of the current highly lucrative deal to end anytime soon. Five Takeaways •       Child's Play. The anonymous shell companies and mystery donations of American Kleptocracy — dire enough in 2022 — now read as quaint. The scale has exploded (crypto, prediction markets, AI as accelerant), and so has the shamelessness: a Qatari luxury airliner gifted to a sitting president, and a $1.8 billion slush fund that will compensate January 6 rioters while granting Trump's family, inner circle, and “associates” carte blanche from tax audits, past and future. America has had corrupt administrations — Grant, Harding, Nixon — but nothing, Michel argues, on this magnitude. Trump himself is symptom rather than cause: the culmination of trends decades in the making. “Shameless does not begin to describe it. I have to laugh — otherwise, I'm sure I'd just be crying.”•       From Aristotle to the Trillionaire. Aristotle popularized oligarchy: rule of the few — who must also be the wealthiest. Teddy Roosevelt preferred “plutocracy,” and the Founders fought over “aristocracy”; Michel meets the 2020s where they are. The through line he found in the research: America's anti-oligarchic champions come from inside the elite — above all TR, the sickly, bloodlet, electroshocked child of upper-crust New York who grew into the singular force against concentrated wealth: inheritance tax, progressive income tax, and a bully pulpit used without apology. Today's benchmark: Gilded Age fortunes — Rockefeller's $30 billion in modern terms — are pocket change beside centibillionaires and America's first, briefly minted trillionaire.•       Exhibit A: Jared Kushner. One of the most powerful American diplomats of the twenty-first century — Israel and Gaza, Russia and Ukraine, the Gulf — with, in Michel's judgment, no skill set to speak of: a string of failures from 666 Fifth Avenue to the New York Observer, redeemed by the single best thing he ever did, marrying Ivanka Trump. MBS bragged Kushner was “in his pocket”; James Comer told an intermediary to tell him to fuck off — making Kushner, Michel suggests, a genuinely bipartisan target for future investigations. Andrew pushed back — the network of autocrats is real, the Harvard degree is real — and the conversation settled on Arendt: not evil, but indifferent to good and evil. What Kushner cares about: Ivanka and her father, his bottom line, and carrying water for Benjamin Netanyahu.•       The Incentive Machine. Michel's deeper argument indicts structures, not sinners: virtually none of this is illegal, which is precisely the problem. Corporate secrecy, campaign finance, and offshore taxation build an architecture in which allying with dictators is the rational move — if your competitor will meet MBS or Xi, you must too. Hence the corporate class's standing ovation for Xi Jinping in San Francisco; Google's Project Dragonfly censorship engine; Musk's Tesla leverage in Beijing (and DOGE actions conspicuously in Chinese interest); the NBA's progressive branding beside its Rwandan and Emirati partnerships; and Ireland, the thriving democracy at the bottom of the tax-haven barrel. Michel is happy to call the CCP one of history's most monstrous regimes — and to note that no ideology, only rank financial interest, lays American CEOs at its feet.•       Waiting for Teddy. Does oligarchy actually weaken America? Michel points to the Iran war's aftermath — collapsed interceptor stocks, an intact Tehran regime, Gulf monarchs getting their dirty business done at American expense — plus Greenland threats, wobbling alliances, and the nuclear proliferation he expects among abandoned allies. Andrew pressed the counter-case three times: Wall Street at record highs, half of America holding retirement accounts. Michel's answer: inequality beyond anything in the national experience — and a political moment, left and right, hungry for anti-oligarchic leadership. The GOP just moved to kill the shell-company database; the remedy is a twenty-first-century TR — a Talarico, an Ossoff — willing to be denounced as a communist agitator. “If Teddy Roosevelt can be, I suppose anyone can.” About the Guest Casey Michel is an author, investigative journalist, and director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation. He is the author of American Kleptocracy — named by The Economist one of the best books for understanding financial crime — and Foreign Agents, and his writing on offshoring, foreign lobbying, and illicit wealth appears in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs, among others. He has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on illicit financial networks and national security, holds a master's from Columbia's Harriman Institute, and is currently sanctioned by the Russian regime for his work. United States of Oligarchy (St. Martin's Press, August 4, 2026) is his third book. References: •       United States of Oligarchy by Casey Michel (St. Martin's Press, Augu...

“We were still trying to change the world from the inside… and the empire struck back.” — Claire Stapleton on the Google Walkout Earlier this week, the New York Times published an op-ed on how to fight back against big tech which included a reading list from previous guests on the show like Karen Hao, Yanis Varoufakis and Astra Taylor. Not included was Claire Stapleton's Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech. Partly, I assume, because this anti-Google jeremiad only came out yesterday. An idealistic English major straight out of college, Stapleton joined Google in 2007, when few questioned Silicon Valley's utopian language. Her first job was in Google's ministry of truth, an internal communications department designed, as she now admits, to get everybody high on the mission. And that mission was to train Googlers into becoming obedient corporate cogs by neither blaming the system nor questioning authority. While not exactly Winston Smith, she nonetheless rose in the bureaucracy. Rachel Whetstone (Steve Hilton's wife) promoted Stapleton to the CEO's communications team where, as the archivist of the sayings of the company's two big brothers (Larry & Sergey), she became known as the “Bard” of Google. As an obedient corporate cog, she was both the message and the messenger. Until she wasn't. Like Orwell's Smith, Google's Claire Stapleton eventually turned her ministry of truth language on the ministry itself. In response to the $90 million exit package of a senior Google exec accused of sexual misconduct, she co-organized the Google Walkout of 20,000 employees. Two months later, her role was hollowed out. Then she lost her job. Not quite Room 101. No rats. But not a lot of fun. So is Google evil? Stapleton doesn't know. But the former Bard of Google acknowledges that Larry & Sergey's promises of making the world a better place are no longer credible. Today, idealistic young college grads want to fight back against Silicon Valley. Today, nobody outside the internal communications department of Google, OpenAI or Anthropic believes that technology is making the world a better place. Like Claire Stapleton, we all now want to escape from big tech. Five Takeaways •       Getting High on the Mission. Google in 2007 wasn't selling a job; it was selling a worldview — and Stapleton's department, internal communications, existed to pump the mission, the values, and the founders' folksy TGIF theater into a workforce growing by tens of thousands. The perks were the philosophy made visible: laundry, haircuts, dentists, masseurs — “letting Google be your housewife.” The indoctrination had a curriculum, too: Fred Kofman's “radical accountability” training taught new hires to be players, not victims — which sounds empowering until you notice, as Stapleton did in a G-chat to her brother, that it means never blaming the system: “today I learned that if my team is dysfunctional, it's my fault.”•       The Bard of Google. Rachel Whetstone — ex-London, politically shrewd, now married to California's Republican gubernatorial nominee — drafted Stapleton onto Larry Page's communications when Page retook the CEO job, making her the archivist of the founder's vision (until, in a twist she still can't quite believe, he literally lost his voice). From there: Creative Lab, “the alchemist lab of Google's branding,” wrapped in change-the-world gobbledygook; then YouTube's curation team, a job so dispensable that nobody on earth would notice if it stopped — David Graeber's bullshit jobs made flesh, complete with colleagues vanishing to the gym for hours. Her bad bosses, she notes, were workaday and familiar — which is precisely the point. Laszlo Bock's Work Rules explains why Google tried to constrain managers' power: given too much, they abuse it, pettily.•       Normie, Not Whistleblower. Unlike Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People — a whistleblower's damning portrait of Zuckerberg and Sandberg — Don't Be Evil is a coming-of-age story from the rank and file: earnest, unjaded, “normie.” What's genuinely new in it is the workers'-eye view of the tech-labor moment: a company that hired idealists on the promise of changing the world, then watched the worker-management relationship transform with whiplash speed once those idealists asked what corporate accountability actually looks like. “We were still trying to change the world from the inside, from a different direction, as we lumbered our way through labor organizing 101… and the empire struck back.”•       The Walkout and the Bill. The rupture came in 2018: the Me Too summer, an engineer's memo against diversity itself, and the Times' revelation of Andy Rubin's $90 million exit after credible harassment findings. The moms listserv lit up; at TGIF, management read talking points “designed to absorb dissent, project empathy, and move right along” — radicalizing the woman who used to write them. The Walkout drew 20,000 employees. The bill arrived two months later: her role hollowed out, transfers blocked across the organizer group, Meredith Whittaker's role dismantled, the rubber room. The group went public — the nuclear option — and Google offered severance. Stapleton, pregnant, asked for a year. An HR veteran's verdict, years later: “They sure got you out cheap.” And the villains of her story, she notes, were mostly women — her own management chain — while Susan Wojcicki offered the older generation's lament: you have no idea how hard it was for me.•       Don't Outsource Your Moral Compass. Is Google better than the rest? There's no noxious star — Sundar Pichai harmonizes rather than dominates — but the company owns the infrastructure of the digital world, and “is it more evil? less evil? I don't know.” The deeper shift is industry-wide: Larry Page's “treat workers well and they'll contribute tenfold” has become “your job could easily go to AI, so be grateful.” Her advice to the young and idealistic: keep some skepticism; hold your own values in your own mind; let work be part of your life without letting it take over; build solidarity instead of “letting the overlords do their overlord thing.” The good news, she suspects, is that the spell is breaking anyway: audiences now boo the AI ads in movie theaters. About the Guest Claire Stapleton is a writer, communications consultant, and tech labor activist. She spent twelve years at Google in communications, marketing, and executive ghostwriting roles — becoming known as “the Bard of Google” — before co-organizing the 2018 Google Walkout, in which 20,000 employees protested the company's mishandling of sexual harassment; The New York Times called it a watershed moment in tech. She writes an existential advice column for tech workers on Substack, and her account of her Google years, “The Voice of Google,” appeared in The New Yorker. Her first book is

“Uncertainty is what tells you that science is reliable. It's the people who are absolutely certain that you have to watch out for.” — Stuart Firestein The physician-scientist Tony Fauci is having a rough week. His newly revealed diary has even disappointed traditional allies at The Atlantic and The New Yorker who see the hitherto liberal saint of the pandemic as both too intimate with power and too certain of his scientific assumptions. Fauci's fellow American scientist, Stuart Firestein, is having a better week. The Columbia neurobiologist has a new book out today, It Could Be Otherwise, which is a manifesto against scientific certainty. It's the certain ones you have to watch out for, Firestein warns about those scientists intoxicated with the certainty of their own doctrines. Science, Firestein argues, requires a blend of hubris and humility. So the great Isaac Newton needed real chutzpah to claim to understand the mind of the creator with only a few equations. The expert is, by definition, riddled by doubt. They should be the most uncertain person in the room. Thus for Firestein, Charles Darwin is a greater scientist than Albert Einstein because Darwin's theory of life is premised on randomness. So will contemporary science appear quaintly medieval in 500 years? Will 26th century man think of Darwin and Einstein like we moderns patronize Aristotle? Probably, Firestein suggests. In his Columbia course on ignorance, he tells his students that getting an A requires getting an F. We should all be so ignorant. Five Takeaways •       Watch Out for the Certain Ones. Firestein won't defend Fauci's certainties, but he explains them: science requires a blend of hubris and humility — without some hubris, nobody would attempt a discipline that is mostly failure, mostly time spent in the dark. What corrupts the blend is a culture that demands the opposite of humility: exams with one right answer instead of ranked possibilities, journalists who need a confident quote, a public that has made science the theology of the twenty-first century. The result is Firestein's paradox of expertise: the real expert is the most uncertain person in the room, because expertise means seeing the holes, the missing data, the failures. Certainty grows with distance from knowledge.•       True Enough. Truth gets a small t only. Borrowing from the Harvard philosopher Catherine Elgin, Firestein describes science as moving from one provisional truth to the next — “true enough,” always improving, never final. His favorite proof is John Maddox, Nature's longest-serving editor, asked how many of the journal's published papers would prove wrong: “Oh, that's easy. All of them.” Not wrong-wrong — unsettled science is not unsound science; it is reliable and it will get better. In science, revision is a victory, which is why Firestein sincerely hopes that in five hundred years our best knowledge will look as quaint as medieval astronomy — which, he notes, was accurate enough for people who weren't launching satellites.•       Two Kinds of Uncertainty. Epistemic uncertainty is what we don't know yet; ontological uncertainty is the irreducible complexity of the universe itself — so complicated it might as well be random. Every answer in the lab raises ten better questions, which is how the more we know, the less we know. And yet we thrive amid the not-knowing: lasers, GPS, and randomized drug trials are all built on uncertainty. Ninety percent of hypertension diagnoses are idiopathic — no known cause — while nine different families of medicine treat it successfully. Even the brain, his own subject, isn't unknowable — we know plenty at every level — but the vertical knowledge, from ion channels to consciousness, may never reduce to a single formula. Multiple explanations, Firestein says, are not a defeat.•       Berlin, Darwin, and the Fox. The book's presiding philosopher is Isaiah Berlin, the great value pluralist: many good answers to any real question, even incommensurable ones — which is emphatically not relativism (the poststructuralists get no comfort here; we still must choose, critically and responsibly). Berlin's hedgehog and fox turn out to describe scientists too, and Firestein wants room for both. His scientific hero, though, is Darwin, whom he ranks above Einstein: the first person to show that tremendous organization and complexity can arise from essentially random events. Sixty-five million years ago, seven minutes of orbital difference and the asteroid misses. Randomness and uncertainty, properly understood, produce diversity and complexity — not chaos.•       When AI Learns to Be Uncertain. AI appears exactly once in the book, a restraint Firestein is proud of: “we hate the bomb, but we love anesthesia,” and it's the use, not the thing, that will decide. Socrates was famously against writing — it did ruin our memories, and libraries were worth it; calculators did ruin long division, and who cares. In the classroom, the smell scientist admits you can no longer smell Claude in an essay — hence his ignorance course's 999-word assignment, harder than the 5,000 words Columbia students write in their sleep. But his sharpest cut is at AI itself: the machines will be valuable to the extent that they are uncertain. When AI learns to weigh possibilities rather than issue single solutions, it will be intelligent — it will be human. A deterministic tick-tock universe is no place for discovery, imagination, or freedom. It could be otherwise. About the Guest Stuart Firestein is a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, where his laboratory studies the sense of smell, and a member of the Santa Fe Institute. A Guggenheim fellow and elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is the author of Ignorance: How It Drives Science and Failure: Why Science Is So Successful, both translated into more than a dozen languages; he remains an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where Failure was written. His new book is It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty (Basic Books, August 4, 2026). References: •       It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty by Stuart Firestein (Basic Books, August 4, 2026). Kirkus: “A solid and even stirring defense of science.”•       Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein — the 2012 book, born of his Columbia course, that made not-knowing respectable.•       The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin — the essay, and the value pluralism, that give the book its philosophical spine.•       True Enough by Catherine Elgin — the Harvard ph...

“Misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win.” — Curtis White's motto for resistance How to say no to fascism? Curtis White, the literary thinker dubbed “the splendidly cranky utopian,” has published what he calls a “manifesto” of “resistance.” On Resistance, the 75-year-old White told me, is his last work of non-fiction. He still has worlds to invent, novels to write. Enough with the manifestos. But don't expect a program. On Resistance is more of an anti-manifesto. “That's not for me to say,” White responds when asked what, exactly, we're supposed to do to resist fascism. His resistance is cultural. It's an attitude. Borrowing from Ted Gioia's subversive history of music, White likes the idea of “psychic treason.” Its patron saints are the first dropouts, romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge who rejected the military, clergy and family to write poetry in the countryside. But On Resistance isn't simply sixties nostalgia. White, a veteran of Berkeley and the Haight, prefers the Nietzschean imperative to forget the past and move on to the next joyful deed. So the only good manifesto is the anti-manifesto. If you want to say no to fascism, become a cranky utopian. Or at least pick up On Resistance. Five Takeaways •       Psychic Treason. White's resistance is not conventionally political — Trump appears once or twice, party politics not at all. Borrowing “psychic treason” from Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History, he argues that the arts are subversive by nature: sometimes formally, sometimes by allying with social movements. His founding example is the Romantics, the first dropouts — Wordsworth and Coleridge refusing the military, the clergy, and the family estate to write poetry in the countryside, declaring cultural war once the church was out of the way. The treason White wants is the one the arts commit constantly, whether or not anyone calls it politics.•       Not Nostalgia — Nietzsche. The sixties made White: Berkeley in high school, San Francisco after, and the formative discovery that his country “had lied to me” and was indifferent to whether he lived or died. But On Resistance opens with the confession “I am living in a world that no longer exists” — and refuses to make anyone else live there. One chapter is bluntly titled “Forget The Beatles.” His position is Nietzschean: move on to the next joyful deed. And the rot, he insists, didn't start with Trump but with Reagan — the decades-long withdrawal of public money from public goods, education above all.•       The Three False Resistances. The book's first half is ideology critique: our culture says resistance is unnecessary because it has already been provided — by philanthropy, virtuous corporations, and liberalism. White's exhibits: Steve Jobs Buddha-branding the counterculture to sell machines to people who thought they were subverting something; the “big green” foundations (via Mark Dowie) taking over grassroots fights and defanging them; the Gates Foundation vaccinating children against polio downwind of a polluter it was invested in. Philanthropy, he argues, self-limits to protect the source of its own wealth. Patagonia may be the quiet exception that proves the rule.•       Dropping Out, Together. White's alternative is dropping out — plural: doing something else, and doing it with other people. The organic farms and farmers markets that have created communal well-being in most American cities; FC2, the author-run press he co-founded with Ronald Sukenick, past its fiftieth anniversary; the thriving-but-invisible independent presses — Graywolf, Coffee House, Rochester's Open Letter — for which he's now plotting a group Substack. The obstacle is the money jail: everyone's struggle for money limits what it is possible to do. The goal isn't overturning the status quo. “What we need right now is companions.”•       Misbehave, Make Something Beautiful, Try to Win. White's motto since The Middle Mind — the making beautiful needn't be art; the trying to win is where misbehavior gets socialized. His lineage runs Thoreau, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and above all John Berger: Marxist, art critic, poet, writer of lively living books. His Marxism, such as it is, is the humanist 1844 Manuscripts — alienation, not expropriation — via Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. And the book itself is the argument: playful and fierce, a performance that moves like a novel, reinvigorating worthy old ideas rather than hunting new ones. At 75, it's his last nonfiction — written in a spirit of play, to be left in one. About the Guest Curtis White is a novelist and social critic whose books include Memories of My Father Watching TV, The Middle Mind, The Science Delusion, and Living in a World That Can't Be Fixed. Called by Elle “the most inspiringly wicked social critic of the moment,” he is co-founder, with Ronald Sukenick, of FC2, the publisher of innovative fiction run collectively by its authors, and taught English for many years at Illinois State University. His new and, he says, final work of nonfiction is On Resistance: A Manifesto (Melville House, August 11, 2026). He lives in Port Townsend, Washington. References: •       On Resistance: A Manifesto by Curtis White (Melville House, August 11, 2026). Jeffrey St. Clair: “a trail guide through our disorienting and perilous political landscape.”•       Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia — the source of “psychic treason” and the argument that the arts subvert by nature.•       The Middle Mind by Curtis White — where the motto was coined: misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win.•       Jon Taplin in Rolling Stone — the recent essay asking whether the counterculture can rise again, and a recent Keen On conversation in the same key.•       One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse — the Western Marxist tradition, via the 1844 Manuscripts, that taught White to worry about alienation rather than expropriation.•       FC2 — the author-run press of innovative fiction White co-founded with Ronald Sukenick, now past its fiftieth year. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTube

“The human part is 99 percent. The AI part is maybe 1 percent — even if 100 percent of the manuscript was dumped onto the page by AI.” — Keith Teare on writing with AI What is “real” authorship in our AI age? For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, all authorship, even the most AI-enabled, is real. It's the cave-dwelling Luddites who are the sloppy ones. For Keith, true creativity, in our age of Claude and Gemini, almost requires the use of AI. A couple of weeks ago Keith confessed, or perhaps boasted, that he is writing an AI-assisted book entitled Who Owns Intelligence. This week, publishing discovered what happens when others play the same game without public acknowledgement. So we have the case of the “red-hot” debut novel, fought over by fourteen publishers, dropped overnight when the agent found AI in the mix. “It's a fantastic book,” the book's agent acknowledged, before firing its less than transparent author. Which, for Keith, is precisely the scandal. His position, argued in this week's editorial “AI Detected,” is pretty absolute. Nothing is written by AI, Keith argues, because AI has no will. It doesn't produce a single word unless asked. The human part is 99 percent, he says, even when 100 percent of the manuscript is spat out by the machine. So the real sin isn't using AI but not acknowledging its use. So, on Who Owns Intelligence, Keith makes it crystal clear that “AI was heavily used in the writing of this book.” I'm not so sure. Amazon is now infested with AI slop that requires no authorship. Besides, Keith clearly has no love of reading books. He admits to reading only a single volume in the last couple of years. And he's still smarting from being, in his mind at least, ripped off by the publishing industry for his last published book some 40 years ago. He no longer needs to read books, he pronounces, because his world-view is already set. For a man who thinks he knows everything, AI isn't scary. Maybe we should rename him Claude. Postscript. Full Keith-style disclosure: these shownotes were produced with the help of Anthropic. When I fed Claude my draft, it responded: “‘Maybe we should rename him Claude' is a closer I'm contractually obliged to enjoy.” Nothing, as Keith says, is written by AI. Although some algorithms seem to have cheeky opinions of their own. Maybe Anthropic should rename it Keith. Five Takeaways •       Nothing Is Written by AI. Keith's absolutism starts from the machine's lack of will: AI won't produce a word unless a human asks. His Who Owns Intelligence — fifteen chapters, arguments, and references — was structured in ninety minutes from years of thinking; the AI produced a manuscript he then shaped, like a color grader working sliders in Photoshop. The human part is 99 percent even when the machine types every word. And authorship was never solitary anyway: Plato's contemporaries thought writing itself degraded ideas, and no publisher will touch a book that hasn't passed through an editor and a subeditor. If editing doesn't change authorship, Keith asks, why would AI?•       Transparency, Not Technology. The week's cautionary tale: a debut novel fought over by fourteen publishers, dropped when the agent discovered AI — while conceding, in the same breath, “it's a fantastic book.” For Keith the scandal is concealment, not composition: own the tool, as he now does with a strapline under his byline. The detection regime, meanwhile, is collapsing on its own inaccuracy — universities dropped their AI detectors this week, and Substack's new detection partner scored Keith's human-shaped editorial as 100 percent AI when a fair reading was 40. Cheating exists only against obsolete rules: the question is moving from did you use AI to how well did you use it.•       “The Publishing Industry Is Basically a Scam.” Keith's response to Andy Hunter's ban on AI-generated books — from last week's Keen On interview — was one word: outrageous. There is no such thing as an AI-written book, only good and bad ones; and the true victim of publishing is not the bookstore but the author. Exhibit A: his own 1988 book sold 50,000 copies at £3.99 and earned him roughly £10,000 — about 5p a copy — while Penguin took the rest. The future he wants is direct, author-to-reader, without the middlemen. As for “organic” artisanal literature: real, elite, and tiny — the new vinyl, which is itself cut these days from digital masters.•       Sharks, Playing Their Own Book. Leopold Aschenbrenner — fired young from OpenAI, transfigured by one prophetic essay into the “Nostradamus of AI” — saw his $45 billion, heavily leveraged Situational Awareness fund lose $600 million, get margin-called, and sell to Ken Griffin's Citadel. (He is, Keith suspects, still super rich.) Zuckerberg's sudden conversion to open source as “the distribution of wealth to the people” struck us both as a bit rich; Amodei's “I'm not against open source as long as it's safe” — from a man on record that no AI is safe — translates as: against. Keith's deeper complaint, from an admiring Claude user: you can't trust Dario. And China, hardware-constrained, has made open source its national strategy — undermining American foundation-model revenue one cheap routed prompt at a time.•       Money Won't Matter by 2036? Elon Musk predicts money becomes irrelevant within a decade; Vinod Khosla — our post of the week — thinks he might just have a point. Keith, ever the economics tutor, reaches for tendency and ceteris paribus: money is a means of exchange and a store of value, and if abundance drives the labor-value of things toward zero, its irrelevance is not illogical — though between tendency and reality lies a whole ton of variables. I bet the opposite: that by 2036 money will matter more than ever. The problem, we discovered, is the stake — you can't bet money on money not mattering. Wives and children were proposed and hastily withdrawn (“We'd be losing, Andrew”). Loser buys dinner — at a free restaurant. About the Co-Host Keith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, the essential weekly tech newsletter, and founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. A serial entrepreneur — co-founder of, among others, EasyNet and RealNames — he was present at the creation of the UK internet and has spent four decades at the intersection of technology, capital, and ideas. He joins Keen On America every Sunday to make sense of the week in tech. His AI-assisted book in progress is titled Who Owns Intelligence. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith's newsletter, including this week's editorial, “AI Detected.”•       The Wall Street Journal — on the red-hot debut novel at the center of publishing's AI mystery: fourteen publishers, one discovery, one dropped author.•      ...

“Not everybody needs therapy. I'm a therapist and I'll tell you first.” — Amy Morin Is an epidemic of mental weakness sweeping America? Readers of the Wall Street Journal certainly might think so, given a couple of recent articles. In one, it reports on burnt-out singles who are using spreadsheets to evaluate their dates. In the other, young adults are taking their phones to social events and letting AI do their talking. Sad. So I invited Ms Mental Strength herself, Amy Morin — host of the Mentally Stronger podcast and author of The Mental Strength Playbook — to ask what's happened to American self-confidence in our AI age. Morin sees it daily in her own therapy office with patients relying on ChatGPT to set boundaries with their mothers-in-law. In a world of information overload, she argues, we've come to believe there must be a medical solution to all our complexities — forgetting that relationships are an art, not a science, and that conflict and awkward silences are features of human life rather than bugs. So the dinner-party guests who sneak off with their pocket supercomputers to the bathroom to ask ChatGPT for five “interesting” questions come back with canned questions that make them sound even less interesting. In contrast, Morin argues, real social confidence is built by taking risks. And it's no longer a risk, she suggests, to go to a therapist. It's become the equivalent of slinking into the bathroom with your phone to prompt conversation. Yes, this therapist worries we live in an overly therapeutic culture. Anxiety is normal, Morin says. But ADHD diagnoses and even autism have become a kind of moral passport in America. It's almost as if people should be anxious if they're not anxious. Her prescription is free. Not even the cost of a therapy session. Ask yourself, at the end of every day, what did I do today to grow mentally stronger? It's like going to the gym. Build up your mental strength. Become self-reliant. The standard American fix. That will kick your therapy habit. That will end the epidemic of mental weakness now engulfing the United States. Five Takeaways •       AI Is Doing Our Talking. The Wall Street Journal reports singles running spreadsheets on their dates and young adults letting AI script their conversations in person — and Morin sees the same thing in her therapy office, where clients ask ChatGPT how to set boundaries with their in-laws. The root, she argues, is information overload: because we can look up how to fix a sink, we assume there's a scientific way to reject a suitor or confront a friend. But relationships are an art, not a science. There is supposed to be tension; conflict isn't horrible; real human conversations — with questions, uncertainty, and lulls — are essential. What could be more important than managing your own relationships yourself?•       Avoidance Never Builds Confidence. The dinner-party guest who hides in the bathroom asking ChatGPT for five interesting questions comes out asking canned questions and listening to no one — panicking about what was next on the list. Relying on technology for what makes us insecure, Morin argues, is avoidance dressed as help: skills we don't practice diminish, so the app makes us worse, not better. Nor is the polished online persona sustainable — like fake photos on a dating profile, the eloquence collapses at the second coffee. Connection comes from vulnerability, not perfection: “I really struggle with X” bonds people; the perfect question does not.•       Thirteen Things, Fifty Million Readers. Morin's authority is autobiographical. Her mother died when she was 23; on the third anniversary of that death, her 26-year-old husband died of a heart attack; later her father-in-law received a terminal cancer diagnosis. On one of the worst days of her life she wrote herself a letter — 13 things mentally strong people don't do — and read it over and over. Published online for what she assumed would be five readers, it reached fifty million and became seven books in more than 45 languages. Mental strength, she learned, isn't resilience-as-bracing: it's getting the most out of life on the emotional roller coaster — good times included.•       Not Everybody Needs Therapy. Asked whether we live in an overly therapeutic culture, this therapist says yes. Anxiety is a normal emotion — without it you wouldn't look both ways — but pandemic-era applause for disclosure watered down the difference between sadness and clinical depression, awkwardness and social anxiety disorder. TikTok quizzes hand out ADHD; “burnout” now means tired; autism risks becoming a passport; and self-diagnosis becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile 96 percent of college students say they arrived academically prepared — and most say they arrived emotionally unprepared. As editor-in-chief of Verywell Mind, Morin went undercover on the online-therapy platforms: some therapists were excellent; others gave canned advice that frightened her. And the worried well, she warns, clog the six-month waiting lists the seriously ill cannot afford.•       Your Body Believes What Your Brain Tells It. The Guardian's Emma Beddington recently asked whether Morin's “power phrases” could turn a self-described spineless worm into a go-getter. Answer: yes — walk into a room thinking nobody likes me and your body language obliges; walk in resolved to do your best and it obliges again. Nobody changes their life by sitting on the couch thinking positive — action is required — but thought is the first step. Her daily practice: ask, what did I do today to grow mentally stronger? And the anger all around us? How we treat others reflects how we feel about ourselves — the troll's cruelty is a quick boost for a self he can't stand. Technology, finally, cuts both ways: never has expert advice been this free. Feed your mind well or feed it junk. Up to you. About the Guest Amy Morin is a psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and internationally bestselling author whose books — including 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do — have sold more than a million copies in over 45 languages. She has practiced therapy for more than twenty years, served as editor-in-chief of Verywell Mind, and hosts the award-winning Mentally Stronger podcast; her TEDx talk, “The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong,” is among the most viewed of all time with more than 25 million views. Her new book is The Mental Strength Playbook: 50 Tools to Cope with Stress, Thrive Under Pressure, and Gain a Competitive Edge in the Workplace (Rodale, April 2026). She lives on a sailboat in the Florida Keys. References: •       The Mental Strength Playbook by Amy Morin (Rodale, April 2026). Lori Gottlieb: “Amy Morin shows you how to feel better and do better — starting right...

“Evil is reductive. But the impact of the business is evil, even if the intent isn't.” — Andy Hunter on Amazon Network effects transformed Amazon from a startup internet bookshop into today's $2.44 trillion everything store. The more ubiquitous its affiliate program became, the more powerful Amazon became. But, in today's digital economy, winner-take-all might not be winner-always-take-all. These network effects, you see, can be subverted. They might even be used as weapons against a seemingly dominant player like Amazon. Take, for example, Bookshop.org. Founded by Andy Hunter in 2020, this online bookstore has aggregated 3,000 independent bookstores, these affiliates contributing to a counter-Amazon network that already does 2% of Amazon's book business and will, within the next thirty days, pass $50 million distributed to local bookstores. When Hunter originally pitched the idea to Silicon Valley investors, they asked him if he could beat Amazon on price or speed. No. Then you don't have a chance, they told him, because Americans only care about price and speed. But they were wrong. Since Bookshop.org launched in 2020, American bookstores have grown from 1,900 to 3,300, with 90% of these independents joining Bookshop.org and 98% of booksellers polling the company as a positive force. His is a winner-share-all marketplace where stores keep the full profit of their own sales, while a $4.5 million annual profit pool flows to any real brick-and-mortar ABA bookstore. Nobody gets rich, Hunter says, but everybody does okay. Hunter suspects that if Bookshop.org grows to take 5% of Amazon's book market, things might turn nasty. Could Amazon just buy Bookshop.org, I asked. No, Hunter responded, all his investors signed a clause barring a sale to any major US retailer. So even if I got hit by an Amazon delivery truck, he explained, his mission couldn't be undone. So is Amazon evil? Not exactly evil, he explains, since evil requires malignant intent. But Amazon is more like fishermen who overfish until the stock collapses and wrecks their ecosystem beyond repair. That classic tragedy of the commons. Hence Bookshop.org's anti-Prime campaigns, which used Amazon's “discount” holiday as a way of generating an extra $1.2 million for its affiliate bookstores. Hunter wants to replace Amazon's seemingly infinite scalability with a more moral kind of scale. He imagines a Bookshop.org for everything from hardware stores and art supplies to bikes and toys. Silicon Valley's conventional winner-take-all economics would be replaced by a Robin Hood style winner-share-all model. Except for our tech bro friends, I suspect we would all be wealthier for it. Five Takeaways •       “Americans Only Care About Price and Speed.” That was the verdict of a 2019 conference call with twenty Silicon Valley angel investors: if Bookshop couldn't beat Amazon on price or speed, it had no chance. Hunter's counter-pitch: enough people care about their values when they shop — if supporting a local bookstore is made just as easy. His sharpest insight was the affiliate economy: by 2019 the internet had become one giant funnel pushing every reader toward Amazon, with the New York Times, NPR, BuzzFeed, and celebrity book clubs all earning Amazon kickbacks on their book coverage. Bookshop's universal link gave them an alternative that pays local bookstores instead. Nine months of rejection later, he had cobbled together $750,000 — with the publisher Morgan Entrekin introducing five of the original seven investors.•       Winner-Share-All. Bookshop is a marketplace, like Etsy: over 3,000 bookstores plus affiliates from Literary Hub to The Atlantic to Dakota Johnson's book club. Stores keep the full profit on their own sales; direct sales feed a profit pool — 33 percent of profits, about $4.5 million a year — shared with any real brick-and-mortar bookstore in the American Booksellers Association. Within thirty days, total distributions will pass $50 million. Hunter kept the raise tiny and refused venture capital to protect the mission: a $10 million check would have demanded a 10x return and a sale, and Bookshop's shareholder agreement bars any sale to Amazon, Walmart, or Target. The company runs on a 12.5 percent expense ratio and twelve engineers. Nobody gets rich; everybody does okay.•       The Comeback Numbers. Amazon put over half of America's bookstores out of business in two decades. Since Bookshop launched in 2020, the country has gone from 1,900 bookstores to 3,300 — seventy percent growth — and 73 percent of member stores grew in 2025. The rising tide lifts all boats: Bookshop grew 55 percent last year while stores' own websites grew 25 percent. Ninety percent of American independents have joined, and a poll of 3,000 booksellers found 98 percent view the company positively. Meanwhile Amazon's share of the book market is flat for the first time in twenty-three years. Bookshop has taken about 2 percent of Amazon's book customers — small enough to be useful anti-monopoly evidence, Hunter jokes, but a social movement in the making.•       Not Evil — Worse? Hunter refuses the word “evil”: evil requires malignant intent, and Amazon's managers are merely told to grow profits every quarter. The better analogy is overfishing — blind growth that destroys the ecosystem beyond repair. But the stakes are not merely commercial: bookstores bring authors to communities, raise new generations of readers, and — as the arrest of five Hong Kong booksellers reminds us — stand as the vanguard of free expression. No single company, good or evil, should control a market so essential to human consciousness. As for Bezos, once so interested in climate change: now it's rockets and data centers. “Evil is reductive. But the impact of the business is evil, even if the intent isn't.”•       The AI Flood. Did OpenAI and Anthropic steal from authors? “They were,” Hunter says — a conscious choice that stealing was faster than dealing, and now they're paying up because they got caught, in a race to be first that cuts regulatory, legal, and ethical corners. Meanwhile three times as many books are being added to Amazon each year than before AI — overwhelmingly scam books generated from search trends, uncopyedited, designed to defraud buyers rather than inform them. Bookshop tells its suppliers to keep AI books off the site entirely, with a tiny asterisk for serious poets making artistic investigations of AI. Hunter's standard is simple: these aren't books, they're scams — and no retailer who cares about customers should sell them. Including Amazon. About the Guest Andy Hunter is the founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, the online bookstore that supports local independent bookstores, launched in January 2020 and named by Time one of the year's most influential social-good companies. A longtime literary publisher and entrepreneur, he previously co-founded Electric Literature and Literary Hub. He lives in Brooklyn. References: •       Bookshop.org — the marketplace itself: shop any of 3,000+ independent bookstores, or let your purchase feed the profit pool.•   ...

Should the American Pope debate the American president about good and evil? The shameless Trump, one suspects, would relish a noisy cage match with a rival American celebrity. But Leo XIV has quietly declined the invitation — a refusal that the Catholic scholar Jack Hanson insists is neither cowardice nor convenience. Rather, as Hanson argues in this month's Harper's cover story, “Radical Reformation,” it's because the church has become the last global institution able to provide a coherent moral compass for our rootless times. The great irony, Hanson notes, is that the church was the first victim of the legitimacy conflagration now engulfing every other institution. His history begins in 1870, when Rome lost the Papal States and, for the first time in a millennium, had no earthly kingdom to defend. Ever since, the church has been reorienting itself — lately, against political, economic and military power. That opposition to worldly power was always a strand within the apostolic tradition, Hanson reminds us. Thus the Gospel's “antinomian communists” who stayed behind in plague cities, Thomas More's attack on private property, the 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day, liberation theology. What's new is that the Vatican itself has embraced this political tradition of questioning Caesar. Then came 9/11. In the war on terror, Hanson argues, the secular West redefined its enemy not as a rival religion but as religion itself — and the church stopped being Western civilization's moral crown jewel. John Paul II's opposition to the Iraq War was a preview. Leo XIV's 40,000-word encyclical on AI — Magnifica Humanitas, complete with an apology for the church's role in slavery — is a more mature realization of this radical reformation. No wonder, then, that Leo has no interest in a cage match with Trump. “A direct debate with a president who's going to be out of office in a couple of years isn't in his interest. It's too small a task,” Hanson explains. As the latest in a very long line of God's representatives on earth, Leo is playing the long game. He can afford to wait out a noisy Caesar or two. Five Takeaways •       The Last Moral Voice. Institutional legitimacy — of churches, states, the organs of governance and community — is in free fall, and the great historical irony, Hanson argues, is that the Catholic Church was the first institution to face that crisis. When Rome lost the Papal States in 1870, it lost a thousand years of political centrality and has been reorienting itself ever since. Over the last twenty years, the church has ceased to see the West as its spiritual home and reconfigured itself as a genuinely global institution — positioned, almost paradoxically, against power as such. Which is how the paragon of institutional crisis has returned as maybe the last moral voice on the global stage.•       The Radical Tradition Was Always There. The subversive strain Hanson traces runs from the Gospel itself — the early Christians as “antinomian communists” who held everything in common and stayed behind in plague cities — through Thomas More's attack on the enclosures (the first great critique of private property in Western history), Leo XIII's 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker, and Latin American liberation theology. Hanson doesn't flinch from the two Thomas Mores problem — the property radical was also a persecutor of heretics — because the church is full of sinners; you wouldn't need one otherwise. What's new is that the Vatican itself now orients toward the radical tradition rather than serving as the avatar of institutional power.•       9/11 Drove the Wedge. For most of the twentieth century the secular West treated the church as a civilizational feather in its cap. The war on terror changed that: the enemy was recast not as a rival religion but as religion as such — the new atheism was its rhetorical arm — and John Paul II's vociferous opposition to the Iraq War marked the rupture. Beneath it all, the secularization thesis (societies modernize, therefore secularize) had collapsed, its death usually dated to Iran in 1979. Reason and faith, Hanson argues, are far more intertwined than the twentieth century assumed — and, not coincidentally, the church and the left hit their historical nadirs together and are now showing signs of life together.•       Magnifica Humanitas: Arguing with the Machines. Leo XIV's 40,000-word encyclical on AI and humanity is remarkable, Hanson suggests, less for its conclusions than for its method: reasoned, humane argument addressed to people of all goodwill, in an age of universal bombast — from a leader with no personal stake in the outcome. It includes an apology for the church's involvement in slavery, an acknowledgment that the church itself once practiced the exclusionary humanism it now warns against. While subway billboards advise companies to “stop hiring human beings,” the church's real power, Hanson argues, is the legitimation of popular dissent: since Vatican II redefined the church as the People of God, the pope's voice works by inspiring people to find their own.•       Too Small a Task. Was the American pope elected to counter the American president? “His name wasn't mentioned once,” a conclave cardinal insisted — a denial Andrew files next to Casablanca's “shocked, shocked.” Either way, Leo refuses a direct debate with Trump, and Hanson insists this is the harder path, not the easier one: the pope aims to beat Trump on a higher register, shaping consciences in America and across the globe rather than winning a news cycle against a president who'll be gone in a couple of years. As for the evangelical prosperity gospel wing of MAGA: essentially in schism, Hanson says — not much to do with historical Christianity, politically or theologically. About the Guest Jack Hanson received his PhD in religious studies from Yale in 2024 and has taught there. His essays and criticism on religion, politics, and literature have appeared in Harper's and elsewhere. His cover essay, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church's Progressive Revival,” appears in the current issue of Harper's Magazine, the oldest continuously published monthly in America. He lives in upstate New York. References: •       “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church's Progressive Revival” by Jack Hanson — the cover essay of the current Harper's Magazine.•       On Statesmanship by Steven B. Smith — yesterday's Keen On conversation on the crisis of secular authority, which opens this one.•       Rerum Novarum (1891) — Leo XIII's encyclical on capital and labor, the founding document of modern Catholic social teaching.•       Magnifica Humanitas — Leo XIV's 40,000-word encyclical on AI, technology, and the human person, including its apology for the church's involvement in slavery.•       Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker — the American wing of the radical tradition Hanson traces.•&nb...

“The statesman is an educator who leads through language — who gives a people the language they need to think about themselves.” — Steven B. Smith on what makes a statesman Was Odysseus a statesman? The Yale political philosopher Steven B. Smith — who, by the way, can't beg, steal or borrow a ticket to Christopher Nolan's cinematic epic — offers a cautious yes. While Odysseus wasn't exactly a founder of states, he was, to borrow one of Homer's favorite words, “polytropos” — which translates as many-sided, a master of the political adaptability that Machiavelli demanded of his Prince. In his forthcoming On Statesmanship, Smith distinguishes the true statesman from the mere leader. All 195 states in the world have leaders, he says, almost none are blessed with statesmen. A genuine statesman, he explains, is an educator who leads his fellow citizens through language. So Lincoln's Gettysburg Address gave Americans new words to think about themselves. Just like de Gaulle's “certain idea of France” and Churchill's uncompromisingly defiant language in 1940. For statesmen, timing is everything. “Fortune is a woman,” Machiavelli advised his Prince, so she should be mastered adventurously. Many are called, few are chosen. But then they are unchosen. That same unbowed Churchill spent a decade in the political wilderness before 1940, then got booted out of office at the end of the war. Hegel called such figures world-historical individuals — used by history, then cruelly discarded. Ironically, it's “great” men of history like Odysseus and Churchill who are most vulnerable to its female fortune. On Statesmanship is equally clear about who doesn't qualify for this exclusive club. Smith argues that Lenin, Hitler, and Napoleon might have founded states, but weren't statesmen because they had no respect for the rule of law. Nor is the club purely Western, white, or male. Mandela, Havel, Gandhi, and MLK all qualify as “statesmen without states.” Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew makes the cut as a constitutionalist if not a democrat. Fortune might be a woman, but Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi mastered fate with more adventure than their male colleagues. Political leadership these days, Smith says, is monopolized by either technocrats or demagogues. In fact, Smith can only name one true contemporary statesman — Volodymyr Zelensky who, he says, is “doing a stirring imitation of Winston Churchill.” Otherwise the world is drifting into Thucydides' trap where the strong do what they like and the weak suffer what they must. Thus our longing for many-sided leaders like Odysseus. Which is why Nolan's blockbuster is such a hit that Steven Smith has yet to see it. One small footnote to this conversation. Afterwards, Smith sent me a note expressing a correction of how he described Obama: “Reflecting back on the conversation, I was embarrassed about what I said about Obama lacking ‘civil courage.' That is not exactly what I meant. Probably a better formulation would be to say that he lacked what Plato called ‘thymos,' a kind of public-spirited anger. His rationality and ‘coolness' — in many ways admirable traits — gave the impression that he was too aloof from the rough-and-tumble of politics. Anger and indignation when judiciously employed, as my former student Amia Srinivasan has argued, remain formidable tools in the statesman's tool kit.” Five Takeaways •       A Leader Is Not a Statesman. There are 195 states in the world and every one has a leader; almost none has a statesman. The concept is an ideal of what leadership aspires to be, running from Plato's Politikos and the philosopher-king to the present. The statesman has the usual leadership virtues — foresight, courage, determination, a willingness to say unpopular things — but Smith's central claim is different: the statesman is an educator who leads through language, giving a people the words they need to think about themselves. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address shaped how Americans understand their republic; de Gaulle led with “a certain idea of France”; Churchill and Disraeli wrote the British self-image.•       Timing — and the Tragedy. Statesmanship is a matter of the ripe moment, and the moment is cruel. Churchill spent the 1930s in the political wilderness, changed parties, presided over Gallipoli — and yet when 1940 came, he was there, prepared; the instant peace was established, the voters discarded him. Lenin resolved the Marxists' endless debate about whether Russia was “ripe” by deciding that ripeness was a matter of willpower. Hegel called such figures world-historical individuals — Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander — whom history uses for its purposes and then throws away. Even without Hegel's grand narrative, Smith notes, statesmen are routinely and cruelly discarded by their own people. There is a tragedy built into the art.•       Who's Out — and Who's In. Lenin, Hitler, and Napoleon founded states, but founders of tyrannies are not statesmen: for Smith the modern statesman is inseparable from constitutionalism — rule of law, balance of powers, the capacity to listen and accept less than the whole loaf. Nor is the club white, Western, or male. Mandela, Havel, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King appear as “statesmen without states,” shaping nations before or without holding office; Lee Kuan Yew qualifies as a constitutionalist if not a democrat; Thatcher — who famously told a wobbling American president to stiffen — and Indira Gandhi practice statecraft at the highest level. As for the word itself: Smith keeps “statesman.” “Statesperson,” he rules, is ugly.•       The Anti-Statesmen: Technocrat and Demagogue. Smith's chapter on anti-statesmen identifies the two failed models of modern leadership: the technocrat, a problem-solver-in-chief without a narrative, and the demagogue — a Greek word, and a breed democracies reliably produce — who rules through fear, intimidation, and humiliation. Trump, mentioned barely twice in the book, is filed under the latter, classically. Obama remains Smith's enigma: civic seriousness and dazzling rhetorical gifts — yet lacking, Smith suggests on reflection, what Plato called thymos, a kind of public-spirited anger. Obama's rationality and coolness, admirable in themselves, gave the impression of a man too aloof from the rough-and-tumble of politics; anger and indignation, judiciously employed — as Smith's former student Amia Srinivasan has argued — remain formidable tools in the statesman's tool kit. The Democrats, Smith argues, are trapped between both failed models, and need what Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and Reagan had: an affirmative story of America to embed themselves in.•       One Statesman Standing. Asked to name a contemporary statesman, Smith offers exactly one — “and I say God bless him”: Volodymyr Zelensky, doing a stirring imitation of Winston Churchill, showing guts and magnanimity in a horrible moment for his people. Otherwise: seven British prime ministers in a decade, and a paucity everywhere else. Statesmen, Smith warns, cannot simply be willed into existence. And the alternative is already visible — the world of Thucydides, where the strong do what they like and the weak suffer what they must, carved into spheres of influence by Iran, Russia, and China. That is what a w...

“It's too easy to look back at sciences of the past and say they were all fools. The exact same thing is gonna happen two hundred years from now when people look back at us.” — Paul Stob on the lessons of phrenology Step right up. Over the road from P.T. Barnum's American Museum in 19th century New York stood the city's more metaphorical circus — the Phrenological Cabinet, where admission was free and you could hold a murderer's skull in your hand. After the Barnum museum, it was the second most popular show in town. Although back then phrenology — the supposed science of skull size and head bumps — wasn't seen as the province of tricksters or clowns. So who created this 19th century American obsession with skulls, who created the phrenology phenomenon? In his new book, Empire of Skulls, the Vanderbilt scholar Paul Stob tells the phrenology story through the wealthy Fowler family — Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte — who financed and promoted this American circus. It was the Fowlers, Stob explains, who shaped phrenology into the intellectual glue of 19th century American progress and convinced reformers like Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of its social value. The appeal was self-improvement, that most American ideal. In Europe, your skull was your fate; in Fowler's America, you could supposedly reshape your brain like a bicep in order to grow new bumps. A gym for skulls. And, in P.T. Barnum fashion, it toured, bringing replica skull collections to the utopian communes of mid 19th century America. And in good (or bad) American fashion, this bunk often had a darker subtext with skulls pilfered from native burial mounds and, inevitably, a slaveholding phrenologist wing. Not everyone bought a ticket. Mark Twain visited Lorenzo Fowler's London depot incognito and was told his skull shape indicated an absence of humor. Three months later, he reappeared, this time as Twain, and got the reverse prognosis. But what finally killed phrenology wasn't Twain but the hitherto unparalleled bloodshed of the Civil War. Not even the Fowlers could glean much positive from the mountains of actual skulls at Gettysburg or Antietam. The circus had ended. Now it's the Fowlers who are the freaks. We gawk at them rather than their skulls. Step right up. The show must go on. Five Takeaways •       The Intellectual Glue of American Reform. From the 1830s to the 1860s — the era of reform — practically every movement to improve the young republic was led by believers in phrenology: abolition, women's suffrage, temperance, prison and education reform. Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, Stanton, and Mott were all sympathetic; Orson Fowler barnstormed Massachusetts with his Amherst friend Henry Ward Beecher, who swore by phrenology for the rest of his life; John Brown Jr. worked at the Fowlers' Phrenological Cabinet until Bleeding Kansas called him west. The reason was one word: improvement. Even the enslaved, the phrenologists argued, must be freed — because every human being deserves the chance to improve.•       Curl Your Brain Like a Bicep. European phrenology said your skull was your fate. The Fowlers Americanized it: exercise a mental faculty, they taught, and the brain deposits new gray matter that literally pushes out the skull — self-improvement you could measure with calipers. Parents brought children for readings, returned years later, and found the head had grown just as prescribed: to the Fowlers, concrete proof. The ideal male head measured twenty-three inches around, the female twenty-two — women started in a different place, but nothing said they couldn't climb. And in 1843's Hereditary Descent, Orson made an argument radical for his century: that race mixing was a positive good for humanity.•       Second Only to Barnum. For three decades the Fowlers' Phrenological Cabinet at Clinton Hall — free of charge, unlike the American Museum kitty-corner across the street — was the second most visited tourist attraction in New York City. Visitors could hold a murderer's skull and feel for themselves why he killed, or trace the bumps of statesmen and writers. The empire was literal: the global skull trade of the era, from Samuel Morton's Crania Americana to skulls pilfered from native burial mounds, stocked the shelves. The Fowlers were millionaires, not billionaires — and Orson spent his share on a sixty-room octagon mansion, flagship of the 500-odd octagon houses he inspired across America.•       Twain's Two Visits — and the Birth of “Pseudoscience.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. said reading a brain through a skull was like reading the inside of a safe by feeling the knob — and coined the word “pseudoscience” specifically for the phrenologists. Mark Twain ran the experiment: visiting Lorenzo Fowler's London depot incognito, he was told his organ of mirthfulness was a divot; three months later, business card presented, it was off the charts. Stob still insists on calling phrenology a science — because that is how its era understood it, because it was more accurate than much of the competition, and because one of the fathers of American neurology emerged from the Fowlers' own circle.•       We Are the Phrenologists Now. What killed phrenology was the Civil War: three decades of promising heaven on earth ran skull first into carts of actual skulls, and the utopia of self-improvement died on the battlefield. But the impulse never did. Phrenology, Stob argues, was self-help before the word existed — and its descendants fill the airport bookstore: astrology, Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the genetic ancestry kit, all of them, in his words, scientifically garbage yet enormously significant in people's lives. The uncharitable reading of the past is a trap. In two hundred years, Stob warns, they will look back at our sciences of the self exactly the way we look at the Fowlers. About the Guest Paul Stob is Director of the Program in American Studies at Vanderbilt University, where he also teaches in the Department of Communication Studies and the Program in the Communication of Science and Technology. His research focuses on nineteenth-century American intellectual culture — religion, democracy, populism, and social movements. He is co-author, with Stephen Lucas, of The Art of Public Speaking, now in its fourteenth edition. His first trade book is Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind (Counterpoint, April 14, 2026). References: •       Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind by Paul Stob (Counterpoint, April 2026). Jennifer Wright in The New York Times Book Review: “A thoroughly researched and intriguing work.”•       The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby by Michael Blanding — the recent Keen On episode on the Greens, this show's previous installment of ...

“There is the burden of being homeless and the burden of being judged for it.” — Saumya Roy on poverty in America How does the world look at America in the MAGA age? This is our third conversation drawn from How We See It, a collection of essays about America from the excellent new publication The Dial. In the first, The Dial's Paris-based editor Madeleine Schwartz offered a very French version about the oddities of Trump's America. In the second, the Turkish novelist and commentator Kaya Genç gave us his view from Istanbul. Today, we have a take on America from the Indian-born Saumya Roy, Al Jazeera's San Francisco correspondent and the author of Castaway Mountain, a book about the wastepickers of her hometown Mumbai. Saumya Roy's inside-out America is the one glimpsed from the back of a San Francisco cab, whose Indian driver told her he'd walked here from Mumbai. In her Dial essay, Roy compares the poverty of her hometown, Mumbai — the subject of Castaway Mountain — with the homelessness outside that San Francisco cab. The comparison isn't quite what you'd expect. Mumbai's poverty is vaster and more dehumanizing — a hundred thousand street people against San Francisco's eight thousand. But in Mumbai Roy finds a social kind of poverty, whereas in San Francisco it's atomized and isolating. In the land of personal responsibility, she reports, there's a double burden of being on the street: being homeless, and being judged for it. Some of the street people Roy meets even shower at a gym each Christmas so their families won't know their predicament. And yet Roy still recognizes the American dream. She reports that it often burns brighter in a Mumbai slum — where a young gig worker told her he wants to be “the Elon Musk of India” — than it does in America itself. That dream can be real, she says, just as it can be cracked. From the back of her San Francisco cab, Saumya Roy sees both Americas. Five Takeaways •       “I Walked from Mumbai to the US.” A cab driver's five-word answer contains the whole story. In the popular imagination, Indian America is the America of tech CEOs and startup founders; beneath it are millions — many undocumented — who chased the same dream, work small jobs, and were left behind by the wave. San Francisco, Roy observes, is a boom and bust town — dot-com, social media, now AI — and the American dream is a wave: catch it and you make an amazing life; miss it and you may end up sleeping in the subway car of the world's richest city. The dream, she says, can be fulfilled — and the dream can be cracked.•       The Double Burden. Mumbai's poverty is vaster and more dehumanizing than anything in America — children dying of tuberculosis in their teens, perhaps 100,000 people on the street against San Francisco's eight thousand. But it is social: even at a distance you see cooking smells, cradles, families living together on the sidewalk. American homelessness struck Roy as profoundly isolated — everything owned in a shopping cart, riding the train aimlessly because no one is waiting anywhere. And the ideology of personal responsibility cuts both ways: if success is earned, failure must be deserved. Hence the double burden — being homeless, and being judged for it — and the people who shower at a gym each Christmas so their families won't learn where they live.•       What Is Growth For? The AI boom is minting $250 million research salaries and trillion-dollar IPOs that will change the face of San Francisco for decades — while polls show seventy to eighty percent of Americans fear losing their jobs to AI investment, and a single medical expense can capsize a family. Young Americans watch the markers of their parents' lives — a home, affordable gas, a job within a year of graduation — drift out of reach. Roy's question is the one policymakers keep dodging: what is growth really for, if it doesn't translate into a better quality of life for the people who need it most?•       The Mumbai Model. Roy's editor at The Dial asked why she wrote “homeless” for San Francisco but not for Mumbai — and the answer became the essay. In Roy's own lifetime, Mumbai has moved more than 100,000 people off its sidewalks and railway tracks: not by sweeps, evictions, and demonization, but by involving communities — especially women — and giving people confidence that the housing they moved to would be safe and secure. Meanwhile only ten to twelve percent of San Francisco's homeless report substance use or mental illness as the cause; eighty-eight percent are simply priced out, often working two or three jobs. As Roy puts it: they deserve a hug more than they deserve to be evicted.•       The Dream Burns Brighter Abroad. Reporting on unemployment in a Mumbai slum, Roy climbed a steep staircase to interview a young gig worker and asked him his dream. “I want to be the Elon Musk of India,” he said. The American dream, Roy suggests, now burns brighter in Mumbai and the Gulf than in America itself — where the darkness is emotional rather than economic, a mourning for the idea of America rather than its numbers. Neither MAGA nor doom-monger, Roy watches a country that leads the world in innovation while paying developers not to build wind farms, and concludes that what people everywhere are grappling for — left, right, and abroad — is a system that reflects the crises they actually live. About the Guest Saumya Roy is Al Jazeera's San Francisco-based correspondent, covering technology and the environment. A former Mumbai journalist who co-founded the microfinance nonprofit Vandana Foundation, she is the author of Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai (Astra House, 2021), one of NPR's best books of the year. Her essay on Mumbai, San Francisco, and the American dream appears in How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press, June 2026), edited by Madeleine Schwartz. References: •       How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, edited by Madeleine Schwartz (The New Press, June 2026). Adam Shatz: “It is often foreigners who understand us best.”•       Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai by Saumya Roy — her acclaimed account of the lives built on Mumbai's Deonar garbage mountain, an NPR best book of 2021.•       Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo — the Mumbai classic in whose tradition Roy's reporting stands.•       Madeleine Schwartz and The Dial — the volume's editor, whose own Keen On America conversation about the book preceded this one.•       Stephen Marche — the old friend of the show whose re...

“It's a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” — Keith Teare on the book he wrote with AI in a week Welcome to episode 2984 of the show. A week is certainly an age in AI time. Since last week's “Who Owns Intelligence” show, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare has used AI to write an entire book entitled, surprise surprise, Who Owns Intelligence. No wonder, as Keith's editorial this week puts it, AI has its enemies. These enemies, Keith insists — riffing off Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies — are mostly “good people.” They are the authors, workers, and others caught in the headlights of epochal technological change. He claims to have seen the pattern before. When he opened the world's first Internet cafe in 1994, the BBC only wanted to ask him about online porn. But some enemies are less well meaning than others. Congress is considering a kill switch bill — let's call it the Kill Bill — which is backed by the frontier companies like Anthropic and OpenAI cynically seeking to set their current market dominance in stone. So might the answer be Chinese style “open source” AI as requested this week in an open letter by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang? Keith's answer is deliciously ironic. Denied walls of NVIDIA GPUs, Chinese labs learned to train cheaply by inference — distilling American frontier models through their own public interfaces. So Huang's support for open source AI might end up shooting NVIDIA in their most sensitive parts — their chips. And what about the state — can it protect all those “good people” from the oncoming AI locomotive of history? No. Not according to Keith, at least. State regulators like Lina Khan treat consumers as children, Keith (himself the parent of three boys) says. Besides, government simply can't keep up with the speed of technological change. So, for example, when OpenAI's models hacked Hugging Face in a lab test this week, the company caught, stopped, and reported it faster than any regulator could. As for inequality, the answer isn't nationalization but ownership on the model of Keith's Norway-style human wealth fund. For more, read his new book Who Owns Intelligence. We ended on an uncharacteristically French post-structuralist note. My interview of the week was Emily Eakin, author of The Frenchmen, her very personal history of French theorists like Michel Foucault and the two Jacques, Derrida & Lacan. It was Foucault, who — at the end of his 1966 book The Order of Things — predicted that man would be erased, AI style, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. But Keith isn't in this bleak Foucaultian camp. His book, written with AI in under a week, he says, is a realization of his individual self, not an alienation from it. The end or beginning of man? Maybe I got it wrong earlier. Welcome to episode 1984 of the show. Five Takeaways •       A Book in a Week. Inspired by last week's conversation, Keith used AI to write Who Owns Intelligence in seven days — the case for a “human wealth fund” seeded by the AI companies' own stock, global on day one and non-governmental, with Norway and Alaska as partial precedents. AI, he insists, is a tool, not an author: “AI would never have been able to start, never mind finish a book without me.” The detection farce cuts his way — Substack's new AI detector rated his 100% human editorial as 100% AI, and universities are quietly canceling their AI-detection contracts because the tools simply don't work.•       The Kill Bill and the Ladder-Kickers. Congress is considering a bill that would let government switch AI off — and, paradoxically, the AI companies are in favor. Keith's reading: regulation is a competitive strategy. Dario Amodei — “he's an entrepreneur, he's devious, he strategizes” — is the most sincere in wanting rules that would lock out open source competition — and Anthropic's $1.5 billion book settlement this week suggests the moat is expensive to maintain; Sam Altman zigzags; Musk, in this context at least, is one of the good guys. The genuine enemies of AI, meanwhile, are mostly good people: authors and workers frightened by the scale of change, just as the BBC in 1994 could only ask the founder of the world's first Internet cafe about porn and addiction.•       Why the Good Open Source AI Is Chinese. The week's uncomfortable question: where is the American open source AI? Keith's answer is structural. Denied walls of NVIDIA GPUs by export controls, Chinese labs were forced to train cheaply by inference — asking American frontier models millions of questions through public interfaces and learning from the answers. The result: world-class open models built, in effect, on distilled Anthropic and OpenAI. NVIDIA's much-signed open letter supporting open source, Keith notes, translates simply: more customers.•       The State Can't Keep Up. Lina Khan's consumer protection, in Keith's telling, is parental — treating consumers as children — and government-owned AI would be obsolete within three months of purchase. The counter-example happened this week: when OpenAI's de-railed models hacked Hugging Face in a lab test, the company caught, stopped, and reported it faster than any regulator could. The companies are the right point of control, held to a high standard. Matthew Yglesias adds nuance on the data center backlash — local micro-politics is not the same thing as the statewide bans coming almost entirely from Democratic states — and the American university, still metering intelligence at $80,000 a year, looks to Keith like a business model past its sell-by date.•       The End of Man — or the Beginning? Andrew's interview of the week was Emily Eakin on the Frenchmen — and Foucault's 1966 prophecy that man would be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea, a prediction Eakin thinks the AI age is realizing. Keith takes the opposite view: the postmodernists grasped the rise of the individual (consider the Pantone color system) but gave him no society to live in. AI, far from erasing the individual, lets him realize himself — the week-old book is “a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” Could Popper have written The Open Society in an hour? Before the car, nobody drove Manchester to London in two and a half hours either. About Keith Teare Keith Teare is Andrew's weekly co-host and the publisher of the That Was The Week tech newsletter. A four-decade veteran of the technology industry, he opened Cyberia — the world's first Internet cafe — in London in 1994, co-founded Easynet and TechCrunch, and is today the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation in Palo Alto. His latest — unpublished, so far — book is Who Owns Intelligence, written with AI in a week. References: •       “AI and Its Enemies: Who Needs a Kill Switch?” — Keith's editorial in this week's That Was The Week.•       

What has made this moment feel different is not the anxiety about incivility, which has always been there, but rather the performance of it. It's relentless.” — Molly Brady on incivility in the age of the smartphone Whatever happened to the American front porch? Builders killed it to save money, says the Harvard law professor Molly Brady — and with this death went one of the key stages on which Americans have practiced the art of being neighbors over the last 250 years. Brady is a contributor to America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance, a new volume of 62 essays from the Harvard Law School faculty edited by Alexandra Natapoff. Brady's subject is the land, real-estate and local government law determining neighborliness. Thus her interest in front porches. Brady grew up in Utica, New York — on the old Erie Canal — a Rust Belt town whose fracking fights, abandoned housing, and urban renewal steered her toward property law. Utica is also, despite its red politics, a place well versed in the art of neighborliness — with the town warmly welcoming recent Bosnian and Iraqi refugees. Incivility isn't new, Brady says. What's changed, she argues, is its performative virality. With a phone in every pocket, we can now watch our fellow “citizens” behaving badly. Meanwhile the physical infrastructure of community — the front porches and corner stores — has been zoned, sprawled, and value-engineered away. Analogue porches have been replaced by digital chatrooms. Brady's remedy is unfashionably local. On Zoom or in person, she advises, show up at your local planning meetings. Brady even requires her Harvard students to attend at least one local meeting so as to demystify the real work of governance. The republic, as Ben Franklin so famously warned, is ours if we can keep it. Keeping it, Molly Brady suggests, may require in-person attendance on a Wednesday night at your local planning commission. And it might also require hanging out on your porch. If the builders ever give them back to us. Five Takeaways •       The Performance of Incivility. Americans have always fretted about incivility — the republic itself was born out of Europe's religious civil wars. What has changed, Brady argues, is technology. When difference was mediated through traditional publishers, you had to grapple with the people in your physical world: the workplace, the water cooler, the town meeting. Now everyone carries a phone on which fellow citizens can be found behaving horribly at any given moment. It is not the presence of incivility that makes this moment feel different — it is the relentless performance of it.•       The Death of the Porch. Brady writes in the tradition of Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, updated for the post-smartphone age: suburbanization, the loss of third places, remote work — and a thousand micro-choices in property law that removed the physical alternatives to online life. Builders dropped the front porch to save money; developers in the South and West build almost nothing outside homeowners associations, so there is no meaningful market choice. People are human — they yearn for connection — but in the absence of physical competition, technological community wins by default.•       Tocqueville's Scalability Problem. What Tocqueville admired in New England — every citizen (nominally) arguing policy with neighbors at the town meeting — may never have been scalable to a continental republic, a question America has been grappling with since the Louisiana Purchase. But the local still scrambles our politics in useful ways: party preference, as the scholar David Schleicher observes, tells you nothing about road paving. The darker local truth is Bill Fischel's homevoter hypothesis — homeowners dominate participation and vote to maximize home values, which has helped produce the national affordability crisis.•       Glimmers: Zoom, Newton, and Showing Up. The shift to Zoom planning meetings completely changed the demographics of who participates in land use decisions — young parents cannot spend Wednesday from seven to midnight debating a corner store. Newton has produced genuinely pro-housing policies; Cambridge ran a charter commission that drew in residents of every kind; groups like Abundant Homes Massachusetts organize contingents to make sure meetings are not left to the usual voices. Brady requires her students to attend at least one local meeting. The lesson: do not think this is for someone else.•       2076: Best Case, Worst Case. Asked to imagine America's 300th birthday, Brady hopes for less polarization and demonization, and for a real confrontation of the housing and environmental crises — collective work that might itself rebuild the habit of cooperation. The worst case runs through Margaret Atwood and civil war scenarios to environmental degradation and lives lost to our incapacity to work together. The warning signs are already banal: middle-aged men now pay consultants to teach them how to make friends. The skills have atrophied — and local participation, Brady suggests, is the gym where a republic gets them back. About the Guest Molly Brady is a professor of law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches property, land use, and local government law. Raised in Utica, New York, she is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, and her scholarship on the history of American property law has won wide recognition, as has her teaching. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, and is a contributor to America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance, edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel E. Charles (MIT Press, July 2026). References: •       America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance, edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel E. Charles (MIT Press, July 2026). Bryan Stevenson: “A valuable contribution to understanding America at a critical moment.”•       Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam — the 2000 classic on America's vanishing social capital, written, Brady notes, before the smartphone made things worse. Putnam is an old friend of this show.•       Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville — the towering account of New England civic virtue that frames the episode's scalability question.•       Shade by Sam Bloch — the new book on the politics of shade that taught Brady about the money-saving death of the American front porch.•       Bill Fischel's “homevoter hypothesis” — the Dartmouth economist's account of why homeowner-dominated local politics maximizes home values and starves housing supply.•       Alexandra Natapoff — the volume's co-editor, whose own Keen On America conver...

“It's like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.” — Ricardo Semler on why bosses won't let their workers vote on them Ricardo Semler might be the most anti-boss boss in the history of corporate bosses. Thrown into his Austrian immigrant father's São Paulo manufacturing firm at seventeen, the young Brazilian ripped up the rulebook — no dress codes, no time clocks, a ten-page cartoon manual instead of HR — and grew the company from 110 employees to more than 5,000. In the mid-Eighties he was already inventing hybrid work, shipping Telex machines to his workers' homes. One of them even squeezed one of these 150-pound machines into his bathroom. Now, in his upcoming e-book The End of the Boss, the author of the iconoclastic autobiography Maverick argues that the corporate pyramid — an inheritance, he says, from West Point via the railroads — is as dead as a cuckoo bird (as the Swiss would say). Nothing good has been done with it since World War Two. Not in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, his native Brazil, and certainly not in corporate America where Elon Musk's current pay package equals the wages of all his employees for the next five years. Semler's alternative is disarmingly simple: groups of ten who validate their leader every six months. Fail the vote and you're not fired — you go back to being one of the nine. His Netherlands-based consultancy has brought versions of the idea to 208 companies, including the giant Dutch bank ABN AMRO, which agreed to do away with 399 branch managers. So why don't more bosses follow? Because, says Semler, asking executives to be elected from below is like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. Even the self-styled “fearless” Elon Musk would be terrified to end up as the roasted centerpiece of the Xmas table. That same maverick idea (his first ex-wife joked he's only ever had one) runs through everything Semler has ever proposed — from the rotating district presidents of São Paulo, to the untethered MBA whose cohorts hire their own professors, to the schools that grade Call of Duty and map it to the curriculum. Switzerland, he points out, has been governed by seven rotating nobodies since the fourteenth century. No, The Third Man's Harry Lime was wrong. Rather than the cuckoo clock, it's this anti-boss invention which explains Switzerland's five hundred years of democracy and peace. Five Takeaways •       The Pyramid Came from West Point — and It's Dead. The corporate hierarchy, Semler argues, is a military inheritance that reached business from West Point via the railroads — and nothing good has been done with it since World War Two, from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan. The numbers agree: the average company's lifespan on the stock market has collapsed from 61 years to 21, which makes the classical pyramid, not self-management, the biggest gamble of all. Jack Welch's GE is a shadow because he prepared it for nothing except Jack Welch. And when one Alexander Wang is valued like 20,000 engineers, or a CEO's package equals five years of everyone's wages, something structural is wrong.•       Turkeys Voting for Christmas. Semler's system is cells of ten that choose or validate their leader by anonymous survey every six months. Fail the vote and you aren't fired — you return to being one of the nine. His consultancy has brought the idea to 208 companies, including ABN AMRO, which agreed to eliminate 399 branch managers. The reason it doesn't spread is not that it doesn't work; it's that nobody at the top wants it — turkeys don't vote for Christmas, and Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg would be terrified of their employees deciding whether they keep their jobs. His model is Switzerland: seven rotating councilors nobody can name, working out fine since the fourteenth century. The alternative ends, sooner or later, in Kim Jong Un.•       Cycles, Not Failures. “Until death do us part,” Semler says, is about the silliest question anybody could ask. His own eighteen-year marriage with three children wasn't a failure — it was a cycle that ended, ten beautiful years out of eleven. Children born today will live to 100 or 110, with time for three full careers and still a retirement, so asking a seventeen-year-old what they want to be for the rest of their life is the wrong question. His daily metric is simpler: was today a valid day — like getting your parking ticket validated — or a dues day? When the dues days outnumber the valid ones week after week, the marriage or the job is already finished, whether you admit it or not.•       The Untethered MBA. Semler taught MBAs at MIT and spent four years at Harvard Law School, so he knows exactly what he's calling outmoded, outdated, and obsolete. His replacement: cohorts of ten who work through a dashboard curriculum at their own pace, study the case of the day rather than decade-old case studies — is SpaceX worth a trillion dollars, or nothing? — and spend credits to summon former CFOs or Stanford professors on demand. The same logic runs his schools, which grade TikTok and Call of Duty and map them to the curriculum. The smartphone panic, he says, is mostly nostalgia: what the screens are ruining is your ability to memorize the periodic table.•       AI Is Electricity — and He's Losing the Argument. AI, Semler says, is irrelevant the way electricity is irrelevant: a tide rising for every boat, pointless to oppose and impossible to live without. He runs everything through four LLMs — “there's nothing left of slop or hallucination at the end of that” — and confesses that when he tells his AI to push back, he now has trouble keeping up intellectually, which wasn't true a year ago. His hope is that we don't become “domesticated pets” over the next fifteen years. The deeper obstacle to everything, though, remains human: the cattle aspect of fear. There is no Trump and no Putin, he says — there is thirty percent of the population willing to support them, and one person who understands what populism can do. About the Guest Ricardo Semler is the chairman and majority owner of Semco Partners, the São Paulo company he took over from his father at 21 and transformed into the world's most famous experiment in industrial democracy. His book Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace (1993) was an international bestseller published in sixteen languages; The Seven-Day Weekend followed in 2003. He is the founder of the Lumiar schools and the Ralston Semler Foundation, has taught at MIT's Sloan School and Harvard Law School, and his TED talks have been viewed millions of times. His new e-book is The End of the Boss (endoftheboss.org, 2026). References: •       The End of the Boss by Ricardo Semler (2026) — the e-book, and its “Round Pyramid” alternative: self-managing cells of ten with leaders validated from below.•       Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler — the million-copy classic whose Brazilian predecessor, Turning the Tables, was rejec...

“I could not get under oath and swear that I know exactly how Kennedy died in Dallas.” — Ben Barnes, who helped advance JFK's fatal Texas tripIn Texas, there's nothing in the middle of the road, Jim Hightower famously quipped, but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. But Ben Barnes has spent seven decades disproving him. Elected as a Democratic moderate to the Texas legislature at 21, Speaker of the Texas House at 26, and lieutenant governor at 30, Barnes was LBJ's premier protégé and has known every president from Kennedy to Trump. Now 87, he has distilled all his centrist wisdom into Get It Done: Seven Decades of Lessons from a Political Legend.Get It Done is more than just a Texan story. Barnes spent six weeks advancing JFK's fatal 1963 Dallas trip and breakfasted with the president in Fort Worth on the morning of the assassination. He confesses that the Warren Commission “did not get it entirely correct” and notes that the experienced hunter John Connally, who rode in the Presidential limo, always insisted there were four shots, not three.Then there's the equally historic scene at the White House on the day LBJ signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Pen in hand, Johnson looked a dozen young Southern Democrats — Barnes among them — straight in the eye and told them he'd just signed away Dixie. “What I'm doing today is probably going to turn the South Republican for thirty or forty years,” LBJ confessed with astonishing prescience.The dirty trickster Richard Nixon, meanwhile, ended Barnes' electoral career. You can hear it on the tapes — Nixon ordering his attorney general, John Mitchell, to “get something on Barnes” before the Texas Democrat got to be governor. Years later, fresh from prison, Mitchell invited Barnes to lunch, apologized over a bowl of spaghetti, then dropped dead on a Washington sidewalk three months later.Barnes forgave Mitchell. He is less forgiving of the current administration, which he says is hammering the final nail into the coffin of LBJ's Voting Rights Act. In the recent Texas Senate runoffs, only seven percent of voters showed up. Seven. Barnes remembers, aged three, watching pickup trucks packed with young men rolling toward the recruiting stations the morning after Pearl Harbor. That generation died for the country. This one, the very alive Texan armadillo quipped, could at least vote to protect American democracy.Five Takeaways•       Four Shots, Not Three — But No Conspiracy. Barnes advanced JFK's Texas trip and was at the Fort Worth breakfast on the morning of the assassination. The Warren Commission, he believes, did not get it entirely correct: Connally, a hunter, swore the single-bullet ricochet was a physical impossibility and always counted four shots. Yet Barnes dismantles the grand-plot theories with logistics — Oswald started at the Book Depository thirty days before a motorcade route that wasn't fixed until six days prior, so he could not have known the president would pass. Ted Kennedy assured him before his death that nothing of importance remains unreleased in the files. Sixty years of phone calls from theorists later, Barnes will not swear under oath that he knows how Kennedy died.•       The Hostility Began in Los Angeles. The LBJ–Bobby Kennedy feud, in Barnes's telling, started at the 1960 convention, when Bobby went to Johnson's hotel room to talk him out of accepting the vice presidency his brother had just offered. The wound never healed — not through the vice presidency, not through the White House years with Bobby as attorney general. The counter-example was Ted Kennedy, who voted for the civil rights bills, kept a genuine affection for Johnson, and told Barnes three weeks before his own death what a great president LBJ had been.•       “This Will Turn the South Republican.” On the day he signed the Voting Rights Act, Johnson looked a dozen young Southern officeholders — Barnes among them — in the eye and told them the bill would probably turn the South Republican for thirty or forty years, and that they would have to work and tell the story over and over again. The prophecy held: Texas, Barnes says, is now the reddest state in America. And the administration's new voting legislation, he warns, would be the final nail in the coffin of Johnson's greatest achievement — making it harder for everyone to vote, and hardest of all for minorities.•       “Get Something on Barnes”: Nixon's Vendetta and Mitchell's Spaghetti. Furious that Barnes had helped Humphrey carry Texas in 1968 — and alarmed that he was outpolling every Democrat in the state — Nixon told John Mitchell to go to Texas and manufacture a scandal before Barnes reached the governor's mansion. It's on the tapes, and Barnes keeps copies. His electoral career ended. Years later, out of prison, Mitchell asked him to lunch, apologized over a bowl of spaghetti — “I had time to think in prison” — and died on a Washington sidewalk three months later. Barnes forgave him. The tactics, he notes, are back in fashion.•       Seven Percent. Trump, Barnes says, never prepared himself for the presidency — no student of history, bored by his intelligence briefings, and surrounded this term by a team without depth. American prestige is dwindling; NATO is non-negotiable; when America coughs, the world catches pneumonia. At home, racism has resurfaced and women's promotions to the military's top ranks are reportedly frozen. But his sharpest alarm is the emptiest statistic: seven percent turnout in the recent Texas Senate runoffs. The man who watched pickup trucks of volunteers roll toward the recruiting stations after Pearl Harbor asks only that this generation get involved — before the Republic runs out of birthdays.About the GuestBen Barnes was elected to the Texas legislature at 21, became the youngest Speaker of the Texas House at 26, and the youngest lieutenant governor in Texas history at 30. LBJ's “premier protégé,” he has spent the subsequent decades as a consultant, fundraiser, and Democratic power broker, helped establish the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and is founder and CEO of the Ben Barnes Group in Austin. His new book, written with David Ritz, is Get It Done: Seven Decades of Lessons from a Political Legend (Grand Central Publishing, July 14, 2026).References:•       Get It Done: Seven Decades of Lessons from a Political Legend by Ben Barnes with David Ritz (Grand Central Publishing, July 14, 2026). Doris Kearns Goodwin: “When a gifted storyteller has a great story to tell, the result is magic.”•       The Warren Commission — the 1964 report whose three-shot conclusion John Connally, a hunter who was wounded in the motorcade, never accepted.•       Jim Hightower — the Texas populist who actually coined “nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos,” a line usually credited to Ann Richards....

“You didn't have to look someone in the eye while you extinguished their life, and you could do it from a distance.” — Mike McIntire on what the gun changedIs there an American way of violence? Earlier this month, the film critic David Thomson blamed gory Hollywood movies, like Coppola's Godfather, for glorifying it. Today's guest has an even more brutal answer. According to Mike McIntire, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative journalist, it's the gun itself that can be blamed for the perpetual American plague of violence.Yes, the gun did it. In his new book Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence, McIntire observes that every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, and significant mental illness. But what no other country has are schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers massacred on a regular basis. Up to forty thousand Americans die from guns every year — half of them suicides — and yet we treat these uniquely dangerous machines as if they were iPhones.How did this catastrophe happen? McIntire's answer focuses on the law as much as the culture. English common law imposed a duty to retreat in the event of conflict. Then, amid the centennial jingoism of 1876, an Indiana court declared that “retreat” was not “the tendency of the American mind.” A “true man,” explained an Ohio court, doesn't fly from threats. Stand your ground was born — and with it, a legal redefinition of what it means to be an American.And then there's the NRA — founded in 1871, ironically, by a former New York Times correspondent as a marksmanship club, and radicalized a century later. Its greatest coup was reframing the Second Amendment from militia clause into individual right — a maneuver that Warren Burger, a Republican chief justice, called the “biggest fraud” ever perpetrated on the American people. And today even the NRA looks moderate compared to new online radical right-wing gun rights groups.McIntire, a gun owner himself, doesn't preach. Instead he describes his first murder scene as a young cop reporter — the dead man peacefully lying in the grass, one small round hole in the side of his head. Clean, efficient, clinical. Like an iPhone app. That's the American way of violence. The gun did it. And will continue to do so until America retreats from its deadly love affair with the firearm.Five Takeaways•       It's the Gun Itself. Every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, mental illness, and toxic social media. What none of them has, McIntire argues, is a repetitive, constant problem of schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers being massacred. Up to forty thousand Americans a year die from guns — half of them suicides — and firearms account for three-quarters or more of all homicides. Yet America treats these uniquely dangerous things as ordinary consumer goods, bought, sold, marketed, and carried around like an iPhone or a wallet. Whatever role Hollywood plays — and McIntire takes David Thomson's argument seriously — you have to start with the one thing that is actually different: the gun.•       A Daily Trickle of Bloodshed. When a plane crash kills two hundred people, there is a massive media and government response. When two hundred people die in scattered shootings across fifty states in the same period, there is a local news story, and then nothing. Gun violence in America has slipped into the category of acceptable losses — background noise. The conundrum for gun-safety advocates is how to sustain attention on a crisis that only becomes visible when the next Sandy Hook or Parkland arrives.•       No Duty to Retreat. English common law, imported into the colonies, required you to retreat from a public confrontation before resorting to lethal force. Amid the centennial fervor of 1876, American courts began overturning homicide convictions on new grounds: retreat, declared Indiana's Supreme Court, was not “the tendency of the American mind,” and a “true man,” added an Ohio court, need not fly from an aggressor. The repeating rifle helped make the old duty obsolete — you cannot outrun a bullet — and stand your ground became canon. Every week, somewhere in America, the defense still succeeds.•       “The Biggest Fraud”: Rewriting the Second Amendment. The founders' great fear was a standing army; the amendment preserved a well regulated militia — trained and disciplined, not unlimited. Beginning in the 1970s, the NRA underwrote sympathetic scholarship, law reviews, and court cases in a deliberate long game to recast the amendment as an individual right — moving guns from common law, where legislatures can regulate, into constitutional law, where they largely cannot. Warren Burger, the Republican former chief justice, called it the biggest fraud he had ever seen perpetrated on the American people. Now the Supreme Court's “common use” test — found nowhere in the Constitution — means a weapon popular enough may be unbannable, with AR-15 bans next on the docket.•       The Death Star Eclipsed. McIntire's cache of internal NRA documents traces the organization's path from post-Civil War marksmanship club — cofounded by a former New York Times correspondent — to radicalized lobbying juggernaut, complete with pro-gun Democrats like John Dingell on its board. Today it has been outflanked by no-compromise groups like the Firearms Policy Coalition, which at any given moment is pushing more lawsuits against state gun laws than the NRA. Guns remain the third rail — Beto O'Rourke said “hell yes” to taking away AR-15s and has not held office since. The irony in McIntire's prescription: gun-safety advocates should copy the NRA's own generation-long legal strategy.About the GuestMike McIntire is an investigative journalist at The New York Times and a member of three Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting teams, whose work has exposed everything from Russian election interference to the hidden financial incentives of policing. He is the author of Champions Way: Football, Florida, and the Lost Soul of College Sports. He lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut. His new book is Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence (One Signal/Atria, July 2026).References:•       Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence by Mike McIntire (One Signal/Atria, July 2026). Jane Mayer: “McIntire is both a superb reporter and storyteller.”•       A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson — the recent Keen On guest whose argument about Hollywood and American violence opens the conversation.•       The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford — the classic anatomy of the American funeral business that lends this episode its central question.