Podcasts about anglo american

“As early as 1805, you had orators getting up there — barely twenty years after American independence was recognised by Great Britain — saying: the Republic is over. We've had it. So there is a tradition of calling it the end times.” — Nathan Perl-Rosenthal It's less than three weeks until America's big birthday bash. But what exactly will be celebrated this 250th Independence Day? In The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776, the historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal read some 2,500 July 4 orations delivered in the hundred years after independence. And what he found is that most Americans didn't believe that the revolution was really over. Orators often unfavourably compared the American Revolution to the French, Spanish American, and European revolutions of 1830 and 1848. They argued bitterly about slavery. As late as the 1870s, leading orators were insisting that the revolution was unfinished because the truths of the Declaration of Independence had not yet been fully worked out. Fast forward to 2026 and Perl-Rosenthal suggests a return to the kind of sustained public dialogue that the oratorical tradition once represented. So put down your smartphones on July 4 and tell the world where America currently is and where it should go. The act of oration, Perl-Rosenthal suggests, is not just a civic act, but essential to the country's long revolutionary tradition. So happy birthday America. And many many more. Five Takeaways •       100,000 Orations: The Archive Nobody Knew About: In the first century after independence, an estimated 100,000 July 4 orations were delivered across the United States — roughly a thousand towns and villages, each holding an annual address for a hundred years. Of those, 2,500 survive in published form as pamphlets, now collected in a digital database at fourthofjulyorations.org. These are not peripheral documents. They were delivered by the most prominent public figures of their day — lawyers, clergymen, politicians — before large audiences. They are among the richest sources we have for what ordinary Americans actually thought about their revolution and their republic. •       The Revolution Was Ongoing: Most Orators Believed This Well Into the 1870s: The single most striking finding of Perl-Rosenthal's research: most orators, deep into the nineteenth century, did not regard the revolution as a completed historical event. They saw themselves not as commemorating it but as participating in it. As late as the 1870s, leading orators were insisting the revolution remained unfinished. One orator in Boston in 1870, in a debate about immigration policy and Chinese exclusion, argued that the revolution could not be over because the inalienable rights proclaimed in the Declaration had not yet been universally extended. The parallel to the immigration debates of 2026 is, Perl-Rosenthal suggests, striking. •       The Orations Were Critical, Not Triumphalist: Perl-Rosenthal went into the archive expecting, as he puts it, “rah America.” He found something quite different. Many orators compared the American Revolution unfavourably to other revolutions: to the French in the 1790s, to Spanish American revolutions in the 1810s and 1820s, to the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848. The comparisons often did not flatter America. Wealthy Bostonians giving the prestigious Boston oration — one of the oldest and most prominent in the country — would argue explicitly that the founders had failed to deal with slavery. The critical tradition was mainstream, not marginal. •       1876 as the Turning Point: When the Tradition Died: The July 4 oration tradition effectively ended after 1876. That year, Congress for the first time asked towns and cities to deliver historical rather than political orations — accounts of local history rather than arguments about the present. A tenfold increase in orations was followed by a rapid collapse of the tradition. The shift was significant: from argument to commemoration, from an ongoing political conversation to a museum piece. The practice of serious sustained public political dialogue — an hour or more, in public, about the state of the republic — has not recovered. •       A Low, Dishonest Period: What the Tradition Offers Now: Mark Lilla's blurb: “a low, dishonest period in our history. This surprisingly timely book reminds us of our responsibilities.” Perl-Rosenthal is not catastrophist about the current moment — he notes that orators were calling it the end times as early as 1805. But he is clear about what is missing: a forum for sustained public argument about where America is and where it should go. The smartphone generation, he acknowledges, is unlikely to sit through an hour-long oration. That, he suggests, is precisely the problem. About the Guest Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a professor of history, French and Italian, and law at the University of Southern California. He has been a fellow at Harvard and Cambridge. He is the author of The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776 (Basic Books, June 2, 2026), Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Belknap/Harvard), and The Age of Revolutions. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Los Angeles and Cambridge, Massachusetts. References: •       The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776 by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (Basic Books, June 2, 2026). •       fourthofjulyorations.org — the digital database of 2,500 published July 4 orations referenced throughout. •       Eric Foner — Perl-Rosenthal's dissertation adviser at Columbia, referenced as still giving July 4 orations in his Connecticut town. •       Mark Lilla — referenced for his blurb: “a low, dishonest period in our history. This surprisingly timely book reminds us of our responsibilities.” 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. Website

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” Oscar Wilde wrote in his 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan. This week, Elon Musk managed — not for the first time — to be simultaneously in the stars and the gutter. SpaceX's IPO valued his rocket company at $2 trillion — making Musk, officially, a trillionaire, the richest person in the world by a very large margin. The space Musk — the defiant genius who bet everything on a reusable rocket and the promise of a cosmic monopoly — is astonishing. The Wall Street Journal called the IPO a Goldilocks debut with Musk starring as the three bears. But there is another Musk — the one in the gutter, promoting white nationalist violence from his platform on X. This week Musk not only stoked the anti-immigrant riots in Belfast but reiterated his support for the English white supremacist gangster Tommy Robinson. So is this another Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella? Keith Teare, publisher of That Was the Week, certainly thinks so. While Keith is in awe of Musk's entrepreneurial genius at SpaceX, he seems to excuse Musk's support for Tommy Robinson's paramilitarism. “I'm not even sure I like him,” Keith confesses in his musings on “civilisation.” Nor do the rest of us. But I wonder if this good/bad Elon narrative is too convenient. There is an uncomfortable symbiosis between Musk's journey to SpaceX and to white nationalist violence. For all the utopian cornucopia of space, our earthly reality is one of scarce land and fear of immigrants — Trump, Tommy Robinson, and this weekend's Swiss referendum on capping its population at 10 million. For all the Muskian promise of cosmic abundance, today's Muskian politics is paranoid and exclusionary. So maybe it's not just Elon. Everyone these days is simultaneously in the gutter and looking up at the stars. Five Takeaways •       SpaceX: From El Segundo Warehouse to $2 Trillion Juggernaut: SpaceX is 25 years old. It started in a warehouse near Los Angeles, in an area with a concentration of rocket scientists. Musk bet almost all of his Tesla gains on the idea of a reusable rocket — and nearly lost everything. Then a rocket worked. Since then: iterative improvement, the rockets getting bigger and more reliable, a virtual global monopoly on delivering payloads to space, Starlink (satellite internet that actually works at gigabit speeds), and NASA subcontracting its launches. Now: $2 trillion at IPO, Musk a trillionaire. Wall-to-wall applause from the startup world. Wall-to-wall pylon on social media. Both simultaneously true. •       The Grimace vs the Applause: Andrew vs Keith's Media Diet: Keith says most commentators are grimacing at the valuation and Musk's net worth. Andrew says the serious press — the Wall Street Journal, even the New York Times — is largely applauding. The exchange reveals the media bifurcation: mainstream outlets cover the achievement; social media — X, Facebook, LinkedIn — is wall-to-wall outrage about a trillionaire in a world of growing inequality. Keith's verdict on Musk: he doesn't care whether people like him. Neither, in Keith's view, should we. You judge him not on likability but on criteria: civilization or net worth. Different criteria, different judgment. •       California and Europe: The Failure of Government: Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post: California is a case study in failed government. Andrew had Jonathan Weber on the show this week — City on the Edge, the historic dysfunctionality of San Francisco city government. Fukuyama is trying to be optimistic about Europe's liberal future. Keith's counter: Fukuyama ignores the structural problem — top-heavy EU bureaucracy that overrides countries, producing dislike of the EU in every European nation, even France, which built it. Populism, Keith argues, is not the disease. It's the symptom. The disease is twenty years of bad policy. •       Bernie Sanders Finally Had an Insight: The Sovereign Wealth Fund: Sanders has proposed a sovereign wealth fund owning 50% of all high-growth AI companies, giving every citizen ownership shares. Keith, who last week said 50% wasn't enough, this week credits it as the first genuine insight Sanders has had. The kicker: David Sacks — arch right-winger, former PayPal Mafia, Andreessen Horowitz — agreed on his podcast and said it should be 75%. Keith's observation: when David Sacks and Bernie Sanders can agree on the direction, left-right labels stop helping. The question is just how to make capitalism's gains flow to everyone. •       Planning Beats Complaint: Keith's editorial closer. The choice is not between liking Musk and hating Musk, not between celebrating SpaceX and resenting its valuation. The choice is between complaining and planning. John O'Farrell, former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, resigned and wrote an op-ed in the New York Times: “We can't let my former venture capital colleagues buy off democracy.” Gary Tan organised an Asian-American reaction against San Francisco's school board and won. Citizens who act beat citizens who complain. That's the week's lesson. That's Keith's lesson. Andrew is away next week. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. References: •       That Was the Week by Keith Teare. •       Fareed Zakaria, “How California Became a Case Study in Failed Government,” Washington Post — referenced in the conversation. •       John O'Farrell, “We Can't Let My Former Venture Capital Colleagues Buy Off Democracy,” New York Times — referenced in the conversation. •       Francis Fukuyama on the liberal vision of Europe — referenced in the conversation. •       Episode 2938: Jonathan Weber on City on the Edge — referenced at the opening. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: SpaceX IPO, ...

“Power trumps money fundamentally. And I think we've seen the extent to which these companies are very subservient to the US government. Because the US government can break them in an instant.” — Jack Watling on whether Anthropic and OpenAI can become geopolitical players In Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, an ageing Texas sheriff finds himself outmatched by a killer operating by a logic the old rules can't contain. It's the story of a man shaped by one world, and then trying to operate in an entirely different system. That's also the situation facing many statesmen today who are having to operate in an international system where the old rules no longer apply. The British military strategist Jack Watling argues in his new book Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World that we have moved from a monopolar world to one of intensely multipolar competition where adversaries can subvert all the premises of another state's strategy. These disruptive rules of the 21st century multipolar international system aren't entirely new. There are, for example, eerie similarities with the chaotically multipolar system that led to the First World War. But they are new to the leaders who have to apply them. So, for example, they are having to deal with Vladimir Putin who is locked into an eighth-century Orthodox Holy Russian Empire fantasy. Or with the impulsive and disruptive Donald Trump whose only goal, it sometimes seems, is to subvert all the rules of the old world. These are Jack Watling's new rules of power in a divided world. New statecraft for old men. Or maybe old statecraft for new men. Five Takeaways •       The Rules Are New to the Leaders, Not the World: Watling's thesis: many of the principles in his book are old, as a historian he knows that. But they are new to the current crop of political leaders because they were formed in a monopolar world where America had primacy, crises were resolved, and the status quo was restored. We are now in a period of intense interstate competition where changes are permanent — the interventions that are being made fundamentally shift the trend. That does require a new way of thinking. The tragedy is that the leaders who most need to think in new ways — Putin and Trump in particular — are the least capable of it. •       Putin vs Trump: Two Different Kinds of Fallibility: Putin has locked himself into a rubric of looking at the world through the lens of the Orthodox Holy Russian Empire — a framework that doesn't align with how anyone else reads the map. He's not a pragmatic dealmaker; when you get him to the table, as Trump found in Alaska, he starts referring back to the eighth century. Trump is very different: much less cautious, much more impulsive, skilled at making the conversation happen on his terms by disrupting everything around him. The problem with impulsive rather than deliberate is that he has no clear idea of where he wants to get to. Both fallible. Neither predictable. •       The WWI Parallel: Over By Christmas: Watling's most sobering analogy: when we look at 1914, nobody thought it would become what it became. The assumption was over by Christmas. It grew out of any capacity to control it. Today, the rules between the great powers don't reflect where power actually sits. The capacity for a conflagration — Taiwan being the obvious tipping point — to suddenly trigger a series of escalations around the world is very real. We have to be cognisant that risk is latent in the system. The outcome we most wish to avoid is also the most mutually calamitous one. That's not a guarantee it won't happen. •       Power Trumps Money — Even Trumpian Power Trumps Trumpian Money: Andrew asks whether Anthropic and OpenAI could become geopolitical players — more powerful than middle powers like Brazil or Japan. Watling's answer: no. Russian oligarchs made this mistake in the 1990s. They thought that because they had huge amounts of money and controlled valuable resources they could play geopolitically. They were very quickly subsumed by the state. These tech companies are very subservient to the US government, which can break them in an instant. The pun lands perfectly: even Trumpian power trumps Trumpian money. •       How Smaller States Build Leverage: Stay Off the Menu: One of the book's central arguments: how do smaller states shape world events when dwarfed by superpowers? Watling's answer: leverage is not just military. It is economic, informational, reputational. The UK spends billions on aircraft carriers it struggles to support at sea — a good illustration of how a state can mistake the form of power for its substance. Smaller states that build genuine leverage — through control of chokepoints, indispensable relationships, asymmetric capabilities — can stay off the menu even in a world dominated by great powers. That requires statecraft. Not just military spending. About the Guest Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London. He works closely with the British, Ukrainian, and American military and advises governments on security and strategy. He was formerly a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World (Pan Macmillan, 2026) and The Arms of the Future: Technology and Close Combat in the Twenty-First Century. Originally a journalist, he has contributed to Reuters, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The Guardian. References: •       Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World by Jack Watling (Pan Macmillan, 2026). •       Episode 2935: Michael Mandelbaum on The American Way of Foreign Policy — referenced in the conversation. •       RUSI (Royal United Services Institute), Whitehall, London — Watling's institutional base. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple Podcasts

Exploring the lives of three Jewish doctors. Living in very different settings, yet linked by a common thread: compassion. They left a lasting mark on medicine and Jewish history and were dedicated to the strong belief that every fragile life matters. In New York, Dr Martin Couney helped save thousands of babies. His sideshow displays were controversial, but at a time when incubator technology was widely doubted, his exhibits brought life-saving technology into the public eye. Dr Mary Gordon was born in Lithuania and her trailblazing career as a pioneering female physician who was deeply connected to Jewish life, allowed her to carry her medical calling into some of the hardest moments of the twentieth century, in Palestine, in detention camps in Cyprus and through world wars. Dr Shlomo Adler's reputation in London as a beloved doctor and trusted medical confidant to Gedolim and Torah leaders as well as to thousands of patients, rested on his complete commitment to care, innovation and halacha. We also hear from his son Dr Yossi Adler - who has continued a 3 generational family legacy - about AI and other issues confronting medicine today   Timestamps: - **0:00:00 – 0:01:13** – Podcast intro, series context (Medicine Part 2), and mention of guests (Rabbi Tatz & Dr. Yossi Adler) - **0:01:13 – 0:02:16** – Introduction of Mary Gordon; granddaughter of Reb Eliezer Gordon; name changes (Miriam → Mary, Sara → Sylvia)   - **0:02:16 – 0:03:49** – Background on the Gordon family, Telshe Yeshiva, and Reb Eliezer Gordon's leadership and social conscience (matzah bakeries)   - **0:03:49 – 0:06:21** – Fire in Telshe (1908), Reb Eliezer Gordon's fundraising trip to England, his death, funeral, and Mary receiving apology from the Chief Rabbi   - **0:06:21 – 0:09:00** – Mary's struggle to enter university, re-doing exams in England, brilliance and speed of study, financial help from Rabbi Moishe Hirsh Siegel, graduation as a physician   - **0:09:00 – 0:10:27** – Status of women doctors in England; WWI, shortage of male doctors; Mary becomes first female medical student allowed to practice in the army   - **0:10:27 – 0:12:57** – Move to South Africa; reuniting with family; pioneering practice in Johannesburg General Hospital; treating rich and poor, all races; miners' strike of 1922   - **0:12:57 – 0:15:30** – Plans to move to Palestine; WWII intervenes; army medical role, rank of captain then lieutenant colonel; final move to Palestine (1946)   - **0:15:30 – 0:18:18** – Postwar DP situation; Anglo-American committee, Truman's proposal for 100,000 DPs; British refusal; Cyprus detention policy and harsh camp conditions   - **0:18:18 – 0:21:06** – Mary chosen by the Jewish Agency to serve in Cyprus; tiny medical team; overwhelming numbers, disease, births; her legendary dedication; quote about measuring temperature vs pain   - **0:21:06 – 0:22:28** – New Year's 1948 story (two big ships arrive, many pregnant women and newborns); Mary persuades nurses to stay; later work in Israel with Yemenite immigrants; return to South Africa, work in Soweto clinics, death and legacy   - **0:22:28 – 0:24:04** – Introduction of Dr. Yossi Adler; recognition that “Dr. Adler” was a global communal institution   - **0:24:04 – 0:26:24** – Growing up in a house that doubled as a practice; constant stream of patients; balancing family meals with emergencies, especially before Hatzalah   - **0:26:24 – 0:28:18** – What made Dr. Adler's practice unique: long-term relationships, personalized care, deep sense of responsibility, readiness to innovate   - **0:28:18 – 0:32:24** – Early roots of his father's connection to Gedolim (Gerrer Rebbe, Imrei Emes); later relationships with Gedolim and Rebbes (Stipler, R' Shach, Satmar, Klausenburger, etc.)   - **0:32:24 – 0:36:24** – Stories illustrating kavod from Rebbes (“Malach Refael goes with Dr. Adler”), and equal importance of all patients; how he handled treating Gedolim without intimidation   - **0:36:24 – 0:40:21** – Lessons Dr. Yossi learned: time use, achrayus (responsibility), integrating halacha and derech eretz into medicine; a few character-defining stories   - **0:40:21 – 0:44:04** – Role of a frum doctor today: giving clear medical facts for Rabbanim, especially in end-of-life, surgery, fasting, and shidduch situations; why doctor ≠ posek   - **0:44:04 – 0:49:05** – Community health issues:   - Vaccine hesitancy and mistrust of authorities     - Halachic support for following broadly accepted medical guidance     - SIDS reduction through “back to sleep” and risk of complacency   - **0:49:05 – 0:53:59** – Discussion on modern weight-loss medications (semaglutide, tirzepatide): when benefits outweigh risks (severe obesity) vs mainly cosmetic use   - **0:53:59 – 0:56:51** – Google and patient information: opportunities and dangers; importance of joint doctor–patient interpretation rather than self-treatment   - **0:56:51 – 0:57:40** – Rabbi Tatz introduction, playful comment about trying to “one up” Rabbi Hirsch with an unknown medical figure   - **0:57:40 – 0:59:37** – Background of Dr. Cooney (Mikhail Kohn): Jewish origins in Prussia, medical studies, interest in premature infants and early incubators   - **0:59:37 – 1:03:10** – Move to America; transformation into “Dr. Cooney”; sideshow incubator exhibits at fairs and Coney Island; hospitals giving up on babies, parents bringing infants in shoeboxes; high survival rates   - **1:03:10 – 1:05:00** – Framing ethical and halachic questions: doing something risky to save life; early incubators as both spectacle and lifesaving tool   - **1:05:00 – 1:08:32** – Classic halachic scenario: terminal/“Ha'ei Sha'ah” patient offered high-risk procedure with chance of cure vs certain shorter-term survival; introduction to “Lo chosheshin lechayei sha'ah” in this context   - **1:08:32 – 1:12:08** – Majority view:     - If chance of success >50%, patient *should* generally accept.     - If

“That's not the America that I believed in and that I chose to merge my fate with.” — David Frum on Trump's predatory foreign policy What does it mean to be an American? It's a slippery question — especially for those of us born outside the United States. Take, for example, David Frum, the Toronto-born writer and Presidential speechwriter who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil” in 2002. Back then, it included Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Today, one wonders if Frum, who has written two powerful jeremiads about Donald Trump, would include what he calls this "fascoid" in this exclusive club. Frum still lives part of the year on Loyalist Parkway in Ontario — a road honouring British troops fleeing the American Revolution. From his deck, what remains of the Canadian in Frum gazes across Lake Ontario at the American shore. The lights on the other side of the lake, he admits, are more glittering. But unlike Nick Carraway in his favourite American novel The Great Gatsby, David Frum isn't seduced by all that glitters. Carraway, Frum says, is an unreliable narrator impressed by the gangster glamour of Jay Gatsby. But Gatsby, like Donald Trump, Frum reminds us, is a criminal. And Gatsby, perhaps also like Trump, is at least part of the answer of what it means to be an American. Five Takeaways •       Loyalist Parkway: Canada as the Product of the American Revolution: Frum spends part of the year on Loyalist Parkway in Ontario — a road named for the refugees who fled the American Revolution northward and settled across Lake Ontario. Canada, in his telling, is the product of what he calls the American civil war that nobody calls that: the revolution of 1776. It was, for the Loyalists, a shattering loss. From his house, he looks across the lake at the American shore. There is something brighter there, more glittering, more charged. That particular Canadian vantage point — attracted to and slightly outside of America — is where Frum and Zakaria both live. •       Predatory America: Trump vs the American Tradition: America is currently at war with Iran. Trump's stated aim, in Frum's analysis, is purely predatory — to take Iran's oil, enrich the United States by impoverishing Iranians, plunder like a bandit. He compares this to Trump's Venezuela policy. Frum's verdict: that is a president against the American tradition. George W. Bush — whatever the failures of the Iraq war — went to Iraq to overthrow a dictatorship and bring a better future. He went in the name of American ideals. Trump invokes no ideals. He just wants the oil. •       The Axis of Evil Defence: Andrew raises the uncomfortable parallel: Frum coined “axis of evil,” worked for Bush, helped set the fuse for the wars that led, arguably, to the current moment. Frum's defence is structural. The Iraq war of 2003 was the continuation of a conflict that began when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. Bill Clinton nearly returned to war with Iraq in 1994 and struck it in 1998, for the same reason: Iraq's violation of the 1991 armistice. Bush was following that path. He went to war in the name of ideals. He didn't go to steal Iraq's oil. That is the American tradition, even in failure. •       Nick Carraway Is an Unreliable Narrator: The conversation's most surprising section: Frum on The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway, Frum argues, is not a reliable guide to Gatsby's moral complexity. He is a narrator seduced by gangster glamour — who constructs moral explanations for an attraction he knows he shouldn't feel. The tell: Nick is horrified by the glamour one night, then thrilled the next morning to fly in Gatsby's private seaplane. Gatsby is a criminal. And Gatsby is, for Fitzgerald, a symbol of America: a self-invented person with a fabricated backstory, living on bootlegging and organised crime, staring across the water at a green light he can never reach. •       Looking Across the Lake: The Canadian Analyst of American Life: Frum's closing meditation: there is something about knowing America from the inside, but there is also something valuable about the critical distance of the outsider. He looks across Lake Ontario at the American shore from which the Loyalists fled — the shore they looked back at because there was something magical on the other side. Fareed Zakaria looks across the Atlantic from India. Both naturalized citizens brought to America by an idea of what it was. Both rethinking that idea now. Frum's plan for July 4: sitting on his deck in Ontario, looking across the water, wishing well to American democracy. About the Guest David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the host of The David Frum Show. He was a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush in 2001–2002. He is the author of Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (HarperCollins, 2018) and Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (HarperCollins, 2020). He lives in Washington, D.C. and Wellington, Ontario. He is working on a memoir. References: •       The David Frum Show — Frum's show at The Atlantic, where his interview with Fareed Zakaria is referenced at the opening. •       The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — the central text of the conversation's second half. •       Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic by David Frum (HarperCollins, 2018). •       Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum (HarperCollins, 2020). •       Loyalist Parkway, Ontario — the road where Frum lives part of the year, named for the refugees from the American Revolution. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

“The same creative and political forces that gave rise to [San Francisco's] boom nearly engineered its collapse.” — Jonathan Weber In Hitchcock's Vertigo, the quintessential San Francisco movie, the villain points to an old painting of the city and tells Jimmy Stewart that San Francisco has changed. The real city has been lost, he says. Somebody has stolen San Francisco's soul. The veteran tech journalist Jonathan Weber is the latest writer to search for that soul. In City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco, Weber bemoans the disappearance of the real San Francisco — the city not just of the Beats and the Counterculture but also of ordinary teachers and policemen. We've had thirty years of boom, bust, and Big Tech. The ordinary folks of San Francisco have been replaced by a new class of tech bros. In 1992, just 2% of San Franciscans worked in tech. By 2019 it was 35%. As a longtime San Franciscan, Weber had a front-row seat on the dot-com mania, the rise of social media, Uber and Airbnb, the pandemic's great emptying of downtown, and now the AI boom driven by the San Francisco-based Anthropic and OpenAI. In City on the Edge, Weber argues that the same creative and political forces that gave rise to the boom — the counterculture's anarchic spirit, the city's love affair with eccentricity, the tech industry's utopian self-belief — also engineered its near-collapse. Digital vertigo, so to speak. Once again somebody has stolen San Francisco's soul. Five Takeaways •       From 2% to 35%: The Numbers Behind the Transformation: In 1992, just 2% of San Francisco workers were in tech. By 2019 it was 35%. The book traces how this happened: a city economically troubled in the early 1990s, still reeling from AIDS and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, with its manufacturing base gone and its corporate headquarters thinning out. Into this vacuum came a group of free-thinking technologists immersed in the city's creative counterculture. They invented the contemporary internet. What followed was one of the most rapid urban transformations in American history. •       The Cacophony Society and the Founding of Burning Man: Before the tech boom, San Francisco in the early 1990s had a remarkable underground culture. Weber writes about the Cacophony Society — the group of anarchic free spirits who effectively founded the Burning Man festival. The Cacophony Society emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s through various evolutions — Situationist pranks, urban exploration, radical creativity. Burning Man began as their annual trip to the Black Rock Desert. The spirit of that founding: go somewhere, build something, be someone different, leave no trace. That spirit was the soul of the city too. •       The City of Nostalgia: Always Believing Yesterday Was Better: Weber takes his Vertigo reference seriously. San Francisco is structurally a city of nostalgia — people arrive with a fixed idea of what the city is, and it inevitably becomes something different. The gap between the idea and the reality generates permanent mourning. This is not unique to San Francisco — Trump has built a presidency on the idea that things were better in the 1950s — but it is intensified here by the height of the hopes people bring. The city means something bigger than itself. That is both its greatest asset and its permanent wound. •       The AI Boom and the Coming IPO Earthquake: The current AI boom is, in Weber's reading, likely to be the largest yet. OpenAI and Anthropic are both based in the city. When those IPOs happen, San Francisco real estate — already rising 25–50% in some neighbourhoods, Andrew notes — will go, in Weber's words, “really, really crazy again.” Hundreds of thousands of millionaires will be created overnight. The city is gradually becoming uniformly wealthy. Some of the old tensions may be less intense for that reason. But Weber does not think the cycles are over. The current boom will bust, as all booms do. What comes next is the question. •       Burning Man, the Internet, and the Future of Cities: Weber ends the book at Burning Man. His closing observation: when the internet arrived on the playa, Burning Man lost the sense that it was a separate world — a place where you could be a different person, because nothing from your regular life could reach you. Now everyone has a phone. The privacy is gone. The sense of separation is gone. For cities: part of the power of cities is that they bring people together, and good things arise from that friction. But if technology no longer requires you to be in the same place, cities become less essential. What is the future of the city in the age of technology? Weber doesn't have a tidy answer. Neither does anyone else. About the Guest Jonathan Weber is a veteran technology journalist and the author of City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco (Atria Books, June 9, 2026). He was the founding editor-in-chief of The Industry Standard, former editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Standard, and covered the technology industry for the Los Angeles Times. He lives in San Francisco. References: •       City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco by Jonathan Weber (Atria Books, June 9, 2026). •       David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love — referenced in the conversation; Weber's recommended companion read on 1970s San Francisco. •       Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance — referenced in the closing exchange. •       Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem — the opening epigraph to Weber's book, referenced in the conversation. •       Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo (1958) — Andrew's reference; the film's own meditation on San Francisco as a city of nostalgia. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstack

In this episode of Liberty + Leadership, Roger Ream sits down with historian and author Michael Auslin to discuss his new book, “National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America.” As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, Auslin explores the remarkable history of the Declaration of Independence, not only as the nation's founding document but also as a living symbol that has shaped American identity for nearly two and a half centuries. Together, they discuss the Declaration's origins, its philosophical foundations in natural rights, natural law and the Anglo-American constitutional tradition, and the ways its meaning has evolved throughout American history. Auslin explains how figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. drew upon the Declaration's principles to advance their own visions of liberty and equality while arguing that the document's most enduring message is one of national unity. The conversation also explores the upcoming America 250 celebration, the state of civic education in the United States and why a renewed understanding of the Declaration remains essential to preserving the American experiment in self-government.The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.Support the show

“I never knew, and I was a bright kid. I didn't know who the mayor of New York was, but I could tell you the names of all the mafia guys on the corner.” — Vincent Coppola So we finally found a Coppola for the show. No, not Francis Ford. But somebody just as cool and even more authentic. The longtime Newsweek reporter Vincent Coppola grew up in Brooklyn three subway stops from Manhattan, but never went there until he was a teenager, nor even visited Central Park until his twenties. Coppola's version of Brooklyn, a teeming Italian ghetto squeezed between the banks of the polluted Gowanus Canal, no longer exists. Except in his exquisitely rendered new memoir, Gowanus Crossing: A Brooklyn Boyhood, which has the most delicious story about an Easter pie recipe you'll ever read. The Brooklyn of Vinnie's childhood was intact, insular, cut off from everywhere more than three stops away. It had its own government — the Mafia; its own religion — the Catholic Church; its own poisoned geography — the Gowanus Canal. A world inside a world. He didn't know who the mayor of New York was, but he knew the name of every wise guy on every street corner. To a kid, Gowanus was a magical place. The grown Vinnie (now called Vincent), having crossed his own Rubicon to attend Columbia journalism school, describes it as a “toxic snow globe.” Brooklyn über alles. Or, more authentically, al primo posto. Especially now, when only a real Coppola can resurrect it. Five Takeaways •       A Toxic Snow Globe: Cut Off Three Stops from Manhattan: Coppola grew up in an Italian enclave on the Gowanus Canal — a waterway that was, unbeknownst to its residents, one of the most polluted in America. The community was so insular that Coppola — a bright, bookish kid — never went to Manhattan until he was a teenager, never visited Central Park until he was in his twenties, though he was three subway stops away. He knew the names of all the Mafia guys on the corner. He did not know who the mayor of New York was. A toxic snow globe: its own rules, its own government, its own religion. Intact and entirely cut off from the rest of the world. •       The Mafia as Shadow Government: The Mafia was not background colour in Coppola's childhood. It was the actual government. Police from the 78th Precinct pulled up to the social club on Sundays; officers walked in and walked out with brown paper bags full of cash. Squad cars ferried a hitman — the bodyguard of Carmine Persico — as if they were taxis. This corrupted any childlike innocence about institutions. The stereotype of the nice policeman, the honest cop, the beloved priest: none of them applied. Because they were poor, nobody cared. Nobody cared about the canal being polluted until real estate people came in. •       The Predatory Priest and the Code of Silence: A local priest molested altar boys for decades, including Coppola's best friend. Nobody in the community knew. Coppola's observation: if the Mafia had known, they would have killed that man. It would have been that simple. Two oppressive codes of silence — the Mafia's omertà and the Church's own silence — operated in parallel. One protected criminals who were also community pillars. The other protected a predator. The community was too poor, too preoccupied, too isolated to see what was happening in front of their eyes. •       The Easter Pie Recipe: A Story About Secrets and Mothers: One of the great set pieces of the book. Coppola was obsessed throughout his life with a specific Easter pastry — pizza di grano, a grain pie — that the old neighbourhood women made and would not share the recipe for. He worked for Newsweek, had access to chefs everywhere, could not reproduce it. At his mother's funeral, an old neighbour pressed a piece of paper into his hand. Weeks later he found it in his jacket pocket and opened it. Not cash — the recipe. Written in Italian. Beginning: “under a full moon.” It was a hundred years old. He wasn't going to be baking under full moons. •       The Ghost Town: A Million-Dollar Desert: Coppola returned to Gowanus three weeks before the interview, invited to speak at a public library. His neighbourhood was blooming with skyscrapers and condominiums. And it was dead silent. When he grew up, the streets were teeming — children playing hopscotch, women gossiping on chairs outside, music, grilling on the corner, betting. He came back to a million-dollar ghost town. It broke his heart. The people he grew up with had been driven out — priced out of the place where they belonged. That is the elegy the book is writing. He hopes he preserved the best of that world. About the Guest Vincent Coppola is a journalist and the author of six books. A former reporter at Newsweek, he has written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, and Atlanta magazine. He is a 1977 honours graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His essay on his mother's battle with cancer won the William Allen White Gold Medal. He is the author of Gowanus Crossing: A Brooklyn Boyhood (Henry Holt, June 9, 2026). He lives in Savannah, Georgia. References: •       Gowanus Crossing: A Brooklyn Boyhood by Vincent Coppola (Henry Holt, June 9, 2026). •       Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes — the publisher's comparison: “Frank McCourt's gimlet eye with the exuberant menace of a Scorsese movie.” •       Carmine Persico — the mafioso boss referenced in the conversation; his bodyguard is a character in the book. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: the Brooklyn of Whole Foods vs the Brooklyn of the Gowanus Canal (01:20) - An Italian village plucked from the south of Italy and dropped in Brooklyn (02:04) - Vince, did you ever really leave? (02:27) - Stage four cancer: the trigger for the memoir (03:11) - The Gowanus C...

“The hyperreal is the real. The surreal is the real in The United States. We've reached that point. The absurd is the real. And so that's what I was trying to capture in the book.” — Ben Fountain Our absurdist-in-chief wants a $250 banknote with his face on it. But the satirist Ben Fountain gives the President something even more valuable. In his new novel Rasputin Swims the Potomac, Fountain delivers something quite priceless: a book that Trump deserves. In Fountain's novel, a sitting president, running for a third term, enlists a world champion professional wrestler, Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, to help secure his re-election. Born Patrick Walsh Strickland in Buffalo, New York, Rasputin served in special forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, spent six years in a monastery, became fluent in Russian, and claims to be a real Russian monk. Evangelicals start defecting to Rasputin. A pandemic of “weeping sickness” sweeps the nation. It's almost as unbelievable as a sitting President wanting a $250 banknote glowing with his orange face. Fountain's parallels with late Tsarist Russia are hard to miss — the chasmic wealth inequality, the impossible get-rich schemes, the quack religions, the gilded decadence, the dying social classes, the mad politicians. It's scary stuff. Fountain says that we should even be careful taking his summer novel to the beach. Rather than Jaws-dropping, Rasputin Swims the Potomac, he warns, might bite us back. Maybe we should put Ben Fountain's face on that $250 bill. Five Takeaways •       The Hyperreal Is the Real: America Has Beaten Its Satirists: When Fountain sat down to write the book in early 2023, he was thinking about the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy in American life. Trump, throughout his career, has blurred that line to masterful effect. Fountain's question: what would be the next step on that continuum? His answer: professional wrestling — famously fake, scripted, and yet real, happening in real flesh and blood. Suppose a wrestler ran for president as his wrestling persona, with the fake baked in and everyone knowing it's fake. Suppose the country buys it. Because the hyperreal is the real. The surreal is the real. America has already reached that point. •       Why Wrestling, Not Politics: Jesse Ventura — “Jesse the Body” — ran for governor of Minnesota and won. But he ran as Jesse Ventura himself. Fountain's innovation: a wrestler who runs as his or her wrestling persona, with the character fully intact. Rasputin — born Patrick Walsh Strickland in Buffalo, special forces veteran, six years in a Russian monastery, world champion wrestler in Japan, legally changed name — never breaks character. He is the historical Rasputin, back from the dead, a holy man of the Russian Orthodox Church. Evangelicals start defecting to him because he's speaking their language. The fake is the real. •       Late Tsarist Russia and Contemporary America: Striking Parallels: Fountain read three or four biographies of the historical Rasputin. The deeper he got, the more striking the parallels. Late Tsarist Russia: extreme wealth inequality, get-rich schemes everywhere in St Petersburg and Moscow, quack religions and spiritualists plying their trade, extreme decadence among the upper classes. A social structure that could not be maintained. People's emotional responses to chaos. Fountain: not just in material terms but in terms of how people were feeling, the parallels to the United States are really striking. Gogol, not Baudrillard, is his natural ancestor. •       The Satirist as Realist: Andrew raises Baudrillard and hyper-realism. Fountain's response: he is a realist down to his bones. Whatever he does, it has to be anchored in some fundamental sense in the real world, as he understands it. American life has become such that the surreal is the real, the comical is the real, the absurd is the real. He didn't set out to write satire. He set out to write the story as genuinely and authentically as he could. The question of genre came afterwards, asked by other people. He is just a realist. It's just that American reality is Rasputin swimming the Potomac. •       Living in the Belly of the Beast: Dallas and North Carolina: Fountain lived in Dallas, Texas for forty-one years — what he calls the most American city of all, better and worse. In Dallas, the free market and capitalism are so much a part of daily consciousness that there's very little awareness that there might be different ways of living. Fountain: it's very conservative and very conservative. For someone to the left of Gandhi, his assumptions are always being challenged. He has to think about how he's thinking about things. That productive discomfort — not Brooklyn, not Los Angeles — is where this book comes from. About the Guest Ben Fountain is the author of Rasputin Swims the Potomac (Flatiron Books, June 9, 2026), Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist), Beautiful Country Burn Again, and Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (PEN/Hemingway Award). He is the recipient of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the Thomas Wolfe Prize, and a Whiting Writers Award. He lives in New Bern, North Carolina. References: •       Rasputin Swims the Potomac by Ben Fountain (Flatiron Books, June 9, 2026). Named a Best Book of Summer by the LA Times, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Boston Globe, Newsday, and New York Post. •       Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (2012) — the predecessor referenced throughout. •       Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution by Ben Fountain (2018) — his 2016 election nonfiction, referenced in the conversation. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (...

“The United States has conducted an unusually ideological foreign policy, an unusually economic foreign policy, and an unusually democratic foreign policy. These three features have been present from the eighteenth century to the present.” — Michael Mandelbaum Is there an “American way” of foreign policy? Does that make the now almost 250 year-old republic unique? Michael Mandelbaum, author of The American Way of Foreign Policy: Ideology, Economics, Democracy, says yes and no. America is exceptional. But that exceptionalism is unexceptional. Mandelbaum says that American foreign policy over the last 250 years has been unusually ideological, economic, and democratic. Foreign policy realists say great powers all behave the same way. Mandelbaum, as an idealist, says: not America. Uniquely in world history, he says, America has pursued its principles overseas without prioritising its political, economic, or military self-interest. And yet The American Way of Foreign Policy isn't triumphalist. Mandelbaum opposed NATO expansion in the 1990s. He was in the anti-Vietnam marches as a Harvard student in the Sixties. Nor is he partial to demonstrations of overt nationalism. His July 4 plans, for example, are to watch baseball. As a lucky man in a fortunate Republic, what better way to celebrate 250 years of independence than to enjoy its national pastime? Five Takeaways •       Three Distinctive Features: Ideological, Economic, Democratic: Mandelbaum's thesis: American foreign policy has differed from the foreign policies of other countries in three enduring ways. First, ideological: political ideas and the effort to spread them have been more important to America than to other powers. Second, economic: America has used economic instruments to achieve political goals — trade, aid, sanctions — rather than the imperial model of using political power for economic gain. Third, democratic: American public opinion has always had greater influence over foreign policy than in other countries. For almost all other countries, for most of their histories, foreign policy was the preserve of a small elite. That was never true of the United States. •       Idealist and Realist: Both Apply: Andrew invokes Kenneth Waltz and the realist tradition, which argues that great powers always behave the same way regardless of their self-image. Mandelbaum's response: realism fits American foreign policy up to a point. America has fought twelve significant wars and has not been oblivious to military power. But it has also conducted idealist foreign policies that cannot be explained by realism — policies driven by its liberal political ideas rather than its material interests. The distinctive feature of American foreign policy is not that it ignores realism, but that it goes beyond realism in ways that other great powers have not. •       NATO Expansion: Mandelbaum's One Big Regret: In the 1990s, Mandelbaum was opposed to the expansion of NATO, alongside George Kennan — one of the architects of Cold War containment. His fear: it would do a lot to alienate Russia. He acknowledges that he cannot blame NATO expansion explicitly for the Russian attack on Ukraine. But he notes that the fear was reasonable and that, as he puts it, alas, it has come to pass. He does not think that the Russian attack was inevitable or that NATO caused it. But he does think the warning was worth issuing and that it deserved more serious consideration than it received. •       Vietnam and the Antiwar Movement: Was It Counterproductive? As a graduate student at Harvard under Stanley Hoffmann, Mandelbaum was opposed to Vietnam and took part in marches. He has since revised his views — not on whether Vietnam was a mistake (it was) but on whether the antiwar movement had any positive effect on the course of policy. His conclusion: it probably didn't, and may have been perverse. Nixon used the antiwar movement as a foil. The war ended because most Americans decided it was costing too much in American lives — not because the goals were wrong. That was the democratic aspect of American foreign policy in action. •       Israel, Gaza, and the American Way: Andrew suggests that Israel has been able to push America around, and that this is “un-American.” Mandelbaum pushes back firmly. America supports Israel for two reasons: strategic advantage (Israel as a bulwark against threats to American interests in the Middle East) and shared values (Israel is the only country in the region that shares American political values). When interests diverged — the 1980s anti-aircraft arms sale, Obama's Iran deal — America went its own way. The reverse is also true: America doesn't have the capacity to push Israel around in Gaza, because for Israel these are matters of national survival. About the Guest Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He previously taught at Harvard, Columbia, and the US Naval Academy, and was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a BA from Yale, an MA from King's College Cambridge, and a PhD from Harvard. He is the author or co-author of thirteen books, including The American Way of Foreign Policy: Ideology, Economics, Democracy (Oxford University Press, April 2026) and The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower. He lives in the Washington DC suburbs. References: •       The American Way of Foreign Policy: Ideology, Economics, Democracy by Michael Mandelbaum (Oxford University Press, April 2026). •       The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower by Michael Mandelbaum — referenced in the conversation. •       Kenneth Waltz and the realist school of international relations — referenced at the opening. •       Ernst Haas and the idealist school — referenced at the opening; Andrew's teachers at Berkeley. •       George Kennan — referenced as Mandelbaum's fellow opponent of NATO expansion in the 1990s. •       Stanley Hoffmann — Mandelbaum's Harvard PhD supervisor, referenced at the close. 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 ...

En Kabwe, una ciudad situada al norte de Lusaka (Zambia), décadas de actividad minera han dejado una herencia tóxica que continúa afectando a generaciones enteras. Considerada uno de los lugares más contaminados del planeta, la ciudad registra niveles alarmantes de exposición al plomo, especialmente entre los niños, que enfrentan riesgos de daños neurológicos, problemas de desarrollo y otras graves consecuencias para la salud. Ahora, unas 140.000 mujeres y menores afectados han llevado a los tribunales al gigante minero Anglo American en busca de reparación y justicia. El Tribunal Superior de Johannesburgo deberá pronunciarse sobre un caso que podría sentar un precedente histórico para la responsabilidad de las empresas mineras frente a los daños ambientales y sanitarios.

Você sabe o verdadeiro significado da licença social para operar (LSO) e como a construção de confiança transforma o setor mineral? Neste episódio do podcast Conversas que Inspiram, Letícia Mendes recebe Karol Amorim, Gerente de Relacionamento e Engajamento com Comunidades na Anglo American, para debater a importância do diálogo contínuo, da transparência e do respeito mútuo com as populações locais.O setor de mineração passa por uma transformação profunda impulsionada pela transparência e pela escuta ativa. Descubra como as empresas gerenciam impactos socioambientais no dia a dia, integrando inovação e diversidade geracional para alinhar as metas de negócios à identidade, cultura e resiliência de cada território coabitado.Além disso, a conversa demonstra que a reputação corporativa e a licença social não pertencem apenas a um departamento específico. Trata se de uma responsabilidade coletiva de todos os colaboradores, fazendo uma analogia direta com a evolução histórica da cultura de segurança do trabalho dentro das organizações.Assista ao episódio completo e comente abaixo: qual ação de empatia e sustentabilidade você considera mais urgente no mercado atual?O Conversas que Inspiram, podcast da Anglo American Brasil, é uma fonte de inspiração e aprendizado! A cada mês apresentamos novos episódios para você mergulhar em conversas envolventes com especialistas de diferentes áreas. Essa é uma oportunidade para refletir sobre temas críticos para a sociedade e se atualizar sobre os desafios do mundo contemporâneo. Inspire-se e se surpreenda com este podcast! Produção: Wepod

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought's entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. Guest Christina Lord is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a scholar of French and francophone studies and science fiction (sf) studies, she often writes about nonhuman beings in literary and visual storytelling. In addition to Reimagining the Human She has published essays in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oeuvres et Critiques, Studies in the Fantastic, and European Comic Art, among others. She also serves as contributing editor for the section on “Speculative Studies in French” for the bibliographic journal, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. Her current research focuses on transnational and transmedial processes of circulation, recycling, and adaptation of sf imagery and narratives. Her current work focuses on the "alien aesthetic" of Denis Villeneuve's sf films and the iconography of mid-twentieth century French comics, Valérian et Laureline. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought's entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. Guest Christina Lord is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a scholar of French and francophone studies and science fiction (sf) studies, she often writes about nonhuman beings in literary and visual storytelling. In addition to Reimagining the Human She has published essays in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oeuvres et Critiques, Studies in the Fantastic, and European Comic Art, among others. She also serves as contributing editor for the section on “Speculative Studies in French” for the bibliographic journal, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. Her current research focuses on transnational and transmedial processes of circulation, recycling, and adaptation of sf imagery and narratives. Her current work focuses on the "alien aesthetic" of Denis Villeneuve's sf films and the iconography of mid-twentieth century French comics, Valérian et Laureline. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought's entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. Guest Christina Lord is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a scholar of French and francophone studies and science fiction (sf) studies, she often writes about nonhuman beings in literary and visual storytelling. In addition to Reimagining the Human She has published essays in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oeuvres et Critiques, Studies in the Fantastic, and European Comic Art, among others. She also serves as contributing editor for the section on “Speculative Studies in French” for the bibliographic journal, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. Her current research focuses on transnational and transmedial processes of circulation, recycling, and adaptation of sf imagery and narratives. Her current work focuses on the "alien aesthetic" of Denis Villeneuve's sf films and the iconography of mid-twentieth century French comics, Valérian et Laureline. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

“Objects in museums have to come from somewhere. The stories of how they came to be in those collections often involve laws being broken, unethical behaviour, and extreme violence.” — Matthew Campbell Imagine a gay Jeffrey Epstein who set up shop in Thailand. Only rather than peddling young girls, he traded in bodybuilders and priceless antiquities. That's the story of the British émigré Douglas Latchford, the subject of Matthew Campbell's new book The Man Who Stole the Gods. It's the true story of a man who was born in the last days of the British Raj, made his fortune in Bangkok, became the world's leading dealer of Khmer antiquities, and was indicted for criminal conspiracy in 2019. Campbell's tale is simultaneously a crime story, a history of Cambodia, and a parable about the relationship between Western wealth and the world's cultural heritage. The Khmer Empire, which dominated Southeast Asia from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, produced one of the finest civilisations of the medieval world. Angkor in the twelfth century had 750,000 people — making it ten times the size of London. After the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, every Khmer site in Cambodia was systematically looted. The pieces went to the Metropolitan Museum, to Christie's, to private American collectors. Latchford was the central conduit. The Jeffrey Epstein enabler. Like Epstein, Latchford got away with it for years. Unlike Epstein, he died a free man, even chalking up a 2020 New York Times obituary as a Khmer antiquities expert. Five Takeaways •       Douglas Latchford: The British Jeffrey Epstein of Asian Art: Born in the last days of the British Raj, educated in the UK, Latchford made his fortune in Bangkok and became the world's leading dealer of Southeast Asian antiquities — selling pieces for millions of dollars to the Metropolitan Museum, Christie's, and wealthy American collectors. He presented himself as an expert and connoisseur. He gave to universities and lent to exhibitions. He received a glowing obituary in the New York Times in August 2020. The dark side: he was, Campbell shows, the central organiser of a decades-long criminal conspiracy to loot Cambodia's cultural heritage. He was indicted in 2019 but died before he could be extradited. •       The Khmer Empire: 750,000 People When London Had 40,000: The Khmer Empire dominated Southeast Asia from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, ruling directly or indirectly over what is now Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and parts of Malaysia. Its capital, Angkor, had 750,000 people in the twelfth century — when London had 40,000 at the absolute outside. The Khmer built extraordinary temple cities — Angkor Wat is only the most famous — and produced remarkable stone and bronze sculpture. Every single Khmer site in Cambodia was systematically looted. The pieces all went somewhere. A great many came to the West. •       The Vietnam War, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Conditions for Genocide: The Vietnam War is central to Campbell's story. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran partly through Cambodia, making Cambodia of great interest to Nixon and Kissinger. Beginning in 1968, large-scale American bombing of Cambodia — ostensibly aimed at destroying a supposed communist headquarters that, Campbell notes, never actually existed — helped destabilise the country and created the conditions in which the Khmer Rouge could emerge. The Khmer Rouge ideology: Pol Pot believed civilisation needed not to be reformed but erased. A blank slate. Rebuild from zero. •       The Museum World's Complicity: The Sackler Parallel: The Metropolitan Museum of Art features prominently in Campbell's account. Objects in museums have to come from somewhere — the works in the Met did not originate in New York. How they came to be in those collections often involved laws being broken, unethical behaviour, and extreme violence. Campbell draws a parallel with Patrick Radden Keefe's account of the Sacklers: the more investigative journalists look at the wealthy donors and private collectors associated with major cultural institutions, the more troubling the stories that emerge. The museum world has a serious provenance problem. •       The Happy Ending: Repatriation and the National Museum in Phnom Penh: Latchford was indicted in 2019 for criminal conspiracy. He died in 2020, in a monastery in Northern Thailand, before he could be extradited. He never went to trial. But the recovery effort — a remarkable collaboration between Cambodia and the US Department of Justice — tracked down hundreds of stolen objects through meticulous detective work. The pieces have been returned to Cambodia. The National Museum in Phnom Penh now has so many repatriated objects that it is running out of room and may need to build a new wing. As Campbell says: that's a good problem to have. About the Guest Matthew Campbell is an award-winning investigative journalist at Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the author of The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy (Portfolio/Penguin Random House, June 2, 2026) and co-author, with Kit Chellel, of Dead in the Water (a Book of the Year in The Economist, Financial Times, and The Times; called a ‘masterpiece' by the New York Times). A 2025 Jonathan Logan Family Foundation Fellow at New America, Campbell has reported from more than 25 countries. He lives in Singapore. References: •       The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell (Portfolio/Penguin Random House, June 2, 2026). •       Dead in the Water by Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel (2022) — the preceding book, referenced at the opening. •       Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain — referenced as a parallel account of museum world complicity. •       The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — a central institution in the Latchford network. •       Cambodia's National Museum, Phnom Penh — the destination of the repatriated objects. 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 2,900 episodes since the...

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought's entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. Guest Christina Lord is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a scholar of French and francophone studies and science fiction (sf) studies, she often writes about nonhuman beings in literary and visual storytelling. In addition to Reimagining the Human She has published essays in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oeuvres et Critiques, Studies in the Fantastic, and European Comic Art, among others. She also serves as contributing editor for the section on “Speculative Studies in French” for the bibliographic journal, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. Her current research focuses on transnational and transmedial processes of circulation, recycling, and adaptation of sf imagery and narratives. Her current work focuses on the "alien aesthetic" of Denis Villeneuve's sf films and the iconography of mid-twentieth century French comics, Valérian et Laureline. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought's entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. Guest Christina Lord is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a scholar of French and francophone studies and science fiction (sf) studies, she often writes about nonhuman beings in literary and visual storytelling. In addition to Reimagining the Human She has published essays in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oeuvres et Critiques, Studies in the Fantastic, and European Comic Art, among others. She also serves as contributing editor for the section on “Speculative Studies in French” for the bibliographic journal, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. Her current research focuses on transnational and transmedial processes of circulation, recycling, and adaptation of sf imagery and narratives. Her current work focuses on the "alien aesthetic" of Denis Villeneuve's sf films and the iconography of mid-twentieth century French comics, Valérian et Laureline. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

“AI represents successful capitalism. What we have alongside that is unsuccessful government. Government has no plan — left or right.” — Keith Teare It's the 82nd anniversary of D-Day. On June 6, 1944, there was an unambiguous end game — the defeat of Nazi Germany. But today, end games are more controversial, especially in terms of harnessing the AI revolution to benefit everyone. For Keith Teare, publisher of That Was the Week, the AI end game requires an “Institute of the Future.” Everyone from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Elon Musk and Sam Altman should hammer out a plan to harness AI for the benefit of society. Keith offers the internet governance organisation ICANN as a model for this institute. It will shape the future for all of our benefit, he promises. So a D-Day for AI? I'm sceptical of this type of Brave New World-style technocracy. Firstly, Sanders, Warren, Musk and Altman agree on very little. And Musk and Altman hate each other. I'm also dubious that AI will or can benefit everyone. As Keith notes, some professions — teachers, for example — will be decimated by AI. Where I agree with Keith, however, is that we need a new politics for this new age. Political parties, rather than institutes, of the future. Innovation rather than ICANN. Five Takeaways •       The Anthropic IPO Slip — and Why SpaceX Now Looks Small: Anthropic accidentally filed for its IPO this week — what the New York Times described as a slip. The terms of SpaceX's unconventional $75 billion IPO were also revealed. Keith's observation: SpaceX now looks small by comparison. He tried to buy SpaceX shares this week through his brokerage and expects to get none — the demand will be way bigger than the supply, and the price will go up from the offering. San Francisco real estate is already feeling the Cerebras effect: 800 employees are now millionaires. The three big IPOs — Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX — will compound that on a much larger scale. •       Successful Capitalism, Unsuccessful Government: Keith's framework for the week: AI is capitalism working. Resources are directed to money-making opportunities via the profit motive, which coincides with innovation and, at least in the short term, creates lots of jobs. That is successful capitalism. Alongside it: unsuccessful government. The Trump administration went from hands-off to requiring all AI models to be submitted for a 30-day assessment before launch — in the same week. No plan. No endgame. Everyone has an opinion. Nobody states what outcome they want. •       Keith's PhD: Why Capitalism Is Never Static: Andrew challenges Keith's authority to pronounce on these matters. Keith reveals: he has a PhD from the University of Kent in Canterbury — on why capitalism is never static, and why new entrants always eclipse what went before. Andrew: that was the 1970s, Keith. Does a fifty-year-old PhD give you authority? Keith: it's a useless criticism. You could say that to anyone about anything. The exchange is revealing: the argument is not about credentials but about frameworks. And Keith's framework — capitalism as dynamic, government as static — has at least the virtue of consistency. •       Credit to Bernie and Warren: At Least They're Having the Conversation: Andrew expects Keith to trash Bernie Sanders (50% government ownership of AI companies) and Elizabeth Warren (high taxation of AI profits). Keith surprises him: at least they're having the conversation. His criticism is not that they're wrong to want wealth distribution but that their framing — tax, centralise, spend — is unattractive to most people and captured by the interests of the old economy: teachers' unions, trade unions, legacy coalitions that can't think freely about a future without teachers as they currently exist. •       An ICANN for AI: Keith's One Concrete Prescription: Andrew pushes Keith for one concrete thing politicians should do this year. Keith's answer: create an Institute for the Future. Bring Musk, Altman, Amodei, Sanders, Warren, and everyone else to the table with a clear mandate — define the future you want, agree actual outcomes, seek governmental authority to implement them. His model: ICANN, the global internet governance body, which disagrees constantly and still makes decisions. Andrew's verdict: Keith wants to create an ICANN for society. Interesting idea. History's jury is out. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. He holds a PhD from the University of Kent. References: •       That Was the Week by Keith Teare. •       Noah Smith, “We Need Liberal Nationalism to Come Back” — referenced in the conversation. •       The Economist, “American Capitalism Has Taken an Apocalyptic Turn” — referenced in the conversation. •       Ben Thompson on Google becoming a capital company; John Battelle on Google reinventing itself from search to data infrastructure — both referenced. •       ICANN — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, Keith's model for AI governance. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: D-Day, June 6, and the Anthropic IPO slip (02:26) - What is the endgame? AI is no longer just a tech story (03:46) - Successful capitalism, unsuccessful government (04:49) - Atomisation and the absence of proper conversation (05:33) - Andrew challenges Keith's authority (06:42) - Keith's PhD: capitalism is never static (07:13) - Bernie Sanders: 50% ownership of AI companies (07:30) - At least they're having the conversation (07:55) - The old economy framing: tax, centralise, spend (08:25) - What gives Keith the authority? (09:00) - Jack Clark and the call to slow down (10:00) - The Trump administration at war with itself (15:00) - Andrew Yang and universal capital distribution (20:00) - ...

“He didn't just say it, he meant it, he felt it — and the combination of the power guy, the ruthless power guy, and the profound idealist was fascinating, and also hard for him.” — Evan Thomas on Bobby Kennedy Who was the greatest riddle in 20th century American political life? Judging from the ever-expanding library of Bobby biographies, Robert Francis Kennedy ranks very high on that list. Indeed, according to Evan Thomas, one of RFK's most acclaimed biographers, this third Kennedy son is, indeed, the most sphinx-like riddle in 20th century America. In his classic 2000 biography, Robert Kennedy: His Life, Thomas unravels the good and the bad Bobby. But, rather than presenting parallel narratives, his portrait treats the Machiavellian and the idealist as the same riddle. Raised by his father to exercise raw power, RFK discovered that mid-century America wasn't living up to its own ideals. The contradiction of the ruthless Kennedy machine politician and the profound idealist was what continues to make him so intriguing to Americans of every political stripe. Bobby concurred with Churchill's dictum that courage is the greatest virtue because, without it, you can't have the other virtues. So he lived a life of ridiculous physical and moral courage — taking insane risks that would terrify ordinary mortals. And, of course, his most insanely courageous act was his last — running for President in 1968 knowing that he was likely to be assassinated. Where have you gone, Bobby Kennedy? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Five Takeaways •       The Central Paradox: Power Guy and Idealist in the Same Man: Bobby Kennedy was raised by his father to be the henchman of the Kennedy machine — doing the dirty stuff in Boston politics to keep Jack floating free and grand. He was pretty ruthless about it. At the same time, in mid-century America, he discovered that the country was not living up to its own constitution, and he wanted to make things right, and genuinely felt it. The combination of the machine politician and the profound idealist was what made him so endlessly fascinating. It also made him hard for himself: a man permanently at war with his own nature. •       Courage: The Only Word That Mattered: No word was more important to Bobby Kennedy than courage. Churchill: it's the greatest virtue, because without it you can't have the others. Kennedy believed in physical courage, emotional courage, mental courage. He was a runty little kid at the wrong end of the dinner table — Jack and Joe and Kick at the golden end with the father, Bobby with the nuns and the mum. He got kicked out of prep school for cheating. He was not the athlete, not the golden one. Real courage comes from suffering. It took courage just to overcome being the loser. That was the source. •       Making Up for Missing the War: Physical and Moral Courage: Bobby missed World War Two, basically. He got in at the very end and ended up scraping the deck of a destroyer in the Caribbean, far from combat. His brother Jack is a war hero on steroids — PT boat cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, rescues his men, written about in The New Yorker and Reader's Digest. Joe volunteers for a secret dangerous mission to replicate Jack's glory and dies. Pretty high bar of courage. Bobby spends the rest of his life making up for it — swimming the Colorado River, climbing Mount Kennedy in the Yukon, jumping overboard off the coast of Maine to save Jack's jacket. Sometimes stunts. But increasingly, moral courage — which is the greater thing. •       The Mob, Joe Kennedy, and the Beehive: When Bobby starts poking around in the mob as a Senate aide, J. Edgar Hoover is only too happy to point out: keep going here, you know where it's going to end up. With Joe Kennedy. Bobby's investigation of Giancana and Frank Sinatra starts grazing against his own father. Thomas's reading: whether conscious or unconscious, there is an element of rebellion. Bobby, appointed henchman, doing the dirty stuff for pop, resenting it, starts poking the beehive that might expose him. It never fully landed. But it started. And Hoover used it to blackmail the Kennedys. •       The Ripple of Hope, and RFK Jr. as Tragedy: Bobby's trip to South Africa — apartheid everywhere, the freedom movement barely existing, everybody in prison. His speech: every time somebody does something brave or heroic, it causes a ripple, and that gives you hope. A young Margaret Marshall, later Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, was in the audience. He gave us hope where there was none. That is the ghost Andrew went looking for at Hickory Hill and didn't find. The contrast with RFK Jr. is, for Thomas, simply sad. Poignant. His own family has disavowed him. Caroline Kennedy made a broadcast accusing him of crimes. The idea of Robert Kennedy Jr. is tragic. About the Guest Evan Thomas is an American writer and historian. He was Washington bureau chief of Newsweek for ten years and a writer and editor there for thirty-three years. He is the author of ten books, including Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon & Schuster, 2000), Being Nixon, Road to Surrender, and, with Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men. He has taught at Harvard and Princeton. His biography of Churchill is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in December 2026. References: •       Robert Kennedy: His Life by Evan Thomas (Simon & Schuster, 2000). •       The Wise Men by Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 1986) — referenced in the closing. •       Robert Coles — Bobby Kennedy's psychologist friend, referenced in the conversation. •       Hickory Hill, McLean, Virginia — the Kennedy family home Andrew visited on this trip to Washington DC. •       Bobby Kennedy's “Ripple of Hope” speech, University of Cape Town, South Africa, June 6, 1966. 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 2,900 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

In der heutigen Folge sprechen die Finanzjournalisten Nando Sommerfeldt und Holger Zschäpitz über den dollen Dow Jones, IPO-Vorfreude bei Goldman Sachs und den Broadcom-Kater. Außerdem geht es um Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, PNC Financial Services, Blackstone, Lululemon, Nvidia, Marvell Technology, ASML, TSMC, Ciena, AMD, Arm Holdings, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Micron Technology, Qualcomm, Western Digital, Vertiv, AT&T, T-Mobile US, Verizon, Qiagen, Fresenius Medical Care, Merck KGaA, Puma, Hochtief, Porsche Automobil Holding, Zalando, Tesla, Deutsche Telekom, UBS, SK Hynix, Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor, SK Hynix, Micron Technology, Citigroup, UBS Group, Bank of America, BHP, Glencore, Anglo American, Freeport-McMoRan, South32, First Quantum Minerals, Teck Resources, Ivanhoe Mines, Hudbay Minerals, Capstone Copper, KGHM Polska Miedź, WisdomTree Copper (WKN: A0KRKR), WisdomTree Industrial Metals (WKN: A0KRLD), WisdomTree Long AUD Short EUR (WKN: A1EKYV). Wir freuen uns an Feedback über aaa@welt.de. Noch mehr "Alles auf Aktien" findet Ihr bei WELTplus und Apple Podcasts – inklusive aller Artikel der Hosts. Hier bei WELT: https://www.welt.de/podcasts/alles-auf-aktien/plus247399208/Boersen-Podcast-AAA-Bonus-Folgen-Jede-Woche-noch-mehr-Antworten-auf-Eure-Boersen-Fragen.html. Hier könnt ihr den AAA-Newsletter abonnieren: https://www.welt.de/newsletter/article232797673/Alles-auf-Aktien-Der-taegliche-Boersen-Newsletter-fuer-WELTplus-Abonnenten.html Und - ganz neu: AAA gibt es jetzt auch auf Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alles_auf_aktien/ Disclaimer: Die im Podcast besprochenen Aktien und Fonds stellen keine spezifischen Kauf- oder Anlage-Empfehlungen dar. Die Moderatoren und der Verlag haften nicht für etwaige Verluste, die aufgrund der Umsetzung der Gedanken oder Ideen entstehen. Hörtipps: Für alle, die noch mehr wissen wollen: Holger Zschäpitz können Sie jede Woche im Finanz- und Wirtschaftspodcast "Deffner&Zschäpitz" hören. +++ Werbung +++ Du möchtest mehr über unsere Werbepartner erfahren? Hier findest du alle Infos & Rabatte! https://linktr.ee/alles_auf_aktien Impressum: https://www.welt.de/services/article7893735/Impressum.html Datenschutz: https://www.welt.de/services/article157550705/Datenschutzerklaerung-WELT-DIGITAL.html

“That kind of put soccer on my radar as a sport. I saw how deeply it meant to people, in a way I didn't appreciate prior to that. And then I was in London when the World Cup began, and I saw the opening match — Argentina and Cameroon, with Cameroon winning in an upset. Just the whole spectacle of it gave me an appreciation for the game.” — Brian Bunk, on Ireland, Italia '90, and the moment everything changed Not long now. Only seven days until the World Cup begins. Just enough time to read Brian D. Bunk's new The Shortest History of Soccer: From Ancient Kicking Games to the World's Most Popular Sport. History isn't Bunk with Brian. He looks a bit like Elton John, which is appropriate given that old Rocket Man was chairman of Watford and bankrolled the tiny English club to almost winning the league. Pop stars like Ed Sheeran (Ipswich) and Robert Plant (Wolves) love football, Bunk notes. Probably because it reminds them of where they came from. Bunk's thesis is that soccer's global dominance is not accidental. Born in the industrial communities of nineteenth-century England, the game gave workers a new identity, new evidence of their collective power, proof they'll never walk alone. That same logic explains why middle-aged men all over America religiously gather at their local bars to watch English teams with strange names like Ipswich Town and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Such is religion in our globalised post-industrial age. “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that,” the great Liverpool manager Bill Shankly quipped. That's the shortest of short histories of football. What the working-class Shankly meant was that it gives us social meaning — which is, indeed, more historically significant than the life or death of a single individual. Or even God. Football saves our souls, Brian Bunk concurs with Bill Shankly. Enjoy the World Cup. Five Takeaways •       Soccer Was Born in Industrial Communities for a Reason: The game emerged in industrial Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century not by accident but because industrialisation had shattered traditional community life. Mass migration to cities, technological disruption, the loss of familiar rhythms — all created a need for new kinds of identity and belonging. Soccer filled that need. It gave factory workers a team to follow, a ground to gather at, a shared identity that transcended ethnic and class lines. Bunk's argument: this community function is baked into the game itself, which is why it has replicated across every culture it has touched. •       Why Americans Love the Premier League: Bunk identifies the 1990s as the pivotal decade for American soccer. The 1994 World Cup on home soil. The women's World Cup. The formation of MLS. The arrival of the FIFA video game. The Premier League broadcasting deals with ESPN and Fox. All of these combined and snowballed. Add to that the NFL owners investing in English clubs, the celebrity ownership wave (Ryan Reynolds, Elton John), and the cultural footprint of shows like Ted Lasso and Welcome to Wrexham. The result: a generation of Americans for whom following the Premier League is a primary source of community. •       Maradona: All the Contradictions of Football in One Man: Asked which historical match he would most want to attend, Bunk chooses Mexico City, June 1986: Argentina vs England. Not for the Hand of God goal — which was cheating — but for the second goal, the one where Maradona picked up the ball in his own half, went past five English players, and scored what is generally considered the greatest goal in the history of the game. Bryon Butler's BBC radio commentary: “turning like a little eel.” Andrew's verdict: if any single figure captures all the genius, joy, turbulence, and tragedy of football, it is Maradona. •       The World Cup Returns to North America: In seven days, the 2026 FIFA World Cup begins in the United States, Canada, and Mexico — the first time the tournament has returned to North America since the USA hosted in 1994. The timing of Bunk's book is deliberate. Soccer is more popular in America than at any point in history, and the home World Cup is the event that could push it into the first tier of American sports culture. The Premier League, MLS, women's soccer, and now the World Cup: the game's US footprint is larger than it has ever been. •       Andrew's Game: Tottenham vs Benfica, April 1962: Andrew's own fantasy match, offered unprompted at the end: the first leg of the 1962 European Cup semi-final between Tottenham Hotspur and Benfica at the Est00e1dio da Luz in Lisbon on March 20, 1962, with Eusebio and Jimmy Greaves on the same pitch. Spurs lost 320131 on the night, went out 420132 on aggregate. Two clear penalties not given. Andrew's conclusion: had Spurs won that match, the history of European football — and possibly his own life — would have been different. He notes that he has a son, and that he should have called him Jimmy. About the Guest Brian D. Bunk is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches courses on world history, modern Europe, and the global history of soccer. He is the author of The Shortest History of Soccer: From Ancient Kicking Games to the World's Most Popular Sport (The Experiment, June 2026), Beyond the Field: How Soccer Built Community in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2025), and From Football to Soccer: The Early History of the Beautiful Game in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2021). He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. References: •       The Shortest History of Soccer by Brian D. Bunk (The Experiment, June 2026). •       Beyond the Field: How Soccer Built Community in the United States by Brian D. Bunk (University of Illinois Press, 2025). •       Argentina vs England, FIFA World Cup quarter-final, Azteca Stadium, Mexico City, June 22, 1986 — the Hand of God game, referenced as Bunk's fantasy match. •       Tottenham Hotspur vs Benfica, European Cup semi-final, Estádio da Luz, Lisbon, April 1962 — Andrew's fantasy match. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On A...

“Get the f*** out of your house and join an organisation. Groups are how we make movements. They're how we make political and social change. They're how we transform. Nobody does anything of value alone.” — Yotam Marom If you're feeling politically powerless, you're not alone. Yotam Marom — full-time organiser, facilitator and veteran of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter — has spent his adult life on the front lines of progressive movements. His new book, For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond the Politics of Powerlessness, explains why progressive movements keep losing — and what to do about it. Marom's diagnosis is that the left has developed a “politics of powerlessness” — an attachment to purity, insularity, and performing resistance rather than building power. In contrast, the right understands that people's pain is real, and channelling it into something organised is the only route to political change. The liberal model of showing up every few years, voting, and then going home is insufficient. And the left too often sabotages itself by dodging conflict and choosing righteousness over action. His prescription is to “get the f*** out of your house” and join an organisation. Groups are how societies change and where people find meaning, purpose, and connection. So go on the streets. Turn up the volume. Your days will be louder and more meaningful. Five Takeaways •       The Politics of Powerlessness: Why the Left Keeps Losing: Progressive and left movements have repeatedly put enormous numbers of people into the streets — and repeatedly failed to convert that energy into durable political power. Marom's explanation: a politics of powerlessness has taken hold. It prizes purity over winning, insularity over coalition, righteousness over effectiveness. It avoids conflict because conflict feels dangerous. It avoids leadership because leadership feels hierarchical. The result is movements that are morally serious and politically weak. The right, by contrast, is very good at taking pain and converting it into organised power. •       The Right Channels Pain. The Left Needs to Do the Same: Trump's most effective political move, in Marom's analysis: he tells people that they're being screwed — and he's right about that. Then he continues to screw them. But the left cannot simply counter this with policy arguments. The people who voted for Trump are not wrong that the system has failed them. Income inequality is growing. Politicians don't listen. There is no leverage. Marom's argument: the left needs its own version of this — speaking directly to people's pain and offering a genuine path to power. Bernie, AOC, and Mamdani know how to do this. They're not the only ones. •       Liberal Democracy Is Necessary but Insufficient: Voting, electoral participation, civic engagement — these are important and necessary parts of a healthy democratic society. But they are not sufficient to make big political change. The right understands this and has been exploiting it for a decade: the failure of the liberal establishment to deliver for ordinary people is the fuel for right-wing populism. Marom's answer is not to abandon liberal democracy but to supplement it with the kind of mass social movement that has historically produced the big political changes: the labour movement, the civil rights movement, the suffragette movement. •       Conflict and Leadership Are Good, Actually: Two of the left's most self-destructive habits, in Marom's experience as a facilitator: avoiding conflict and avoiding leadership. Groups that learn to face conflict with dignity and care come out with better strategies. Leaders who accept the responsibility of leadership — who are willing to be visible, to take risks, to be wrong in public — give movements something to coalesce around. The fetishisation of horizontalism and the terror of hierarchy have kept many progressive organisations small, fractured, and ineffective. Leadership is not domination. It is responsibility. •       Get the F*** Out of Your House: Marom's prescription for individuals who feel powerless: join an organisation. Not a party, not a mailing list — an actual organisation where people gather, disagree, decide things together, and act collectively. It doesn't have to be a national political organisation. It can be a union, a community organisation, a neighbourhood group, a mutual aid network. The point is the group. Groups are where political change happens. They are also where people find meaning, purpose, and connection. Nobody does anything of value alone. Not political change, and not a good life. About the Guest Yotam Marom is a full-time organiser and facilitator based in Brooklyn, New York. He has been active in movements since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, played leadership roles at Occupy Wall Street, and co-founded IfNotNow and the Wildfire Project. He is the author of For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond the Politics of Powerlessness (The New Press, June 2, 2026). He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children. References: •       For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond the Politics of Powerlessness by Yotam Marom (The New Press, June 2, 2026). •       Episode 2919: David Masciotra on A Country of Strangers — referenced at the opening. •       Episode 2903: Ece Temelkuran on Nation of Strangers — referenced at the opening. •       Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848–1849 — referenced in the closing exchange. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:  

“Be optimistic about the boom, but don't buy the stock.” — Liaquat Ahamed on the AI bubble Yesterday, Alexander Starritt argued that the 2008 financial crash ruined the lives of his generation. But compared with the great crash of 1873, 2008 looks like a tremor. The Pulitzer Prize-winning economic historian Liaquat Ahamed has a new book out today, 1873, which presents this 19th century economic crash as the first truly global financial crisis. In 1870, three globalising infrastructure projects were completed in quick succession: the US transcontinental railroad, the Suez Canal, and the Trans-India railroad linking Bombay to Calcutta. Into this newly integrated global economy, the Franco-Prussian War injected a trillion-dollar-equivalent indemnity that the Rothschilds helped France raise — and the resulting dramatic capital flows produced three simultaneous bubbles in Berlin, Vienna, and New York. A French journalist named Jules Verne worked out that for the first time, you could circumnavigate the globe in less than eighty days. Around the world in one global economic crisis. The lesson for posterity, Ahamed warns, is that the authorities made a catastrophic error by doubling down on the gold standard, producing decades of deflation that triggered an anti-semitic and anti-globalist populism, and ultimately led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. So what does that tell us about today's AI boom, which is about to be rocketed by three trillion-dollar IPOs? Be optimistic about the boom, the wise Ahamed says. But don't buy the stock. Five Takeaways •       Jules Verne and the First Global Economy: In 1870, three iconic infrastructure projects were completed: the US transcontinental railroad, the Suez Canal, and the Trans-India railroad linking Bombay to Calcutta. A French newspaper noted that for the first time, a traveller could circle the globe in less than eighty days. Jules Verne read the article and found his next novel. The point for Ahamed: this moment marked the creation of a genuinely integrated global economy for the first time in history. And with global integration came the first global financial crisis. The boom of the 1850s and 1860s was not irrational. It reflected real economic growth. The crash came from what happened next. •       The Trillion-Dollar Indemnity and Three Simultaneous Bubbles: Under the peace treaty ending the Franco-Prussian War, France was required to pay Germany an indemnity worth the equivalent of $1.2 trillion in today's money. With the help of the Rothschilds, France raised this sum in six months. The resulting capital injection caused the Berlin and Vienna equity markets to rise 200–300 percent. Simultaneously, European capital fleeing the war flowed into US railroad construction, inflating that bubble further. A third bubble formed in foreign borrowing on the London capital markets, as money chased yield in countries that should never have been given credit. Three bubbles, one crash. •       The Wrong Lesson from 1873: Gold Standard Orthodoxy: When the crash came, the authorities made a catastrophic error: they concluded that the gold standard had worked because the 1850s and 1860s boom had happened under it. They failed to see that the crash itself was partly produced by the gold standard's rigidities. The resulting decade of deflation crushed farmers, debtors, and ordinary people across Europe and America, fuelling anti-globalist populism. The same orthodoxy — applied by Montagu Norman and others in the 1920s — helped cause the Great Depression. We always fight the last war. •       The Rothschilds: Scapegoated Despite Being Innocent: The Rothschilds were at the centre of the 1873 boom as the world's leading bond underwriters. Presciently, they kept a low profile during the most speculative phase of the bubble. When the crash came, they were viciously scapegoated — part of the wave of antisemitism that swept Europe in the wake of the depression. Ahamed's irony: the Rothschilds were blamed for a crisis they had been cautious enough to partially avoid. The story of 1873 is, among other things, a story of how financial panic turns into political persecution. •       The AI Boom: Be Optimistic, Don't Buy the Stock: Andrew's final question: should we buy Anthropic and OpenAI when they go public? Ahamed's answer, via the lesson of every bubble from 1873 to 1929 to the dot-com era: bull markets are usually driven by real fundamentals — until the last phase, when they become untethered. The 1920s were rational until 1927; the dot-com era was rational until 1997. The dilemma: the last irrational phase may still produce 40 percent gains. Ahamed's advice: be optimistic about the AI boom. It reflects real productivity growth. But don't buy the stock. About the Guest Liaquat Ahamed is a financial historian and investment manager. He graduated with degrees in economics from Cambridge and Harvard, worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and had a twenty-five-year career as a professional investment manager based in London and New York before turning to writing. He is the author of 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World (Penguin Press, June 2, 2026) and Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Gold Medal, and the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year). He lives in Washington, D.C. References: •       1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press, June 2, 2026). •       Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press, 2009) — the Pulitzer Prize-winning predecessor, referenced throughout. •       Episode 2928: Alexander Starritt on Drayton and Mackenzie — directly referenced at the opening; the 2008 companion. •       James Surowiecki, “Why Stocks Keep Going Up,” The Atlantic — referenced in the final exchange. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstack

In this episode, Carmen Hofmann (eabh) speaks with M. Fatih Karakaya (Istanbul University) about the historical development of consumer finance in Turkey from the early Republic to the present day. Drawing on archival research, they explore how instalment payments, retailer credit, and bank-led lending evolved within Turkey's distinctive economic and political context. Far from simply importing Anglo-American credit card models, Turkey built on a long tradition of "buy now, pay later" practices that stretched from Ottoman-era Singer sewing machines to the instalment plans of major household appliance manufacturers. The conversation examines how these historical legacies shaped modern consumer finance, what makes the Turkish experience unique, and what it can teach us about credit markets more broadly.

“To explain the lives of people living in this moment, to look at the historical forces that are shaping all of us, you have to look at business and technology. In our period, what is it that's shaping us? I would suggest it's the long fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and the technology revolution that's been happening in California.” — Alexander Starritt How to write a novel about our times? For Alexander Starritt, it means juxtaposing friendship and ambition alongside the grand historical forces of the age. Just as George Eliot did in Middlemarch. Whereas for Eliot, those forces were the 1832 Reform Acts and the industrial revolution, Starritt's forces are the 2008 financial crisis and the digital revolution. His novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year, follows two ambitious Gen X'ers through the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The 2008 crash, Starritt says, ruined the lives of many of his generation. Rather than being in a Gramscian interregnum, our brave new 21st century world is already visible. But in contrast with many progressive critics of our neo-liberalism age, Starritt isn't apocalyptic about the future. Think of Drayton and Mackenzie as Middlemarch and McKinsey. Revolutions will come and go, but, for Alexander Starritt, friendship and ambition are unchanging. Five Takeaways •       The First Novel on the FT Business Book List in 15 Years: The Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year longlist typically features books on China, AI, and tech giants. In 2025, for the first time in fifteen years, it included a novel. Starritt's reading of why: there's a gap. The literary and cultural worlds have become so estranged from the business world that very few writers are even attempting to write seriously about the forces that actually shape people's lives. That gap, he says, says as much about the cultural moment as any quality the book itself might have. •       George Eliot's Method: Historical Forces as the Engine of Fiction: When George Eliot wrote Middlemarch, the historical forces she was dramatising were the Reform Acts and the industrial revolution. Starritt's equivalent: the 2008 financial crisis and the California tech revolution. His method is Eliot's — use a closely observed relationship (in his case, a male friendship rather than a marriage) as the engine through which the reader experiences history. The friendship gives the historical canvas an emotional charge. The historical canvas gives the friendship its full weight. Neither works without the other. •       Male Friendship: The Most Important Relationship Nobody Writes About: We've all read too many books and seen too many films about romantic and sexual relationships. Starritt's observation: there is another type of relationship — friendship — that is incredibly important to almost all of us, and that gets almost no literary attention. Drayton and Mackenzie is his attempt to take it seriously. The friendship between James (straight-lined, disciplined, brilliant) and Roland (impulsive, self-sabotaging, charming) evolves from incomprehension to something described by the Financial Times as “unbreakable” — and the reviewer admitted that by the end, their vision wasn't the clearest. •       The Post-Liberal World Is Already Here: Everyone quotes Gramsci's interregnum — the old world is dying, the new one hasn't been born yet. Starritt's counter: the new world has already been born. You can see it everywhere across the Western world. British jobs for British workers. Reshoring manufacturing. Keeping out undesirable foreigners. There is, he notes, quite a lot of consensus about these things, even if the discourse around them is contested. The post-liberal world is already here. The question is not whether it will arrive but what we do with it. •       European Optimism: The Separation From America May Be for Europe's Own Good: Starritt's closing optimism, which he acknowledges may not be welcome news for American listeners: the painful separation from America that America is forcing upon Europe is probably, in the long run, for Europe's own good. Rather than relying on the White House, Europeans can take responsibility for themselves. David Runciman's idea: democracy needs to be renewed every generation. The external pressure of China, Russia, and an America that no longer wants to help may be the forcing function that produces that renewal. Maybe we can get some agency back. About the Guest Alexander Starritt is a Scottish novelist and entrepreneur. He was born in 1985 and is the author of Drayton and Mackenzie (Atlantic Monthly Press, June 2, 2026), We Germans (winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize), and The Beast (a 2017 Spectator book of the year). He was a founding team member of the policy platform Apolitical. He lives in London. References: •       Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt (Atlantic Monthly Press, June 2, 2026). •       George Eliot, Middlemarch — Starritt's primary literary model, referenced explicitly. •       Adrian Wooldridge, “Bring Back the Big Business Novel,” Bloomberg — the piece referenced at the opening. •       David Runciman — referenced for his argument about democratic renewal. •       Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — the Financial Times comparison. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: the FT Business Book longlist and the first novel in 15 years (02:03) - The gap in culture: literary and business worlds estranged (02:50) - Adrian Wooldridge: bring back the big business no...

“When you're in a world that is careening out of control, where we've broken through seven of the nine safe dimensions of safe operating space that scientists have discovered, it's unrealistic in my view to focus on those little things and think that will lead to a real better outcome. What's realistic is backcasting.” — Jeremy Lent There Is An Alternative. That is the central argument of Jeremy Lent's new book, Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All. Margaret Thatcher's historically materialist TINA — THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE — was both the most seductive and disempowering message the neoliberal establishment ever produced. As long as everyone believes in the inevitability of free market capitalism, nothing will ever really change. Anti-agency is the name of agency. We just push for slightly higher carbon taxes and slightly fewer fossil fuel subsidies and give it the euphemism of “progress.” For Lent, however, this is environmental capitulation. Jeremy Lent imagines a genuinely sustainable world — one where humans have a long-term relationship with the living Earth. From that vantage point, the steps that look realistic to the incrementalists seem timid or counterproductive. He reminds us that we've broken through seven of the nine safe operating dimensions that scientists have identified for a stable Earth system. No, incrementalism isn't realism. Rather than progress, it's a trance-like slide into the apocalypse. Rather than state control or free markets, the alternative Lent introduces in Ecocivilization is the commons — Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom's third way in which humans self-organise in the collaborative ways of the natural world. It is already happening, he says, in places as far apart as Cleveland, Ohio and Jackson, Mississippi. Maggie was wrong, the Anglo-American Lent insists. TINA is bunk. THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE. Five Takeaways •       The Consensus Trance: Why Nobody Is Freaking Out: Everyone knows who's in and who's out in Washington today. Everyone knows their team's sports score. Almost nobody is aware of some of the bigger existential questions facing all of us. Lent's explanation: we have media owned by billionaires who don't benefit from people freaking out. The entire system is designed to lull people into what he calls a “consensus trance.” We broke through seven of the nine safe operating dimensions that scientists have identified for a stable Earth system. In normal times that would be front-page news every day. Instead: the news cycle moves on. •       Backcasting vs Incrementalism: The Two Realisms: There are two ways to use the word “realistic.” Realistic given the forces of destruction and oppression all around us right now: push for slightly higher taxes on the uber-wealthy, slightly fewer fossil fuel subsidies. Realistic given what a genuinely sustainable world would actually look like: start from the destination and work backwards. The first kind of realism may be taking us in the wrong direction. Lent's argument: when you're in a world careening out of control, the timid steps of incremental realism are not realistic. Backcasting is. •       The Commons: Ostrom's Third Way: The political debate of the last hundred years has been between state control and free markets. Both have failed. Lent's alternative, via Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom: the commons. Not the state owning things. Not markets extracting profit. Humans self-organising together in the way they evolved to do — collaboratively, cooperatively, with attention to the common good. Ostrom showed, empirically, that commons governance works. The Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi: these are working prototypes of what Lent means. •       TINA Is the Most Disempowering Message Ever Produced: Margaret Thatcher's “there is no alternative” — shortened to TINA — is, for Lent, the central ideological achievement of neoliberalism. As long as everyone believes there is no alternative, people will just try to improve the situation that little bit and nothing will change fundamentally. Ecocivilization is Lent's counter-argument: there is an alternative. The first step is to believe it. Once you believe it, the second step is to figure out what the practical steps are to get there. The book is those practical steps. •       The Authoritarian Moment: Why People Vote for Strongmen: People drawn to authoritarian strongmen feel in their gut that the system is designed to screw them. They're right about that. They're wrong about the solution — the strongmen are offering greater inequality dressed as populism. Lent's prescription: what AOC, Bernie Sanders, Mamdani represent is the alternative — the courage to actually stand for human dignity. When things swing to one extreme, they tend to swing back. We could be surprised at the speed of change. It's already happening in local communities — islands of coherence in a sea of chaos — and it can happen at the mainstream level too. About the Guest Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker described by George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age.” He is the founder of the Deep Transformation Network and the nonprofit Liology Institute. He is the author of Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All (Melville House, May 26, 2026), The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning, and The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. He lives in Berkeley, California. References: •       Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All by Jeremy Lent (Melville House, May 26, 2026). •       Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons — the Nobel Prize-winning work on commons governance referenced throughout. •       Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics — referenced in the conversation as a related framework. •       Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level — the study showing higher well-being in more equal societies, referenced by Lent. •       The Evergreen Cooperatives, Cleveland, Ohio — referenced as a working prototype of commons governance. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. Website

South Korea is a colony of Anglo-American imperialism. The Democratic Republic of Korea, otherwise known as North Korea, is a demonised state that is described as 'the aggressor' by Western Media for its defensive actions in response to the U.S. empire which killed 2.5 million innocent civilians during the 1950s Korean war and still seeks to destroy them today. To the West, the DPRK does not have an army, prisons, an intelligence service, and national interests, but death squads, prison camps, secret police, and rogue-state interests. This is the language to the West employs to victimise themselves. As taken from: 'US Aggression in Korea: playing with fire!' ( • US Aggression in Korea: playing with fire! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9okZ5KvQhKE) ______________________________________________ Subscribe! Donate! Join us in building a bright future for humanity! http://www.thecommunists.org http://www.lalkar.org http://www.redyouth.org Telegram: https://t.me/thecommunists Twitter: / cpgbml Soundcloud: / proletarianradio Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/theCommunists Odysee: https://odysee.com/@proletariantv:2 Facebook: / cpgbml Online Shop: https://shop.thecommunists.org/ Education Program: Each one teach one! http://www.londonworker.org/education... Join the struggle! https://www.thecommunists.org/join/ Donate: https://www.thecommunists.org/donate/

“I don't look to companies to be moral guides. I want them to be good companies. When you invest in the stock market, you want them to be growing fast and making profit. That's it. There's nothing more to it.” — Keith Teare If it's Saturday, it must be our weekly tech show. Before we went live, That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare told me it wasn't a big news week. He was wrong, of course (as he often is). The really BIG news this week, which Keith conveniently missed, is that Anthropic overtook OpenAI as the world's most valuable AI startup. Dario Amodei's AI startup raised $65 billion this week, putting its valuation at $900 billion, way ahead of OpenAI's last round at $730 billion. Keith says, without any proof, that they've cooked their numbers. Which makes this week's news even tastier. The more interesting story, for Keith at least, is Sam Altman's latest pivot: that humans need stakes in the AI platforms whose wealth they help create. Rather than Patagonia-style moral corporations (which Keith says would make him “throw up”), it should be the responsibility of the state or government to make capitalism more moral. But even slippery Sam got outpivoted this week by Anthropic, who sent a co-founder to Rome to do a deal with the Pope. Leo XIV's new encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” is Anthropic's papal pivot. It's the smart model for value investing in the AI age. Five Takeaways •       Anthropic Tops OpenAI — But the Numbers May Be Wrong: Anthropic raised $65 billion this week at a $900 billion valuation, overtaking OpenAI's last round at $730 billion. The VCs backing it — Green Oaks, Sequoia, Altimeter, Dragoneer — are credible. Andrew's argument: they've seen the books. Keith's counter: the VCs are playing a different game. They expect two to three times their money at IPO and they'll probably get it — not because the revenue numbers are solid, but because the only way is up right now. The real test: the S-1, which requires audited accounts. Keith's prediction: the revenue numbers will look different when the SEC sees them. •       Dario's Credibility Problem — But Claude 4.8 Is Fantastic: Keith has consistently characterised Dario Amodei as “slightly juvenile” and has long been sceptical of Anthropic's public positioning. This week he cites Om Malik and the All In podcast in support of the revenue numbers critique. But he is careful to separate the man from the product: Claude 4.8, released two days ago, is “fantastic.” At SignalRank, Keith's firm, Claude rebuilt an entire agent valuation workflow in an hour that would have taken days manually. Andrew's observation: Andrew is now Anthropic's newest fan. He has replaced Spurs with Anthropic as his team. •       Altman's Pivot: From UBI to Ownership: Sam Altman has shifted his public narrative on AI and labour. Previously: UBI — universal basic income — as the answer to mass unemployment. Now: ownership. Humans need to own stakes in the AI platforms whose wealth they help generate. Not welfare. Not redistribution. Ownership. Keith's verdict: it's an interesting and significant move. More interesting than Amodei's continued fearmongering about AI devastation. Andrew notes that Altman seems to have genuinely grown up in the last two months. His tone is markedly different. •       Patagonia Capitalism Would Make Keith Throw Up: The week's interview of the week: Eric Ries on Incorruptible, arguing that great companies stay great by choosing a higher moral purpose — the Patagonia model. Keith's response: it would make him throw up. He doesn't want companies to be moral guides. He wants them to be profit machines. Moral guidance is the job of politics. And politics, he acknowledges, is massively disappointing. He does agree with Ries on one thing: Sundar Pichai, as an individual, should care about the future. But Google's job is to make money. That's it. •       Where Does Moral Guidance Come From? The Populists: Andrew's closing question: if not corporations, not politicians, not the pope — where does moral guidance come from? Keith's reluctant answer: the populists. Because the people care. They care about the future. And in the absence of politicians they can trust, they go elsewhere. Keith sees this as inevitable rather than desirable. Populism is the unintended consequence of political failure. The people filling the gap that broken institutions left. It's not a solution. It's a symptom. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. References: •       That Was the Week by Keith Teare. •       Om Malik, “The Copy and the Guru” — the post on Anthropic's revenue numbers referenced in the conversation. •       All In Podcast — referenced for the Anthropic S-1 revenue discussion. •       Episode 2921: Eric Ries on Incorruptible — the interview of the week discussed in the show. •       Episode 2915: Keith Teare on capitalism and AI — the preceding TWTW, referenced at the opening. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: ten days since the last TWTW (01:01) - The big news: Anthropic tops OpenAI at $900 billion (01:53) - Keith's reaction: both true and BS (02:22) - OpenAI is further ahead on IPO filing (03:15) - Om Malik and the revenue numbers: what does misleading mean? (03:41) - The All In podcast and Dario's credibility (04:21) - Anthropic's $65 billion raise: the VCs' game (04:42) - But Claude 4.8 is fantastic: the SignalRank story (06:16) - Dario vs Sam: who's more grown up? (07:00) - Altman's pivot: from UBI to ownership (08:00) - Keith admits he was wrong about OpenAI's dominance (09:47) - What did Keith get wrong? (10:36) - Corporate vs consumer AI dominance (15:00) - Agentic AI: the big theme in Keith's newsletter (20:00) - The pope: Leo XIV and AI (25:00) - Moral cap...

“The thirteen colonies that became the United States were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. We need to think about why some colonies rebelled and others did not.” — Sarah Pearsall Earlier today, the historian Dominic Erdozain came on the show to argue that American patriotism has the same exceptionalist Puritan roots as British imperialism. But not all historians of the American revolution would agree. Take, for example, Sarah Pearsall, author of Freedom Round the Globe, who turns 1776 inside out to present the American rebellion as a kind of world revolution. 1776 as 1917. American patriotism as an explosion of borderless humanity. Pearsall argues that 1776 was as globally significant in its revolutionary promise as 1789, 1848 or 1917. She reminds us that there were at least 26, possibly as many as 32 British colonies in existence in 1775 — in the Caribbean, in Canada, in East and West Florida. And the radical ideas that drove the Declaration of Independence — security, happiness, respect — were being asserted simultaneously all over the world. So in Edinburgh debating clubs, Caribbean sugar plantations and West African castles, the American revolution was welcomed as a global revolution. Universal rather than exceptional. The Tea Party as the Storming of the Winter Palace. Five Takeaways •       32 British Colonies, Not 13: The Forgotten Empire: People talk about the thirteen colonies as if they were all the British colonies in North America. They weren't. There were at least 26, possibly as many as 32, depending on how you count groups of islands. British colonies in the Caribbean. In Canada. In East and West Florida. Each had its own relationship to the British Empire, its own internal tensions, its own calculations about the costs and benefits of rebellion. The question Pearsall asks — why did some rebel and others not? — is the question that opens up the global story. •       The Caribbean Undermines the Slavery Thesis: There is a popular argument that the American Revolution was primarily fought to preserve slavery — that the colonists feared British abolition and revolted to protect the institution. Pearsall's counter: if this were the main driver, the Caribbean colonies would have been the first to join. They were far more dependent on slavery than the mainland colonies. They did not join. The relationship between slavery and the revolution is genuinely complicated — not simple in either direction. The Caribbean story is the evidence that demands a more nuanced account. •       From St Kitts to Kolkata: The Declaration's Global Keywords: Pearsall's organising device: she takes thirteen key words from the Declaration of Independence and finds the spark of each in a far-flung location. Security in the Six Nations cornfields of upstate New York, where it meant something very different to the Haudenosaunee than to the Philadelphia delegates. Happiness in the debating clubs of Edinburgh, where women were demanding it alongside men for the first time. Respect in the streets of Kolkata. This device lets her write about the globe without losing the Declaration as her anchor. •       Americans Were Already Thinking Globally in 1776: One of Pearsall's more surprising findings: Americans in 1776 were far more aware of global events than we tend to assume. They were reading about events in India. The Boston Tea Party is unintelligible without knowing that tea was an Asian commodity and that the East India Company was simultaneously extracting profit from Asia and from the American colonies. Colonists compared themselves explicitly to Indians under the Company's thumb. They saw the connections. The isolation of American history as a subject of study is a modern academic choice, not an eighteenth-century reality. •       Read the Declaration, Not the Constitution: Pearsall's July 4 Prescription: Andrew asks Pearsall what she'll be doing on July 4 and suggests people should read the Constitution. Pearsall gently corrects him: the Declaration of Independence. Two very different documents from very different moments. The Declaration, published on July 4, 1776, is short, bold, and reaches toward universal ideals. The Constitution, ratified in 1788, is a compromise document about how to govern. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, Pearsall's prescription: read the Declaration. The IndyCar races and the UFC match at the White House can wait. About the Guest Sarah Pearsall is a prize-winning historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution (Knopf/Penguin Random House, May 2026). She previously taught at the University of Cambridge, where she was a colleague of Christopher Clark. She grew up in the United States and lives in Baltimore, Maryland. References: •       Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution by Sarah M. S. Pearsall (Knopf/Penguin Random House, May 2026). •       Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848–1849 — referenced in the conversation; Pearsall's former Cambridge colleague and friend. •       Episode 2924: Dominic Erdozain on To Love a Country — the morning's companion episode, directly referenced. •       Episode 2922: Alexandra Natapoff on America Unfinished — the week's America 250 series. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: Erdozain this morning, Pearsall this afternoon (01:57) - A meta vantage point: turning the revolution inside out

Comedy writer Ben Elton's autobiography What Have I Done? tells the story of a career of comedy firsts, writing hit shows like Blackadder, The Young Ones and Upstart Crow. His love of words is legendary - as a small child his mother wouldn't let him speak til she was on her second cup of tea to braving the "Oxbridge tutorial" vibe of the Blackadder rehearsal room with Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Rowan Atkinson. Great Pottery Throw Down judge Keith Brymer Jones is a man so mad about pots they can move him to tears. He's now on the road with a tour about his renovation of a Welsh church complete with pigeon poo that took £40,000 to remove. But did you know he puts his remarkable resilience down to his ballet training?Comic Suzi Ruffell is also on the road with her stand up show, dressed correctly - 'shirt, tie and mullet', she says - but she's also written a memoir slash how-to-guide, Am I having fun now?, about winning (and laughing) at life in spite of her deep anxiety about it.And music from Sarah Jane Morris's new album paying tribute to the great women singer songwriters and from Anglo-American rocker Barns Courtney.Presenter: Stuart Maconie Producer: Olive Clancy Assistant Producer: Sam Nixon Technical Producers: John Cole and Kelly Young

Happy 250th Anniversary of 'Murica. You're in for a treat . This is part 1 of multiple on the Second Chapter "The English and American Public Culture." "The American Founders read the Bible," Oxford University Rhodes Scholar Daniel Dreisbach says in his first sentence of his Oxford University Press book. "They knew the Bible from cover to cover." "Its ideas shaped their habits of mind." "The Bible left its mark on the political culture of the era." Dreisbach's first sentence in his chapter 2 is: Ready ? "Anglo-Americans are people of the Book, and that Book is the Bible." WOW ! We had the author, Dr. Daniel L. Dreisbach, D.Phil. (Oxford), JD (University of Virginia Law School) on the podcast for Thanksgiving, Fall 2022. We're going to make a fair use, do a transformative reading of the book. We'd like to thank Dr. Dreisbach for writing this, and thank Oxford University Press for making it available. Support publishers when they make something worth reading. Support the publisher and throw some bidness their way. Support your brick and mortar book dealer. This episode was filmed Thursday 28 May 2026 years after Jesus in the backyard of my long-time (nearly a quarter of a century) Epistemology mentor Dr. Doug Geivett (PhD, USC under Dallas Willard), a student himself of the famous late-great Republican professor, the late-great Dallas Willard of USC's Philosophy Department. The Republican Professor is a pro-correctly-and-adequately-articulating-the-Bible's-appropriate-influence-on-American-politics podcast. Therefore, welcome again, through his writing, Dr. Daniel L. Dreisbach, D.Phil., J.D. The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. Warmly, Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. The Republican Professor Podcast The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack https://therepublicanprofessor.substack.com/ https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/podcast/ https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/articles/ YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheRepublicanProfessor Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheRepublicanProfessor Twitter: @RepublicanProf Instagram: @the_republican_professor

“We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” — Randolph Bourne, via Dominic Erdozain Should Americans be proud of their country? The Anglo-American historian Dominic Erdozain thinks not. His new book, To Love a Country, argues that there's a problem with American patriotism. Americans shouldn't love their country, Erdozain says. It's not a good place. His argument is that American patriotism has the same Puritan root as British imperialism. The idea of a chosen people, a city on the hill, a nation with a special mission is a kind of moral virus. He says it infected America in the great awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has provided moral cover for slavery, military aggression abroad, and the denial of rights at home. So what America needs, he argues, is a new set of foundational myths laid out by progressives like Jane Addams, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Martin Luther King Jr. This would establish a new kind of American patriotism which is forward-looking and internationalist rather than nativist or exceptionalist. Erdozain even gives Gandhi a shoutout as a model of American patriotism, although one wonders what the Indian pacifist would have made of this. So what will the Atlanta-based Erdozain be doing on July 4? Hiding under his bed, perhaps, rather than enjoying the hotdogs and fireworks. In hiding from hundreds of millions of patriotic Americans. Five Takeaways •       The Puritan Root of American Exceptionalism: The idea of America as a chosen people, a city on a hill with a special mission to the world, was not invented in America. It was inherited from English Puritanism. As it spread through the first and second great awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — what some scholars call the New Englandization of America — it became the canopy under which very different kinds of people sheltered. You didn't have to be a Puritan in any theological sense. You just had to accept the premise that America was righteously exceptional. And once you accepted that, a great deal of scrutiny became unavailable. •       Nationalism Is Immune to Failure: One of Erdozain's sharpest observations, via historian Lindsey O'Rourke's work on American interventionism: nationalism can absorb any amount of failure. The defeat in Vietnam, the disaster of Iraq, the failure of Afghanistan — a certain kind of nationalism insulates itself from the lessons these events might teach. It's always someone else's fault. It's always a particular administration's failure, never the national premise. This makes exceptionalism uniquely resistant to the ordinary mechanism of democratic accountability. •       Randolph Bourne and the Patriotism of the Future: Erdozain's most original historical recovery: Randolph Bourne, a radical journalist writing during the First World War, who argued that nativism and nationalism were European imports, backward-looking and derivative. Bourne's phrase: “we must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” A patriotism faithful to the diversity of modern America — its bustling pluralism, its immigrant energy — cannot be built by looking backward to the founders. It must be built by looking forward to the founders we have not yet had. •       Alternative Founders: Addams, Douglass, Garrison, King: Erdozain proposes replacing — or at least supplementing — the canonical founders with a different cast. Jane Addams, who said the question is not what can we teach the bewildered immigrant but what can we learn from them. Frederick Douglass, who held America to account for its foundational promises. William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. Martin Luther King Jr., who went to India to learn about nonviolence from Gandhi. These are the people, Erdozain argues, who offer a patriotism adequate to the diversity and complexity of twenty-first century America. •       JFK's Strategy of Peace: The Possibility of Reinvention: Erdozain ends the book with Kennedy's strategy of peace speech at American University in June 1963 — two months before his assassination. By then, Kennedy had come to believe that the impetus for war was coming from within his own country, from his own military and CIA, not from the Soviets. His speech — conceding nothing to communism as an ideology, but immensely generous about the Russian people and about Khrushchev as a leader — is Erdozain's model for what reinvention looks like. The Bay of Pigs taught him something. By the end, he was talking about Vietnam as not America's fight. Lessons can be learned, even in office, even at the last moment. About the Guest Dominic Erdozain is a historian and writer, graduate of Oxford and Cambridge, and visiting professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta. He is the author of To Love a Country: The Problem of Patriotism in America (Crown, June 2, 2026) and One Nation Under Guns. He grew up in Preston, Lancashire, supports Liverpool FC, and lives in Atlanta, Georgia. References: •       To Love a Country: The Problem of Patriotism in America by Dominic Erdozain (Crown, June 2, 2026). •       Randolph Bourne — radical journalist and critic of American nationalism during the First World War. His phrase “our American cultural tradition lies in the future” is the book's central provocation. •       Jane Addams — co-founder of Hull House, Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Referenced as an alternative founder. •       JFK's Strategy of Peace speech, American University, June 10, 1963 — the closing argument of the book. •       Episode 2922: Alexandra Natapoff on America Unfinished — directly referenced at the opening. •       Episode 2923: Joe Cunningham on Life of the Party — directly referenced at the opening. 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 2,900 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

 “I deliver it with the credibility of having won a district that Trump carried by 13 points. Not only how to speak to these voters, but how to win them back.” — Joe Cunningham Yesterday's guest was Alexandra Natapoff, co-editor of America Unfinished — a collection of essays by illustrious Harvard Law School professors grading the march toward justice in the United States over the last 250 years. America got about a C+ from this progressive clique. “Could do better” their report cards suggested. Today's guest is a very different kind of Democrat. Joe Cunningham is a lawyer and personal injury attorney in Charleston, South Carolina, a one-term US representative, and the author of Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America's Trust and How They Can Win It Back. Cunningham got his law degree at Northern Kentucky University's Salmon P. Chase College of Law. Harvard, he jokes, was his safety school. In contrast with Harvard Law professors, Cunningham's credibility is hard to dress up. He was the first Democrat to win South Carolina's 1st Congressional District in over forty years, in a seat Trump carried by 13 points. He was also the first Democrat in elected office to publicly warn against Biden seeking re-election. His diagnosis of what went wrong is that the Democratic Party abandoned kitchen-table economic issues in favour of culture wars, dismissed legitimate voter concerns as bigotry, and told people what they should care about rather than listening to what they actually cared about. The party, he argues, replaced empathy with arrogance. It's as if it's been colonized by morally prickly Harvard Law professors. Professor Cunningham gives the Dems a D+. Could do significantly better. Five Takeaways •       Winning Trump +13: The Credibility Argument: Cunningham's case for why his diagnosis should be taken seriously is not his ideology but his record. He won South Carolina's 1st Congressional District in 2018 — a heavily gerrymandered seat that Trump had carried by 13 points — making him the first Democrat to hold it in over forty years. He was also the first elected Democrat to publicly warn against Biden seeking re-election. His prescriptions don't come from a think tank or an op-ed page. They come from a man who has actually won where Democrats can't win, and lost where Democrats keep losing. •       The Party Replaced Empathy with Arrogance: Cunningham's central diagnosis: the Democratic Party stopped listening and started lecturing. It told people what they should care about — immigration wasn't an issue in West Virginia because West Virginia is far from the border. It told people the economy was fine when they couldn't afford their bills. It dismissed legitimate concerns about crime, immigration, and cultural change as bigotry rather than trying to understand them. The result: voters who felt condescended to left. The party that was founded on speaking for ordinary people no longer speaks their language. •       Big Publishing's Progressive Insularity: The book didn't get picked up by a major publisher. Cunningham was told, more or less directly, that a book this critical of the Democratic Party — of Biden, of Harris, of the party's leadership — was too much. He published it himself, through South Battery Press, named for a street in Charleston. Andrew's observation: isn't this itself evidence of what the book argues? If progressive culture controls big media and big publishing, those institutions will inevitably filter out self-criticism and reinforce the insularity that caused the problem in the first place. •       The Geriatric Oligarchy and the Technology Frontier: Cunningham uses the phrase “geriatric oligarchy” — the same phenomenon Andrew has been calling a gerontocracy — to describe Congress's inability to grapple with technology, AI, and social media. The vast majority of members of Congress cannot understand the problems that are emerging: social media preying on children, identity theft, artificially inflated prices, the environmental impact of data centres. The party needs new leaders who understand these issues. The answer to data centres is not a blanket ban — it's community-level decisions and proper regulation. •       The Party Needs Bloodletting, Not Just Rebrand: Cunningham's sharpest prescription for the Democratic Party: a coming-to-Jesus moment or genuine accountability for what led to 2024. After the debate, Democratic officials stood outside the White House claiming Biden was fine. His staff said he'd go to bed earlier, wake up later, and shorten his workday — as if this would reassure Americans. Cunningham's verdict: lessons will be repeated until they're learned. The party needs a Newsom-level confrontation — real winners and real losers — not the bloodless triangulation it currently offers. Only then can it earn back trust. About the Guest Joe Cunningham is a personal injury attorney and former US Representative from South Carolina's 1st Congressional District, the first Democrat to win that seat in nearly forty years. An attorney and ocean engineer by training, he was the Democratic nominee for Governor of South Carolina in 2022. He is the author of Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America's Trust and How They Can Win It Back (South Battery Press, May 20, 2026). He lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife Ashley and their children. References: •       Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America's Trust and How They Can Win It Back by Joe Cunningham (South Battery Press, May 20, 2026). Available at lifeofthepartybook.com. •       Episode 2922: Alexandra Natapoff on America Unfinished — the preceding episode referenced at the opening; the Harvard Law contrast. •       Episode 2912: Michael Clinton on Longevity Nation — the gerontocracy argument directly referenced. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: Natapoff's Harvard Law vs Cunningham's Charlesto...

“As long as democracy is a collective endeavour of all the people who belong to it, in some sense it can never be finished — because we are constantly bequeathing to the next generation the opportunity and the freedom to have these conversations over and over again.” — Alexandra Natapoff It's less than six weeks until America's 250th birthday. The official America 250 store is selling T-shirts while Harvard Law School is doing something slightly less commercial. 62 HLS professors have written 1,000-word essays, assembled into a single volume to be published on July 4. Entitled America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance, it's co-edited by Alexandra Natapoff, a Harvard Law professor who spent years as a federal public defender in Baltimore. The title, of course, is borrowed from the Gettysburg Address, where Lincoln charged the living with completing “the unfinished work” of those who died in the Civil War. So is America unfinished or is it just getting started? For Natapoff and other Harvard Law School professors like this year's Pulitzer Prize-winning Jill Lepore, the answer is suitably complex. Yes and no and maybe. Everything all at once. The essays focus on 250 years of both justice and injustice in America. Perhaps the only thing all authors agree on is the central role of capitalism in the history of the United States. Follow the money, Natapoff suggests. Those dollars will transport the reader to the heart of the American story. That said, America Unfinished will certainly cost you less than a three-year Harvard Law degree. And if you wait six months, the book will be available at no cost online. So follow the money. It will take you to some unexpectedly free places. Five Takeaways •       The Gettysburg Address as the Title's Source: The book does not merely allude to Lincoln's famous speech — it reproduces it at the front, so readers can go back to the original. In the Address, Lincoln charged the living with completing “the unfinished work” of those who died at Gettysburg — the work of building a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Natapoff and Charles chose this frame because it captures both the challenge and the hope: democracy is unfinished in the sense that it demands active work from every generation. It is not a gift that has been fully delivered. It is a task being handed on. •       America and Democracy Are Not the Same Thing: Andrew's challenge — you use the words interchangeably — earns a concession. Natapoff's work in criminal justice has led her to argue repeatedly that the American criminal system fails many tests of democracy: it is exclusive, inegalitarian, overly coercive, inconsistent with democratic principles. So ‘America' and ‘democracy' are not synonyms in the book. Many of the 62 essays disagree about the state of various pieces of governance. The book's inquiry is whether it is fair to call any particular piece of American legal governance a democracy — which both editors consider a compliment, and not a certainty. •       A Federal Public Defender in Baltimore: The Biography Behind the Scholarship: Before she became a law professor, Natapoff was a federal public defender in Baltimore's federal courts. Her job was to be adverse to the federal government all day every day, defending some of the most vulnerable and dispossessed people in the city against the massive resources and power of the federal apparatus. Those years shaped everything: her subsequent twenty years of scholarship on criminal courts, plea bargaining, misdemeanors, and race and inequality; her book Punishment Without Crime; and her contribution to America Unfinished. In her reading, the experience of her clients — people facing off against the federal government — is now more widely shared than it used to be. •       It's the Money, Not the Lawyers: Dan Wang's recent book Breakneck contrasts China, run by engineers, and America, run by lawyers. Natapoff's counter, via the book's economic governance essays: it's much more complicated than that. Six very different scholars who disagree about almost everything converge on a perhaps surprising answer: it's the money. Financial interests, corporate interests, the ownership class — in one way or another, they've been running America. The lawyers helped. They were part of the management scheme. But they weren't making the decisions. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. •       Molly Brady's Essay: Property Law and the Destruction of Community: Asked to pick her favourite essay without starting a fight with 61 colleagues, Natapoff flags the very last one: Professor Maureen “Molly” Brady on property law. Brady argues that property law has permitted suburban sprawl and the destruction of physical community — the kind of infrastructure that makes analog life (libraries, neighbours, public space) possible — while being profligate in its support for social media and the dispersed, thinner version of community. She exhorts us to remember how law has contributed positively to communities we are proud of, and to stand up for that vision. For Natapoff, it captures both the critical nature of this moment and why lawyering still holds out some important promise. About the Guest Alexandra Natapoff is the Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, and a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School. She began her legal career as a federal public defender in Baltimore. She is the author of Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (Basic Books) and Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice (NYU Press). She is co-editor, with Guy-Uriel Charles, of America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance (MIT Press, July 4, 2026). References: •       America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance, co-edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel Charles (MIT Press, July 4, 2026). Open access from January 2027. •       Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (Basic Books, 2018). •       Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future — referenced in the interview as the “America run by lawyers” contrast. •       Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863) — reproduced at the front of the book; the source of the title. 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 2,900 episodes since ...

“I took it for granted that we were trying to make the world a better place. But I think in retrospect that was naïve. What kind of change? For whom? We kind of forgot to specify what the purpose of all this disruption was.” — Eric Ries In 2011, Eric Ries published The Lean Startup, a book that reflected the optimistic zeitgeist about disruptive Silicon Valley companies. Fifteen years later, in Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, Ries reflects today's totally different zeitgeist about the value of companies inside and outside Silicon Valley. Back in 2011, everybody loved tech. Ries, creator of the Lean Startup method and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, admits he was naïve in his positive view of disruptive corporations. In Incorruptible, Ries argues that corporate corruption is structural, rather than a problem of bad actors. As organisations grow (ie: become more disruptive), the systems that govern them — ownership, incentives, charters, accountability — quietly reshape behaviour. Success itself becomes a form of financial gravity, diverting companies away from their original purpose. Ries proposes that we design organisations to be incorruptible from the beginning. It's the Patagonia model. When the outdoor clothing company almost went bankrupt in the 1990s, their bank agreed to restructure their loans if they would suspend their charitable donations for a couple of years. No deal, the CEO said. The bank blinked and Patagonia remained Patagonia. Now, Ries argues, every corporation should try to emulate Patagonia and become the incorruptible corporation. We must all join Eric Ries in getting beyond the lean startup. Five Takeaways •       Corporate Corruption Is Structural, Not Ethical: For decades, we've explained corporate failures as problems of bad actors, moral weakness, or isolated scandals. Ries' argument: that story doesn't match reality. Again and again, companies founded with strong ideals drift toward short-term thinking, extractive behaviour, and mission abandonment — often despite the best intentions of people inside them. The failure is structural. As organisations grow, the systems that govern them — ownership structures, incentives, charters — quietly reshape behaviour. Success becomes financial gravity, bending companies away from their purpose. •       The Patagonia Model: Organisational Strength, Not Moral Righteousness: When Patagonia nearly went bankrupt in the 1990s due to outsourcing to poor-quality foreign factories, their lead lender agreed to restructure the loans on one condition: suspend charitable donations during the restructuring. Reasonable request — any other company would have said yes. Patagonia said no. The bank blinked. Ries' reading: this is not moral righteousness. It is organisational strength. The ability to resist external pressure and stay true to a core principle. That is what makes a company not just good but great. Also: Black Wednesday, the day of their layoffs, is still referred to by name inside the company. •       The Wrong Distinction: For-Profit vs Non-Profit: Ries argues that the distinction between for-profit and non-profit is fundamentally a tax code distinction that has come to define how we think about organisations in ways that are misleading and harmful. He proposes a reframe: if profit means the maximisation of human flourishing, then the Smithsonian is very for-profit and Philip Morris is very non-profit. This reframe changes what we should demand of governance, of accountability, of what organisations are for. It is simultaneously an economic and a political argument. •       Civic Infrastructure: The Political Dimension: Ries' book ends with a chapter on what he calls civic infrastructure — the kinds of organisations that set the rules of the road for others. He argues that the principles of incorruptible design apply not just to companies but to the institutions of governance. The darkness of the current political moment is, for him, partly a failure of organisational design. When this darkness passes, he argues, the generation that follows will have to rebuild civic infrastructure in the way the generation that survived the Depression built the institutions that governed the second half of the twentieth century. •       The Anakin/Padamé Problem: Ries' Mea Culpa: Ries opens with a reference to the famous internet meme — Anakin says he's going to change the world, and Padamé asks: for the better? He grins mischievously. Ries used to find it funny. Then it stopped being funny. When he wrote The Lean Startup, he assumed the purpose of disruption was to make the world a better place. He took it for granted. He now thinks that was naïve. The lesson: you have to specify the purpose. What kind of change? For whom? That is the question that Incorruptible is trying to answer. About the Guest Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, The Leader's Guide, and The Startup Way. As a founder, he has put his ideas into practice with the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), Answer.AI, Virgil, and IMVU. He is the author of Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great (Authors Equity/Simon & Schuster, May 26, 2026). He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. References: •       Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great by Eric Ries (Authors Equity, May 26, 2026). •       The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (Crown Business, 2011). •       The Startup Way by Eric Ries (Currency, 2017). •       More information and bonus materials at incorruptible.co. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSp...

“There is a pretty powerful strain in America today in which men feel some need to be violent and domineering to sort of prove their masculinity. And there's sort of less intense but still prevalent strains that infect many other types of men.” — Jasper Craven Today is Memorial Day — America's annual celebration of its warriors and military ethic. But for Jasper Craven, author of God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, it should be a day of muted self-reflection rather than bellicose celebration. Especially in May 2026 with America involved in another ludicrous overseas war. Craven's argument is that from George Washington onwards, America has fused military manliness with a self-destructive masculine identity. Thus young men are trained at top military academies like West Point to be unthinkingly domineering and violent. But for Craven, America — a continent surrounded by oceans to the east and west and by friendly neighbours to the north and south — has no need for the unreflective militarism fetishised by its military academies and culture. So what has West Point wrought? A nation of Pete Hegseths, Jasper Craven implies. Happy (ie: peaceful) Memorial Day everyone. Five Takeaways •       Military Manliness and American Identity: From Washington to Hegseth: From the Founding Fathers — most of whom were Revolutionary War veterans — America has explicitly fused military manliness with core masculine identity. Boys who want to define themselves as Americans have felt a need to be strong, to serve, to defend. The archetype has only been beefed up over time: through the steroid era and into the world of Navy SEALs and special operators. The result is a culture where men feel the need to be violent and domineering to prove their masculinity, from carrying AK-47s to protests to becoming ICE agents. The problem: the archetype has no relationship to actual national security needs. •       West Point and the Civil War: A Fuse, Not a Remedy: West Point was created to produce a well-schooled officer class. What Craven argues: when you allocate massive resources to building a military, you will feel the consequences. Before the Civil War, West Point was segregated into northern and southern companies — which exacerbated tensions rather than building union. When war broke out, many West Point officers defected to the Confederacy, including Robert E. Lee, who had been superintendent. West Point officers on opposite sides then killed each other in their thousands. Many lawmakers called for West Point to be abolished. They were not heeded. •       Race, Integration, and the Military's Complex Legacy: Craven acknowledges the military's partial role in racial integration: Truman's executive order in 1948 desegregated the armed forces, which was a genuine milestone ahead of civilian institutions. But he is careful about what this means. Integration at the institutional level did not eliminate racism within the culture. And the same military that desegregated also produced the culture of violence, dehumanisation of the other, and misogyny and homophobia that Craven chronicles throughout the book. Partial credit is still only partial credit. •       January 6th and the Politicisation of the Officer Class: In Trump's first term, General Mattis and General Kelly and others demonstrated real courage in reining in Trump's worst impulses. By the end of that term, they had all been replaced by loyalists. During the transition to Biden, Trump's military cronies at the Pentagon went dark. January 6th was largely carried out by military veterans. More than 100 senior retired military officers penned an op-ed supporting what Trump had done. In Trump's second term, the politicisation of the officer class has only accelerated. The non-political professional officer class is now divided. •       ROTC, Not West Point: Craven's Prescription: Craven's preferred model: ROTC — military training supplemental to traditional liberal arts education. Survey data shows ROTC officers, because of exposure to Plato, Shakespeare, and the rest, are more well-rounded and better thinkers than West Point graduates. At West Point, it is essentially all STEM. Craven's prescription: introduce the humanities, expose cadets to civilians, break the silos. Ideally, West Point could become a national university that includes military programmes alongside the training of doctors and aid workers. The military-civilian divide is as much the military's creation as the civilian's. About the Guest Jasper Craven is a freelance reporter covering the military and veterans' issues. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, Politico, The Baffler, and the New Republic. He is the author of God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood (Atria/One Signal Publishers, May 19, 2026) and the co-author, with Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early, of Our Veterans. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. References: •       God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood by Jasper Craven (Atria/One Signal Publishers, May 19, 2026). •       Sebastian Junger, Tribe — referenced in the publishers' framing as a companion text. •       Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning — referenced as a companion text. •       Episode 2907: Brandon Webb on Puddle Jumpers — the companion episode referenced at the opening; the pro-military counterpart to Craven's critique. •       Episode 2909: Adrian Goldsworthy on Athens vs Sparta — also referenced at the opening. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple Podcasts

Even as governments draw up contingency plans to deal with expected shortages of food and fuel, freedom-loving peoples are rooting for Iran. For all the Trump regime's bombast, it has been clear from the beginning that Iran has the upper hand in the war being waged by Anglo-American imperialism. If they cannot find a face-saving retreat, the imperialists and their Zionist proxies will find they have precipitated the rapid destruction of their entire middle-eastern network of domination. Even with a de-escalation, the consequences for the global economy and for the regional power of US and British imperialism will be far-reaching and severe. --------------------------------------- Subscribe! Donate! Join us in building a bright future for humanity! www.thecommunists.org www.lalkar.org www.redyouth.org Telegram: t.me/thecommunists Twitter: twitter.com/cpgbml Soundcloud: @proletarianradio Rumble: rumble.com/c/theCommunists Odysee: odysee.com/@proletariantv:2 Facebook: www.facebook.com/cpgbml Online Shop: https://shop.thecommunists.org/ Education Program: https://thecommunists.org/education-programme/ Each one teach one! www.londonworker.org/education-programme/ Join the struggle www.thecommunists.org/join/ Donate: www.thecommunists.org/donate/

South Korea is a colony of Anglo-American imperialism. The Democratic Republic of Korea, otherwise known as North Korea, is a demonised state that is described as 'the aggressor' by Western Media for its defensive actions in response to the U.S. empire which killed 2.5 million innocent civilians during the 1950s Korean war and still seeks to destroy them today. To the West, the DPRK does not have an army, prisons, an intelligence service, and national interests, but death squads, prison camps, secret police, and rogue-state interests. This is the language to the West employs to victimise themselves. As taken from: 'US Aggression in Korea: playing with fire!' ( • US Aggression in Korea: playing with fire! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9okZ5KvQhKE) ______________________________________________ Subscribe! Donate! Join us in building a bright future for humanity! http://www.thecommunists.org http://www.lalkar.org http://www.redyouth.org Telegram: https://t.me/thecommunists Twitter: / cpgbml Soundcloud: / proletarianradio Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/theCommunists Odysee: https://odysee.com/@proletariantv:2 Facebook: / cpgbml Online Shop: https://shop.thecommunists.org/ Education Program: Each one teach one! http://www.londonworker.org/education... Join the struggle! https://www.thecommunists.org/join/ Donate: https://www.thecommunists.org/donate/

“We've learned how to tolerate acts of violence, acts of widespread death, disease — that other developed nations simply don't tolerate. And that tolerance manifesting in myriad political failures — all of which go back to our refusal to maturely deal with mortality and issues of grief.” — David Masciotra Earlier this week, we talked to Ece Temelkuran about her book Nation of Strangers, a manifesto about strangers finding one another. But for the cultural critic David Masciotra, strangerdom is the problem rather than the solution. Contemporary America, he argues in his new essay A Country of Strangers, has become a place of death, despair and indifference. Masciotra takes his cue from Albert Camus' 1942 novella The Stranger. Camus' Meursault — the narrator of The Stranger — is a man completely detached from meaning. He attends his own mother's funeral without feeling anything. He murders an Arab man on a beach without motive. He faces his execution with a shrug. Masciotra's argument is that the United States has become Meursault writ large. America's failure is existential rather than political. It is a failure to mourn — a sustained refusal to engage with death, grief, and the weight of history that produces a society of strangers who cannot connect with one another across race, class, or geography. So is Masciotra right? Are we all Meursault now? What can Albert Camus teach us about America? Five Takeaways •       Meursault and America: The Same Detachment: Camus' The Stranger is narrated by Meursault — a man who attends his mother's memorial without feeling, murders an Arab man on a beach without motive, and faces execution with indifference. The novel, Camus said, was his attempt to detail “man's confrontation with absurdity in its nakedness.” Masciotra's argument: this is America now. A country that has adopted Meursault's emotional posture toward mass death. Columbine stopped the nation in 1999. Mass shootings now barely register. That is not political failure. It is existential failure. •       A Failure to Mourn: Masciotra's central thesis: America's deepest problem is its refusal to mourn. Not guilt — he is careful to distinguish mourning from guilt. You can have a national memory that reckons with both what you celebrate and what you grieve. If the Founding Fathers are worth preserving in active memory, so are the people they enslaved. Never properly dealing with the Civil War allowed the resurgence of white supremacist movements. Never properly mourning mass shootings allows them to accelerate. The failure to grieve is not sentimental. It is political. •       Is Meursault Autistic? The Spectrum Reading: Some contemporary critics read Meursault as someone on the autism spectrum — a man whose emotional detachment reflects neurodivergence rather than moral failure. Masciotra is skeptical. His reading: Camus' portrait is one of moral refusal, not neurological condition. The distinction matters for the American parallel: if America's indifference is a structural feature rather than a disease, the remedy is not therapy but political and cultural change. You can't medicate a country into empathy. •       The Colonial Murder and the Racial Hierarchy: Meursault murders an Arab man in French Algeria and feels nothing. Some critics fault Camus for not making colonialism more explicit. Masciotra defends Camus: Meursault doesn't care about anything, including his own mother's death. His indifference to his Arab victim's humanity is the point, not an evasion. The parallel to America: the hierarchy of victims, where Black Americans have historically ranked lower in the eyes of law and institution. David Shipler's 1997 book A Country of Strangers documented the same failure of Black and white Americans to actually talk to one another. •       You Are the First Close White Friends I've Had: Masciotra's friend Alana — a highly educated, cultured Black woman who lived in Chicago — once told him and his wife: “You are the first close white friends I've had.” They said the same back. This, Masciotra argues, is the country of strangers in daily life. Not the horror stories of overt racism. The quieter failure of self-imposed segregation that persists in a society that preaches diversity but, judging from its own behaviour, doesn't really want it. About the Guest David Masciotra is a cultural critic and the author of six books, including Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy, I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters, and Mellencamp: American Troubadour. He has written for the Progressive, the New Republic, Liberties, and many other publications about politics, literature, and music. His Substack is Absurdia Now. References: •       A Country of Strangers: Death, Despair and Indifference in the US by David Masciotra, CounterPunch, May 1, 2026. •       Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942). Camus' novella, the primary text of the conversation. •       Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel — referenced in the conversation. •       François Ozon, The Stranger (2024 film) — the adaptation that prompted the essay. •       David Shipler, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (1997) — referenced in the conversation. •       Episode 2903: Ece Temelkuran on Nation of Strangers — the companion episode referenced at the opening. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: Temelkuran's nation of strangers and Masciotra's country of strangers (01...

“If you write something you think is really fanciful today, tomorrow's news headlines might be telling the exact same story. That's the challenge of writing realism today — when everything feels so sci-fi and so dystopic.” — Fred Lunzer Boy meets girl meets AI therapist. That is the premise of Sike, the debut novel by Fred Lunzer. Adrian is a rap ghostwriter who has never met any of the rappers he writes for. After a relationship collapse, he signs up for Sike — a Facebook-style AI psychotherapy app that tracks your every move and emotion via smart glasses and guides you toward mental contentment. He meets Maquie, a venture capitalist and Sike refusnik. You can imagine the rest. Sike is a self-consciously “realist” love story set in a world where AI therapy is ubiquitous. Lunzer wanted to write AI fiction that is realistic rather than dystopian or utopian. He started it speculatively. By the time he'd finished, ChatGPT had launched and what he'd once fancifully imagined had become reality. It's the futuristic writer's permanent predicament. Make the future believable before it becomes so familiar that we barely notice it. Turn science fiction into social realism. Five Takeaways •       AI Fiction Without Dystopia: The Gap Lunzer Is Filling: Almost all AI fiction is either utopian or dystopian. James Bond loves gadgets. Most literary fiction treats technology as vaguely grubby and pushes it into genre. Lunzer's ambition: find the realism. Write about a world where AI is already everywhere, the initial fears are already past, and we've reached the same ambivalent relationship with it that we have with our smartphones. We don't know what model we have. We barely think about it. That's where the interesting questions live. •       Reality Caught Up Before He Finished: Lunzer wrote Sike speculatively. By the time he finished, ChatGPT had launched. William Gibson's observation: the future is already here, just unevenly distributed. His corollary: if you write something fanciful today, it's tomorrow's news story. Lunzer's solution to this perpetual problem is to stop writing near-future speculation and instead set the story in a world where the technology is already past its introduction — where the hype is over and the real reckoning begins. •       Realism Is the Hardest Genre Right Now: Andrew's observation: the best AI fiction is realist. Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun treats unimaginable things as taken for granted. That's the technique. Lunzer agrees — and notes that realism is particularly hard to write now because everything already feels surreal. Trump, AI, the state of the world: if you'd described any of it thirty years ago, people would have called it fiction. The challenge of the realist novelist in 2026 is to find the quiet normality inside the chaos. •       Non-Polarising AI Fiction: Lunzer deliberately avoided writing a book that slams Meta, or that is obviously pro- or anti-AI. He calls it non-polarised. In Sike, some characters love the AI therapy app, some refuse to use it. No one is obviously right. The book's thesis — insofar as it has one — is that the interesting questions about AI are not the ones about whether it's good or bad, but the ones that arise once you've stopped arguing about that and started living with it. •       The Economics of Writing: Trenches, Not Glamour: Lunzer has a day job — AI researcher at Sony. Sike was his first published novel, not his first written. Before it: a travel narrative about the Japanese restaurant industry that went nowhere, and a novel about a global pandemic finished in early 2020 and overtaken by COVID before any publisher would touch it. His verdict on the publishing world: not glamorous. A lot of books. A lot of writers. Not much money except for a few. He got an advance. Most debut novelists don't earn it back. The lesson he draws from Norman Mailer: writing a good novel is like learning to play the piano well. It just takes time. About the Guest Fred Lunzer is an AI researcher at Sony and the author of Sike: A Novel (Celadon Books, 2024; paperback 2026). He was born in London and lives in West Sussex, England. References: •       Sike: A Novel by Fred Lunzer (Celadon Books, 2024; paperback 2026). •       Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun — the key comparison text referenced in the interview. •       William Gibson — two quotes referenced: “The future is already here, just unevenly distributed”; and the observation about reality catching up with fiction. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

As taken from ' Is imperialism losing in Africa and Syria? Interview with Harpal Brar' ( • Is imperialism losing in Africa and Syria? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6DZmBNVzVk&pp=0gcJCR0AztywvtLA) In today's world, having a functioning government puts you in the cross-hairs of imperialism for the export of 'democracy and freedom'. No country can have a government unless it is approved by Anglo-American imperialism and a country that follows a defensive line, such as North Korea developing nuclear weapons, becomes the target of slander, lies, threats, and, if possible, the destruction and plundering of their nation with the utmost brutality. ______________________________________________ Subscribe! Donate! Join us in building a bright future for humanity! http://www.thecommunists.org http://www.lalkar.org http://www.redyouth.org Telegram: https://t.me/thecommunists Twitter: / cpgbml Soundcloud: / proletarianradio Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/theCommunists Odysee: https://odysee.com/@proletariantv:2 Facebook: / cpgbml Online Shop: https://shop.thecommunists.org/ Education Program: Each one teach one! http://www.londonworker.org/education... Join the struggle! https://www.thecommunists.org/join/ Donate: https://www.thecommunists.org/donate/

“Vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression — not as the product of scientific misinformation. These debates have been proxies for existential concerns about justice and morality.” — Kira Ganga Kieffer Are anti-vaxxers simply bizarre anti-science crazies egged on by conspiracists like RFK Jr? For Kira Ganga Kieffer, author of Unvaccinated Under God, what she calls “vaccine hesitancy” in America is actually a more complicated and prescient affair. The prevailing narrative — that vaccine-hesitant people lack scientific facts or serve their own individual agendas — misunderstands what's actually happening. Kieffer's argument is that vaccine hesitancy is best understood as a kind of religiosity. Not in the narrow context of church doctrine, but in the broader sense of meaning-making, moral reasoning, and an intensely individualist relationship with the body that is deeply rooted in American evangelical and alternative-spiritual tradition. This hesitancy, Kieffer shows, is not new. It has been present since the smallpox vaccine in the eighteenth century. What recurs across very different eras and very different communities is a set of metaphysical rather than scientific concerns expressed in the language of wellness, purity, and bodily sovereignty. The most interesting political implication of Kieffer's argument is that the same hyperindividualistic anti-modern instinct behind vaccine hesitancy also drives the wellness movement, the rejection of AI, and the political coalition that coalesced around RFK Jr. She sees this as a broad and growing constituency that neither party has fully understood nor spoken to. Rather than crazies, today's anti-vaxxers might offer a window onto tomorrow's American politics. Five Takeaways •       Vaccine Hesitancy Is Moral Meaning-Making, Not Ignorance: The dominant public health framing: vaccine-hesitant people lack scientific knowledge. Kieffer's reframe: they are engaged in profound moral reasoning about the body, purity, parental responsibility, and the relationship between the individual and the state. The parent who fears the MMR vaccine is not asking a scientific question. They are asking: if I consent to this intervention and my child is harmed, am I responsible? That is a theological question — about guilt, intention, and moral agency — dressed in the language of health. •       Evangelical Hyperindividualism Is the Root: Kieffer's structural argument: American evangelical Christianity is, at its core, an individualist proposition. You are saved by your personal choices. This translates directly into the wellness culture's logic of bodily salvation: you are saved from illness, aging, and death by your personal choices about diet, supplements, and vaccines. The individual body becomes the site of spiritual as well as physical salvation. This hyperindividualism is very American — and very old. It predates the wellness movement and will outlast it. •       Vaccine Hesitancy Has Been Present Since the Eighteenth Century: Kieffer's most important historical corrective: vaccine hesitancy did not begin with COVID, with MMR, or with the anti-vaccine movement of the 1990s. It has been present since the smallpox inoculations of colonial Massachusetts. What recurs across very different eras is not the same people or the same science — it's the same core concerns: bodily purity, parental moral responsibility, and distrust of external authority over the body. Each generation clothes these concerns in the available language. Today it is wellness. Earlier it was religious freedom. •       RFK Jr.: Evangelical Crusader or Wellness Influencer? RFK Jr. shares many characteristics of the evangelical crusader — a sense of special mission, a narrative of persecution, a world divided into the awakened and the deceived. But Kieffer is careful not to put words in his mouth. What she observes: in his crusade for wellness and his critique of organised medicine, he channels the same instincts she traces throughout the book. His coalition is now showing signs of disillusionment — followers who believed he was a true believer are finding that political power complicates purity. They are looking for someone else. •       The Anti-Modern Instinct Will Shape American Politics: The same hyperindividualist, anti-modern instinct that drives vaccine hesitancy also drives the rejection of AI, the wellness movement's critique of pharmaceutical medicine, and the political formations that coalesced around RFK Jr. Kieffer sees a broad and growing constituency that packages distrust of modernity in spiritual terms: what is essentially good is nature, humanity, the unmediated body. Neither party has fully understood or spoken to this constituency. As skepticism about AI and hypertechnology grows, Kieffer expects it to become more politically significant, not less. About the Guest Kira Ganga Kieffer is a scholar of American religions, history, culture, and politics. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Boston University and is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University. She is the author of Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America (Princeton University Press, May 19, 2026). She lives in Westport, Connecticut. References: •       Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America by Kira Ganga Kieffer (Princeton University Press, May 19, 2026). •       Matthew Avery Sutton, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity — referenced in the opening; the preceding KOA episode on American religion. •       Episode 2913: David Ost on Red Pill Politics — the companion episode on the anti-modern political impulse that Kieffer's book helps explain. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify

“The rules-based system just hasn't worked. China's system is so opaque that you can't see the subsidies. And when you've got China not interested in new rules and the US not interested in a referee, you've got two of the world's biggest actors who aren't on board.” — Soumaya Keynes It would have been nice to get John Maynard Keynes on the show to get his critique of Trump's trade war. But in the long run, we're all dead — even old Maynard. So instead, we found his great-great-niece, Soumaya Keynes — Financial Times columnist and co-author of How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy. Having already appeared on Jon Stewart this week, Soumaya has a bit of Keynesian star quality about her. But she's also a first-rate economist. Her thesis is that the old rules-based trading system that her great-great-uncle helped design after World War II is gone. And it ain't coming back. China's subsidies are so opaque that rules can't be written to constrain them, let alone enforced. The US is no longer willing to submit to a referee. Without the two biggest players, no rules-based system is meaningful. So — now what? Keynes says we must think like a trade warrior. Donald Trump should leverage the tools available — but use them strategically. Trump's error in his second term was not being tough on China while being too tough on everyone else, especially allies like Canada and Mexico. Soumaya Keynes' most contemporary idea might be her most Keynesian one. John Maynard Keynes proposed penalties for countries running large trade surpluses as well as those running deficits — recognising that global imbalances are a two-sided problem. That idea didn't make it into the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement. Eighty years later, in equally anxious economic times, his optimistic great-great-niece is reviving it. Five Takeaways •       Can Trade Wars Be Won? Yes, Sometimes: The conventional wisdom: no one wins a trade war. Keynes and Bown agree — in theory. In practice, countries in a weaker position cave. History has examples: France in the late nineteenth century told its trading partners they were renegotiating treaties, and the smaller partners complied. Trump's tariffs in his first term produced concessions. The problem is not that trade wars can't be won. It's that the smaller power's only defence — coordinating with other smaller powers — is extremely hard to sustain. There's always an incentive to cut a deal first. •       China Is the Doper on the Sports Field: Keynes's sharpest analogy: the global trading system is like a sports game that needs rules to ensure a level playing field. China's subsidies — cheap credit, corporate handouts, opaque support for state-linked companies — are the equivalent of performance-enhancing drugs. The problem is that unlike doping in sport, China's subsidies are invisible. You can write a rule saying China won't give these handouts. But you can't verify compliance. And without enforcement, rules are meaningless. The WTO has not solved this. Nothing has solved this. •       Trump Was Right About China, Wrong About Everything Else: Keynes is careful here. She credits Robert Lighthizer in Trump's first term with identifying China as the real problem and building a focused strategy. In the second term, Trump put tariffs on everyone simultaneously — which dissipated leverage, alienated the coalition of allies needed to pressure Beijing, and mixed up the problem of China's subsidies with grievances against Canada, Mexico, and the EU. If you were genuinely tough on China, you wouldn't have put tariffs on everyone. You would have been more targeted. •       The Rules-Based System Is Gone and Isn't Coming Back: Why can't we return to the system Keynes's great-great-uncle helped build? Two reasons. China's subsidies are too opaque to write enforceable rules against. And the US has lost confidence in any international referee — a long and complex story, but the result is that America won't submit to neutral adjudication. Without the two biggest players, no rules-based system is meaningful. Yearning for the old approach is not an option. A new strategy is needed — and that's what the book is about. •       AI and the Next Trade War: Services: AI is central to the US-China conflict already — chip restrictions, military advantage, economic supremacy. But Keynes's less-noticed observation: AI could fundamentally reshape international services trade. The UK, for example, is a massive services exporter — finance, legal, consulting, accounting. If AI eliminates demand for those services, the UK faces a new current account crisis, new trade tensions, a new wave of economic conflict. Nobody knows how this plays out. Which is why, she suggests, the tools in the book will remain relevant for longer than the current tariff cycle. About the Guests Soumaya Keynes is an economics columnist at the Financial Times and host of The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes. Before joining the FT she spent eight years at The Economist. She co-founded the Trade Talks podcast with Chad Bown during Trump's first term. Chad P. Bown is the Reginald Jones Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former Chief Economist at the US State Department under President Biden. Together they are the authors of How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy (Simon & Schuster, May 26, 2026). References: •       How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy by Soumaya Keynes and Chad P. Bown (Simon & Schuster, May 26, 2026). •       Soumaya Keynes on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, May 19, 2026 — referenced in the interview. •       Episode 2892: Jason Pack on the Iran war — the companion episode on America's strategic distractions from the China problem. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouT...

“The end of labor means the end of paid slavery. And the opening up of freedom — that is to say, choice of how to spend your time. The only question, a big question, is how do you eat?” — Keith Teare Does capitalism have a future in our AI age? For Musk, Silicon Valley's baddest bad entrepreneur, the answer might surprise. Musk seems to think that in the long run, money and wealth will disappear in an age of abundant intelligence. Which, presumably, will include hundreds of billions of his own dollars. Although given Musk's determination to sue and take money from OpenAI, some might be slightly sceptical of his real faith in a post-money cornucopia. It's not just Musk and That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare who are reimagining capitalism in our AI age. The former World Bank chief economist, Branko Milanovic, drawing on Karl Marx and Adam Smith in equal measure, argues that if AI eliminates the labor component of production, things will become free — thereby creating the conditions for the destruction of capitalism. Keith agrees — and goes further than Milanovic. The end of paid labor, he insists, borrowing also from Marx, is not a catastrophe. It's the end of what he calls “paid slavery” and the opening of genuine freedom. I'm not so sure. If nobody has to work, we'll all become bad artists. The cult of the amateur. The future is of bad entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and even worse artists. Hyper-capitalism in our age of AI. Five Takeaways •       The Musk-OpenAI Trial: A Big Yawn That Cost Millions: An Oakland jury rejected Elon Musk's claim against OpenAI in under two hours — not because OpenAI didn't do what Musk alleged, but because the statute of limitations had expired. Someone should have caught this before two weeks of trial. Musk has vowed to appeal, but it's hard to see how you get around a statute of limitations. Keith's verdict: sideshow, big yawn, ego contest. The lawyers won. The real question — who owns OpenAI after it converts to for-profit — was never going to be answered here. •       Sam Altman's Credibility Problem: The New York Times took five takeaways from the trial, one of which was that Sam Altman has a credibility problem. Keith's response: not new information. What the trial did reveal is the depth of mutual animosity between Musk and Altman — two people who, despite everything, share more beliefs about where AI is going than almost anyone else in the world. Keith on who he'd back in a Stalin vs Hitler choice: Stalin, 100 times out of 100. Which is not to say he's enthusiastic about either. •       Krugman on Europe: Right Analysis, Wrong Conclusion: Paul Krugman, touring Europe, argues that GDP per capita understates European quality of life. A third of US income buys more than a third of US lifestyle in Europe — healthcare, education, travel, housing are all significantly cheaper. Keith agrees with the analysis. His counter: Europe's structural hostility to innovation means it can maintain its lifestyle but not grow it. The social democratic model is sustainable until it isn't. It needs to unlock innovation or it will slowly fall behind. Hard to do when you're spending your time writing regulations. •       Milanovic's AI Thesis: When Things Are Free: Branko Milanovic — Marxist and neoclassical economist — argues that if AI eliminates the labor component of production, value in the classical Adam Smith/Ricardo/Marx sense disappears, and things approach free. Keith agrees and goes further: this isn't just Marxist logic, it's classical economics. The organic composition of capital. If variable capital — mostly labor — tends toward zero, costs tend toward zero, prices tend toward zero, and the distinction between capitalism and its opposite dissolves. Musk says the same thing. Agree or disagree, it's the most interesting economic argument of our time. •       The End of Paid Labor Is the End of Paid Slavery: Keith's most provocative position. The end of paid labor is not something to fear. It is freedom — the opening up of genuine choice about how to spend your time. What remains are human-to-human activities: care work, travel companionship, live music, the masseur. These will be in demand. They just won't constitute most of what 8 billion people do. The question of how the previously employed population participates in society — eats, lives, has purpose — is real and large. Keith's position: it's not an inconceivable problem. Andrew's counter: if nobody has to work, we'll all become bad artists. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. References: •       That Was the Week by Keith Teare. •       Branko Milanovic, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism from a Marxist and Neoclassical Point of View,” Substack. •       Paul Krugman, “Is Europe in Economic Decline?” The New York Times / Substack. •       Episode 2910: Keith Teare and Jonathan Rauch on AI — the preceding special edition, directly referenced. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:  

Anglo American plans to sell its Australian coal mines for up to $3.8bn ahead of the company's planned merger with Teck Resources, according to a report by Reuters. The Ghanian government has asked gold miners in its country to sell some production to the country's central bank. Commercial terms are not yet determined. According to Goldman Sachs, central banks bought more gold than previously thought and are poised to ramp up their purchases further into 2026.Mining Stock Daily is sponsored by Vizsla Silver, advancing the Panuco silver-gold project in Sinaloa, Mexico — one of the highest-grade silver development projects in the world. The project hosts the world's largest, undeveloped high-grade silver resource, and the company has been aggressively expanding its drill program to grow that resource ahead of a development decision. Learn more at vizslasilver.ca.

“Maps are communicating vast quantities of new knowledge that was only estimated. They convey this imaginative energy — an imaginative energy that maps today have lost, because today maps are so functional, so utilitarian.” — Peter Keating In the sixteenth century, Spanish cartographers represented California as an island. They weren't being careless. Nor were they drawing New Yorker covers. These 16th century cartographers were, instead, mapping the limits of both what they knew and what they imagined. Cartography is as much an art as a science and maps always mirror how we see the world. Thus Peter Keating's beautifully illustrated new book, Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World. Assembling nearly 100 of history's most consequential political maps, Keating's thesis is that maps are not neutral. They are arguments. Every map centers something — a religion, an empire, a people — and pushes something else to the margins. The story of cartography, then, is the story of power. Five Takeaways •       California Was an Island: The Power of Imagined Geography: In the sixteenth century, Spanish cartographers drew California as a large island off the coast of America. They weren't being careless — they were mapping the edge of what was known and imaginable. Before any map can draw a border, Keating argues, it has to decide what is real. The T-and-O medieval maps placed Jerusalem at the center of the world, with the biblically admitted lands of Europe, Africa, and Asia radiating outward. Only slowly, and with great difficulty, did the Western cartographic tradition absorb the fact that there was a whole continent between their imagination and the Pacific. •       The Oldest Tension in Cartography: Sacred vs Scientific: Keating identifies two traditions in constant tension throughout Western history. The cosmographical tradition: center what you know and believe, place your gods and sacred lands at the middle of the world, and mix fantasy with inquiry. The scientific tradition: starting with Ptolemy in ancient Greece and independently in ancient China, create maps that generals and kings could actually use to expand territory, find resources, and identify enemies. With Rome's Christianisation, the cosmographical tradition dominated for nearly a thousand years. The Ptolemaic scientific tradition only re-emerged with the Renaissance and exploration. •       Poland: The Most Erased Country in Cartographic History: Keating's answer to his own question — which country has been wiped off maps most often yet survived? Poland. It disappeared from maps at least three times, divided and partitioned by more geographically fortunate powers — Habsburgs, Russians, Nazis — whose cultural and military might seemed overwhelming. And yet Poland survived every erasure in the hearts of its people. A 1956 map of Poland as a carnation, published by the communist government as a May Day celebration, reads — Keating argues — as subversive under the surface: a nation asserting its existence against the regime that claimed to represent it. •       Lincoln's Favorite Map: The Slave Density Survey: The most powerful map in the book: the 1861 Coast Survey, a non-ideological government project that shaded American counties by the density of enslaved populations. Lincoln studied it obsessively. He reasoned that where enslaved people were densest, Union troops could arrive as liberators and find support. Where they were rare — in predominantly white areas of the South — he could pursue accommodation and peace. The map shaped the Emancipation Proclamation's geography. And because enslaved populations had settled where the delta soils were richest, the map also explains the cultural and political geography of the American South today. •       The Two-Color Election Map Is Making Democracy Worse: Every two years, Americans are shown the same red-and-blue electoral map. Keating's verdict: it is a bad projection, a winner-take-all distortion, and a representation of the Electoral College's biases rather than actual political sentiment. Research shows that two-color maps increase cynicism, cause people to underestimate the number of fellow-partisans in other states, and erode faith in politics. In a democracy, maps should reflect actual political support. The United States is overdue for population-based electoral maps. About the Guest Peter Keating is a narrative journalist whose work has appeared in GQ, Mother Jones, National Geographic, and Politico. He was a longtime columnist and founding member of the Investigative Unit at ESPN, where he was part of teams that won three National Magazine Awards. He is the author of Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World (Black Dog & Leventhal, May 12, 2026) and Dingers! A Short History of the Long Ball. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey. References: •       Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World by Peter Keating (Black Dog & Leventhal, May 12, 2026). •       Saul Steinberg's “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” The New Yorker, 1976 — the famous New Yorker cover discussed in the interview. •       Episode 2908: Audun Dahl on moral judgements — the parallel episode on how framing shapes perception. •       Episode 2909: Adrian Goldsworthy on Athens and Sparta — referenced in the conversation. 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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - California as an island: sixteenth-century Spanish maps (02:14) - What imagined maps teach us: the limits of knowledge (04:30) - The New Yorker cover of 1976: New York's view of the world (05:22) - Two traditions in tension: cosmographical vs scientific (08:13) - Geo...

As the wine flows in the Spring of 92 AD, Gaius and Germanicus shift their focus to the power of ceremony and the "paper tiger" status of modern empires. They analyze the symbolic "disrespect" shown during a meeting between the American and Chinese emperors in Beijing, noting how ritualized slights reflect a collapsed military reputation. Germanicus argues that the United States has "defanged" its own sea power, rendering a clash over Taiwan unnecessary because the global power dynamic has already shifted. The duo also delves into historical revisionism, suggesting the Pacific War was an avoidable tragedy exacerbated by failed diplomacy with Japan. Amidst "upbeat stories" for the resting centurions, they conclude that the Anglo-American alliance is viewed as a single entity by Eastern powers, much as it was during the 20th century. The retired soldiers find comfort in these tales of strategic errors that do not reflect their own storied service. (2/3)1937 IMPERIAL JAPAN ARMY IN SHANGHAI

In 1941, Pamela met Averell Harriman, the American overseeing Lend-Lease, and immediately recognized his importance to British survival. Tasked with enlisting him to the British cause, she used her beauty and intelligence to "bewitch" him, turning the aloof statesman into a passionate advocate for UK aid. Pamela became Churchill's "secret weapon," gathering vital military intelligence and White House thinking from influential Americans like Harriman and CBS reporter Ed Murrow. She and Murrow shared a deep, passionate relationship, and she fed him information to shape American public opinion in favor of the European war effort. Simultaneously, she managed multiple high-profile liaisons with American generals and intelligence officers, maintaining these critical back-channels without causing scandal. Her work helped solidify the nascent Anglo-American alliance. She was so well-embedded in the military leadership that she knew the timing of the D-Day invasion before it was publicly announced. (3/8)1650 HOLLAND

Last time we spoke about the battle Yaoyi. Japan pushed hard into Hubei with a plan: surround the main Chinese forces and seize Yichang, hoping to use it to strike at Chongqing. At first, the fighting was chaotic and punishing. The Chinese side tried to hold the line and disrupt the advance, and they even managed setbacks for the Japanese, pushing back, retaking key ground, and hitting supply and positioning weaknesses. But victory came with a cost: commanders were lost, and every gain was hard-won. Still, the battle didn't unfold as a clean Chinese retreat or a simple Japanese win. As Japanese units shifted and tested for openings, the Chinese forces adjusted—delaying, regrouping, and fighting to keep their formations from being completely trapped. Eventually, Japan managed to break through at critical moments, especially through crossings and maneuvers that the Chinese had not fully sealed off. In the end, Japan succeeded in taking Yichang, but it didn't achieve the decisive annihilation it wanted.    #201 The New Fourth Army Incident and the Strained United Front Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. After the catastrophe of the early 1930s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entered the war against Japan in a political mood that was both hopeful and wary: it wanted to be seen as a genuine national leader of resistance, yet it also feared being absorbed—or destroyed—by the Guomindang (KMT) state it had spent years battling. That tension became the organizing principle of the war's early years. The turning point came from the Xi'an Incident in December 1936, which forced a new calculation in Nationalist politics. In the months that followed, agreements between KMT and CCP representatives were publicly proclaimed in August and September 1937, after the Shanghai fighting began. Under these arrangements, the CCP accepted constraints that in peacetime would have looked like surrender: it pledged to strive for Sun Yixian's "Three People's Principles," to end its former policies of armed revolt and sovietization, to abolish the soviet government, and to discontinue both the term "Red Army" and the expectation that its forces would operate outside central control. Communist troops would be treated as part of the national military under KMT command, and the revolution's old administrative structures were to be formally dismantled. In return, the KMT offered the CCP something just as important: space to exist publicly and politically. Liaison offices were permitted in key cities; the CCP was allowed to publish the New China Daily; and it could nominate representatives to KMT advisory bodies. Civil rights were extended—political prisoners were released—and subsidies were established to help cover administrative and military expenses in "reintegrated" areas and territories. The war thus transformed the tactical reality on the ground: the CCP could not treat the KMT as an immediate enemy, but it also could not afford to become politically passive. It had to learn how to fight Japan while building legitimacy fast enough to survive the next phase. In the first year and a half, the Party Center focused on three problems that kept returning in different forms: how the "united front" would be defined—especially what the CCP's relationship to the National government should be; how to coordinate military strategy and tactics with Nationalist units without losing control of its own operations; and how leadership should be consolidated, particularly for Mao Zedong in a party that still contained rival centers of authority. These disputes mattered not just for doctrine but for survival, because the CCP's autonomy was constantly being tested by the very alliance that was supposed to protect it. Mao's own approach to the united front combined cooperation with a refusal to surrender independence. Publicly, the CCP praised Jiang Jieshi and the KMT and promised unity, but it did so in language that was deliberately broad. In private (and in internal party debates), Mao treated unity as conditional: the CCP must not split the united front, but it also must not be "bound hand and foot." The strategic idea that emerged was political initiative under constraints—fighting when it could plausibly claim justification, keeping enough restraint that the CCP would not appear self-interested or anti-national, and deciding for itself when to engage and when to withdraw. This balance was reinforced through military reorganization. In August–September 1937, CCP forces were reorganized as the Eighth Route Army (8RA), with roughly 30,000 men drawn from Long March survivors, local forces, and new recruits. The 8RA was divided into three divisions: the 115th, 120th, and 129th, commanded by Lin Biao, He Long, and Liu Bocheng respectively. Shortly after the war began, the National government also authorized a second major Communist force: the New Fourth Army (N4A), to operate in central China. Its core came from those left behind when the Long March began in 1934—small groups surviving in difficult conditions against continuing KMT pressure. Officially authorized at 12,000, it took months to reach that strength. Nominally commanded by Ye Ting, actual military and political control rested with Xiang Ying and Chen Yi. From the start, then, the CCP's wartime "integration" with the National system coexisted with a clear effort to preserve internal control. Ideologically, the CCP worked to make its revolutionary program compatible—at least in appearance—with a national resistance coalition. On the New Democracy demonstrated how this strategy operated on two levels. In KMT-controlled spaces, its language could be read as aligning with liberal-democratic expectations: public participation, multi-party governance, legally protected civil rights. But in CCP-controlled areas, the same text could carry sharper class-based and authoritarian implications. The Party wanted a united front that broadened support without becoming committed to Nationalist limits on how society itself might be reorganized after victory. Meanwhile, even as the rhetoric of unity rose, the CCP worried about something more dangerous than military setbacks: the possibility that the KMT might accommodate Japan. Late 1939 and early 1940 made this fear harder to dismiss. Japan pursued collaboration with Wang Jingwei, culminating in the establishment of a "reorganized" government at Nanjing in March 1940. At the same time, Japanese intermediaries sought approaches to Chiang Kai-shek himself—an effort that the CCP tracked closely as a sign that peace negotiations might be possible even when battlefield conditions looked grim. Propaganda was involved, but the anxiety was real: if Japan and the Nationalists reached an arrangement, the CCP's whole wartime legitimacy-building effort could collapse overnight. As a result, the united front was interpreted inside the CCP not as a permanent coalition with the KMT, but as a flexible strategy with a cardinal purpose: to prevent peace between Japan and the Nationalists. Mao's position on the united front reflected this. For him, the alliance was meant to suspend the possibility of a China–Japan settlement, not to end the CCP's separate identity. The CCP could participate in a reconstituted national framework—possibly even a "democratic republic"—to gain legality and influence, but it should remain politically and, where possible, physically separate from the KMT. By 1939, however, the practical meaning of "flexibility" collided with reality. What had seemed, to some observers, like an unusually cordial entente began to fade. The KMT Central Committee adopted measures early in 1939 aimed at restricting Communist expansion, and armed clashes increased through the summer and continued into autumn and winter—especially around North China Communist bases. The period of rising conflict was later labeled by the CCP as the "first anti-Communist upsurge" (roughly spanning December 1939 into March 1940), but the crucial point was that both sides viewed each confrontation as a test of legal rights, moral legitimacy, and control over territory. Strategically, the CCP understood the KMT's effort as an attempt to check unauthorized growth of Communist armed power and to recover areas where influence had already slipped away—either to the Communists or, by indirect effect, to Japan. The KMT emphasized its traditional legal authority; the CCP countered with its claim to an "evolutionary" moral right to challenge the government's legitimacy. In practice, the conflict took the form of increasingly systematic military pressure, including a blockade around the Shen–Gan–Ning region. By this point, the blockade involved large numbers of troops (on the order of hundreds of thousands), halting Communist expansion and disrupting direct contact with other Communist forces farther afield, even as fighting flared along border zones and around vulnerable points in the Communist defensive perimeter. So, by the edge of the "middle years," the wartime alliance had not broken into open civil war—but it had also stopped being secure. The united front survived, yet it operated under strain: its language of cooperation continued, while "friction" between partners hardened into a central feature of the resistance struggle. Transition into the war's second phase began in early 1939, shaped by the stalemate Mao had already anticipated at the sixth plenum in late 1938. Mao argued that during this prolonged "new stage" the forces of resistance—above all, Communist-led forces—would strengthen. The overall result, however, was mixed. In Shandong and Central China, new Communist bases did take shape. But across much of North China, Japanese consolidation cost the resistance heavily in manpower and population. Base-area economies suffered serious strain, and the peasantry endured hardships more severe than at any earlier point. This stalemate had two main dimensions. The first was the growing resentment of the Nationalists toward Communist expansion—resentment made especially sharp by their own losses. As the Nationalists were driven out of regions that had previously provided them their greatest wealth and power in the central and lower Yangtze basin, they also lost the "cream" of their armies. In contrast, the CCP was spreading through the wider countryside behind Japanese lines, extending its influence and winning broader popular support. The second dimension was Japan's desire—and need—to consolidate territories it had only nominally conquered and to extract economic value from them. After all, the logic of the "China Incident" was to draw on China's labor and resources to strengthen Japan, not to bleed Japan's gains away by draining wealth into China's vast interior. A Japanese colonel, lamenting the situation, captured the frustration of this drift into deeper entanglement: he regretted that Japan had not ended the "China Incident" once its initial objectives were reached. Instead, Japan was drawn into the hinterland and became bogged down in endless attrition—leaving it with little more than "real estate" rather than the popular support it believed it would secure from those it claimed to "liberate." To improve their position, Japanese authorities—still fragmented by internal rivalry—pursued several strategies. One was a new peace offensive aimed simultaneously at Jiang Jieshi, alongside efforts to establish a "reformed" Nationalist government under Wang Jingwei, who had fled Chongqing in December 1938. Japan also recruited more collaborators and puppet officials. Finally, it carried out forceful military, political, and economic measures intended to establish effective territorial control and eliminate opposition. During the middle years of the war, the Communists described their conflicts with the Nationalists using the euphemism "friction". By 1939, what many observers—possibly incorrectly—had viewed as an unusually warm alliance began to break down. In early 1939, the KMT Central Committee adopted measures meant to restrict the CCP. From the summer onward, military clashes began and continued into autumn and winter with increasing frequency and intensity, most of them concentrated around and within the North China base areas. The Communists later labeled the period from December 1939 to March 1940 the "first anti-Communist upsurge." Naturally, each side accused the other of aggression and claimed self-defense against unjust attacks. Strategically, though, the North China "upsurge" functioned as a Nationalist attempt to limit the CCP's expansion beyond the areas assigned to it and to regain influence in regions the Communists—or the Japanese—had already taken from the KMT. Jiang Jieshi framed the matter as a defense of legal rights grounded in tradition, while the Communists asserted an "evolutionary" right to challenge the moral legitimacy of those legal claims. During 1939, the Nationalists began to blockade Shen–Gan–Ning around its southern and western perimeter. Within a year, this blockade grew to nearly 400,000 troops, including some of the last remaining Central Army units under the command of Hu Zongnan. The blockade stopped further Communist expansion, especially into Gansu and Suiyuan, and severed direct contact between SKN and Communists operating in Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan) adjacent to Soviet Central Asia. The Xinjiang Communists—including Mao Zedong's brother—were eliminated in 1942. Meanwhile, fierce fighting erupted along the Gansu–Shaanxi border and in the north-eastern corner of SKN near the Great Wall at Suide, as the blockading forces probed for weak points. Elements of He Long's 120th Division were even pulled back from the Jin–Sui base across the Yellow River to strengthen SKN's regular defenses. Economically, the blockade was even more damaging. During 1939, central government subsidies to the Border Region budget were cut off. Trade between the Border Region and other parts of China nearly stopped, a devastating blow to a region unable to supply itself with many basic commodities. At the same time, Nationalist and regional forces also attempted to expand their military and administrative authority into Hebei, Shanxi, Henan, and Shandong—areas the CCP now considered its base zones. In resisting these efforts, the CCP predictable accused its rivals of harming resistance work and damaging the people's interests. The "experts in dissension" were said to cooperate with the Japanese and their puppets. Based on increasing collaboration by regional units with Japan, the CCP implied that this was a deliberate and cynical strategy—described as "crooked-line patriotism"—intended to preserve those units for future anti-Communist operations. Even so, the CCP tried to avoid an open break with the Nationalist regime in Chongqing. In public, it consistently portrayed these clashes as being initiated by local commanders acting beyond orders from higher authority—despite knowing this depiction was false. Jiang Jieshi, unable to refute the claim outright, effectively permitted it to serve as the justification for a firm Communist response. Mao Zedong outlined the general resistance policy as "justification, expedience, and restraint". The CCP was to fight when it could claim justification and when it could gain advantage, but not to press attacks beyond what the Nationalists would tolerate or in ways that could damage its image as selfless patriots. Communist forces were expected to keep initiative as much as possible in their own hands—deciding when to engage, whether to engage, and when to disengage. The most striking episode of the "first anti-Communist upsurge" was the rupture with Yan Xishan in December 1939. Tensions in Shanxi had been rising throughout the summer and autumn, as Yan and his conservative supporters—associated with the "Old Army"—linked the Sacrifice League and the Dare-to-die Corps of the "New Army" with Communist forces. When base areas and Japanese occupation eventually took over much of his province, Yan was forced into exile at Qiulin across the Yellow River in Shaanxi. In November, Yan ordered his Old Army to disarm the Dare-to-die forces with help from central units dispatched by Hu Zongnan. In the bloody fighting that followed, these elements gradually broke free of even nominal provincial control and fully completed their connection with Communist forces. More than 30,000 people went over to the Communists. One KMT intelligence agent described the process with bitterness and a sense of inevitability: the Communists were first "full of sweet words," flattery, and distortions designed to open things up and conceal their actions. But once they had fully entrenched themselves, and once the low-level base had been established, they turned and bit. The agent suggested they had suspected things might end this way, but were not aware how quickly events would move—or that it could happen precisely while Communist calls for "united front" and "maintenance of unity for resistance" filled the air. About a month later, in February and March 1940, elements of the 8RA beat back this so-called upsurge. Zhang Yinwu's forces were disarmed and dispersed across the plains of north Hebei. To the south, Chu Huaiping and Shi Yusan were pushed out of the base area, as was the KMT-appointed provincial governor Lu Zhonglin. Although some non-Communist forces remained in the region, the CCP's and CCLY bases were never again seriously threatened by forces affiliated with the central government. Reinforcing the CCP's accusations, Shi Yusan was later executed in 1940 by the central government for collaboration with the Japanese. By late 1939, CCP central authorities maintained that the areas where the CCP could expand its armed strength were mainly limited to Shandong and Central China. In those regions, the CCP continued trying to carve out bases where they could operate. The situation in Shandong was complicated. After the Japanese invasion, most Nationalist-affiliated forces stayed in the province, while Communist forces and bases were weaker and more scattered than further west. Only in late 1938 did major 8RA units from the 115th and 129th Divisions—led by Xu Xiangqian and Luo Ronghuan—enter Shandong to link up with the Shandong column and local guerrillas, including survivors of a large band recently decimated by the Japanese. Even with these efforts, Communist actions led to clashes not only with Japanese forces but also with various Nationalist-affiliated groups—groups that were stronger than the Communists at the time. Until late 1940, the CCP's clashes with Nationalist forces in Shandong were actually bloodier than clashes with the Japanese. The CCP understood that its Chinese rivals mistrusted one another, and that their attitudes toward the CCP varied widely. The main Nationalist forces were often not tightly affiliated with Chiang Kai-shek or the central government. Instead, they operated under independent—and at times disgruntled—regional commanders. Communist tactics were expressed through slogans emphasizing ways to win support and isolate hardliners: develop progressive forces and win over fence-sitters while isolating "die-hards"; flatter top echelons, enlist the middle ranks, and hit the rank and file; and win over Yi Xuezhong, isolate Shen Honglie, and eliminate Qin Qirong. Still, unlike other North China base areas, the Communists were unable for several years to neutralize Nationalist forces in Shandong. Even if Japanese mop-up campaigns had not weakened those Nationalists, the text suggests the Communists may still have struggled to do so. By November 1940, Xu Xiangqian claimed meaningful progress while admitting Shandong had not yet become a fully consolidated base. CCP successes were greatest along parts of the Shandong–Hebei border, around the Taishan massif in central Shandong, and near the tip of the peninsula far to the east. Elsewhere, "progressive forces" remained weak. Communist regular troops numbered about 70,000, which was far below the party center's goals of 150,000 regulars and between 1.5 and 2 million self-defense forces. Moreover, systematic economic reforms had barely begun. The CCP relied on familiar practices—confiscations, collections of "national salvation grain," contributions, and loans—alongside a conventional taxation system adjusted to favor poorer peasants. Communist expansion in Central China was even riskier, with a greater likelihood of large-scale conflict with central government forces than in the north. In much of North China, "friction" came primarily from rapid Communist expansion into areas with partial vacuums. In Central China, however, base-building required displacing an existing Nationalist military-administrative presence closely tied to Jiang Kai-shek and the Chongqing government. The burden of this expansion was carried mainly by the 6th Detachment (northern Anhui and Jiangsu) and the 5th Detachment, which was reinforced by 15,000 to 20,000 8RA troops under Huang K'o-ch'eng. As Chen Yi's 1st Detachment crossed from south to north through the corridor provided by Guan Wenwei's local forces, it became actively involved as well. This expansion—driven by increasingly urgent directives from Mao and Liu during the latter part of 1939 and into 1940—brought the N4A north of the river into ever more frequent and sharper clashes with Nationalist authorities in Anhui and Jiangsu, especially with units under Jiangsu governor Han Deqin. South of the river, though, Xiang Ying did not directly challenge Chongqing's commanders. Mao later charged that Xiang Ying may have been influenced by Wang Ming, or else he may simply have seen no realistic alternative. His forces—three detachments plus a headquarters unit—were heavily outnumbered by Qu Chutong's Nationalist units, not to mention Japanese forces and their puppets. Even if Mao insisted bases could be built "anywhere," the Shanghai–Hangzhou–Nanjing triangle was especially difficult terrain. Xiang Ying and his followers had survived with extraordinary tenacity in the mountains of South China between 1934 and 1937, enduring brutal search-and-destroy operations that were not lifted until the war began. It therefore seems unlikely that such survivors would suddenly become "right-wing capitulationists."  Yet by spring 1940, Mao was pressing Xiang Ying more intensely. The Central Committee's message was explicit: expansion was necessary in all cases. It meant reaching into all enemy-occupied areas rather than being bound by the Kuomintang's restrictions—going beyond Kuomintang limits, not waiting for official appointments, not depending on higher-ups for financing, and instead expanding armed forces freely and independently. It also meant setting up base areas without hesitation, independently mobilizing the masses in those areas, and building united front organs of political power under Communist Party leadership. The struggle between Nationalists and Communists involved more than contests for control of territory behind Japanese lines. It also involved national-level politics, ideology, and leadership. One worrying development for the CCP was the campaign throughout 1939 to expand Jiang Kai-shek's prestige and formal power—adding more titles for him across major party, government, and military positions. In early 1939, the Central Executive Committee appointed him "director-general" of the Kuomintang, a title reminiscent of the one previously held by Sun Yat-sen. In addition, during the summer and autumn of 1939 there was talk of constitutional rule. In November, the KMT announced plans to convene a constitutional assembly the following year. If Jiang could fulfill these promises, he and his government could gain new legitimacy and wider popularity. Mao and his colleagues could not allow this to go unchallenged. If the Nationalists were to have a paramount leader and authoritative spokesperson, the CCP needed one as well. The timing of Mao's famous "On the new democracy"—written in late 1939 and published the next January—was therefore no accident. Its substance had been anticipated earlier, but its final timing and full development were shaped by the KMT's constitutional movement. The CCP's entry into this competition served as both a bid for support away from the KMT and a statement of the multi-class united front that the CCP wanted to lead. Although "On the new democracy" was written in a tone that seemed moderate, it persuaded many Chinese readers that the CCP had either diluted its revolutionary objectives or postponed them to a distant future. In Kuomintang-controlled areas, the work could be read through the liberal values associated with Anglo-American democracy—popular participation, multi-party government, legally protected civil rights. In CCP-controlled territories, the same language carried stronger authoritarian, class-based meanings. In internal documents meant for party audiences rather than public consumption, the ambiguity was removed, showing a tough but patient and flexible commitment not only to resistance but also to social control and social change. During this same period, the Communists expressed deep concern about Nationalist capitulation to Japan—not only on the battlefield behind Japanese lines but also at the highest levels. Some of this concern was propaganda, but beneath propaganda lay genuine anxiety. In late 1939 and early 1940, politically aware Chinese already knew that Japan was negotiating with the unpredictable Wang Jingwei, who had fled Chongqing a year earlier. A "reorganized national government" in Nanjing was finally established in March 1940, representing the most formidable collaboration with Japan to date. Less well known, but equally important, was that Japan was also seeking an understanding directly with Jiang Kai-shek through intermediaries in Hong Kong. This effort, called "Operation Kiri"—described as spreading a "feast for Chiang"—combined intrigue with a kind of dark comedy. Reports suggested Chiang's reported interest in peace could have been a stratagem designed to discredit Wang Jingwei by keeping him waiting. But even if Chiang had no intention of coming to terms with Japan, the Communists could not be sure what the outcome would be until after the multi-pronged peace offensive had failed. By the middle of 1940, China had never been so isolated. In Europe, the "phony war" ended in the spring when Germany launched a blitz across the Low Countries. France fell soon after, and England appeared likely to be next. Japan used this moment to press China to sever its last tenuous connections to the outside world: cutting the Burma Road, trade with neutral Hong Kong, and the rail link running from Hanoi to Kunming. At the same time, Russia was engaged in a difficult and embarrassing war with Finland and reduced military aid to the Nationalists. The United States was only gradually moving away from isolationism and clearly regarded England as more important than China. In Chongqing and elsewhere in "Free China," signs of war weariness, despair, and demoralization were visible. Under these circumstances, Mao's insistence on aggressive expansion was a calculated risk—either it would deter any Japanese advance, or it would place the Communists in the strongest possible position in case a split between the KMT and the CCP became unavoidable. In Central China, the size and pace of the fighting kept increasing, starting in the final months of 1939. One flashpoint was the clash between Luo Pinghui's 5th Detachment and units of Han Deqin's Jiangsu force near Lake Gaoyou. In the following months, Guan Wenwei's forces ranged along the left bank of the Yangtze, repeatedly running into Luo's troops as they operated farther north. Luo also began receiving some 8RA reinforcements, moving them south through areas controlled by the 6th Detachment. Clearly, a major showdown was taking shape across north and central Jiangsu. At the same time, the South Yangtze Command was doing poorly. Nationalist commanders Leng Xin and Qu Chutong restricted its activities so severely that Mao and Liu gradually abandoned the idea of building a unified, consolidated base in that region. During late spring and early summer, Chen Yi moved most of his 1st and 2nd Detachments north of the Yangtze. In September, the 3rd Detachment followed suit, crossing the river into the area around Lake Chaohu, where the 4th Detachment was already stationed. After these moves, only the Headquarters Detachment—under Ye Ting and Xiang Ying—remained south of the Yangtze, positioned at Qingxian in southern Anhui. As the military situation edged toward an open confrontation, negotiations began in June 1940 between representatives of the KMT and the CCP. The core issues were Communist operating zones and the authorized strength of the armies led by the CCP. Proposals were exchanged, followed by equally sharp and hostile counter-proposals, but no agreement was reached. The KMT viewed it as a concession to permit the CCP "free rein" north of the pre-1938 course of the Yellow River, with the exception of southern Shanxi, which was to remain under the influence of Yan Xishan. In exchange, the KMT demanded that all 8RA and N4A units evacuate Central China. In effect, the KMT was offering the CCP something it was already prepared to allow, in return for the CCP giving up what it might soon be able to obtain by force of arms. Nationalist authorities then issued a set of deadlines, but without clearly stating what would happen if those deadlines were violated. On the surface, the CCP appeared to be complying in part. The movements of Chen Yi and the South Yangtze Command could look like obedience, but in reality they were responses to orders coming from their own superior leadership rather than instructions issued by the Nationalists. Even so, Xiang Ying's continued delays and evasions during the autumn and winter of 1940 remained puzzling. One possibility is that he felt—quite reasonably—that Mao had already lost confidence in him and that once he crossed to the north bank of the river he would lose his command. Another complication was that directives from Yan'an were sometimes ambiguous and even contradictory. He may also have been trying to reach secure understandings with KMT commanders about evacuation routes and guaranteed safe conduct out of the area. For a period, Han Teqin kept most of his forces—estimated at about 70,000 men, far outnumbering the N4A—in north Jiangsu, thereby blocking the expansion of the 6th Detachment and slowing further southern intrusions by 8RA troops. But by mid-summer he realized he would have to counter the N4A build-up in central Jiangsu, or else risk writing that region off to the Communists. A confusing sequence of engagements then unfolded, culminating in a decisive battle in early October 1940 near the central Jiangsu town of Huangjiao. Over the course of four days, several of Han's main-force units belonging to the 89th Army were destroyed, while others were scattered. That battle also served as a signal for the 6th Detachment to advance more aggressively in the north. In the aftermath, one of Han's principal commanders entered collaboration with the CCP, while another defected to the Nanjing government under Wang Jingwei. Although Han Teqin managed to maintain a foothold in Jiangsu until 1943, his real power had been broken. Relatively little attention was paid to the battle of Huangjiao in the Chinese press. The KMT did not want to publicize what it considered a disastrous defeat, while the Communists were satisfied to stay silent about an episode that conflicted with their proclaimed policy of a united front. As could be expected, during the autumn—after Han Teqin's defeat—KMT-CCP negotiations deteriorated further. In early December, Jiang Kai-shek personally ordered that all N4A forces withdraw from southern Anhui and southern Jiangsu by 31 December. He also ordered that the entire 8RA be positioned north of the Yellow River by the same deadline, followed one month later by the N4A. Discussions then followed between Ye Ting and Qu Chutong's deputies concerning the route to be taken, safe conduct, and—astonishingly—the money and supplies that were to be provided to the N4A to help it move. On 25 December, Mao Zedong ordered Xiang Ying to begin evacuating immediately. Yet it was not until 4 January 1941 that Ye and Xiang actually started moving. Almost immediately, Qu Chutong's forces harassed and dispersed the N4A Headquarters Group, which included administrative personnel, wounded soldiers and dependents, as well as combat-ready troops. In an attempt to reorganize, they moved southwest toward Maolin, where they were surrounded by Nationalists and, over the next several days, were cut to pieces. Losses were heavy on both sides. The CCP suffered an estimated 9,000 casualties. Xiang Ying tried twice to break out of the blockade on his own, but failed. He was then denounced as a deserter by Ye Ting, who took over full command of the doomed forces. Xiang Ying eventually escaped, but he was killed a couple of months later by one of his own bodyguards, motivated by the N4A gold reserves that he had taken with him. Up to the very end, Xiang either failed or refused to seek refuge in Liu Shaoqi's domain north of the Yangtze. The unfortunate Ye Ting was arrested and spent the rest of the war in prison. He was finally released in 1946, only to die one month later in a plane crash, along with several other high-ranking party members. On 17 January, Jiang Kai-shek declared that the New Fourth Army was dissolved for insubordination. Direct contacts between Yan'an and Chongqing nearly came to an end, and CCP military liaison offices in several cities held by the Nationalists were closed. This is what became known as the New Fourth Army incident, also referred to as the South Anhui incident. Clearly, it functioned as an act of retaliation for the defeats suffered by Han Teqin in north and central Jiangsu. It ended any realistic prospect of establishing a consolidated Communist base south of the Yangtze. Still, from a strategic perspective, these losses were ultimately more than offset by the gains achieved farther north. In fact, only a few months later, the reorganized N4A quietly began reintroducing some units into this region, where they carried out guerrilla activities without possessing a secure territorial base. Unlike the relative silence surrounding the fighting at Huangjiao, the New Fourth Army incident sparked bitter, prolonged controversy. The CCP argued that it was a second "anti-Communist upsurge," even more serious than the first. Presenting themselves as martyred patriots, they depicted their opponents as people who wanted to end the War of Resistance through what they called "Sino-Japanese cooperation" aimed at "suppressing the Communists." In their account, the Nationalists wanted to replace the war of resistance with civil war, substitute capitulation for independence, trade unity for a split, and replace light with darkness. People were telling each other the news and were horrified. Indeed, they claimed that the situation had never been as critical as it was at that moment. The Nationalist response, of course, was that provocations had been numerous and serious, and that violations of military discipline could not be tolerated. But the KMT's unwillingness to describe in detail its own defeats at the CCP's hands left it speaking in broad generalities. In the propaganda battle, the CCP clearly gained the better position and won more political capital. If it was politically valuable to be regarded as a national hero, it was even more valuable to be seen as a national martyr.  Many Chinese—and some outside—observers were genuinely alarmed and feared that civil war might openly resume. Yet, with a few exceptions, the events that culminated in the New Fourth Army incident have generally been interpreted as marking the breakdown of the second united front. That interpretation, however, is described as being wrong in two respects. First, the CCP understood the united front not as a narrow arrangement limited to a few major partners, but as a strategy that could be applied flexibly to all political, military, and social forces in China—from the highest levels of the central government down to the smallest village. Relations with Jiang Jieshi and the Guomindang regime mattered, but they did not, by themselves, constitute the whole of the united front. Even regarding Jiang and the Nationalists specifically, the common reading is said to be misguided. Throughout the war, a cardinal objective of the united front was to prevent peace between Japan and the Nationalists. Therefore, if clashes between CCP forces and those of the central government on such a large scale as at Huangjiao and Maolin could occur without leading to peace with Japan and without triggering a full-scale resumption of civil war, then this should not be understood as the end of the united front—it should be seen as its fundamental vindication. If friction at that scale could nevertheless be tolerated by Jiang Jieshi, then fears about his future accommodation with Japan were greatly reduced. Following the New Fourth Army incident, the CCP reorganized its political and military presence in Central China. The Central Plains and South-east China Bureaus were merged and renamed the Central China Bureau, with Liu Shaoqi placed in charge, reflecting the area's importance to Party Central. The New Fourth Army was also reorganized completely and substantially regularized. Chen Yi became its new acting commander, since Ye Ting was imprisoned. He directed the force, now divided into seven divisions. Each division had territorial responsibilities, and in each region the CCP claimed the establishment of a base. Indeed, base construction proceeded in earnest only after the friction of 1940 and the New Fourth Army incident. In the years that followed, the operating areas of the First through Fourth Divisions contained expanding enclaves of consolidated territory, where military dominance was joined with open party work: administrative control, the development of mass organizations, local elections, and socio-economic reforms. The other three areas fluctuated between semi-consolidated and guerrilla status. With the incident, the worst phase of the KMT-CCP conflict was now over. When CCP documents later speak of a third upsurge in 1943, they refer to something openly political. With the exception of Shandong—where a fairly strong Nationalist presence persisted for a longer time—the overall balance of power among Chinese forces behind Japanese lines had shifted in favor of the CCP by mid-1941. In subsequent years the CCP's predominance became even more pronounced, until by the end of 1943 the Communists were virtually beyond challenge by Chinese rivals.   I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. After the CCP and KMT entered the united front, cooperation felt conditional from the start. Mao pushed the New Fourth Army to reorganize and preserve Communist autonomy, even as the 1937 agreements publicly pledged obedience to KMT leadership. In 1939–40 the Communists worried that Chiang might negotiate peace with Japan; so they expanded bases and military presence, triggering repeated clashes. The pressure intensified when KMT orders forced the New Fourth Army to evacuate south Anhui in late 1940.