Keen On America

The David Frum Show: Frum on Gatsby, Trump the Fascoid and What It Means to Be an American Jun 12, 2026 3019 “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

Save San Francisco’s Soul: Jonathan Weber on Technology and Politics in the City By the Bay Jun 11, 2026 3910 “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 vetera

Brooklyn Al Primo Posto: Vincent Coppola’s Magical Memoir of the Church, the Mafia and the Gowanus Canal Jun 10, 2026 2576 “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, b

Trump Finally Gets the Priceless Book He Deserves: Ben Fountain on How Rasputin Swims the Potomac Jun 9, 2026 2846 “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, Foun

The Unexceptional Exceptionalism of the United States: Michael Mandelbaum on the American Way of Foreign Policy Jun 8, 2026 3337 “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, auth

The Jeffrey Epstein of Antiquities: Matthew Campbell on the Man Who Got Away With Stealing the Gods, Jun 7, 2026 2861 “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

D-Day for AI: How to Create an End Game That Will Benefit Everyone Jun 6, 2026 2293 “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 Kei

Good Bobby, Bad Bobby: Evan Thomas on the Greatest Riddle in 20th Century American Politics Jun 5, 2026 2268 “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 lis

Why Football Saves Our Souls: Brian Bunk on the Collective Beauty of the World’s Most Popular Game Jun 4, 2026 2919 “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 momen

Get the F*** Out of Your House: Yotam Marom on How to Raise the Volume on the Politics of Powerlessness Jun 3, 2026 2674 “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 spe

Around the World in One Long Depression: Liaquat Ahamed on 1873 & the Making of the Global Economy Jun 2, 2026 3623 “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 ec

Drayton and Mackenzie: Alexander Starritt on How the 2008 Crash Ruined Everything Jun 1, 2026 3053 “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

Ecocivilization and Our Discontents: Jeremy Lent on Why TINA Is Wrong May 31, 2026 2718 “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

Anthropic Trounces OpenAI with Its Papal Pivot: Value Investing in Our AI Age May 30, 2026 2350 “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 cou

1776 as 1917: Sarah Pearsall's World History of the American Revolution May 30, 2026 3045 “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

To Love or Hate the United States? Dominic Erdozain on the Problem of American Patriotism May 29, 2026 2602 “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

Life of the Party: Joe Cunningham on How Democrats Lost America’s Trust and How They Can Win It Back May 28, 2026 2904 “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 25

Is America Unfinished or Just Getting Started? Alexandra Natapoff on 250 Years of Justice and Injustice in the United States May 27, 2026 2681 “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-s

Beyond the Lean Startup: Eric Ries on Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Ones Stay Great, May 26, 2026 2744 “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 lat

God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: Jasper Craven on the Damage West Point Has Done to American Boys May 25, 2026 2744 “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 Forg

What Albert Camus Teaches Us About America: David Masciotra on a Country of Strangers, May 24, 2026 2055 “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

Boy Meets Girl Meets AI Therapist: Fred Lunzer on Sike, Fictional Realism, and the Future of Love May 23, 2026 2420 “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 r

Unvaccinated Under God: Kira Ganga Kieffer on Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America May 22, 2026 2789 “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 sh

How to Win a Trade War: Soumaya Keynes on Trump, China, and Her Great-Great-Uncle Maynard May 21, 2026 2489 “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. Bu

Bad Entrepreneurs and Even Worse Artists: Does Capitalism Have a Future in the AI Age? May 20, 2026 2600 “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 di

When California Was an Island: Peter Keating on the Cartography That Maps How We See the World May 19, 2026 3042 “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 cove

Don’t Use the F-Word: David Ost on Why the Red Pill, Not Fascism, Demystifies the Far Right May 19, 2026 2809 “Fascism is the term that is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary political discussions. We can talk about right-wing populism — but the type of politics they share with classic fascism is what I call red pill politics.” — David Ost Please don’t use the F-word. At least to describe the politics of Trump, Orbán, Meloni, Netanyahu, Modi, Farage et al. Rather than fascism, the best way to

Don't Retire, Rewire: Michael Clinton's Longevity Nation May 18, 2026 2548 “Retirement is a false construct created a hundred years ago by the government. It was basically created when Social Security was born. Prior to that, people worked until they died — because they didn’t live as long.” — Michael Clinton At the ripe young age of 70, Michael Clinton hiked nine days to Everest Base Camp and ran the Tenzing-Hillary Marathon down. Now 72, he is president of his

How to Watch the World Cup Like a Genius: Nick Greene on Why the Best Team Doesn’t Always Win May 17, 2026 3626 “Soccer matches are poorly designed experiments — you don’t necessarily find out which team was better. But any soccer fan will tell you that. Oftentimes, the better team does not win.” — Nick Greene, via a NASA scientist On June 11, the World Cup comes to North America. Fifty-six years ago, I watched the searing injustice of Johann Cruyff’s Holland getting robbed in the 1974 final by Ger

Can Keith Teare Convince Jonathan Rauch That AI Is Benign? That Was the Week, Special Edition May 16, 2026 3341 “The dangers are human, not AI. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what the AI does itself. In fact, even the idea that there is such a thing as the AI in itself is a mistake.” — Keith Teare I’m in Korea this week. So rather than doing a traditional one-on-one That Was the Week tech summary, Keith Teare and I are trying something different. We invited Jonathan Rauch — Broo

Athens vs Sparta: Adrian Goldsworthy on the Rivalry That Made the West May 16, 2026 2531 “History is really interesting because it’s about people. And people are interesting. So there are plenty of different ways of doing this, and I think there’s room for everybody.” — Adrian Goldsworthy The greatest rivalry in antiquity is also uncomfortably relevant to us today. In Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece, the classical scholar Adrian Goldsworthy covers th

Sometimes Fixed Sometimes Fickle: Audun Dahl on Why Our Moral Judgements Are Always in Flux May 16, 2026 3105 “We need to develop better theories of why the other side believes what they do. Having an accurate theory includes recognizing if somebody is a psychopath — but also recognizing that psychopaths are rarer than we think.” — Audun Dahl If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no head. While this sounds like an annoying cliché (es

From SEAL Sniper to Puddle Jumper: Brandon Webb on How to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids May 15, 2026 3240 “Being a father is probably one of the toughest and most rewarding jobs I’ve ever had. A lot of the principles I used to teach snipers apply to kids: dealing with negativity, replacing negative self-talk, learning that well-meaning adults can say terrible things — and you don’t have to take that on as baggage.” — Brandon Webb Brandon Webb defines himself as an author, entrepreneur, Navy S

The Sweatshop of the Meritocracy: Dylan Gottlieb on How the Yuppies Conquered America May 14, 2026 3054 “As recently as the mid-seventies, under 5% of Ivy Leaguers are headed to Wall Street. It’s actually not that attractive. But as Wall Street’s deregulated, it changes the incentive structure — it makes it much more profitable and demands this huge labor force.” — Dylan Gottlieb They stalked the sidewalks of Manhattan in button-down shirts embroidered with the names of investment banks. Th

Where Are the Firefighters? Jonathan Vigliotti on How Los Angeles Was Left to Burn May 13, 2026 2673 “All the warnings were there. It was almost a carbon copy — the same warnings that were ignored before Paradise, ignored again before the Palisades. And nobody was held accountable.” — Jonathan Vigliotti On January 7, 2025, the Palisades Fire ignited in Los Angeles. Over the first few hours of the fire, the second-largest city in America had no firefighters on the front lines and no coord

What Would You Do With the Last 19 Minutes of Your Life? Vincent Yu on an Apocalypse that Fizzled May 13, 2026 2281 “They’re all me. Every single one. I see them almost as if they’re inoculated on various petri dishes, and the petri dishes are all put into this pressure-cooker situation — that of a missile alert.” — Vincent Yu So what would you do with the last 19 minutes of your life? That’s the question Vincent Yu plays with in Seek Immediate Shelter. Triggered (so to speak) by a 2018 Hawaii missile

A Nation of Strangers: Ece Temelkuran on Rebuilding Home in a Homeless World May 11, 2026 2481 “We’re losing home on so many different levels. Physically. Politically. Morally. And after AI, spiritually — because language, our spiritual home, is taken away from us. We now have to share it with an unhuman entity.” — Ece Temelkuran Do you feel homeless — physically, politically, morally or spiritually? That’s the question posed by Ece Temelkuran’s new book Nation of Strangers: Rebuil

That Sounds Incredibly Boring: Keith Teare's Vision of our Jobless AI Future May 10, 2026 1928 “You can’t be confident about human decision-making. You can be confident on the potential of technology. Humans are quite capable of making both wrong and bad decisions.” — Keith Teare Is a jobless AI future really something to celebrate? That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare certainly thinks so. His editorial “Civilization: What Is Worth Doing” this week imagines a future in which nob

Hong Kong Burning: Simon Elegant on the 2019 Protests May 9, 2026 3004 “It was a completely unthinking exercise in cost-cutting that made no sense in terms of the newspaper. I think perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper, it made sense.” — Simon Elegant on being ‘eliminated’ by the Washington Post Hong Kong in 2019. A dismembered body is found in a landfill. A disgraced police superintendent is called back from internal exile to solve it. The city arou

Is London Really Falling? Bethanne Patrick on Patrick Radden Keefe, Freya India and the Collapse of Book Reviewing May 8, 2026 2900 “If criticism isn’t going to be written by one human mind, what else is it for? Criticism done by AI means nothing.” — Bethanne Patrick Is London really falling? Perhaps. This week on Keen On America, everything seems to be falling. There are young men falling from riverside apartments. Girlhood is falling to the commodification of appearance. Book reviewing is falling to AI. Mary Todd Li

Never Trust a Handsome Soldier: Becky Holmes on the Past, Present and Future of Fraud May 8, 2026 2776 “Fraud makes up between 40 and 50 percent of all crime in the UK. Police resource dedicated to fraud: 1 percent. No country is giving fraud the attention it deserves.” — Becky Holmes Was Shakespeare a fraud? Possibly, says Becky Holmes, the Stratford-upon-Avon-based writer and the lady behind the X account @deathtospinach. She should know. Best known as the author of Keanu Reeves Is Not I

The Mysterious Mr Murdaugh: James Lasdun on Why a Father Annihilated His Son May 7, 2026 2585 “Justice may have been served, but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up.” — James Lasdun In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh — wealthy scion of a South Carolina prosecutorial dynasty — was found guilty of murdering his wife Maggie and his son Paul at their family estate. With its opioid addiction, fatal boat crash, staged suicide, and a cousin called Eddie, the case could have be

Why History Keeps Happening: Patrick Wyman on Human Failure and Success in Building Civilizations, May 6, 2026 3281 “Every single person that we meet was both the endpoint of thousands of years that brought them there, and the midpoint of some other process, and was the beginning of something else entirely. Think of yourselves as the middle and the beginning, not just the end.” — Patrick Wyman History, we are often told, is a simple story of progress — from caves and villages to cities; from forests an

How Politicians Broke Our World: Ian Shapiro on Raising Ourselves Up After the Fall May 5, 2026 3138 “The current crisis was far from inevitable. Politicians made consistently bad choices. In doing so, they fostered a crisis of confidence in political institutions, empowered anti-system candidates, and produced a new Cold War as dangerous as the last.” — Ian Shapiro The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was a moment of extraordinary euphoria. Fukuyama even described it as the end

Why the Future of Europe Is Wales: Glyn Morgan on the Rise and Fall of American Europe May 4, 2026 2441 “Post-war Europe is essentially an American protectorate. Europeans don’t like to admit that. They only came to realize just how dependent they were on the United States in 2025, when Trump basically leveraged US security and forced Europe into a very disadvantageous trade deal.” — Glyn Morgan Post Second World War Europe was always an American project. At least according to The Rise and

Make Hungary (and America) Boring Again: Marc Loustau on Why Orbán Lost and How to Defeat Trump May 3, 2026 2600 “Orbán rigged the electoral system to highly benefit the winner. He thought he would never face the realistic possibility of losing. When someone actually threatened his plan, he just couldn’t imagine it. And that person got more than 55% — a two-thirds-plus majority. Orbán shot himself in the foot.” — Marc Loustau On April 12, Viktor Orbán — the populist who invented the illiberal playbo

Do We Really Want a No-Hands Job From Silicon Valley? Who Holds the Power in the Age of AGI May 2, 2026 2922 “Anyone that’s properly using AI now knows that you tell it what you want, it gives you a plan, carries out the work, and you judge and tweak. You’re not a passive victim — you’re an active user with outcomes in mind.” — Keith Teare Do we really want a no-hands job from Silicon Valley? That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare — who thinks all tech innovation results in human pro

May Day, May Day: Jason Pack on the Unhappy War in Iran We All Want to Ignore May 1, 2026 2623 “Trump has no strategy and no endgame. No amount of success in tactics will win. No military campaign has ever been won solely from the air.” — Jason Pack Happy May Day! Today’s papers are leading with stories about Obamacare, a Gaza flotilla, and the price of oil. Everything but the story at both the front and back of our minds. Only the Wall Street Journal leads with Iran. Which is more

God Looks After Fools, Drunks and the United States: John Steele Gordon on How Information Technology United America May 1, 2026 2363 “Nobody has ever made money selling America short. We’re an extraordinary country.” — John Steele Gordon To honor America’s semiquincentennial birthday, the Wall Street Journal has been celebrating the most impactful American inventions of all time: 1. Internet2. Light bulb3. Integrated circuit4. Personal computer5. Airplane The railroad doesn’t even make the top twenty. But the business

We Know You Can Pay a Million: Anja Shortland Illuminates the Dark Screen of Ransomware Apr 30, 2026 2629 “It’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses. The sunglasses are the ransom. The damage to the car is fifty to seventy-five billion dollars a year.” — Anja Shortland Cybercrime is booming. Ransomware attacks — where criminal gangs encrypt your servers and hold your data hostage until you pay — cost victims somewhere between fifty and seventy-five billion dollars a year in damag

The Deadliest of Plagues? Gary Slutkin on Violence as Our Most Contagious Disease Apr 29, 2026 3186 “Violence has been misdiagnosed. And there’s a misdiagnosis that has caused us to not be able to control it as we could.” — Dr. Gary Slutkin Human violence appears ubiquitous. In Iran. In Gaza. In Ukraine. In Sudan. In American cities and homes. So widespread, indeed, that it seems naturally hardwired into us. Our species-being, so to speak. But, for Dr. Gary Slutkin, there is nothing ine

How Iraq Turned Some American Soldiers into Monsters: Helen Benedict on the Unintended Consequences of War Apr 29, 2026 2231 America is once again at war. Helen Benedict is one of our most distinguished writers on the moral consequences of war. Her new novel, The Soldier’s House, is set in the aftermath of the Iraq war. But it could, equally, be about the aftermath of Afghanistan. Or even Iran. “The war turned me into a monster,” veterans tell Benedict, again and again. “How am I supposed to face my wife, my ch

The Too Many Führers Problem: Steven J. Ross on the History of American Neo-Nazism Apr 28, 2026 2966 “All these groups from 1945 on said: we can resist any hate group in America, even the Ku Klux Klan, as long as we take them on one at a time. But our great fear is if these right-wing groups figure out a way to communicate with one another in a more instantaneous way — we are in big trouble.” — Steven J. Ross It’s not just springtime for Hitler in America. It’s winter, summer and fall to

The Truth Is Paywalled and the Lies Are Free: Brewster Kahle on the Internet of Forgetting Apr 27, 2026 2566 “The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free.” — Current Affairs editor, quoted by Brewster Kahle The internet, we were promised, would remember everything. Rather than memory, however, it is now most distinguished by its digital forgetfulness. That’s the warning in Vanishing Culture, a new series of essays published by the San Francisco-based Internet Archive. In its concluding essay b

Are White Men Really Smarter Than Everybody Else? Steve Phillips on Who Actually Runs America Apr 26, 2026 3466 “White men are 29 percent of the population but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all money managed by money managers. Is that because they’re smarter? Or is it because there is preference, inequality, and active bias in favor of white men?” — Steve Phillips Are white men really smarter than other Americans? Some white men might

Adulting: The Week That AI Finally Grew Up Apr 25, 2026 2183 “Sam Altman’s best case scenario is that abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but it also exacerbates inequality. That was his favorite outcome.” — Keith Teare This week’s editorial from Keith Teare, publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, is entitled “Adulting.” His verdict: this was the week the AI industry finally started behaving like grown-ups. The evidence:

A Terrible, Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South Apr 24, 2026 3110 “The burdens of slavery did crush some people. They elicited outright armed rebellion from others. And between those two extremes, there’s all manner of response. But black culture was what most historians say it was: rich, semiautonomous — and yet there is all kinds of cross-fertilization that goes on.” — Melvin Patrick Ely As we approach the 250th anniversary of the republic, America is

Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong: Peter Wehner on Trump's Unholy War Apr 23, 2026 3193 “They weren’t interested in being on the side of God so much as they are insistent that God is on their side.” — Peter Wehner on Hegseth and Trump According to Peter Wehner, something has gone terribly wrong in America. And that something, Wehner has been warning us now for more than ten years, is Donald Trump. In his latest Atlantic piece, “Hegseth’s Unholy War,” Wehner aims his moral ri

The Revolutionary Center: Adrian Wooldridge on the Lost Genius of Liberalism Apr 22, 2026 3046 “Liberalism was founded in the middle of the eighteenth century as a revolutionary philosophy — a philosophy that tried to subvert the old world. That set of beliefs has continued to be radical and revolutionary. When liberalism fell into decadence, it examined itself, subverted itself, and became once again a revolutionary faith.” — Adrian Wooldridge We’ve lost our revolutionary center.

How to Be a Dissident: Gal Beckerman on Why Pessimism Is the Most Important Human Quality Apr 21, 2026 3140 “Pessimism is not fatalism. Fatalism is the belief that things will always necessarily be worse. Pessimism is the belief that things will probably get worse. Within that ‘probably,’ it opens up space for action.” — Gal Beckerman In the first months of Trump II, Gal Beckerman watched American society do something that shocked him: comply. In one pathetic example after another, prominent la

The Eleventh Commandment: Jamie Metzl and GPT-5 Write a New Moral Code for Humanity Apr 20, 2026 2278 “These technologies are morally agnostic. They could be the best things ever and the worst things ever, and the determinant is us.” — Jamie Metzl Two summers ago, Jamie Metzl gave a talk on AI and spirituality at the Chautauqua Institution in Upstate New York. That same spot where Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage a couple of years earlier. Rather than an assassination attempt, Metzl’s

Friending the Machine: Victoria Hetherington on How to Fall in Love with Your Bot Apr 19, 2026 2615 “I felt sad after every interview. Because it’s not real. These AI are able to elicit a very convincing illusion of empathy — even love. But it’s fake. And these people are alone.” — Victoria Hetherington One night in 2023, the developers at Replika — a so-called AI intimacy company — changed a few lines of code. Thousands of people woke the next morning, kissed (so to speak) their AI par

Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous Apr 18, 2026 2490 “Let’s just say it out loud,” Keith Teare, publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, says. “AI is not dangerous.” Not all of you will agree. I’m certainly not so sure. But the gruff Yorkshireman is convinced that AI can only benefit humanity. For him, with his scientific faith in historical progress, today’s AI revolution is a glorious combination of the Enlightenment and the industr

Read Fifty Books a Year: Deborah Kenny on Nurturing a Well-Educated Child Apr 18, 2026 2399 “A mark of an intelligent person is humility. If you have the right amount of humility, then you’re seeking out knowledge from others rather than thinking you’re going to invent something new. It’s really about executing well on ideas.” — Deborah Kenny When her husband died of leukemia, leaving her a single mother of three small children, Deborah Kenny read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search fo

Cold Feet over the Cold War: Daniel Bessner on Why Cold War Liberalism Was Unamerican Apr 17, 2026 2247 “If God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty-first. Could you actually imagine people dying for communism or for liberal democracy? That actually happened. Now you would be considered an idiot or a fool to do that.” — Daniel Bessner Co-host of the American Prestige podcast Daniel Bessner is a bit of a bomb thrower. Which is why he’s a regular on the show. Today, he

From One Mad King to Another: Don Watson's Shortest History of the United States Apr 16, 2026 2649 “Politics is the systematic organisation of hatreds.” — Henry Adams, quoted by Don Watson America is celebrating its 250th anniversary this July. In The Shortest History of the United States, Australian writer Don Watson has squeezed these 250 years into 60,000 words. Beginning with Mad King George, he ends with Mad King Donald. In between: the Puritan North, the plantation South, the mir

Agency, Agency, Agency: Sophie Haigney on the Three Things All the Worst People Want Apr 15, 2026 2115 “I find it very odd that agency is being promoted for its own sake rather than being connected to any kind of value system. Because without those things, agency looks pretty scary. Dictators are quite high agency.” — Sophie Haigney On April Fools’ Day, The New York Times published an op-ed entitled “All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be High Agency.” But it wasn’t a joke. Sophie Haigney

How Osama Bin Laden and Barron Trump Explain the World: Franklin Foer on Arsenal, the MAGA World Cup and an Unlikely Theory of Globalization Apr 14, 2026 2667 “Globalization has revived tribalism. Instead of destroying local cultures, as the left predicted, it has made them stronger. Far from the triumph of capitalism that the right predicted, it has entrenched corruption.” — Franklin Foer How do Osama Bin Laden and Barron Trump explain the world? According to Franklin Foer — senior writer at The Atlantic and author of How Soccer Explains the W

Biden’s Blue Authoritarianism: Stuart Schrader on How America’s Police Seized Power From Below Apr 14, 2026 2270 “You don’t have enough money to pay all the bills? Well, cut the budget for parks and rec, cut the budget for libraries, cut the budget for fixing potholes — but don’t touch the police budget.” — Stuart Schrader Fifty years ago, America’s local police still served at the pleasure of democratically elected politicians. Not anymore. Stuart Schrader has spent years in the archives tracing ho

Forget Iran: Eyck Freymann on Taiwan, China, and Why America Keeps Hitting the Snooze Button, Apr 13, 2026 2698 “We keep getting wake-up calls and snoozing the alarm. Now is the time to actually get out of bed and confront this problem before it is too late.” — Eyck Freymann Forget Iran for a moment. The Hormuz crisis is a template for the bigger crisis of Taiwan. Eyck Freymann — Hoover Fellow at Stanford, author of the brand-new Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China — believes tha

Can I Say It? Jacob Mchangama on Our Global Crisis of Free Speech Apr 12, 2026 2446 “Once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we’re starting to see that now.” — Jacob Mchangama The Jyllands-Posten editor who published those Mohammed cartoons in 2005 spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He’d commissioned artists to say it with their pens, but the mob came after him with AK-47s. Copenh

Slippery Sam, Devious Dario, Honest Hassabis: Blowing Up Silicon Valley’s Cult of Personality Apr 11, 2026 2315 “The media has its own agenda, completely separate from anything going on in the real world, creating the story themselves.” — Keith TeareLast night, somebody hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion. I live a couple of hills over, but heard nothing. Meanwhile, the New Yorker hurled its own explosive cocktail at Sam, publishing a 15,000-word hit piece rhetorically

The Failure of Ultra-Stability: Robert Pearl on Why American Healthcare is Quietly Rationing Us to Death Apr 11, 2026 2792 “It’s ultra stable. Health care doesn’t move. If you biopsied American health care in 2010 and again in 2026, no one could figure out which slide was which.” — Robert Pearl, MDBad news. The patient, I’m afraid, is ultra-stable. Robert Pearl, former CEO of Kaiser Permanente for eighteen years and author of ChatGPT MD, returns with the bleakest diagnosis we’ve heard all month. American heal

Between Pride and Shame: Beverly Gage Gets in her Subaru & drives Across 250 Years of American History Apr 10, 2026 2172 “You can face your history and still love your country. This is my attempt at doing that.” — Beverly GageWhen the Yale Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage finished her almost nine-hundred-page biography of J. Edgar Hoover, she needed a little break before starting her next book on Ronald Reagan. So she got in her old Subaru and spent six months on the road driving across America

The Many Faces of AI: Sebastian Mallaby on Demis Hassabis and the Quest to Read God’s Mind Apr 9, 2026 3261 “Doing science is like reading the mind of God.” — Demis Hassabis, quoted in The Infinity MachineThis week’s New Yorker uncomplimentary profile of OpenAI’s CEO is entitled “The Many Faces of Sam Altman.” But not all AI leaders are quite as many faced as slippery Sam. Take, for example, Demis Hassabis, the North London based co-founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind. In his new biography, Th

More Embarrassing Than Sex: Alex Mayyasi on Why Money Talk Makes Us So Nervous Apr 8, 2026 2896 “There are parts of the business and finance world that are invested in making these things seem intimidating and scary. We really enjoy making things more approachable.” — Alex MayyasiWhat’s the last taboo? The thing that we are totally embarrassed to discuss? No, not sex. It’s money. At least according to Alex Mayyasi — frequent contributor to NPR’s Planet Money — who has just published

An Anticapitalist Mutiny: Noam Scheiber on the Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class Apr 7, 2026 2629 “Historically, when the college-educated become politically radicalised, that does tend to lead to real shifts.” — Noam ScheiberA university degree has always been seen as a passport out of the working class. But according to the New York Times’ Noam Scheiber, the reverse is now true. In his new book, Mutiny, Scheiber argues that the good white-collar jobs college once promised have been

Truth is Dead: Steven Rosenbaum on AI as a Spectacularly Good Liar Apr 6, 2026 2878 “When we trust AI to tell us the truth, we are setting ourselves up to hand over something deeply human to a machine that does not have our best interests at heart.” — Steven RosenbaumTruth, Steven Rosenbaum cheerfully admits, is a shitty word. It has two ontological realities — one objective, the other subjective — but most of us use the word without much thought. Maybe it’s like pornogr

The Joe Biden Tragedy: Julian Zelizer on the Last New Deal President Apr 5, 2026 2870 “His ultimate failure is not simply losing. It’s his failure to stop Trumpism from being such a dominant force in America.” — Julian ZelizerOn this Easter Sunday, can we resurrect Joe Biden’s reputation? Perhaps not — according to Julian Zelizer, the Princeton historian and editor of The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden, a collection of essays about the historical significance of the Biden P

We Shape Our AI, Thereafter It Shapes Us: How to Maintain Human Agency in Our Agentic Age Apr 4, 2026 2515 “We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan (attributed)Who gets to tell the AI story? A movie, a media company or Marshall McLuhan?1. The movie: the AI doc, How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare dismissed because it failed to define AI.2. A media company: OpenAI bought the streaming show TBPN for hundreds of millions of d

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