Keen On

Is the idea of “progress” the propaganda of the ruling class? Yes, according to Samuel Miller McDonald, author of Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy it. McDonald traces this “narrative formula” back 5,000 years to the first market empires in Mesopotamia—societies that were parasitic from the start, extracting from nature for profit and expansion. The Mesopotamian epic Epic of Gilgamesh, McDonald argues, is essentially a celebration of deforestation. Fast forward a few thousand years and modern industrialization didn’t corrupt this system; it supercharged it. His solution? Sortition, agroecology, and dissolving elite power. “I have more faith in the general public,” he tells me about a contemporary world dominated by what he sees as extractive billionaires like Bill Gates and Peter Thiel, “than in people who seek positions of power and control.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substa

They certainly are an odd couple. Silicon Valley veterans Dave McClure and Aman Verjee have been friends and business partners for 25 years — first at PayPal, then at 500 Startups, and now at Practical Venture Capital. Yet they have quite different styles, personalities and, above all, politics. What they share, however, is an unvarnished take on the world — especially on the much mythologized Silicon Valley. In this refreshingly unfiltered conversation, they assess tech’s two most dominant titans: Sam Altman and Elon Musk. McClure describes Altman as someone he’d never want to face across a poker table — “there’s probably three layers of chess going on in his head.” Verjee breaks down the competitive psychology driving Musk as OpenAI’s valuation leapfrogs SpaceX. Plus Verjee makes sense of Google’s Gemini challenge to ChatGPT domination and McClure leaves us with one of his trademark blunt takes on Trump’s crypto conflicts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get

If you think the American Dream is dead, then you probably don’t know the story of Lu Zhang. Born in Mongolia and educated in China, Zhang came to Stanford as a graduate student, struck it rich as a young tech entrepreneur and is now managing partner of her own early-stage venture fund. In our conversation, Zhang makes a compelling case for why Silicon Valley remains the world’s most important innovation ecosystem—even as she warns that restrictive immigration policies threaten to strangle the very talent pipeline that made her remarkable success possible. She’s bullish on AI, bearish on energy infrastructure, and refreshingly candid about the capital market bubble that everyone in tech pretends doesn’t exist. So does Zhang really exist or is she a bot designed to promote the American Dream? She says she’s real. I believe her. Do you? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

We all know about the broken American Dream. But according to the American-based China scholar Minxin Pei, China’s dream is equally broken. In his new book, The Broken China Dream, Pie argues that the party-centric reforms of both Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping have, by definition, revived totalitarianism. So while he does acknowledge some material achievements of the communist revolution, Pei is ultimately skeptical of its long-term benefit to the Chinese people. The party is the problem, Pei suggests. It has broken the Chinese dream. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

For Peter Wehner, American politics is a tale of two Kellys. On the one hand, there’s the moral resistance of Arizona Senator Mark Kelly to what appears to be the gratuitous violence of American forces overseas. On the other hand, there’s the conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly who has openly fantasized about this bloodthirsty behavior. For Wehner, Megyn Kelly’s immorality is an excellent example of both the moral and intellectual decline of the right. Once a serious journalist who challenged (and upset) Trump in the 2015 debates, Kelly has devolved into what Wehner calls “darkly deranged” territory - a trajectory that mirrors the broader conservative movement’s abandonment of Burkean and Madisonian principles for Kelly-style shock jocks and neo-Nazi clowns like Nick Fuentes. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Dick Cheney died four weeks ago, but his dark legacy lives on—quite literally—at Guantanamo Bay. The human rights lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan was among the first attorneys to enter the notorious prison in 2004, and what he found there shattered every official justification for its existence. The “worst of the worst”? Most detainees were never even accused of acting against America. Many were simply sold to the Americans for bounties. The sophisticated interrogation program? Techniques copied from Chinese and Soviet methods designed to extract false confessions, not intelligence. In his new book Through the Gates of Hell, Colangelo-Bryan tells the story of his unlikely friendship with Jaber Mohammed, a Bahraini detainee who spent years in captivity for the crime of being an Arab man in the wrong place (Afghanistan) at the wrong time (post 9/11). Released without apology or compensation—just a form asking him not to “rejoin” organizations he’d never belonged to—Jaber now lives in Saudi Arabia with four childr

Who’s winning and losing in AI plays like a wacky race in that every week there seems to be a new leader. But that’s actually the wrong way of thinking about today’s AI revolution. The right questions are about the three Cs: Capability, Capital and Civics. That’s the lesson of Keith Teare’s latest That Was The Week tech newsletter which focuses on what he calls “the Year in Intelligence”. Nobody is winning the AI race, Teare argues, because it isn’t a race. Instead, it’s an endless innovation cycle without either a start or finish line. The three key questions are whether AI capabilities are solving real social and economic problems, whether we can fund a $200 trillion industrial rebuild, and whether the rewards can be equitably shared. Those are the questions we should be asking. Not who is winning or losing.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with othe

“May you live in interesting times,” is supposed to be a Chinese mantra. But according to Cambridge University China expert, Christopher Marquis, our current interesting times are actually a curse for businesses seeking stability rather than disorder. Is this, then, a moment for “strategic hibernation” Marquis asks in a provocative Harvard Business Review piece. Yes, he mostly answers. Businesses are indeed frozen by a perfect storm of uncertainty—overhyped AI, tariffs, and climate disasters. And speaking out in these turbulent times, he warns, can carry severe consequences -such as Jack Ma’s “cancellation” and the NBA’s exile from Chinese TV demonstrated after political missteps. Marquis, author of Mao and Markets, draws on his decade observing Chinese corporate survival tactics to counsel American companies navigating the stormy Trump waters: continue vital work like DEI internally, but avoid publicly poking the political bear. The Prohibition playbook offers a historical model—1920s brewers pivoted to soft

Few journalists, certainly non-Italians, know Italian football as intimately as The Athletic’ James Horncastle, co-author of The Soccer 100. For Horncastle, Italian football presents a fascinating paradox: a nation celebrated for beauty, fashion, and La Grande Bellezza built its footballing identity around winning ugly. Forged in post-war austerity, the Italians embraced a minimalist, counter-attacking style—yet their greatest defenders, Paolo Maldini and Franco Baresi, were anything but ugly players, mastering their craft with elegance and brilliance. Italy, Horncastle reminds us, has also produced a remarkable lineage of world-class goalkeepers, from Dino Zoff to Gianluigi Buffon. And despite its defensive reputation, the position Italians venerate most is the creative number 10—the fantasista embodied by Roberto Baggio, the subject of an upcoming biography by Horncastle. Then there’s Maradona, the “spiritual Italian” who found his perfect home in Naples, a city with a magical realism quality that matched h

Should we be giving thanks today for our capitalist system? Maybe. But we should certainly be thankful for a 1100-page book about the history of capitalism published this week by the Harvard historian Sven Beckert. Entitled Capitalism: A Global History, this magisterial history, which took Beckert 8 years to write, covers the last thousand years of our increasingly dominant capitalist world. In fact, Beckert suggests, capitalism has become so ubiquitous that most of us can’t imagine an alternative economic system. If we are fish, then it’s our water. So what, exactly, were the origins of capitalism? And is there really an alternative economic system? What, if anything, will come after capitalism? A happy (capitalist) Thanksgiving everyone. 1. Capitalism Isn’t Natural—It’s Historical Capitalism is a radical departure from previous forms of economic life, not the default state of human exchange. Because it’s historical, it had a beginning—and anything with a beginning can have an end.2. The Death of Capitalism

In The Soccer 100, the Athletic’s list of the greatest footballers in history, Lionel Messi is ranked number one. Perhaps. But he might also be its most boring—at least as a man. For Michael Cox, a contributor to The Soccer 100, Messi is undeniably great, but compared to his fellow Argentine Diego Maradona, he’s a nonentity. Football is theater. That’s why it’s the world’s game. So it’s the tragic narratives of a Maradona or a Jimmy Greaves we most remember and cherish. The game is beautiful because of the poetry, not the prose, of its stars. * Messi has ticked every box except one: being interesting. Cox voted for Messi as the greatest, but concedes Maradona and Cruyff “go above and beyond everyone else” in terms of personality. Messi left Argentina at thirteen, never had Maradona’s volcanic connection with his country, and may never be held in quite the same esteem at home.* Di Stefano was stolen from Barcelona by Franco—and the theft created football’s greatest rivalry. Before the heist, Real Madrid’s main

Maradona, Pele or Messi? It’s the eternal debate. Who is the greatest footballer of all time? According to The Soccer 100, The Athletic’s new book ranking football’s hundred greatest players, the answer is Messi. But the North London based contributor Amy Lawrence cast a dissenting vote: she chose Pelé, deferring to those who witnessed the Brazilian king’s dominance firsthand. The book’s official ranking places Maradona second, Pelé third, then Cruyff, Ronaldo, and Di Stefano. But the list reveals something more interesting than rankings: the impossibility of comparing eras. How do we judge players like Alfredo Di Stefano or Ferenc Puskas we’ve only seen in grainy footage against those, like Messi or Ronaldo, whose every touch has been televised? And why do great footballers like Diego Maradona —masters of intelligence on the pitch—sometimes become such flawed and tragic figures off it?1. The Pelé Problem: Why Nostalgia Matters Amy Lawrence voted for Pelé as number one, even though The Athletic’s collective r

Whither America? It’s the question that the Swedish writer Johan Norberg examines in both a recent Washington Post op-ed as well as his new book, Peak Human. What we can learn from history’s great civilizations, Norberg argues, is that they decline when they turn inward, away from both the outside world and innovation. “All Sparta, no Athens”, as he puts it. So what does that tell us not only about Trump’s America but also Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China? And what should we make of Europe, which is neither Sparta nor Athens? And when compared with China, Russia and Europe, Norberg’s vision of the American future seems relatively sunny. So maybe, with or without MAGA, the 21st century really will be the American century. * MAGA doesn’t fit any traditional conservative or liberal framework. It’s a radical ideology built around a strongman who has no patience for democratic process, rule of law, or compromise—precisely the institutions that classical liberalism and genuine conservatism have always sought to protec

I’ve spent this week in Washington DC where most people seem suspicious and sometimes even downright hostile about the future. Especially the supposedly “abundant” AI future being built in Silicon Valley. So where is this abundance going to come from? Some optimists, like The Great Progression’s Peter Leyden, believe there’s an emerging coalition of smart technocratic elites who will construct a more efficient state to engineer a new progressive era. That Was The Week’s Keith Teare, however, is suspicious of this kind of new New Deal, arguing that reform from above is, by definition, flawed. That’s all very well. But then, if the future isn’t going to be built by a new kind of smart government, then where’s it going to come from? The defiantly anti-top-down Teare believes, without much evidence, that it will somehow percolate up from what he calls “the masses”. I’m not so sure. Do we really want to trust our AI future to a vengeful digital mob?1. The Policy Gap is Real – But No One Knows How to Fill It Keith

Call it the Zakaria paradox. We live in revolutionary times, the CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria explains, and yet it’s the reactionary MAGA politics of resentment that is currently ascendant. It’s this paradox that laces Zakaria’s 2024 book, Age of Revolutions (just out in paperback), a narrative that traces the history of liberalism from the 17th century revolutionary Dutch Republic to today’s reactionary age of populist strongmen. The Trump playbook is clear, Zakaria notes: “the Chinese Are Taking Your Factories, the Mexicans Are Taking Your Jobs, the Muslims Are Trying to Kill You.” So how should progressive liberals, in our age of TikTok and OpenAI, respond with a more optimistic, forward thinking message about our revolutionary times? What is Fareed Zakaria’s escape from the Zakaria Paradox?1. Trump’s Genius Was Sensing the New Republican Base Trump was the only candidate in 2016 who abandoned the Reagan formula (free trade, balanced budgets, interventionist foreign policy) and rec

Did American eugenics really fuel the murderous euthanasia programs of the Nazis? Yes, according to Susanne Paola Antonetta, author of The Devil’s Castle, a history of Nazi eugenics and euthanasia. According to Antonetta, pioneering American eugenicists not only influenced Nazi thinking—Hitler himself corresponded with them and praised U.S. sterilization laws in Mein Kampf—but the New York City-based Carnegie Institute proposed gas chambers in 1918 as one solution for dealing with what eugenicists called the ‘hereditarily tainted’ population. While Germany’s response was uniquely brutal, Antonetta argues that American psychiatric thinking provided the conceptual framework for deciding whose lives had value and whose didn’t. Moreover, the notorious Nazi Aktion T4 euthanasia program killed 300,000 people with neuropsychiatric disorders, yet it was never properly prosecuted by the Americans at Nuremberg and remains largely unknown today.1. American Eugenics Provided the Blueprint The U.S. passed sterilization l

On November 20, 1925, Robert Francis Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. A hundred years later, Bobby might matter more than ever. Chris Matthews, longtime host of MSNBC’s “Hardball”, is already the author of one bestselling RFK biography, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit. And today, to celebrate the centennial of his birth, the pugnacious polemicist has a new book about RFK’s abiding relevance. In Lessons From Bobby, Chris Matthews gives us ten reasons why Robert Francis Kennedy still matters. Matthews’ favorite lesson? Bobby’s willingness to concede defeat. After losing the 1968 Oregon Democratic primary to Gene McCarthy, Kennedy graciously acknowledged his loss and paid tribute to his opponent. Matthews argues this is essential to democracy. “The loser is the only one who can give credential to the winner,” he notes. “Without that, the American people always have doubts.” Yes, in November 2025, Bobby matters more than ever. 1. Bobby’s Vulnerability Was His Strength Unlike JFK’s aloof, almost royal

25 movies and 0 hits: it’s been a particularly rough quarter for Hollywood. But as I discuss with the cultural commentator David Masciotra, it’s actually been a pretty strong quarter in terms of movie quality. From Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” and Jennifer Lawrence’s astonishing performance in “Die My Love” to a glitteringly bald Emma Stone in “Bugonia” and Ethan Coen’s “Honey Don’t!”, Hollywood is producing high quality, relevant material. One problem, however, is that Gen Z has abandoned cinema. Another is that Hollywood’s penchant for movies dominated by memorably uncompromising female leads like Stone and Lawrence might be out of step with a broader culture still imprisoned by a nostalgia for a dominant masculinity. Perhaps that’s why “One Battle After Another”, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as a pathetically redundant Sixties radical, is the one hit of the season. And it may also be why the excellent Springsteen biopic, “Deliver Me From Nowhere”, featuring a clueless Bruce trying to fi

It’s the ultimate financial nightmare. Kristin Collier, a young student in Minnesota, woke up one morning to discover that her mother had taken out $200,000 in Kristin’s name. Collier tells this story in What Debt Demands, a book about America’s student debt crisis that is both personal and political. Collier, who proudly defines herself as a “democratic socialist”, believes that student debt is a form of modern American serfdom. So what to do? She argues for massive debt cancellation, free public higher education funded by taxes on stock trades, and restoring bankruptcy protections that existed before 2005. But with the average American now carrying $105,000 in debt and one in four households living paycheck to paycheck, can any political initiative—a Mamdani democratic socialist style or otherwise—actually address this crisis before it triggers a nightmarish financial crisis in the broader economy?1. Student Debt Has Become Inescapable Serfdom Since 2005, student loans—both federal and private—are nearly im

There are those who ask why so many Americans speak Spanish. But according to the Latino media entrepreneur and historian Javier Marin, you might as well ask why so many Americans speak English. Over the last half century, the Hispanic community in America has risen from 3.5 to 62 million. In his new history of Latino media, Live From America, Marin charts how networks like Univision and Telemundo drove the meteoric rise of Hispanic America. This IS America, Marin insists - there are now 62 million Latinos shaping the country’s politics, economy and culture. Rather than a demographic trend about some curious minority, it’s the core reality of 21st century America.1. The US is now the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking country Only Mexico has more Spanish speakers than America. The US has surpassed Spain and Argentina. This isn’t an immigrant enclave - it’s a linguistic and cultural reality that’s permanent and growing. As Marin puts it: “Even if you deport three million, we still have 57 million.”2. Univ