Keen On

“The lynching itself was the explanation. The adults who were participating in a communal homicide are the curriculum.” — Stacey PattonFor Halloween, a true American horror story. Last week, Joseph Kelly came on the show to argue that racialized American fascism has a prehistory running back to 1818. But today’s guest goes much, much further — both in time and in criminality. Stacey Patton wrote her doctorate on the racialization of American childhood and her new book is entitled Strung Up. It’s the story of how white America learned to lynch Black children.“Learned” is key. Patton writes about the people who turned up to watch the lynchings so endemic in American history. She traces the practice back across the Atlantic, to a Europe with centuries of history of public execution and the punishment of children as theater. And she sets out the two versions of 19th-century American childhood. The Lockean child to be nurtured and rewarded. The fallen child to be corrected and punished. White childhood and Black c

“They didn’t really ever create value for the company. They shifted value. They extracted value from the workers and communities and gave it to the shareholders.” — Chris MarquisINTROYou would expect the man publicly calling for the abolition of business schools to be a Bolshevik. But he is, in fact, the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School. It’s a little like an angry cleric proposing the demolition of the traditional church. As the Martin Luther of the Business School world, Chris Marquis pinned his argument in the New York Times on 18 October. Its headline proclaims that “it’s time to shut them down”. But he means abolish. Kill the B-School, Marquis says.His charge isn’t that MBAs are useless. It is that they are playing the game of bait and switch. Students arrive at B-School saying they want to change the world and, fourteen weeks later, their altruistic ambitions have narrowed to getting a corporate job and making money. Nobody lied to them. The system simply has its

“President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were, in fact, working with the CIA to kill Castro. The CIA wasn’t plotting behind the Kennedys’ back.” — Mark AllenA few days ago we had the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs on the show talking about the thirteen days in 1962 when John F. Kennedy saved the world from nuclear annihilation. That was him at his best, the Kennedy we want to remember. Today we have the JFK we want to forget. The one who was passing envelopes to the Chicago Outfit via Judith Exner, a twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, while his brother was busy putting mobsters in prison.Mark Allen, a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney, knew Exner. He flew out to California in 1991 to get the rest of the JFK story from her. She told him that she carried not only messages but money between Kennedy and the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, beginning before the 1960 election.All this is in A Dangerous Beauty, a new book Allen has written with the Los Angeles writer Tricia Aurand. Frank Sinatra i

“We have to be willing to lose elections. That is the very essence of a democracy.” — Michael G. MillerWill the midterms be free and fair? With only six days to go, these are now the questions about American democracy that we most fear. But much of this nervousness might be misplaced. Rather than militiamen in balaclavas, the real damage to American democracy was done quietly, thirteen years ago, by five Supreme Court justices.That, at least, is the view of Michael G. Miller, a Barnard political science professor. With the Brennan Center’s Kevin T. Morris, Miller has written An American Problem, a book accusing John Roberts’ 2013 Supreme Court of breaking Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Act. The book title is LBJ’s, from the speech he gave a week after Selma, when he told Congress that denying the vote was neither a Northern problem nor a Southern one. The law Johnson got is, according to Miller, the most effective Congress has ever passed. Its sword was section two, which let citizens sue if their voting

“Why would you want the guy who is good at coding to decide what we all do? Why would you want the guy who built the pyramids to actually run Egypt?” — Noam CohenThe war movie is back in vogue. Only this time it’s Hollywood turning its guns on Silicon Valley. There’s the four-hour Musk doc, an upcoming Sam Altman satire entitled Artificial, Nathan Fielder’s love/hate Elizabeth Holmes picture, and now The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s assault on the Facebook-Zuckerberg complex. The Sorkin movie is, of course, a follow-up to the 2010 biopic, The Social Network, which he wrote. Sorkin both writes and directs the sequel. If he turns it into a trilogy, Sorkin should probably star as Zuck.Brooklyn-based Noam Cohen, former New York Times tech writer and author of The Know-It-Alls, has seen both Sorkin movies. His critique is that The Social Reckoning is a passive-aggressive legal brief with the wrong defendant. He notes that Zuckerberg is barely in it. The movie’s heroes are a Wall Street Journal journalist and a

“It would be lovely to imagine that writing comes out of some instinct to compose works of great literature. It absolutely doesn’t. It’s a side effect of accountancy.” — Jonn Elledge“Borders Are Back, Baby” we proclaimed last year to celebrate Jonn Elledge’s appearance on the show to talk about his 2025 work A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders. And now the prolific Elledge, currently residing in the bosom of London’s lower east side in Bethnal Green, is back to talk about his latest book A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions. In Blighty, by the way, it’s entitled 31 Inventions That Built Our World. America gets the extra (brief) invention. Not that we’re counting.Elledge’s most prosaic invention isn’t exactly Archimedean. Writing was invented, he says, because somebody had to count the grain. Once ten thousand people live in one place you need not only a granary but a way of recording what’s in it. And of course, laws protecting grain owners from thieves.Et voilà (rather than eureka!).Thus came ma

“If you have a space of democracy that is closing, you have infinitely more leverage to act before it closes than after.” — Paul Rogat LoebThe Impossible Will Take a Little While is an anthology of essays, speeches, memoirs and poems about perseverance & hope in troubled times. Edited and introduced by Paul Rogat Loeb, the anthology came out in 2004, in the middle of the Bush years and the Iraq war, and now has 125,000 copies in print. Colleges assigned it across the curriculum. One of the founders of the Natural Resources Defense Council told Loeb he reached for it at the points where he had hit the wall and wasn’t sure he could keep going.In 2026, many of us feel we’ve hit a wall and aren’t sure we can keep going. So it’s apt that Loeb has reworked his book to suit what seems to be our particularly troubled times. Classic essays from Havel, Mandela, Neruda and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail all remain in the anthology. But this edition has also been comprehensively rebuilt. New work includes Navalny

“There are ways of being evil that are not fascist, but I don’t think there’s a way of being fascist without being evil.” — Joseph KellyINTROOn yesterday’s show, Anthony Badger, author of Prosperity Road, told the story of America’s transformation into a global superpower between 1920 and 1945. Today is the prequel. Joseph Kelly, author of The Biggest Lie, narrates the story of America between 1818 and 1915. It’s what he calls the “prehistory of American fascism”. There’s no prosperity here. Nor nostalgia. It’s a miserable story.The “biggest lie”, for Kelly, is the myth of white supremacy. He traces it back to a South Carolina congressman named William Smith who, in 1820, claimed that what the founders had meant by all men are created equal was that all men aren’t created equal. The convenient logic of Southern slave-owners. So America didn’t import fascism from Mussolini or Hitler, Kelly says. It’s actually a made-in-America product, the innovation of Southern racists. Thus the American white supremacist Mad

“Hoover is probably the most intelligent president the United States has ever had. That is not necessarily a guarantee of political success.” — Anthony BadgerGiven our preoccupation with American decline, it’s nice to sometimes remind ourselves of the reasons for the country’s rise to superpowerdom. Anthony Badger, the former Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge, has dedicated his life to charting the rise of the United States as the world’s leading economic and military power. His new book is Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt. There is, thankfully, no mention of Trump or MAGA in it.Badger’s interest in the United States came through Huey Long, who he read about as a schoolboy in gray nineteen-fifties Britain. What intrigued him was not Long’s showmanship but his delivery. Plenty of Southern populists made grand promises. But the Kingfish actually delivered on some.In Prosperity Road, Badger reminds us of America’s astonishing domestic transformation in the first

“Nobody in the United States wants to call it that. But I write history, and I know what a coup d’état looks like.” — John Ralston SaulAs the leaves turn, it’s becoming Canada week. Yesterday we had the Newfoundland-based Paris Marx offering an incisive critique of American Big Tech. Today, it’s my old Canadian friend, John Ralston Saul — novelist, essayist, former president of PEN International — speaking to us from the top floor of his house in an autumnal Toronto.Like another frequent Canadian guest, Stephen Marche, Saul offers a sharp critique of the United States which, he reminds us, is a geographically smaller country than Canada. Not that size matters, of course.Saul thinks of America as Rome. Canada’s great achievement, he says, is surviving as Rome’s neighbor for over two hundred years. In contrast with Chile, Mexico or Guatemala, Canada hasn’t been invaded or subverted by its clumsy imperial neighbor. When America sneezes, the rest of the continent gets pneumonia. Except Canada. Even in autumn.Is T

“The only reason to write history is because it helps us in the present. It’s not a vegetable. It’s not good for you.” — Katy SiegelINTROIt’s been three months since America’s 250th, although I’m guessing few are nostalgic for those official MAGA celebrations. That said, nostalgia is a feature rather than a bug of these types of anniversaries in America. Take, for example, What Was America? by Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, a new book about the art, culture and politics of the Bicentennial era. Siegel and Armani are nostalgic for nostalgia. We don’t do anniversaries as we used to, they worry.What Was America? opens with the African-American artist Benny Andrews, who feared exclusion from the Bicentennial celebrations and responded with a feverish six years of monumental paintings. Then there are the Bicentennial quilts which Siegel and Armani see as a metaphor for a nation whose strength has always lain in its diversity. Both leftist women in Northern California and the Daughters of the American Revolution qui

“Scale” is such a loaded word. In Silicon Valley, it’s the thing-in-itself, the holy grail. So what happens if you scale up “scale”? You accelerate to Hyperscale, the title of a new book by the big tech critic Paris Marx, who has turned Silicon Valley’s holy grail against itself.So what, exactly, does the H word mean? We say “big tech” which means everything and nothing. In his use of hyperscale, Marx means something very specific. His hyperscalers are multi-trillion-dollar conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta, who own the computation powering the AI revolution. These are the data center guys. Frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t.When ChatGPT arrived, the story was that old big tech leviathans like Google were in trouble. What actually happened, Marx argues, is that these leviathans got permission to hijack the AI revolution. They had the models and data centers. What they didn’t have was cover, because the regulators were watching. Somebody else shipped first, and so the big tech h

“My whole life has been coming up with ideas myself, and now AI can do that better than me.” — Bill GrossINTROBill Gross has been Mr Ideas Man since 1996 when he founded Idealab in Pasadena and started the hand production of startups. Today, he launches Idealab AI where the hand production of startup ideas is replaced by the algorithm. He fed seventeen million documents — news stories, expired patents, SEC filings, complaints on Reddit — through a thirty-thousand-token prompt built around the thirty-one methods he has used all his life, and out popped 1.2 million business ideas. The first batch cost a thousand dollars in tokens and produced thirty-two thousand ideas in an hour. He is giving all of them away.“Holy shit, my life is over,” he thought.Then he decided it was a superpower instead. Mr Ideas Man had come up with his greatest (and final?) idea.His showcase algorithm-produced idea is a five-dollar-a-month app that locks in today’s gas price by hedging the pooled subscriptions on the New York Mercantile

Two straight days of murder in America. Yesterday we were in Ozark, Alabama with Matt Kessler investigating the gruesome murder of two young women. Today’s guest has spent four decades investigating homicidal crimes and continues to have the time of his life. Harold Schechter has written more than thirty true crime books, his latest being Murder by the Numbers, an account of 199 chilling tales of true crime.When it comes to crime, I asked the Queens, NY–based Schechter, is America special? On the murder rate, yes. He was just in Iceland, where he asked a retired homicide detective whether the country had ever had a serial killer. Oh yes, the man said. Around 1325. Some Viking. The difference is firearms, Schechter argues, and a frontier that closed within living memory.But, he says, the appetite for murder isn’t uniquely American. Martin Dumollard was guillotined in a French village in 1862 before a crowd three times the size of the town. During the Terror, tradesmen sold guillotine earrings to the women and

Ah, the American South. So romantic. A few days ago we were in Clayton, Georgia, hearing about the dissident Lillian Smith, whose house was burned down for telling the truth about Jim Crow. Today we go south-west into Alabama, to Ozark, in the Wiregrass, the boondocks of the boondocks — a region named for a scrub that grows where nothing else will. Except for murder.The Wiregrass, as the Birmingham, Alabama–based journalist Matt Kessler explains, has poor soil, no cotton, almost no plantations, and therefore, none of the southern decorum either. He has spent nine years there researching The Wiregrass, a new true-crime investigation into a case nobody has satisfactorily explained.On 31 July 1999, JB Beasley turned seventeen. She and her friend Tracie Hawlett set out from the Alabama town of Dothan (peanut capital of the world) to go party-hopping in the Wiregrass. Searching for a field party with a keg, the two young women got lost. They stopped at a closed filling station in Ozark to use the payphone, and som

On 16 October 1962, exactly sixty-four years ago, photos of Soviet missiles on Cuba were shown to President Kennedy and the world faced nuclear Armageddon. The definitive account of that thirteen-day crisis, One Minute to Midnight, was written by today’s guest, the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs. He has now written about a crisis that few remember, but which he calls the climactic crisis of the Cold War.It happened in 1983. In September of that year, the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner with 269 people aboard, among them the most anti-communist member of the United States Congress. A few weeks later a Soviet early-warning computer reported that America had launched its missiles, and a colonel named Petrov, alone in a bunker at one in the morning, decided on his own authority that the machine was lying. In November NATO ran a nuclear release exercise called Able Archer, which Moscow took for the real thing.The difference between 1962 and 1983, Dobbs says, was twenty years of technology. K

Last month Adam Kirsch was on the show arguing that our current obsession with UFOs represents a new kind of religion. Today’s guest, the international relations expert Alexander Wendt, argues that today’s UFO obsession is the least of our problems. In his new book, The Last Humans (out today), Wendt’s worst-case scenario is that the UFOs are already here — and have been for some time.While the Pentagon has conceded only that the objects are real and that it cannot identify them, Wendt extrapolates further. A recognition of the presence of UFOs would bring, he warns, both a crisis of global security and the demise of the traditional state system. Worst of all, he fears, would be a descent into a Hobbesian-style war-against-all.Wendt is less worried about the invasion of the earth by little green men. If they had wanted to attack, he says, they would have done it when we fought with sticks rather than nukes. Instead, he worries about the social contract we have with the state. We obey the laws of the state bec

“We don’t have to choose between AI and no AI. The bigger choice is what type of AI we want, and who we want in control of it.” — Ben GreenINTROIn our age of AI, do we want to be ruled by all-knowing engineer kings? Not according to Ben Green, a professor of information and public policy at Michigan, whose new book, Algorithmic Realism, presents “data science practices to promote social justice”. Unsexy? Yes. And that, according to Green, is the whole point of algorithmic realism. Such a down-to-earth use of AI is super unsexy by design, he explains.Green’s critique is of Silicon Valley utopians who promote an algorithmic formalism. So he’s dismissive of the idea of “superintelligence” with its promise of curing cancer at the snap of a finger. He borrows from the sociologist Erik Olin Wright the idea of real utopias reached concretely, step-by-step. So he’s not exactly against algorithmic idealism. Just the lazy type that sees the world as an infinitely scalable laboratory.Green describes working as a data sc

Yesterday Janet Reitman described post-9/11 America, with its forever wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, as a tragedy in five acts. Today we meet a man who helped strategize one of those acts. Eliot A. Cohen was Counselor of the State Department under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 — in part responsible (“if that’s the right word” as he puts it) for America’s post-9/11 forever wars. Not that he feels deep remorse. Afghanistan was unavoidable, he says — no president would have refrained, and the Democrats would have done the same. While he was in favour of the Iraq adventure, he does admit that he never asked hard enough questions about whether America’s institutions were fit for that kind of war.His new book, The Strategist, is a short introduction to thinking about war and politics. So is Cohen a realist or idealist when it comes to thinking about international relations? There are two kinds of people in this world, he responded, half jokingly, people who divide things into two and people who don’t. And given Cohen

“They weaponized the fear, and the fear became institutionalized, and we internalized it.” — Janet ReitmanBack in 2022, the ex-Marine Elliot Ackerman came on the show to talk about The Fifth Act, his account of America’s humiliating end in Afghanistan. The New York Times Magazine contributing writer Janet Reitman’s new book, The Inheritance, also imagines post-9/11 America as a tragedy in five acts. But, in contrast with Ackerman’s military account, The Inheritance is an American story, focusing on what Reitman sees as the tragic fate of the country since September 11, 2001.Reitman watched the towers come down from her Brooklyn rooftop and later found pieces of American Airlines in-flight meals that had drifted across the river and landed in front of her building. She is unambiguous about what came next. The world was with America, she reminds us, but instead we sought violent, often irrational revenge. She was in Iraq on bases displaying NEVER FORGET posters for a war that had nothing to do with the thing we