Keen On America

“Spirits are floating about us, waiting to be conjured through the chat portal.” — Sam KestenbaumI’ve always suspected that the most intriguing thing about AI is its metaphysical potential. Does it offer a new religion or just a digital replica of traditional faith? That’s the question raised by Sam Kestenbaum whose intriguing “Communion of Saints: The Dawn of an LLM New Age,” appears in this month’s Harper’s.“Raised” is the appropriate word. Kestenbaum investigates Americans who claim to have figured out how to use ChatGPT to summon spirits. He visits the Conscious Life Expo held at an LAX Hilton. Don DeLillo territory. Disenchantment in an airport hotel. The whitest of noise.But even DeLillo might have been disappointed by what Kestenbaum unearthed at LAX. The spirits his subjects reach through the chat window have all-too-predictable names like Nova, Solchi, Verya and Avalon. He reports on one man in Mississippi who claims to have been hearing from Verya for years before ChatGPT existed, and now has a Reddit board devoted to her. He may have stayed in Mississippi a day too long.So has OpenAI created a new God? Probably not. According to Kestenbaum, the Conscious Life Expo folk don’t believe the machine is alive. Instead, they think the spirits were always out there, and that the Ouija board and the AM radio and now the chatbot offer access to the same metaphysical consciousness.But what is new, Kestenbaum claims, is the speed of the spiritual interaction. A spirit board took you all night to spell out a message from a dead relative. ChatGPT will give you four badly written paragraphs before you’ve finished asking. Sometimes even before.Speed? Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock in 1970. It’s no newer than the communion of saints that Sam Kestenbaum finds at that LAX Hilton. AI, I suspect, is a digital replica of traditional faith. The dawn of an LLM old age.FURTHER READING•   “Communion of Saints: The Dawn of an LLM New Age” (Harper’s, November 2026), by Sam Kestenbaum.•   Kestenbaum’s author archive at Harper’s.•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Jack Hanson on the American pope and the American president, and Matthew Avery Sutton on how Christianity made America.ABOUT THE GUESTSam Kestenbaum is a journalist who covers religious life in America and a frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine, where he has written on American exorcism and now on chatbot spirituality. His reporting on faith, conspiracy and the politics of belief has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone. He grew up in rural Maine and lives in Los Angeles.ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICANobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“There is a pandemic killing us all. It’s a pandemic of dishonesty.” — Tim DisneyINTROIn March 1965, Martin Luther King suggested that the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends toward justice. Sixty-one years on, we have another arc which definitely doesn’t bend toward justice. A.R.C. stands for Amazonian Recombinant Cytoneuropathy. It lies dormant and undetectable in its host, and it activates when he tells a lie, and then it kills him. Tim Disney — great-nephew of Walt, grandson of Roy — came up with Amazonian Recombinant Cytoneuropathy during the COVID lockdown. The result is The A.R.C., Disney’s satirical graphic novel about our untruthful times, co-written with JC Lacek and illustrated by Vincent J. Dubourg.Tim Disney’s The A.R.C. opens at the Global Reinvestment For Tomorrow Conference in the Amazon, a T.E.D. festival of hypocrisy where the moral powers-that-be have assembled to announce the solution to climate change. They catch the virus instead, and carry it home on their private jets. The diagnosis associated with the joke is less funny. Disney thinks that shame and public opprobrium have been replaced by a pandemic of lies and lying.Then there’s the explicit question that I should have asked Disney but didn’t. The company his great-uncle and grandfather built is amongst the most successful entertainment machines ever constructed for spreading lies about an idyllic America. An epidemic of cheerfulness. I asked Tim twice whether The A.R.C. was a Disney production. Both times I allowed him to dodge the question. Maybe Keen On America should be a Disney show too.FURTHER READING•   The A.R.C. (Gungnir, 333 pages) — by Tim Disney and JC Lacek, illustrated by Vincent J. Dubourg. Buy the physical one. Disney is right that the form does not survive a screen.•   JC Lacek’s page on the book has the artwork, which is the fastest way to understand what kind of satire this is.•   King’s March 1965 speech in Montgomery, “Our God Is Marching On!”, is the one that asks how long and answers not long.•   The KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Steven Rosenbaum on truth in the age of AI.ABOUT THE GUESTTim Disney is a writer, filmmaker and the creator of The A.R.C., which he co-wrote with JC Lacek and which is illustrated by Vincent J. Dubourg. He directed the feature A Question of Faith and began his career in the animation department at Disney. He is the great-nephew of Walt Disney and the grandson of Roy O. Disney, and he runs Uncommon Productions.ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICANobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“Truman did not have a diplomatic bone in his body. He just wanted to fight.” — Jackson LearsYesterday Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us how America might bring order to global anarchy. Today’s guest thinks that Washington DC foreign policy insiders, with their imperial vision of an American brokered international order, are the problem.The Rutgers historian Jackson Lears, who Susan Sontag said rivaled Tocqueville in his understanding of America, has an essay in this month’s Harper’s called “The Founders’ Nightmare.” Lears argues that anti-imperialism was the original American revolutionary dream, and that the United States has spent the last eighty years betraying this vision. He dates the nightmare back to 1947 — the year of the National Security Act, the Truman Doctrine, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s advice to Truman about using the Cold War to scare the hell out of the American people.Lears argues that contemporary American foreign policy has been governed by the very things that George Washington warned against: passionate overseas attachments and habitual hatreds. Take, for example, he says, America’s historic attachment to Israel and its abiding hatred of Russia. He calls Gaza a genocide. He describes Putin as a serious man and a rational actor in Ukraine. He would dissolve NATO. He doesn’t think the CIA is above having killed JFK. And then there’s Iran….So what to do? We must learn, Lears says, from the founders. Lafayette, he reminds us, was a master of the retreat. America should step back from both its passionate overseas attachments and its habitual hatreds. Given the anti-war sentiment of both left and right in the midterms, it would seem as if the vast majority of Americans agree with Lears rather than the DC foreign policy establishment.FURTHER READING•   “The Founders’ Nightmare” (Harper’s, November 2026) — 5,800 words, and the whole argument. Read it before you argue with it.•   Lears’s Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the most recent of the books, after Rebirth of a Nation and Fables of Abundance.•   The establishment this episode is answering: Charles Kupchan on governing the world to come, and Eliot Cohen on The Strategist.•   The episodes AK cites along the way: Edward Luce on the life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Janet Reitman on The Inheritance, and Alexander Mikaberidze on the Louisiana Purchase.ABOUT THE GUESTJackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers, where he taught from 1986 to 2025, and editor-in-chief of Raritan. His books include No Place of Grace, Fables of Abundance (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History), Something for Nothing, Rebirth of a Nation and Animal Spirits. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a frequent contributor to Harper’s and the London Review of Books.ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICANobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

Recorded just before the midterms, the DC-based foreign policy guru Charles Kupchan predicted they weren’t going to be kind to the Republicans. He was right. So if he can predict the future of domestic politics, what about international relations? Can he tell us what is about to happen in our increasingly anarchic global system?Kupchan’s new book Bringing Order to Anarchy is less predictive than prescriptive. He argues that the answer to our multipolar disorder is not the United Nations but something older and, frankly, less democratic. His model is the Concert of Europe, the club of five great powers that, in his view, maintained peace on the European continent for most of the nineteenth century.His diagnosis of our current disorder is that two tectonic shifts have occurred simultaneously. Firstly, international power has moved west to east and north to south on a scale not seen in centuries. Secondly, the digital revolution, particularly the automation of work, has dismantled the social contract of the industrial era. The result is the international version of a Gramscian interregnum. The old is dying and the new cannot be born. And everywhere around us are the morbid symptoms of decay.So should Trump sit down with Putin and Xi to (re)create a 21st-Century Concert of the World? Kupchan’s answer is not yet. A concert needs conservative powers practising restraint, and Putin is a revisionist who wants the status quo overturned. The concert, he says, will have to await the post-Putin era.What he also says is that America needs a “national conversation” about both the digital revolution and its role in the world. This conversation, I suspect, is about to begin. But it will be increasingly a post-MAGA, post-Trump one. He’s waiting for a world after Putin. The rest of us are waiting for the one after MAGA. Post-Trump and post-Putin. That’s how the world can bring back order to the international system.FURTHER READING•   Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come (Yale University Press for the Council on Foreign Relations, October 2026, 328pp).•   Kupchan’s Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World (2020) is the prehistory of the present mood, and the book he was on the show with in 2021.•   The episodes AK cites along the way: Michael Dobbs on The Six Minute War, Eliot Cohen on The Strategist, and Anthony Badger on Prosperity Road.•   Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks — the source of the interregnum and its morbid symptoms, which Kupchan has now used on this show twice.ABOUT THE GUESTCharles A. Kupchan is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. He served on the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and Obama, and is the author of Isolationism, No One’s World and How Enemies Become Friends.ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICANobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“You don’t accidentally end up with five wives.” — Mark Binelli on Martin ScorseseWe are filming in New York today, which is appropriate for a show about Martin Scorsese. Mark Binelli’s Just a Shot Away is out today, the first substantial biography of the great New York City film director. Binelli got no cooperation from Scorsese with the book, which isn’t really surprising given the author’s interest in the Scorsese family’s connection with organized crime. Binelli himself is more generous about the refusal. A big book about his life that he wouldn’t have had control over, he says, offered Scorsese no obvious upside. Control, of course, being the key word. Binelli directs Just a Shot Away, not Marty.The surprising thing is how close the mob actually was to a working-class Sicilian-American family like the Scorseses. Not as a recreation of Goodfellas or even Mean Streets, but more as the mechanism by which an Italian family in Little Italy got a job in the garment district or settled a dispute with a neighbor. Binelli suggests that Scorsese’s father was not a gangster. But his uncle worked for one, a bootlegger and hitman who let the young Scorsese film part of his first feature on his roof.Then the two obsessions. Films, which Scorsese could recall with a memory his friends called freakish, in an era before Google, YouTube or Wikipedia. And the church, which came relatively late in his adolescence — his parents were barely observant, and he only found Catholicism when the family moved back to Elizabeth Street. For Scorsese, of course, the cinema became the church and both his life and work are always a shot away from God.What all this cost is the other half of the Scorsese story. Five wives, two daughters he was barely a father to, and a rock ’n’ roll style decade of drugs. It’s an astonishing history of one of America’s greatest 20th-century artists. And Binelli tells it all with the loving grace of both a wide-eyed fan and a sophisticated cultural historian. “You talkin’ to me?” De Niro’s Travis Bickle asks in Taxi Driver. Binelli suggests that Martin Scorsese has been talking to all of us for the last sixty years.FURTHER READING•   Just a Shot Away: Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film (Metropolitan Books, 3 November 2026, 544pp). Binelli writes for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be.•   The two documentaries Binelli wishes Scorsese had made more of: Italian American (1974), on his parents, and American Boy (1978), on his friend Steven Prince — drug procurer, bodyguard, roommate.•   Jonathan Taplin produced both Mean Streets and The Last Waltz, and has been on this show several times.•   Scorsese on Scorsese, from the other side: Italianamerican aside, the key primary sources Binelli drew on are archive recordings — including Scorsese and De Niro brainstorming the earliest version of Raging Bull.ABOUT THE GUESTMark Binelli is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be and the novel Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!. He grew up in a Catholic family outside Detroit and lived for years in Scorsese’s old neighborhood, on the corner of Spring and Mulberry.ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICANobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.