Keen On America

Mount Rushmore, with its images of four Presidents carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota, is America’s most identifiable monument. It might also be its most monumental contradiction — which is saying a lot, given the country’s gaping contradictions. According to Matthew Davis, the mountain’s biographer, the history of the Rushmore project captures both the remarkable engineering achievements of early 20th-century America and the country’s bloody colonial and racist past. So Mount Rushmore, Davis suggests, is indeed as American as cherry pie. Only that pie and those cherries aren’t quite as sweet as the MAGA crowd might like to think. 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 other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

George Packer is one of the most celebrated non-fiction writers on contemporary America. So why, in his new book The Emergency, has he turned to fiction? You’d think, after all, that MAGA America’s surrealism would be an ideal nonfictional canvas for a writer with Packer’s observational gifts. But, as Packer explains, when facts fail a society, then - like Orwell or Atwood - a writer might be obliged to turn to fiction. This emergency, then, begot The Emergency. 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

The CNN anchor Carol Lin was on air on September 11, 2001 when the first plane hit the tower. So, in that now seemingly distant broadcast media age, she was the world’s first television journalist to break the news. But as Lin notes in her new memoir, When New Breaks, 9/11 broke traditional news media, both then and now. That morning was CNN’s finest hour — a network built for exactly this moment, with deep resources, high standards, and global reach. Yet it was also the beginning of the end - both for Lin’s career in journalism and for the mainstream television news industry. What followed was the rise of opinion panels, personality-driven shows, ubiquitous social media and the slow erosion of trust that leaves us asking: who do we believe anymore?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 other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Jessica was the good Mitford sister. The English aristocrat who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, then came to America and dedicated her life to social justice. According to her biographer Carla Kaplan, Mitford had the fierce, unruly life of a great muckraker. She was a Troublemaker in the best sense of the word. Unlike prudes like Upton Sinclair or Ralph Nader, she was hysterically funny—her voice as distinctive as Jane Austen’s or Virginia Woolf’s. She understood that bullies are driven by insecurity and paranoia, and she knew exactly how to punch them in the nose with her sharp upper-class English humor. So where are you now, Jessica Mitford? When the left desperately requires a good dose of humor and the right needs to be laughed at?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 other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

The American economy is a numbers game and those numbers are becoming more and more unfair. “30 years ago, if you were born in the bottom 25th percentile of wealth, you had about a 25% chance of dying in the top 25th percentile.” notes the venture capitalist Seth Levine. “Today you’ve got a 5% chance.” So what to do? What Levine wants is more rather than less capitalism. As he argues in his new co-authored (with Elizabeth MacBride) book, Capital Evolution, “if we want more people to have a stake in the economy, more people have to have a stake in the economy.” Thus the case for what he calls stakeholder capitalism. Only capitalism can save capitalism, Levine argues. Whether that’s Davos-style tautology or the way to right the wrongs of American capitalism is a more complicated question. 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

Numbers often tell the story best. Yesterday, we discussed today’s 95/5 reality in which 5% of Americans control 95% of the wealth. Today, in our conversation with Patrick Markee, author of Placeless, the key number is 2%. That’s the number of Americans who, on any given day, are homeless. But it’s a number, Markee insists, that doesn’t have to be. Mass homelessness, America’s most shameful open secret, is a modern phenomenon, he explains, triggered by Reagan’s neo-liberal policies. There’s nothing inevitable or necessary about it. And just as economic and political policy caused the crisis, it can also solve it. What’s most chilling is how normalized it’s become. Two-thirds of Americans are too young to remember a time when large numbers of people weren’t sleeping on sidewalks. In New York City alone, 35,000 children sleep in shelters every night—numbers not seen since the Great Depression. Future generations, Markee suggests, will look back at us the way we look back at those who tolerated slavery. How could we all have just walked on by? 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

Forget Pareto’s 80/20 rule. What AI is doing is producing a new rule in which 5% of society captures 95% of the value of this revolution. That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare calls this the “Great Compression”, describing it as the new math of our AI age. It’s creating a winner-take-most society of increasing inequality and outrage - the kind of situation which, historically, governments have stepped in to redistribute the rewards of a great technological leap forward. That isn’t happening today, however, thereby creating what Keith and I describe as a Code Red emergency for humanity. 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

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.substack.com/subscribe

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 access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 children, focusing less on bitterness and more on those rare moments when American guards showed him unexpected kindness. As the Trump administration revives the “worst of the worst” rhetoric against immigrants and once again sends people to Guantanamo, Colangelo-Bryan’s account is a warning from recent history: demonize a racial or religious group, and you will inevitably destroy innocent lives. The gates of hell have once again been opened. Will they ever be closed? 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

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 other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

“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 drinks using their core bottling capabilities, hibernating their alcohol-making assets until the environment changed. The exception? Brands built on moral values, like Patagonia and Dr. Bronner’s, shouldn’t go silent—but even they should seek strength in collective action rather than standing alone. Rather than poking the bear, Marquis concludes about our interesting times, become the bear and hibernate. 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

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 his unique genius. Unlike England, where football loyalties follow class lines, allegiances at Italian clubs like Roma and Lazio are drawn along political divisions—a legacy of Cold War tensions when Italy hosted Western Europe’s largest communist party. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Keen On America! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

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 Has Been Wrongly Predicted for 200 Years From Marx onward, critics have forecast capitalism’s imminent collapse. Beckert is skeptical of these predictions—most of capitalism’s history came after someone declared it finished.3. There’s No Going Back to the Pre-Capitalist Village The nostalgic alternative—returning to some pre-modern arrangement—is both impossible and undesirable. Feudal lords extracting surplus from peasants, subsistence farming at the margins of survival: there’s nothing romantic about scarcity and exploitation.4. We Have the Means to Solve Our Problems—We Lack the Political Will The capitalist revolution has given us unprecedented productive capacity. We could feed everyone, educate everyone, provide universal healthcare. The obstacles aren’t material—they’re political choices.5. AI Could Liberate Us or Concentrate Wealth Further—It’s a Political Decision If artificial intelligence delivers massive productivity gains, those gains could go to a tiny elite or be distributed broadly through shorter work weeks, better wages, expanded education. The technology doesn’t determine the outcome. We do.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 other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 rivals were Atletico. The loss of the era’s best player helped transform Barcelona vs. Real into what it is today.* England doesn’t produce geniuses because English football is suspicious of them. Cox: “There’s often been a desire to amalgamate mavericks into a system rather than bringing out the best in them.” The culture values hard work, scrappiness, physicality. Jimmy Greaves—perhaps the greatest English player ever—was left out of the 1966 final and later sold without his knowledge.* The 2026 World Cup may be a logistical and competitive disaster. Forty-eight teams, three countries, more group-stage matches than any previous tournament just to get down to thirty-two. Cox: “There’ll be a few teams there who with respect just won’t be able to compete.”* The greatest goal in history wasn’t Maradona’s solo run—it was Pele’s pass. Cox prefers the Carlos Alberto goal: team football as poetry, five number tens on the same wavelength, and the simplest possible finish after exhausting Italy with collective brilliance.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 other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 ranking placed Messi first. Her reasoning? “When I grew up, when you spoke to people who were older than you, there wasn’t a debate. Pelé was the best.” She deferred to those who witnessed him live—a rare admission that nostalgia might actually be wisdom, not sentimentality.2. Maradona’s Genius Was Inseparable from His Madness Lawrence describes Maradona as playing “with a madness...there was something of the kind of intense creative artist about him.” He was a street footballer thrust into Italian mafia management, hacked and kicked because defenders “couldn’t stop him by playing football.” His 1986 World Cup remains the most dominant individual performance in history—but his life became the cautionary tale of what happens when raw genius meets extreme celebrity.3. Cruyff Was the Anti-Ronaldo Johan Cruyff “encouraged everybody to think instead of just watch”—a philosopher-footballer who “was a bit of a rebel” and famously skipped the 1978 World Cup (possibly because his wife didn’t trust him with the ladies). Contrast that with Cristiano Ronaldo, whom Lawrence describes as “built by design”—the AI-generated footballer, all machine, no poetry. If Ronaldo represents modern football’s corporate efficiency, Cruyff embodied its lost intellectual soul.4. Women Journalists Don’t Play the Gender Card—But Maybe They Should Lawrence, possibly the only woman among the ten journalists who compiled The Soccer 100, says she “never played the women’s card” when arguing for players. But she admits that being a woman in a male-dominated field made her “just a bit more memorable” and perhaps allowed for “a slightly more sensitive line of questioning” that helped players relax. It’s a fascinating tension: rejecting gender as relevant while acknowledging its subtle advantages.5. The Impossibility of Comparing Eras Makes These Lists Meaningless—and Essential How do you compare Di Stefano (whom most people have only seen in grainy footage) with Messi (whose entire career has been televised)? Or account for the fact that modern players rack up goals against Lithuania and Andorra, while older players “never got able to pick up goals playing against” minnows? Lawrence acknowledges “there was never any pretense that this was some kind of definitive list”—yet we need these lists anyway, because they force us to articulate what we value in greatness itself.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 other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 protect.* Declining empires are the most dangerous. Russia is “all Sparta, no Athens”—a society that builds barracks rather than innovation, extracts resources rather than creates wealth, and fears any neighboring democracy that might give its own people ideas. Putin may sense this is his last chance to rearrange the world order.* China’s split personality may doom its long-term prospects. Deng Xiaoping borrowed from Athens—openness, experimentation, “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” Xi Jinping has reverted to Sparta—centralized control that can build electric vehicle factories fast but stifles the strange surprises that drive real innovation.* America’s saving grace may be its constitutional limits. The courts are the only branch doing their job right now, striking down unconstitutional overreach one case at a time. Republicans know there’s life after Trump—and after two centuries of championing the Constitution, they can’t simply throw it aside.* Europe is Rome without the military power. The EU’s great idea—an open continent that experiments with different solutions—is undermined by a Mandarin class in Brussels that insists on standardizing everything. That’s why great European startups keep moving to California.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 other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe