Keen On

In a “post-truth” world, who should we trust? According to Alex Edmans, one of the UK’s hottest business school professors, you should trust him enough to read his new book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics and Studies Exploit Our Biases - And What We Can Do About It. You should also trust me enough to listen to and/or watch this conversation with Edmans, but not enough to believe everything that I say. For example, describing Alex as one of the UK’s “hottest” business school professors could be an exaggeration. It might even be a lie.Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School.  Alex graduated from Oxford University and then worked for Morgan Stanley in investment banking (London) and fixed income sales and trading (New York).  After a PhD in Finance from MIT Sloan as a Fulbright Scholar, he joined Wharton in 2007 and was tenured in 2013 shortly before moving to LBS. Alex’s research interests are in corporate finance, responsible business and behavioural finance.  He is a Director of the American Finance Association, Vice President-Elect of the Western Finance Association, Fellow, Director, and Chair of the Ethics Committee of the Financial Management Association, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. From 2017-2022 he was Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, the leading academic finance journal in Europe.  Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, presented to the World Bank Board of Directors as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series, and given the TED talk What to Trust in a Post-Truth World and the TEDx talks The Pie-Growing Mindset and The Social Responsibility of Business with a combined 2.8 million views. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and World Economic Forum and been interviewed by Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox, ITV, NPR, Reuters, Sky News, and Sky Sports.  Alex serves as a Non-Executive Director of The Investor Forum, on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Responsible Investing, on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee, and on Novo Nordisk’s Sustainability Advisory Council. The UK government appointed him (jointly with PwC) to study the alleged misuse of share buybacks and the link between executive pay and investment. Alex previously served as Mercers’ School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, giving a four-year programme of lectures to the public. His series were on The Principles of Finance (2021/2), The Psychology of Finance (2020/1), Business Skills for the 21st Century (2019/20) and How Business Can Better Serve Society (2018/9). Alex’s book, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, was featured in the Financial Times Best Business Books of 2020 and won the Financial Times award for Excellence in Sustainable Finance Education; it has been or is being translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. He is a co-author of the 14th edition of Principles of Corporate Finance (with Brealey, Myers, and Allen). His latest book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It, will be published by Penguin Random House in 2024. Alex was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021. He has won 25 teaching awards at Wharton and LBS, won the Finance for the Future award for Driving Change in the finance community, and featured in Thinkers50 Radar.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

Museums, the distinguished anthropologist Adam Kuper argues in his new book Museums of Other People, are actually mirrors of ourselves. Rather than revealing curiosities about cultures of antiquity, they are actually living documents of power - particularly western, colonial power. Does this mean we affluent westerners should all feel horribly guilty ever time we go to the British Museum or the Peabody? Perhaps. But Kuper brings these old museums back to life by reminding us of their contemporary political significance. So maybe guilt isn’t such a bad thing, if it makes us think a little more deeply about how and why we value other people’s culture.Professor Adam Kuper (FBA) is an anthropologist and public intellectual. Most recently a Centennial Professor in this department and a Visiting Professor at Boston University, and a recipient of the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, he has authored or edited 19 books and published over 100 journal articles focusing on anthropological theory, the history of anthropology in the US and Britain, and southern African societies and cultures. He has made numerous appearances on BBC TV and radio, and reviewed regularly for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Wall Street Journal. His new book, The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions, Profile Books, was launched in America in April 2024.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

There are few people more adept at navigating America’s labyrinthine medical system than Robert Pearl. Yale medical degree, Stanford University professor, best-selling author, former CEO of the Californian insurance network Kaiser Permanente, Pearl has explored this byzantine confusion of private enterprise monopoly and government supported bureaucracy from almost every angle. And now Dr Pearl has a way of curing its profound dysfunctionality and shoving the archaic system into the 21st century. As Robbie argues in his new book, ChatGPT, MD (which he claims he “co-authored” with ChatGPT), Robbie is unfashionably bullish about AI’s potential to improve both our health and our working lives. Let’s hope he’s right.For 18 years, ROBERT PEARL, MD served as CEO of The Permanente Medical Group (Kaiser Permanente). He is also former president of The Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group. In these roles he led 10,000 physicians, 38,000 staff and was responsible for the nationally recognized medical care of 5 million Kaiser Permanente members on the west and east coasts. He is a clinical professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on healthcare strategy, technology, and leadership. Pearl is board certified in plastic and reconstructive surgery, receiving his medical degree from Yale, followed by a residency in plastic and reconstructive surgery at Stanford University. He’s the author of three books: Mistreated: Why We Think We’re Getting Good Healthcare—And Why We’re Usually Wrong, a Washington Post bestseller (2017); Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors & Patients, a Kirkus star recipient (2021); and his newest book ChatGPT, MD: How AI-Empowered Patients & Doctors Can Take Back Control of American Medicine (April 2024). All profits from sales of his books go to Doctors Without Borders. Dr. Pearl is a LinkedIn “Top Voice” in healthcare and host of the popular podcasts Fixing Healthcare and Medicine: The Truth. He publishes two monthly healthcare newsletters reaching 50,000+ combined subscribers. A frequent keynote speaker, Pearl has presented at The World Healthcare Congress, the Commonwealth Club, TEDx, HLTH, NCQA Quality Talks, the National Primary Care Transformation Summit, American Society of Plastic Surgeons, and international conferences in Brazil, Australia, India, and beyond. Pearl’s insights on generative AI in healthcare have been featured in Associated Press, USA Today, MSN, FOX Business, Forbes, Fast Company, WIRED, Global News, Modern Healthcare, Medscape, Medpage Today, AI in Healthcare, Doximity, Becker’s Hospital Review, the Advisory Board, the Journal of AHIMA, and more.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

Dr Judy Ho has a new book entitled The New Rules of Attachment: How to Heal Your Relationships, Reparent Your Inner Child, and Secure Your Life Vision. It’s one of those books which explain to us, in our therapeutic age of intense anxiety, how to stop f*****g ourselves up. Yeah, I know. These kinds of books, by “clinical and forensic neuropsychologists” like the telegenic Judy Ho, can be intensely annoying. But, as an proven expert in f*****g up one’s life, I rather liked Dr Judy’s arguments about “reparenting our inner child” and securing our “life vision”. And I was particularly intrigued by her theory of “Dialectical Behavioral Therapy” - a particularly wild Jungian child of Marx’s parental principle of dialectical materialism.Dr. Judy Ho, Ph. D., ABPP, ABPdN is a triple board certified and licensed Clinical and Forensic Neuropsychologist, a tenured Associate Professor at Pepperdine University, and published author. She penned Stop Self-Sabotage (published by HarperCollins in August 2019), a book detailing a scientifically driven six-step program which has been translated into 7 additional languages around the world. Her second book, co-authored with Max Dubrow, titled I’ll Give it to Your Straight-ish: What Your Teen Wants You to Know, was published by Flashpoint in November 2021 and contains Dr. Judy’s evidence-based tips to help parents raise healthy and resilient teenagers. Dr. Judy’s third book, The New Rules of Attachment, which focuses on healing insecure attachment styles at any age to optimize well-being, career, goal attainment, and relationships with family, friends, and colleagues, published by Hachette Book Group in March 2024. Dr. Judy maintains a private practice in Manhattan Beach, CA where she specializes in comprehensive neuropsychological assessments and expert witness work. She regularly appears as an expert psychologist on television, podcasts, radio, and contributes to other media including print and electronic periodicals. She was a co-host on the syndicate daytime television talk show The Doctors, co-host of CBS’s Face the Truth, and host of The SuperCharged Life podcast. Dr. Judy Ho is an avid researcher and a two-time recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health Services Research Award. She teaches masters and doctoral level psychology students, hosts an active research program to improve mental health care for high-need populations, and is the chair of the Institutional Review Board at Pepperdine University. Her treatment approaches integrate the scientific principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. She is a sought after keynote speaker and educator for national and local events including research, clinical, and corporate conferences and workshops for businesses, organizations, and schools.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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 suburbs haven’t got a great press recently on KEEN ON. First there was Benjamin Herold, author of Disillusioned, who found the dead body of the American Dream in the American suburb. And then David Masciotra, author of Exurbia Now, discovered political lethargy and reaction in the outer suburbs of American “exurbia”. Matt Hern, however, disagrees, finding in the suburbs the very political energy and engagement that he believes have been lost from the gentrified inner cities of London, Vancouver and San Francisco. Indeed, Hern, a Canadian urban activist and author of the new Outside the Outside, believes that the “sub-urbs” are the very vibrant places of political resistance and regeneration that can offer a positive model for progressive critics of neo-liberal urbanism. Matt Hern lives in Richmond, BC on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory.  He is the co-founder and co-director of Solid State Community Industries and has led many other community projects.  He teaches with multiple universities, continues to lecture globally and his books and articles have been translated into nineteen languages.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. 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 his early opposition to the Iraq war and other overseas misadventures in Bosnia, Haiti and El Salvador, Mark Danner is one of the most respected observers of American foreign policy. So it was a real honor to sit down with him and talk about his life both as an American and as a critic of America’s increasingly frayed relations with the rest of the world. Given his peripatetic life as a correspondent of overseas conflict, there’s a Homeric quality to Mark Danner, both as a man and as a writer. And so it wasn’t surprising that we began our conversation with Danner’s memories of how the Illiad inspired his life of travel and adventure.Mark Danner is a writer, journalist and educator who has written on war and politics for more than three decades. He has covered conflicts in Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the greater Middle East, and has written extensively about the development of American foreign policy during the Cold War and the post-Cold War era, focussing on human rights and democracy. He has covered every American presidential election from the 2000 vote recount in Florida to Trump’s “Capitol Coup” in 2021. His books include Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War (2016), Torture and the Forever War (2014), Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War (2009), The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History (2006), Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (2004), The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter’s Travel’s Through the 2000 Florida Vote Recount (2004) and The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (1994). Danner was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. Danner holds the Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate Education at the University of California at Berkeley, and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

Harper’s has a great cover story this month entitled “The Life and Death of Hollywood” by the intellectual historian, podcast and general muckraker Daniel Bessner. Film & tv writers face an existential threat, Bessner told me, from a Hollywood now controlled by four financialized mega-companies operated by MBA touting execs. But is this really new, I asked him, or is today’s dismal story just another rerun of the standard anti-capitalist narrative of creatives getting screwed by the money men? Yes, it is new, Bessner insists, because today’s existential crisis of Hollywood’s film & tv writers is the canary in the coal mine for an entire professional elite of lawyers, journalists and academics about to be hit by the AI powered tsunami of 21st century techno-capitalism. Daniel Bessner is currently the Annett H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Associate Professor in American Foreign Policy at the University of Washington. He is a member of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and previously held the Joff Hanauer Honors Professorship in Western Civilization.  He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an Associate of the Alameda Institute, and a Contributing Editor at Jacobin. In 2019-2020, he served as a foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign; in 2024, for unclear reasons, the Russian government sanctioned him. Daniel is an intellectual historian, and his work has focused on three areas of inquiry: the history and contemporary practice of U.S. foreign relations; the history and theory of liberalism; and, most recently, the history and practice of the entertainment industry. He is the author of Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Cornell, 2018), which you may order here. He is also the co-editor, with Nicolas Guilhot, of The Decisionist Imagination: Sovereignty, Social Science, and Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Berghahn, 2019), which you may order here; and the co-editor, with Michael Brenes, of Rethinking U.S. World Power: Domestic Histories of U.S. Foreign Relations (Palgrave, 2024), which you may order here.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

Elliot Ackerman has an intriguing essay in this issue of Liberties Quarterly on the use and abuse of mercenaries throughout history. Linking the history of the British in India, the US in Afghanistan and Russia in contemporary Ukraine, he ask what it means when mercenaries replace regular soldiers to fight supposedly “national” wars? It’s not usually good news, he suggests, arguing that for America to remain both a militarily and morally great power in the 21st century, it should consider reestablishing national service for all citizens, irrespective of gender, class or race. ELLIOT ACKERMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Halcyon, 2034, Red Dress In Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, as well as the memoir The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan, and Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize among others. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and Marine veteran who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

I have to admit I absolutely HATED Alex Garland’s new movie Civil War. I found it annoyingly trite, self-evidently packaged for an ahistorical cinematic audience addicted to the amnesia of mindless violence. That’s fine, of course, for most Hollywood productions, but not for a supposedly serious movie about the American future by a highly talented filmmaker. However, my Canadian friend, Stephen Marche, author of the much acclaimed The Next Civil War, clearly disagrees with my own (elitist) critique of Garland’s movie and I tried to keep my own views out of our conversation. As Marche also noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, Garland’s movie matters for reasons different from you think. “The Americans of 2024 can easily imagine a civil war,” Marche writes. And the step from imagination to reality, Marche warns, isn’t always as gigantic as we assume.Stephen Marche is a novelist and essayist, and the author of, among other works, On Writing and Failure and The Next Civil War. He has written features and essays for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Walrus and many others. He has collaborated with artificial intelligence on the first AI-generated novel reviewed in The New York Times, Death of an Author. His most recent novel, The Last Election, was co-written with Andrew Yang.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

Part of the purpose of our new KEEN ON AMERICA series is to (re)discover what it means to be an American. Many of the wisest observers of American life - from De Tocqueville in the 19th Century to Max Weber and Alistair Cooke in the 20th - saw the uniqueness of the American character in its can-do quality, in its hunger to fix the fixable. Christopher Schroeder is an archetype of this type of practical wisdom. As a media executive, tech investor, political insider, start-up entrepreneur and writer, the Washington DC based Schroeder has lived many lives over the last fifty years. What ties together all these accomplished lives is Schroeder’s defiantly non-ideological attitude. If it’s broken, Chris Schroeder wants to fix it. Maybe we should entrust him with fixing the America of the 2020s. Christopher M. Schroeder is a Washington D.C. and New York City based entrepreneur and venture investor. He co-founded HealthCentral.com, one of the nation's largest social and content platforms in health and wellness, backed by Sequoia Capital, Polaris Ventures, The Carlyle Group, Allen & Company and IAC Corporation. The company was sold to the health media publisher, Remedy Health, in January 2012 where Schroeder remained a board advisor.  Previously he was CEO of washingtonpost.newsweek interactive and LegiSlate.com, the b2b interactive platform on US and state legislation and regulation that he sold in 2000. He currently is an active investor in and advisor to top US venture capital funds and over a dozen consumer-facing social/media startups. He has had a career in finance and served in President George HW Bush's White House and Department of State on the staffs of James A. Baker, III and Robert B. Zoellick. He speaks regularly around the globe, and sits on the board of advisors of The American University of Cairo School of Business, the Jordanian incubator Oasis500, the Middle East online entrepreneur information platform and network wamda.com. He was named one of LinkedIn top 50 Influencers. Schroeder is also on the Board of Directors of the American Council on Germany, The Dean's Board of the American University School of International Service, and member of the French American Foundation and Council on Foreign Relations. He graduated with honors from The Harvard Business School, and magna cum laude from Harvard College. Schroeder is married to Alexandra Coburn and has three children.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

Like yesterday’s KEEN ON guest, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Dale Maharidge believes that liberals are “equally to blame” for what he calls, in his new collection of essays, America’s Doom Loop. Maharidge, whose Pulitzer prize winning writing about the gutting of the industrial midwest, inspired Springsteen’s iconic 1995 song “Youngstown”, barely recognizes the America of the 2020s. It was a different reality in 1980, he says, arguing that Americans of both left and right have written off the center of the country over the last half century. This is the tragic story of our age and there are few Americans who tell it straighter than Maharidge. For nearly four decades, Dale Maharidge has been one of America's leading chroniclers of poverty. Alongside photographer Michael S. Williamson, his book And Their Children After Them won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1990, revisiting the places and people of Depression-era America, depicted in Walker Evans's and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Also with Williamson, Maharidge produced Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, which Bruce Springsteen has credited as an influence for songs such as "Youngstown" and "The New Timer."Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

Behind all the partisan hysteria, a dramatic political realignment is taking place in America. As SECOND CLASS author Batya Ungar-Sargon told me, the Democrats have become the party of a mostly coastal global knowledge elite and the Republicans the party of the old (most white) working class. This new elite, Ungar-Sargon argues, have broken its contract with the working people by pursuing internationalist policies that hurt most working Americans. There’s obviously some Trumpian hyperbole here, but there is also more than an element of truth, especially in the context of the immigration “debate” and the unwillingness of the coastal elites to acknowledge the damage being done to American workers by both legal and illegal immigration. The New York Times’ David Leonhardt made a similar argument when he came on the show last year. Leonhardt, however, dresses up his argument in the palatable social scientific language of the ruling technocracy; Ungar-Sargon, in contrast, calls out the treason of the American elite in populist ways that will, no doubt, boil the blood of the new American ruling class encased in their coastal citadels of Brooklyn and Berkeley. BATYA UNGAR-SARGON is the opinion editor of Newsweek. Before that, she was the opinion editor of the Forward, the largest Jewish media outlet in America. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, the New York Review of Books Daily, and other publications. She has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, NBC, the Brian Lehrer Show, NPR, and at other media outlets. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

Finally some good news for progressive Americans. According to Natalie Foster, whose new book The Guarantee is out on April 23, Americans are about to get the economy they deserve. In The Guarantee, Foster gets inside the what she describes as “the fight” for our economic future and discovers the seeds of an American post neo-liberalism. This “New New Deal” began, she says, in the depths of the Great Recession of 2008, and matured during the COVID years when the government took financial responsibility for tens of millions of Americans affected by the pandemic. And now, she argues, both Trump and Biden are committed to an America in which the US state, rather than the market, determines the economic fate of its citizenry. “Something imaginable” is happening, she promises. I hope she’s right.Natalie Foster is the author of “The Guarantee” (April 2024, The New Press), and is president and co-founder of the Economic Security Project, a network dedicated to advancing a guaranteed income in America and reining in the unprecedented concentration of corporate power. She is a senior fellow at the Future of Work Initiative, an initiative of the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program. Foster served as digital director for President Obama’s Organizing for America and the Democratic National Committee. She built the first digital department at the Sierra Club and served as the deputy organizing director for MoveOn.org. She’s launched and run several successful progressive startups, and she has been awarded fellowships at the Institute for the Future, Rockwood Leadership Institute, and New America California. She is a board member of the California Budget and Policy Center, Higher Ground Labs, Liberation in a Generation, and Next River.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

I do enjoy our regular new books show with Bethanne Patrick, the astonishingly widely read book critic of Los Angeles Times. For April, she recommends freshly published books by Salman Rushdie, Erik Larsen, Amor Towles, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Patric Gagne & Leif Enger. Of these, she picks Leif Enger’s new novel, I Cheerfully Refuse, as the best book for April. But I’m so intrigued by Mohamed Amer Meziane’s The States of the Earth, that I’ve already booked him to appear on the show. I’d also like to get Patric Gagne on KEEN ON - after all, who wouldn’t want a psychopath on their show?Bethanne Patrick maintains a storied place in the publishing industry as a critic and as @TheBookMaven on Twitter, where she created the popular #FridayReads and regularly comments on books and literary ideas to over 200,000 followers. Her work appears frequently in the Los Angeles Times as well as in The Washington Post, NPR Books, and Literary Hub. She sits on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the host of the Missing Pages podcast.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

So what does it mean to be an American? Previous guests on KEEN ON AMERICA like Arlie Russell Hochschild and Thelton Henderson told me that they learnt to be an American during the civil rights unrest of the Sixties. Sara Paretsky, the creator of the incomparable female Chicago detective V.I. Warshawski, might agree. As Paretsky told me, learning what it meant to be American was shaped by her experience in the civil rights struggles in Chicago during the Sixties. And the issue of racial injustice remains with her today, featuring centrally in her new V.I. Warshawski thriller, Pay Dirt, a novel which returns returns us to the Kansas of the Civil War.Sara Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world in 1982 when she introduced V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only. By creating a detective with the grit and smarts to take on the mean streets, Paretsky challenged a genre in which women historically were vamps or victims. V.I. struck a chord with readers and critics; Indemnity Only was followed by twenty more V.I. novels. Her voice and her world remain vital to readers; the New York Times calls V.I., “a proper hero for these times,” adding, “to us, V.I. is perfect.” While Paretsky’s fiction changed the narrative about women, her work also opened doors for other writers. In 1986 she created Sisters in Crime, a worldwide organization to advocate for women crime writers, which earned her Ms. Magazine’s 1987 Woman of the Year award. More accolades followed: the British Crime Writers awarded her the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement; Blacklist won the Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers for best novel of 2004, and she has received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from a number of universities. Called “passionate” and “electrifying,” V.I. reflects her creator’s own passion for social justice. After chairing the school’s first Commission on the Status of Women as a Kansas University undergraduate, Paretsky worked as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side during the turbulent race riots of 1966. Since then, Paretsky’s volunteer work has included advocating for healthcare for the mentally ill homeless; mentoring teens in Chicago’s most troubled schools, and working for reproductive rights. Through her Sara & Two C-Dogs foundation, she also helps build STEM and arts programs for young people. The actress Kathleen Turner played V.I. Warshawski in the movie of that name. Paretsky’s work is celebrated in Pamela Beere Briggs’s documentary, Women of Mystery. Today Sara Paretsky’s books are published in 30 countries. Paretsky detailed her journey from Kansas farm-girl to New York Times bestseller in her 2007 memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In addition, Paretsky has written two stand-alone novels, Ghost Country, and Bleeding Kansas, set in the part of rural Kansas where Paretsky grew up. She has published several short story collections, most recently Love & Other Crimes, and has edited numerous other anthologies. Like her fictional detective, Paretsky has an adored Golden Retriever. Like alto Warshawski, soprano Paretsky doesn’t work hard enough at her vocal exercises, but the two women share a love for espresso and rich Italian reds.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

How to deal the American crisis of homelessness? Late last year, Kevin Adler, the San Francisco based homeless activist and author of When We Walk By, came on the show to argue that we should all personally interact with the unhoused. Alexander Gorlin, an award winning architect, and Victoria Newhouse, an architectural historian, look at the problem in a more traditionally top-down manner. Co-editors of the new Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture and the Future of Affordable Housing, their focus is on building more affordable homes for the unhoused, financed both through the public and private sectors. In contrast with Kevin Adler, who wants us to befriend the homeless, the upperclass Manhattanites Gorlin and Newhouse see the solution in conventionally political rather than personal terms. Neither of them see the problem as one of the American capitalist system itself which might not be surprising since they are both products and beneficiaries of this system. Alexander Gorlin is an architect, scholar, critic, and a leader in the design of affordable housing. Alexander Gorlin Architects are the recipients of the 2023 Best Downstate Residence of the Year award from the New York State Association for Affordable Housing (NYSAFAH).Victoria Newhouse is author of Rizzoli’s Parks of the 21st Century: Reinvented Landscapes, Reclaimed Territories.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

Few Americans of any color or creed have had a legal career as historically rich or significant as Thelton Henderson. One of the earliest African-American graduates of Boult law school at UC Berkeley, Henderson was the first black attorney for the civil rights division of the US Department of Justice, going down to Mississippi in 1963 where he become familiar with MLK and many other civil rights leaders. He later became a Federal judge where he pioneered historic legal decisions regarding racial, environmental and gay rights. So it was a real honor for me to have the opportunity to sit down with Henderson at his Berkeley home to talk about his childhood, his memories of the Sixties and why, in his view, the success of the civil rights movement was as dependent on radicals like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael as it was on MLK and other moderates. And then, of course, there is Henderson’s own relationship with America which, like so many African-Americans, is tangled and frayed. No, he confessed, he won’t be celebrating raucously in 2026 on the 250th birthday of the American Republic. Especially if, as Henderson fears, a certain Donald J Trump, who he likens to Hitler, is once again President. Judge Thelton E. Henderson is a world-renowned federal judge whose commitment to advancing civil rights spans six decades and three continents. He was the first African American lawyer assigned to field service in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, where he worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As the second African American federal judge in the Northern District of California and its first African American chief judge, he authored groundbreaking civil rights decisions.  Born in Louisiana, Judge Henderson left the Jim Crow South with his mother and grandmother for Los Angeles. He excelled academically and athletically, becoming one of the first African Americans to earn a football scholarship to UC Berkeley. After serving in the Army, he returned as one of two African Americans at Berkeley Law. He graduated in 1962 and joined the DOJ. At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Judge Henderson was posted in the Deep South to gather information on voter suppression and monitor opposition to Dr. King’s peaceful demonstrations. After Henderson loaned Dr. King his rental car for a Selma rally, Alabama Governor George Wallace inaccurately told the press that a “high ranking” DOJ official had driven Dr. King to Selma. Rather than worsen a public relations problem for the Kennedy Administration, Henderson resigned. Returning to California, Judge Henderson helped establish, and directed, one of the first federally funded legal aid offices in the U.S. He was appointed Assistant Dean of Stanford Law School and launched its pioneering minority admissions program, which was replicated nationwide. In 1980, Judge Henderson was appointed to the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California. His courageous decisions included declaring prison overcrowding unconstitutional; placing the California prison system under monitoring to prevent cruel and unusual punishment; ruling for the first time in U.S. history that gays and lesbians are entitled to equal protection; declaring unconstitutional a law that eliminated affirmative action; and upholding environmental protections. He has advocated for civil rights globally, helping develop strategies to end apartheid. After retiring from the court in 2017, Henderson taught at Berkeley Law, where the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice advances his vision for a better world. Among his many awards are the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award, the California State Bar Bernard Witkin Medal and UC Berkeley’s 2008 Alumnus of the Year Award. At over 90 years strong, Judge Henderson remains a beacon for democracy, liberty and equality.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

Everyone deserves a second chance. The former Harvard professor of psychology Marc D Hauser has had a controversial academic career, having been investigated in a high profile case in 2010 by Harvard for supposedly falsifying research data. But Hauser, who quit Harvard in 2011, remains prolific and has a new book out this week, Vulnerable Minds, focused - perhaps not uncoincidentally, given Hauser’s own history - on giving children second chances to overcome trauma and thus lead happy lives. In our conversation, I didn’t bring up Harvard’s accusations against Hauser of fabricating and falsifying data. So I’m noting it here, as a reminder that we all - children and adults alike - deserve second chances to fully realize ourselves.Marc Hauser, PhD, is an educator, neuroscientist, and the founder of Risk Eraser, a program that helps at-risk kids lead healthier lives. He is a former professor of evolutionary biology and psychology at Harvard University and the author of over three hundred papers.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

According to Dr Damon Tweedy there a connection between the historic struggle for civil rights and today’s struggle for more mainstream mental healthcare. In 2016, Tweedy wrote Black Man in a White Coat, his bestselling reflections on race and medicine. And now the Duke University based doctor is back with Facing the Unseen, a book making the case for what he calls “centering” mental health in medicine. In both his new book and this conversation, Dr Tweedy argues for a more comprehensive and integrated approach in which people afflicted with mental illness have a healthcare system that prioritizes their full well-being.DAMON TWEEDY is a graduate of Duke University School of Medicine. He is a professor of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine and staff physician at the Durham Veteran Affairs Health System. He has published articles about race and medicine in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). His columns and op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and various other print publications. He lives outside Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, with his family.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

Today, on the eve of the total lunar eclipse of the sun, the media is full of practical guides about how to tilt our heads at this once-in-a-lifetime celestial event. But what about the metaphysical questions about the eclipse? What should it mean to us humans, both in terms of our existence on earth and to our planet’s uncertain future? According to cosmological poet Christopher Cokinos, author of the new STILL AS BRIGHT: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow, the eclipse should make us humble. It’s a sneak preview, Cokinos reminds us, of the inevitable fate of the earth when, in a billion years, the sun will be extinguished. And, he reminds us, it should also be a reminder of our ever-so-small place alongside other species in the vastness of universe. Christopher Cokinos is the author of three books of literary nonfiction: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (Tarcher/Penguin 2000); The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars (Tarcher/Penguin 2009); and Bodies, of the Holocene (Truman 2013). In 2016, the University of Arizona Press published his co-edited anthology (with Eric Magrane) The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide, which won a Southwest Book of the Year Award. The poet Gabriel Gudding selected his collection The Underneath as winner of a New American Press Poetry Prize, and it appeared in 2019. With Julie Swarstad Johnson, Cokinos co-edited Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (Arizona, 2020), which was featured on Planetary Radio, PBS’s “The Open Mind” and in Scientific American. He’s also the author of a poetry chapbook, Held as Earth (Finishing Line). His new nonfiction book, Still as Bright: A Backyard Journey through the Natural and Human History of the Moon, is just out from New York independent Pegasus Books. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. 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