Keen On

On yesterday’s show, Keith Teare mourned the scarcity of utopian thinking in Silicon Valley. But maybe Keith was looking on the wrong coast. Robert Wolcott, who teaches at the University of Chicago and is the chair of the World Innovation Network, recognizes the value of utopian idealism in his co-authored new book, Proximity: How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-in-Time Transform Business, Society and Life. As he told me, the just-in-time tech revolution of generative AI, 3D printing, lab-grown meats, renewable energy, and virtual reality is going to change everything. But what Wolcott can’t predict, he confesses, is whether all this radically disruptive new tech will lead us to utopia or to dystopia. Robert C. Wolcott is Adjunct Professor of Innovation at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, and Adjunct Professor of Executive Education at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. From 2010 – 2019, he served as Clinical Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Kellogg. Wol

If you want to insult somebody in Silicon Valley, call them a “utopian”. It suggests a fantastical mind unable or unwilling to come to terms with reality. Utopians, it is assumed by self styled “realists”, are children. They’ve failed to grow up. But according to That Was The Week tech newsletter Keith Teare, the problem with today’s Silicon Valley is the scarcity rather than abundance of utopian thinking. Borrowing from an essay entitled Whither Utopia by the British technologist Rohit Krishnan, Teare argues that we need a new generation of Robert Owen style utopians for our age of AI, technological visionaries with the audacity to think big and dig deep to confront our most persistent problems. Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He wri

Heroism might be out of fashion, but that hasn’t deterred Jeremy S. Adams from offering what he calls Lessons in Liberty from the lives of ten extraordinary Americans. His list (yes to RBG, but no to JFK, FDR or MLK) will inevitably be controversial, but most of us don’t doubt that Americans need civic inspiration from their most distinguished citizens. And Adams, a much celebrated high school teacher in California’s Central Valley for the last quarter century, has the right combination of erudition, enthusiasm and patriotism to rekindle American innovation and moral excellence.Jeremy S. Adams was the Daughters of the American Revolution 2014 California Teacher of the Year and a finalist for the Carlston Family Foundation Outstanding Teachers of America Award. He is a social studies teacher at Bakersfield High School and was a longtime political science lecturer at California State University, Bakersfield.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best kno

We live in a erotically dissonant and carnally confused age. One the one hand, young people are having a lot less sex these days; on the other, they are listening intently to the music of erotically dissonant artists like Billy Eilish and Taylor Swift. I first came across the ideas of “erotic dissonance” and “carnal confusion” in “The New Sound of Sexual Frustration”, an intriguing Atlantic piece by their prolific culture critic Spencer Kornhaber “I've listened to Billie Eilish's "Blue" 400 times already”, the obsessive Kornhaber confesses. So what did the author of ON DIVAS learn about the carnal confusion of today’s youth? Is the music of Eilish and Swift just another explosion of youthful sexual frustration? Or is our age of anxiety creating something quite new - a culture of anxiety in which sex is always in our heads but not in our beds. Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers music and popular culture. Prior to joining The Atlantic as an editor in 2011, he wrote for Spin, Th

Is history, particularly the last thousand year history of North America, written by the victors? Perhaps. After all, as Kathleen DuVal, the author of NATIVE NATIONS reminds us, a thousand years ago, back in 1024, North America was inhabited by a rich mosaic of indigenous civilizations that in many ways mirrored European societies. Today, of course, things are quite different. But as DuVal, a much acclaimed historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, reminds us, in 1024, a sophisticated collection of North American indigenous communities inhabited advanced urban areas linked by diplomatic and trading networks. What’s particularly refreshing about DuVal’s narrative is that she sidesteps the colonial guilt schtick that all-too-often corrodes the telling of this story. The indigenous peoples of North America were probably not much better or worse than Europeans, she suggests. And that’s what makes them and their thousand year history so interesting.Kathleen DuVal is a Professor of History at the

There will be a British general election on July 4. “The most consequential of our generation” no doubt many politicians will remind the voters. But almost exactly 45 years ago, there really was a profoundly consequential British election. Back in May 1979, Mrs Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party won power in an election that ultimately changed everything about Britain. In 1979, (Sir) Tim Lankester was the first economic private secretary to Margaret Thatcher and, in his new book, INSIDE THATCHER’S MONETARISM EXPERIMENT, he writes about the promise, failure and legacy of this radical economic gamble. Yet in spite of the economic failure of Thatcher’s monetarist experiment, Sir Tim appears not a little nostalgic for a politician with the vision and will of the Iron Lady. “Mrs Thatcher never lied”, he reminded me about a politician whose success at the polls was rooted in the trust she established with the electorate. And it’s this trust that seems most scarce now, not just in the UK, but also in the US and

May might be almost finished, but you’ve still got time this Memorial weekend to begin reading one of Bethanne Patrick’s recommended new books. And this month, Patrick’s list is really scintillating - extending from fresh fiction by Claire Messud, Kaliane Bradley and Colm Toibin to new non-fictional books by George Stephanopoulos, Nina St. Pierre and Alan M. Taylor. So no excuses. Watch/listen to Patrick - the best read person in the world - and then beg, buy or steal one of her recommended new books.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.Na

Few people are better equipped to unravel the riddle of the Indian economy than the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan. As the co-author (with Rohit Lamba) of the just published Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity, Rajan lays out a strategy for Indian economic development that might allow the country to both maintain its much storied democracy and provide jobs and prosperity for its almost 1.5 billion people. While Rajan didn’t use the term “third way” in our conversation, there is a sense that he’s trying to navigate India between the Scylla of conventional western free market neo-liberalism and the Charybdis of the protectionism pursued by populists like Trump, Erdogen and perhaps the current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Certainly no great fan of Modi’s bureaucratic centralization, Rajan’s path to prosperity lies in decentralizing economic power to its federal states. It’s in the enlightened economic policies of states like Kerala, Rajan argues, that

Along with Ukraine and Gaza, Taiwan represents the third leg of our increasingly wobbly international political system. This week, for example, the Chinese navy put on military drills off the Taiwanese coast designed, supposedly, to test its ability to “seize power”. So is the world on the brink of a third world war between China and the United States? Perhaps, according to the Tufts university scholar and author of The Struggle for Taiwan, Sulmaan Wasif Khan, who compares the current highly militarized situation in the East China Sea with the situation in Europe before World War One. In our KEEN ON conversation, Khan brings some historical perspective to the situation in Taiwan, even comparing the current geopolitical tensions of the island with the Cuban situation during the Sixties. Sulmaan Wasif Khan holds the Denison Chair in International History and Chinese Foreign Relations at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He is the author of HAUNTED BY CHAOS: CHINA'S GRAND STRATEGY FROM MAO ZEDONG TO XI JINP

Another week in tech, another splashy AI scandal. This one involves OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the voice of Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson. Dear Sam, Keith Teare’s That Was The Week newsletter begins, as the SignalRank CEO tries to give the OpenAI CEO advice about how to minimize these sorts of scandals in the future. But I wonder if the Johansson-Altman spat is a very early example of the multi-fronted war that is about to erupt between the creative and tech economies. All Scarlett Johansson has is her face, her voice and her acting skills. If companies like OpenAI can replicate all these, then what becomes not just of Johansson but all the stars of the future? Keith Teare, however, isn’t too worried. He believes that AI offer a radical democratization of creative production tools. In the age of Sam Altman’s OpenAI, we will all have the technological tools to become Scarlett Johansson. Dear Keith - I hope you’re right.Keith Teare is a Founder and CEO at SignalRank Corporation. Previously he was Executive

The debate about the supposed “colonial” foundations of Israel goes on and on. But I wonder whether Jehuda Reinharz’s definitive new biography of Chaim Weizmann might help clarify the unintentional colonial foundations of the Zionist project. Reinharz explains that Weizmann made his name as a brilliant chemist in the UK, where he leveraged his equally glittering social networking skills into the publication of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. As Reinharz told me, it was Weizmann’s ability to appear like a British aristocrat that enabled him to successfully schmooze imperial Brits like Lloyd-George, Balfour, Astor and Mark Sykes (of Sykes-Picot fame). So even if his Zionist dream wasn’t formally designed as a colonial project, the fact that Chaim Weizmann had to dress up like British colonialist to get his way might have unintentionally resulted in Israel becoming a spooky replica of a European colony. To remix Marx, great men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.Jehuda Reinharz was

The digital revolution has few more persistent critics than John (Rick) MacArthur, the legendarily outspoken publisher of Harper’s Magazine. His skepticism about Silicon Valley, he confesses, came at the turn of the century when he overheard the gibberish sales talk from a rabble of start-up entrepreneurs in a San Francisco restaurant. In the quarter century since, MacArthur hasn’t been shy to argue that the internet is killing not just our culture and economy, but also our democracy. His latest crusade is what he considers to be the disturbing impact of screens on our cognitive skills . Kids learn better on paper, he insists. Which may be why Harpers - in contrast with the Atlantic and the New Yorker - is first and foremost a print rather than an online magazine. John R. (Rick) MacArthur is president and publisher of Harper's Magazine and an award-winning journalist and author. Under his leadership, the magazine has received nineteen National Magazine Awards, the industry's highest recognition. He writes mon

Bobi Conn’s life is an American story. Growing up in a desolate Kentucky holler, her father a drug addicted outlaw who abused her mother, Conn has reinvented herself as a successful writer and mother. But for all Conn’s unflinching honesty about her brutal upbringing, she remains proudly America - both in her love of the Kentucky land and her unwillingness to demonize rural America. Her American spirit, inherited from generations of poor folk scratching out a living on the land, is a defiant optimism and offers hope that America can once again reinvent itself in the 21st century.Bobi Conn was born in Morehead, Kentucky, and raised in a nearby holler, where she developed a deep connection with the land and her Appalachian roots. She obtained her bachelor’s degree at Berea College, the first school in the American South to integrate racially and to teach men and women in the same classrooms. After struggling as a single mother, she worked multiple part-time jobs at once to support her son and to attend graduat

Is it time to start worrying about the Germans again? Perhaps, at least according to Jacob Kushner, the author of LOOK AWAY: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, a book about an eleven year terror campaign by the National Socialist Underground (NSU). Kushner is ambivalent about the broad appeal in Germany of the NSU’s murderous violence against immgrants, but he does suggest that this recent chapter in German history suggests that the country isn’t quite the peaceful haven of toleration that some previous KEEN ON guests, like Peter Gumbel, believe it to be.Jacob Kushner is an international correspondent who writes magazine and other longform stories from Africa, Germany, and the Caribbean. He reports on migration and human rights, foreign aid and investment, terrorism and violent extremism, science and global health, climate change and wildlife, and press freedom.  His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Th

Jordan Elgrably, the Morrocan-French editor of the Markaz Review, wants us to read complex stories about the Middle East and North Africa that our simplistic newspaper headlines mostly ignore. In his new anthology, Stories from the Center of the World, Elgrably includes short stories from writers as diverse as Leila Aboulela, Amany Kamal Eldinn and Hanif Kureishi that reflect the rich mosaic of life in the region. Elgrably’s anthology offers a refreshing alternative to the standard apocalyptic slant of most conversations in Western media about the Middle East and North Africa.Jordan Elgrably is the Editor in Chief of The Markaz Review. For many years he worked in Los Angeles where he was a social entrepreneur, producer & the founding director of the former Levantine Cultural Center (est. 2001), renamed The Markaz, Arts Center for the Greater Middle East. The Markaz closed on May 31, 2020 (as reported in the Los Angeles Times) but returned in September 2020 as The Markaz Review. A former curator of public

I’ve always been a big admirer of Steven Johnson, whose prolific work focuses on the disruptive role of new technologies in shaping our past and future. In his new book, The Infernal Machine, Johnson writes about the turn of the 20th century, a period of feverish technology innovation and no less febrile political unrest. Our conversation focuses on the strange symbiosis between Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite, Emma Goldman’s anarchist violence and the invention of J. Edgar Hoover’s modern surveillance state. Good stuff from one of the world’s most eclectic thinkers. Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of thirteen books, including Where Good Ideas Come From, How We Got to Now, The Ghost Map, and Extra Life. He’s the host and cocreator of the Emmy-winning PBS/BBC series How We Got to Now, the host of the podcast The TED Interview, and the author of the newsletter Adjacent Possible. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons.Named as one of the "100 most

It’s a mind blowing story. In Fat Leonard, the Washington Post’s prize winning investigative journalist Craig Whitlock tells of a Malaysian contractor called Leonard Glenn Francis who successfully seduced up to a thousand US naval officers with prostitutes, fancy dinners and expensive gifts. The most astonishing thing of all, he explains, is that many Naval officers seems to have known exactly what Fat Leonard was up to. So what, I asked Whitlock, does this tell us about the state not just of the Navy but of all the armed services. Might there be other Fat Leonards also lurking in the closets of the US Air Force and Marines?Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Afghanistan Papers. He has worked for the Post since 1998 as a foreign correspondent, Pentagon reporter, and national security specialist, and has reported from more than sixty countries. His coverage of the war in Afghanistan won the George Polk Award for Military Report

Ever wondered why the never-endingTrump show seems simultaneously like a reality show remake and sequel? According to Chris Gavaler, the self styled Patron Saint of Superheroes, it’s because our view of reality itself has been shaped by all those “sequels, remakes, retcons and rejects” endlessly spewing out of Hollywood. Our addiction to the Stars Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Marvel franchises has “revised" our reality,” Gavaler, the co-author of the new REVISING OUR REALITY, suggests. So how we can seize back reality from these entertainment titans? Here, Gavaler is less instructive. Perhaps the Patron Saint of Superheroes has, himself, been watching too many inane Star Wars or Lord of the Rings remakes. Chris Gavaler is Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, USA. He is also the author of On the Origin of Superheroes: From the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1 (2015) and Superhero Comics (2017) and Creating Comics (2021), both published by Bloomsbury. Since 2021, he has

Given the situation in Gaza, some might interpret a new book entitled Judaism Is About Love to be either satirical or slightly chutzpahdik. But its author, Rabbi Shai Held, President & Dean of New York City’s Hadar Institute, is all too serious in his argument that the idea of love lies at the historic heart of traditional Jewish life. It’s an intriguing, if idealistic, interpretation. Christianity, he suggests, appropriated this idea, thereby creating what he considers the anti-semitic trope of Judaism being the religion of law rather than love. Rabbi Held describes himself as a religious Jew on the left and his embrace of love might be contrasted today with the violently unloving tribalism of many contemporary right-wing religious Jews.Rabbi Shai Held-- philosopher, theologian, and Bible scholar-- is President and Dean at the Hadar Institute.  He received the prestigious Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education, and has been named multiple times by Newsweek as one of the fifty most influential 

Last week’s KEEN ON America interview featured a conversation with R. Derek Black, the son of a KKK Grand Wizard, whose all-too-American life has been defined by radical personal reinvention and second chances. In contrast, Ali Velshi, host of MSNBC's "The Last Word", not only chose to come to America from Canada, but also chose to become an American citizen. For Velshi, a self-styled libertarian who confesses to holding five passports, the act of being America suggests the kind of small act of courage which he writes about in his eponymous new biography. Americanness, for Velshi, is chosen not given. It suggests our agency to fight for democracy. Being American is then, by definition, a form of political obligation. It requires small acts of courage from citizens like Ali Velshi.Ali Velshi is MSNBC’s Chief Correspondent and the host of Velshi. Previously, he was CNN’s Chief Business Correspondent and co-host of American Morning. Velshi has been nominated for multiple News and Documentary Emmy Awards.Named as