Keen On

The Harvard academic Elisa New is host of the much acclaimed PBS series POETRY IN AMERICA. Now in Season Four, the show has featured conversations about American poetry with Joe Biden, Herbie Hancock, Gloria Estefan, Shaquille O’Neal, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. While America isn’t normally considered a poetic nation, New’s show has brought poetry into the homes of millions of Americans. So when I caught up with New, I asked her whether there was such a thing as an American poem and what it is about America that inspires memorable poetry. Elisa New is the Director and Host of Poetry in America, director of the Center for Public Humanities at Arizona State University, director of Verse Video Education, and Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. New created Poetry in America, a PBS series, to bring poetry beyond classrooms into living rooms and onto screens of all kinds. The show can be seen on public television and streaming platforms, in schools and libraries, and on airlines. G

In November of this year, two particularly out of touch eighty-year old men will contest the US Presidential election. America, in other words, has an age problem. According to David Faris, author of THE KIDS ARE ALL LEFT, the country might be on the brink of a generational war between young and old. But there’s nothing apocalyptic about this imminent conflict, Faris believes. The majority of American kids, he argues, are politically on the left and their progressive activism will unite rather than divide the country. So the American future, Faris predicts, will be a civil peace rather than war. I hope he’s right.David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago, where he focuses on American political institutions, foreign policy, Middle East politics, and democracy. He is the author of "It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics" (Melville House Publishing, 2018) and "The Kids Are All Left: How Young Voters W

As founding director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute and author of the new ALIEN EARTHS: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos, Lisa Kaltenegger is one of the world’s most respected cosmologists. She believes that, with our revolutionary new cosmological technologies, we are likely to “discover” non-human life somewhere in the cosmos. What’s particularly astonishing about these kinds of conversations is how they no longer astonish us. Fifty years ago, the idea of discovering non-human life somewhere in the Universe was science fiction; today, it’s become the mainstream scientific assumption of leading cosmologists like Kaltenegger and the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. The issue is not if we’ll find these life-forms, Kaltenegger and Loeb are saying, but when. Astonishing. Lisa Kaltenegger is the Director of the Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell and Associate Professor in Astronomy. She is a pioneer and world-leading expert in modeling potential habitable worlds and their d

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

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

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

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 detailin

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

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

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

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 Pe

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 essay

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, bac

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

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

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

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 boa

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

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, sch

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 c