Keen On

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 t

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

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/Pen

In this KEEN ON show, the music historian Sheryl Kaskowitz, author of A CHANCE TO HARMONIZE, narrates how FDR and his team of New Dealers saved America from the Great Depression - one folk song at a time. And she explains that there would have been on popular American folk music - no Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez or Bob Dillon - without FDR's Hidden Music Unit and its radical ambition to reinvent American communities in the depths of the 1930s. Sheryl Kaskowitz is a writer, editor, and audio storyteller based in Berkeley, California. Her new book, A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Tried to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time, comes out in April 2024 from Pegasus Books. Since earning her PhD from Harvard, Sheryl has written extensively about music in American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the role that music can play in civic life. Her first book, God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song, was published in 2013 to positi

Is there such a thing as an economic bubble? Not according to That Was The Week author Keith Teare who argues that all bubbles reflect innovation and promise (even if you lose your shirt by investing in tulips or dotcoms). While Keith still doesn’t seem to have met a bubble he wouldn’t invest in, his argument probably does make sense for the current “AI bubble” which many skeptics today are writing off as just more irrationally exuberant techno-babble. For all his critique of techno-pessimism, Keith himself sounded pessimistic this week about the future of innovation, arguing that it’s China now, rather than America, that captures the really disruptive spirit of Silicon Valley. Keith Teare is a Founder and CEO at SignalRank Corporation. Previously he was Executive Chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd - A UK-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. He was also previously the founder at the Palo Alto incubator, Archimedes Labs. Archimedes was the original incubator for TechCrun

Is Trump really like Hitler? Last month, we did a show with the Hitler scholar, Peter Range, who argued that the Adolf Hitler of 1924 had much in common with the Donald Trump of 2024. And now we are back on the Trump-Hitler comparison train with Henk de Berg, author of the new Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying. What ties Trump and Hitler together, de Berg argues, is their ability to fabricate reality (ie: lie). Both men, de Berg explains, are masterful performers on a political stage. Both, he insists, are supremely skilled in operating in a society in extreme flux. Henk de Berg is Professor of German at the University of Sheffield, UK. His previous books include Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary Studies, which received a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award.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.

In TRIPPED, his intriguing new history of drugs and postwar America, the German writer Norman Ohler makes LSD both a symbol and a metaphor for the history of the Cold War. Linking Nazi Germany, the CIA with what he calls “the dawn” of the psychedelic age, Ohler presents LSD — the revolutionary psychedelic drug invented by the Swiss pharma giant Sandoz which the Nazi tested as a “truth serum” in Dachau — as a weapon used by the American military-industrial complex to fight the Soviets. As with most anti Soviet CIA plots, of course, it was a bit of a farce - although Ohler’s thesis certainly offers an alternative way of interpreting trippy Cold War movies like Doctor Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate. And Ohler reminds us of the psychedelic age’s most lasting legacy - its influence on West Coast countercultural figures like Ken Kesey, Stewart Brand and Steve Jobs and their invention of the personal computer and internet.Norman Ohler is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He is the au

How to put America back together? Few people have thought more about this Humpty Dumpty style challenge than Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the 2016 classic Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. So when I sat down with Hochschild for my new KEEN ON AMERICA series, we began by talking about what it means to her to be American and whether she’s ever felt like a stranger in her own land. Born in 1940, my sense is that Hochschild has spent much of her life grappling with what it means to be a progressive American in a mostly conservative country. The Berkeley based Hochschild has made two significant journeys to the American South - the first in early Sixties as a civil rights activist and the second, fifty years later, to research Strangers In Their Own Land. She talked about both journeys as a form of confronting and then resolving her ambivalence about what it means to be an American. These journeys, then, were her way of building what she calls “empathy bridges” with anot

Like all immigrants who fled to the U.S. to escape civil war, Ismar Volic has a deep personal appreciation for American democracy. And Volic - a Bosnian refugee from the Yugoslavian civil war who is now director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College - fears that American democracy has now slipped into existential crisis and might only be fixable with the help of math. Thus Volic’s new book, Making Democracy Count, which explains how mathematics can not only improve voting and representation but can even be used to help fix a gerrymandered electoral map that reduces the value of many American votes to near zero. Ismar Volić is professor of mathematics and director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College. His work has appeared in publications such as The Hill, Cognoscenti, and Education Week.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 K

Becca Rothfeld’s much heralded new collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, challenges the American Puritan values of self-control and abstinence. Why have one meal when you can three, she asks, praising the New York City diner who orders and eats several plates of the same pasta dish. On the one hand, Rothfeld’s embrace of mess is a polemic against Marie Kondo and her fetishization of tidiness and order; on the other, it’s a challenge to the stuffiness of an American coastal intelligentsia for whom smallness and moderation have become not just moral but also political virtues. Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post’s Book World. Before joining The Washington Post, she served as assistant literary editor of the New Republic and worked toward her PhD in philosophy at Harvard, where she focused on aesthetics and the history of philosophy. Her debut essay collection, ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL, is now out. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ mag

According to David Masciotra, the real battleground for the future of American democracy lies in that no-man’s land between suburban and rural America - what he calls the “exurb”. It’s here, Masciotra argues in his new book EXURBIA NOW, that we can find the pathologies of a 21st century American totalitarianism. The America that Masciotra finds in these outer suburbs is the antithesis of Tocqueville’s small town America - a fragmented, alienating place without public space or communal interaction. What Masciotra uncovers is Marjorie Taylor Greene’s America and this grey often overlooked zone between suburb and countryside, he suggests is the Gettysburg of American democracy, the battleground which will determine the fate of the Republic in the 2020’s and beyond.David Masciotra is an author, lecturer, and journalist. He is the author of I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (I.B. Tauris, 2020), Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky), Barack Obama: Invisible Man (Eyewear Publishers,

The Daily Mail called him the “Sith Lord” of the art world, the New York Times annointed him as the art world’s Patron Satan”, while the Wall Street Journal described him as the dealer the art world “loves to hate”. Californian voters aren’t too keen on him either, with only 0.24% voting for him in January as the Republican candidate for Diane Feinstein’s Senate seat. Yes, we’re talking about Stefan Simchowitz, the notoriously disruptive Los Angeles based entrepreneur who has built an enormously controversial art empire. So why, I asked Malibu’s self-styled enfant terrible, does almost everyone in the art world seem to hate him so much? And does he really believe, as he supposedly told another interviewer recently, that the US government should round up 150,000 homeless people in California and stick them into military camps?Stefan Simchowitz (born October 8, 1970) is the Los Angeles based art collector, art curator and art advisor who runs Simchowitz Gallery. He is a vocal proponent of social media as a leg

Is it really conceivable that Apple will withdraw its products and services from the entire European Union? What might sound absurd is actually conceivable, That Was the Week’s Keith Teare says, because of what he sees as the EU’s increasingly autocratic behavior toward big tech US companies like Apple. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, has been doing the math, Keith warns EU bureaucrats, and is recognizing that it’s simply not worth being in a market where regulatory fines are making its European Union presence unprofitable. In other tech news of the week, Keith evaluates Sam Bankman-Friedman’s 25 year prison sentence and Amazon’s latest $4 billion investment in AI “startup” Anthropic. Keith Teare is a Founder and CEO at SignalRank Corporation. Previously he was Executive Chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd - A UK-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. He was also previously the founder at the Palo Alto incubator, Archimedes Labs. Archimedes was the original incubator for TechCrunch

On the front page of her website, the family therapist and psychologist B. Janet Hibbs quotes Kierkegaard’s observation that “we live our lives forward, but understand them backwards.” But her coauthored You’re Not Done Yet: Parenting Young Adults in an Age of Uncertainty seems to reverse that Kierkegaardian narrative. Many contemporary young Americans, Hibbs explains, are living their lives backwards by retreating home to live with their parents and surround themselves with all the certainties of their former childhood. It’s an odd paradox that, in supposedly the most “advanced” country in the world, American kids are unlearning how to grow up. Parents, Hibbs tells us in her new book, should understand and welcome these adult-children back to their nests with open arms. But Hibbs, who sports an M.F.T. (Marriage Family Therapy) and the obligatory Ph.D, is part of that growing therapy-anxiety complex which, some might argue, are both the cause and beneficiary of our “age of uncertainty” (which is, of course,

In his 1887 polemic, On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche suggested that the idea of good and evil, of morality itself, might have been born by slaves. Candida Moss, who holds the Edward Cadbury Chair of Theology at the University of Birmingham, riffs off this Nietzchean idea by suggesting that enslaved Christians, as well as artisans and women, might have actually written (or, at least, transcribed) the Bible. This precariat of antiquity were, Moss argues in her new God’s Ghostwriters, not much different to the Amazon delivery men and Uber drivers who now make up the labor force of our digital economy. It’s an intriguing argument especially, as Moss gleefully acknowledges, because it will offend many American evangelicals who assume that the Bible was written by white men like Luke, Peter, Mark, Paul, John and Ringo. Happy Easter everyone. Enjoy your Cadbury chocolate eggs and the Resurrection/Passover. Candida Moss is Edward Cadbury Chair of Theology at the University of Birmingham, prior to which she ta

Surveillance capitalism is ubiquitous. If we’re not being watched by Google or Facebook, then we are watching movies warning about how these digital platforms are watching us. David Donnelly’s new documentary, COST OF CONVENIENCE, trots all the familiar charges that we’ve heard over the years from KEEN ON guests like Shoshana Zuboff , Jaron Lanier, Nick Carr and Roger McNamee. It’s good stuff, I guess, even if we’ve heard these existential warnings many times before. The problem is what to do about it. Like most Silicon Valley critics, Donnelly’s fixes - from more education and regulation to greater self control - aren’t very realistic. Ultimately, I guess, we’ll find something else to worry about. The real question, however, is if we forget about the screen, will the screen forget about us? DAVID DONNELLY is an American filmmaker renowned for his impactful documentaries in the classical music realm, notably his award-winning debut, Maestro, featuring stars like Paavo Järvi, Joshua Bell, Hilary Hahn, and Lang

Few conservatives or Christians have stood up to Donald Trump with the coherence and bravery of The New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner. “I think morality is to Trump what color is to a person who is colorblind”, Wehner told me. And, in contrast with the ethically monochromatic Trump, Peter Wehner’s moral palette is akin to a sophisticated painter. In a wide ranging KEEN ON AMERICA conversation about his life in and out of Republican politics, Wehner explains why there is nothing “conservative” about Trump or “Christian” about many right-wing evangelicals, and how the Republican party is now flirting with ethical bankruptcy. Regular KEEN ON viewers know that I don’t care much for the Trump-Hitler comparison, but if there’s any truth to it, then Peter Wehner could be the Dietrich Bonhoeffer of conservative Christian resistance to Trumpism. Peter Wehner is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and the Atlantic. He is a senior fellow at the the Trinity Forum who served in Ronald R

Do we really need more jeremiads exposing the Randian greed of Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg & Travis Kalanick? Rob Lalka’s THE VENTURE ALCHEMISTS is about how big tech turned profits into power. but this has been the alchemy of American economic life for two hundred years. What isn’t clear to me is how we are supposed to distinguish good big tech guys like Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, & Reid Hoffman from the evil Peter Thiel, Travis Kalanick and Elon Musk. Lalka’s fetishization of “ordinary people” might be well meaning, but it doesn’t really address today’s alchemic challenge of democratizing the economic benefits of technological innovation. Rob Lalka is Professor of Practice in Management and the Albert R. Lepage Professor in Business at Tulane University’s A.B. Freeman School of Business and the Executive Director of the Albert Lepage Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He has twice received the A.B. Freeman School’s Excellence in Intellectual Contributions Award and is the

All the tech news this week seems to be about how Big Tech is, for better or worse, getting BIGGER. There’s the Department of Justice anti-trust case against Apple, a hail-Mary attempt by Biden’s DOJ to transform to the high-end iPhone into a lower-end Android device. There’s Microsoft’s “acquisition” of InflectionAI, orchestrated by Reid Hoffman, both a co-founder of InflectionAI and a Microsoft board member. There’s a new Saudi $40 billion AI fund. There’s Elon Musk’s Neuralink announcement of an astonishing breakthrough in brain implants. So what becomes of the little guy, the genuine innovator, in this top-down world of titanic capitalism? That Was The Week’s Keith Teare still thinks there’s hope for start-ups without billions of dollars of backing from Musk, Hoffman or some Saudi prince. I’m not sure. My sense is that Big Tech isn’t much different now from Big Pharma or Big Oil. The glory days of the tech start-up are probably over. Tech superpowers now have the economic and political power to mostly elu

As we approach Easter and Passover, it’s worth noting that our mainstream monotheistic creeds are based on a belief in what Professor Chris French, the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths college at London University, would call “weird s**t”. So as French, the author of new MIT press book THE SCIENCE OF WEIRD S**T, explained to me, maybe we shouldn’t be that surprised with all the weird s**t about pizza parlors and extraterrestrial invasions that seems to have invaded all but the most scientific minds. Nobody seems to believe anything anymore, French explains. But it’s an anti skeptical science of the networked 21st century rather than the skeptical science of the 18th century Enlightenment. Happy Easter and Passover, everyone!Professor Chris French is the Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and of the Committee for Skeptical