Keen On America

2,050 episodes — Page 20 of 41

Keen On America

The book that transformed how Americans think about economics: Peter Slen on the impact of Rose and Milton Friedman's 1980 defense of free market capitalism, "Free to Chose"

In defense of digital education: William B. Eimicke on how to level the learning curve and create a more inclusive and connected university

Is the current Gazan ceasefire a mirage?Jason Pack on Qatar, Iran, Biden, Hamas, Israel and the road to order in the disordered Middle East

Ten Ways of Winning Differently in the AI Age: Kate Bravery's truths about work, skills and education in the smart machine epoch

Digital Lennonism: Marga Hoek imagines how tech can solve some of the world's greatest challenges

The Last Ships from Hamburg: Steven Ujifusa on the race to save Russia's Jews on the eve of World War I

OpenAI , Sam Altman and the new war over capitalism in Silicon Valley: Keith Teare on the moral fight over technological progress triggered by the OpenAI brouhaha

Eight brilliant books to give this Xmas: Bethanne Patrick's list of literary gifts that will delight even the most discerning reader

The Shame of America's Six Million Homeless People: Kevin F. Adler on the forgotten humanity and broken systems causing today's American homelessness crisis

Why only humans can imagine the future: Margaret Heffernan on art, creative uncertainty and the insatiability of AI moguls like Sam Altman

How to protect our all-too-human superpower of creative thinking: Viktor Mayer-Schonberger on the guardrails needed to regulate big data companies like OpenAI

A Uniquely Glittering Literary Club: Christopher De Hamel on the remarkable people behind a thousand years of medieval manuscripts

So what, exactly, is "equality"? Darrin McMahon on the history, from antiquity to today, of this most elusive idea

Why women might make better spies than men: Anna Pitoniak on the art of espionage and the tradecraft of the spy novelist

How the October 7 tragedy might turn out to be a game changer in a good way: Israeli writer Assaf Gavron on why we must "try again" to make peace in the Middle East

Six all-too-human books about AI: Bethane Patrick on the mavens, mavericks and mythology writing our smart machine future

This was the week that the world dramatically changed: Keith Teare celebrates the beginning of the end of the pre AI age

A classic novel that not only shaped America but also captured the authentic voice of the African-American South: Peter Slen on Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God", an anthropological fiction set in a particularly rough period in American

Why genuine neutrality was mostly a myth in the Second World War: Neill Lochery on the flight of Nazi treasure through "neutral" countries after the war

How to write poetry on a smartphone: Best-selling poet and TikTok sensation Whitney Hanson on the anxiety of her generation and why social media makes physical events more "real"

The dark truth of Mexico as a mostly truant state terrorized by subsistence gangsters and haunted by hollow people: Azam Ahmed on the story of a missing daughter, a violent Cartel and a mother's quest for vengeance

Do great leaders make history or does history make great leaders? Moshik Temkin on the art of leadership from FDR, Malcolm X and MLK to Trump and Biden

How to accurately reconstruct the entire 13.9 billion year history of the universe: David Helfand on the power of atomic science to unveil the mysteries of unreachably remote time and space

Turning Mrs Dalloway into a novel set in the New York City of April 2017: Lisa Gornick on writing a New York story in the philistine age of the Taliban and Donald Trump

An Unprincipled Man for our Unprincipled Times: Rob Copeland on Ray Dalio, the billionaire Big Brother of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund on the planet

How early 21st century America resembles late 19th century Russia: John Gray on our post-liberal future

The double life of America's most notorious agent of betrayal: Major Garrett on Robert Hanssen, the FBI spy and weaver of a web of lies, both outrageously large and pathetically small

How to make the most of college: Ben Wildavsky on the art of using college to build a career

Why the American mass incarceration system is jarringly unamerican: Ben Austen on parole, prison and the near impossibility of change in the current American criminal justice system

In defense of literary flyover country: Peter Slen on Willa Cather's "My Antonia", the 1918 novel that captured the ideal of immigrant middle America

Orwell and his women: Bethanne Patrick on new feminist takes on George Orwell - the man , the husband and the writer.

Guilty by seven crimes and death by a thousand verticals: Keith Teare on Sam Bankman-Fried and Palo Alto, Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak, and Space X and X

How to get more women in science right now: Lisa Munoz on implicit bias, leaky pipelines, tokenization and other explanations for the persistent gender gap in science

Did the KGB really invent the idea of the Palestinian nation in the 1960s? Pierre Rehov on Iranian financed sleeper-cells in US universities and why he admires Hamas' "evil mind"

Overcoming the politics of black grief and white grievance in America today: Juliet Hooker on why American democracy is in desperate need of an radical expansion of its political imagination

A remarkable American hero at a time in which many Americans are no longer comfortable with the heroic ideal: Ronald C. White on the life of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the unlikely hero of Gettysburg

The problem with stories about the Holocaust is that they are told by the survivors: Daniel Finkelstein on the extraordinary coincidences enabling the survival of his mum and dad from both Hitler and Stalin

Zero to Zero: William Deresiewicz on what happens when the price of online content is driven down to zero

Where have all the Democrats gone? Ruy Teixeira on why the Democratic Party needs to tone down the volume on cultural issues if it's to rediscover its soul

How this month's "almost miraculous" Polish election might be a hopeful sign for democracy everywhere: Maciej Kisilowski on the promise and peril of representative democracy in a post authoritarian Poland

Does today's climate change crisis represent an existential threat to humanity? Antonello Provenzale contextualizes the contemporary crisis within a history of climate change from the earth origins to the Anthropocene

An enigmatic city teetering on the edge of the world: John Kampfner on Berlin, a city of ghosts and memories where he can still smell the Wall

A Theory of Everyone (but not Everything): Michael Muthukrishna on how human-beings are a new kind of animal and why we need to transform the world into the most efficient laboratory possible

Why Americans have the constitutional right to sometimes lie: Jeff Kosseff protects free speech in our digital age of misinformation

Eight literary tricks and treats to scare you this Halloween: Bethanne Patrick on "app-aritions", cultural ghosts and unfamiliarly familiar haunted houses

Why our cyborg AI future may already have arrived in the trained-on-jargon "person" of Sam Bankman-Fried: Hito Steyerl on pyramid schemes, on-boarding tools and the "mean" creativity of our AI age

Is the venture capital industry a big ponzi scheme? Keith Teare separates the hyperbole from the hysteria of VC techno-optimism

The American Shakespeare or trash of the veriest sort? Peter Slen on Mark Twain's ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, the adventurous story of a young man and young nation on a great and not-so-great adventure

A Graphic Diary of the War in Ukraine: Nora Krug on the contrasting realities of a Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist in the first year of Russian invasion

The Dismal Science investigates that most dismal of things - economic inequality: Branko Milanovic on visions of inequality from the French Revolution to the end of the Cold War