Keen On

Instagram superstar and “Here’s Where It Gets Interesting” podcast host Sharon McMahon has been dubbed America’s government teacher. In her first book, The Small and the Mighty, McMahon writes about twelve unsung Americans who changed the course of history. Some of her heroes are more unsung than others, but as she explains, they all - like Sharon McMahon herself - capture the moral agency & can-do spirit that reflects the best of America. Sharon McMahon is a former high school government and law teacher who earned a reputation as “America’s Government Teacher” amidst the historic 2020 election proceedings for her viral efforts on Instagram to educate the general public on political misinformation. Through a simple mission to share non-partisan information about democracy, Sharon has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers online, affectionately called the “Governerds,” who look to her for truth and logic in a society plagued by bias and conspiracy.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ mag

Back in April 2011, Saad Mohseni was made one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world. And who exactly is that, you might ask. I have to admit I hadn’t heard of him either. But as Rupert Murdoch wrote about Mohseni for that Time award, “he's the best-informed person in the world about Afghanistan”. Mohseni, in fact, is the Afghan version of Murdoch (without the wives & nasty right-wing politics). Even today, with the Taliban back in power, Mohseni remains amongst Afghanistan’s most influential media moguls. And he writes about all this in Radio Free Afghanistan, a memoir focusing on what he calls his “twenty-year struggle for an independent voice in Kabul”. Important stuff about a country that needs to be remembered in the West rather than conveniently forgotten.Described by the Asia Society as a ‘Game Changer’, Saad Mohseni has built a reputation as a dynamic and innovative entrepreneur. As Chairman and Chief Executive of MOBY GROUP, Saad has been widely applauded for his role in advancing pre

There are few more authoritative American journalists than the longtime NPR and PBS host Ray Suarez. So it was a real treat to sit down with Ray earlier this month in Washington DC to talk broadly about his and his family’s experience as American immigrants from Puerto Rico. Suarez is part of that golden generation of late twentieth century American journalists who exemplified both trust and authority in their coverage of the news. And listening to him today is a reminder of what America has lost because of its failure to replace guys like Suarez with a young generation of equally trusted and authoritative journalists. Ray Suarez is the host of the public radio program and podcast "On Shifting Ground," produced by Commonwealth Club-World Affairs and KQED-FM. His next book, on the modern era of American immigration, We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century, is published by Little, Brown. He has been a visiting professor of Political Science at NYU Shanghai, and the John McCloy Visiting Professor of A

Do you work too hard? Is it ruining your life? If so, then you may want to look at Brigid Schulte’s new book, Over Work, an exploration of why American work isn’t working and how our lives can be made more meaningful. Schulte traces the arc of our discontent from a time before the neo-liberal 1980s, when work was compatible with well-being and allowed a single earner to support a family, until today, with millions of our new precariat working multiple hourly jobs or in white-collar positions where no hours are ever off duty. And she imagines a future in which we will all be able to transform the daily grind of work into a more meaningful life.Brigid Schulte is the author of the bestselling Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time and an award-winning journalist formerly for the Washington Post, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize. She is also the director of the Better Life Lab, the work-family justice and gender equity program at New America. She lives in Alexandria, Virg

Few people are more familiar with America’s drug addiction crisis than Ryan Hampton. A former addict himself as well as the author of three books on the crisis, including the new Fentanyl Nation, the Las Vegas based Hampton is also running for the Nevada State Assembly in November. For Hampton, America’s failed war on drugs and its toxic politics are part of the same “uniquely American” problem of what he described to me as “reckless capitalism”. That’s why, he explains in Fentanyl Nation, 80% of the world’s illegal opioid drugs end up in the United States. And it’s why addressing America’s drug crisis, Hampton argues in Fentanyl Nation, simultaneously requires confronting what he considers to be the toxic politics of the country’s pharmaceutical and medical economy. A prominent advocate, speaker, author, and media commentator, Ryan Hampton travels coast-to-coast to add solutions to our national addiction and drug overdose crisis. In recovery from a decade-long opioid addiction, Hampton is regarded as a foref

Not everyone fears that AI revolution represents an existential event for humanity. Anindya Ghose, the Heinz Riehl Professor of Business at NYU’s illustrious Stern school, actually believes AI can positively impact our daily lives - from health and wellness, to work, education, even love and dating. In Thrive, a new book he co-authored with Ravi Bapna, Ghose explains how we can maximize our well-being in the AI age. It won’t be easy, he acknowledges. But, in sharp contrast with skeptics like Gary Marcus, Ghose believes that the AI revolution can nudge us into living richer, happier, healthier and more productive lives. Let’s hope he’s right.Anindya Ghose is the Heinz Riehl Chair Professor of Technology and Marketing at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business where he holds a joint appointment in the TOPS and Marketing departments. He is the author of TAP: Unlocking The Mobile Economy which is a double winner in the 2018 Axiom Business Book Awards and has been translated into five languages (

Working on Sheryl Sandberg’s team at Google, Megan Hellerer - who had just graduated top of her Stanford class - was on the fast track to become a young Silicon Valley superstar. A few years later, however, she had a breakdown and quit. Describing herself as an “underfulfilled overachiever”, she writes about this traumatic experience in her new book, Directional Living. Hellerer - who now runs her own career coach consultancy and includes Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a client - confesses that at Google she wasn’t living her life and thus was miserable. Her answer to what she calls the traditional “destinational thinking” of career development is in “directional living” - a concept that replaces the “achievement lie” with a more authentic and less quantifiable path to personal fulfillment. Megan Hellerer is a career coach and the founder of Coaching for Underfulfilled Overachievers. She has led hundreds of women, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to transform their lives by tran

Earlier this week, I interviewed the Australian AI expert Toby Walsh about Google’s new NotebookLM, a seemingly magical AI product that creates believable conversation between bots. Today, on our weekly That Was The Week tech roundup, Keith Teare and I agreed that this is going to profoundly change the way we not only produce media, but also how we imagine “trust” and “truth” in our synthetic media age. Referencing an optimistic essay by @Every CEO Dan Shipper entitled “Generalists Own the Future”, we agreed that products like NotebookLM will create what Shipper calls a “wicked environment” for generalists to create their own unique content. GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5 and the other LLMs means that we all have “10,000 Ph.D.’s available at our fingertips.” While that’s exciting news for know-nothing generalists like Keith and I, it’s less good news for all those narrow Ph.Ds beavering away in research libraries In the age of AI, these types of narrow specialists are the new proletariat. Luddites will, of cou

Last year, Michael Scott-Baumann, author of The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine and a peace activist at the Balfour Project, came on the show to talk about the problem to end all problems - the Israel-Palestine question. Today, Scott-Baumann explains, this problem has, if anything, metastasized into something even more shameful and insoluble. Gaza has been transformed from what he calls “the world’s largest outdoor prison” into a war zone and the two sides are no nearer what the Balfour Project calls “peace with justice, security and equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis.” Given this deeply depressing situation, it’s essential that analysts like Scott-Baumann keep giving us the bad news. There is nothing to be cheerful about here. The situation, Scott-Baumann reminds us, is unrelentingly bad. And it is likely to get considerably worse. Michael Scott-Baumann is a graduate of Cambridge University and has an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He has 35 years’ experience a

The AI revolution, long in hype but short in practice, is finally beginning to happen. In today’s WSJ, the tech writer Joanna Stern introduces her own Joannabot to review the new iPhone 16. Soon, of course, we will increasingly struggle to distinguished between the real Joanna and her Joannabot. And the same will also be true for yours truly on KEEN ON who will, in the not too distant future, be easily replicated (ie: replaced) by an Andrewbot. That, at least, is the view of Toby Walsh, one of the world’s most respected AI experts and authors. As Walsh explained to me (the real AK), he’s been playing around with Google’s new NotebookLM, a break-through product which, he says, amazed him as much as his reaction to GPT3. Toby is right. NotebookLM is an astonishingly good product which, in the not too distant future, will make most podcasters like myself redundant. My only consolation is that my wife works for Google. And she, I’m proud to say, is impossible to replicate. Toby Walsh is Scientia Professor of Arti

This is the final episode of a trilogy of critical conversations about the digital revolution. Earlier this week, Gary Marcus explained how to tame Silicon Valley’s AI barons. Then Mark Weinstein talked to us the reinvention of social media. And now we have the former member of the European Parliament & current Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, Marietje Schaake, explaining how we can save democracy from Silicon Valley. In her provocative new book, Tech Coup, Schaake explains how, under the cover of “innovation,” Silicon Valley companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. So what to do? For Marietje Schaake, in addition to government regulation, what we need is a radical reinvention of government so that our political institutions have the agility and intelligence to take on Silicon Valley.Marietje Schaake is a Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and at the Institute for Human-Centered AI. She is a columnist for the Financial T

And still they come. Every week, it seems, there’s a new book celebrating resistance to Nazism. The latest is Two Wheels to Freedom, Arthur J. Magida’s true story of Cioma Schonhaus, a 20 year-old Jewish art student in Nazi Berlin who successfully forged papers for hundreds of Jews. Yes, of course, Magida’s new book is, in part, about the triumph of human agency in fighting the evils of Nazism. But as Magida - who has written two other acclaimed books about resistance to Nazi Germany - explains, the story of Cioma Schonhaus can also be read as a parable of contemporary America. If Trump does indeed win the November election and begin deporting millions of people, Magida argues, then we might all have a moral obligation to mimic Cioma Schonhaus and become heroic resisters ourselves. Arthur J. Magida has been nominated for a Pulitzer and won multiple awards. His last two books—Code Name Madeleine (“absolutely gripping,” “tightly plotted”) and The Nazi Séance (“an astonishing story, brilliantly told,” “haunting,

Early social media pioneer Mark Weinstein is deeply disturbed by the current state of social media. He’s not alone of course, but in his new book, Restoring Our Sanity Online, Weinstein lays out what he boasts is a “revolutionary social framework” to clean up social media. The book comes with blurbs from tech royalty like Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Steve Wozniak, but I wonder if Weinstein, in his attempt to right social media through a more decentralized Web3 style architecture , is trying a fix yesterday’s problem. In tech, timing is everything and the future of online sanity, as Gary Marcus noted a couple of days ago on this show, will be determined by our ability to harness AI. Rather than social media, that’s what we now need a revolutionary framework to protect us from. MARK WEINSTEIN is a world-renowned tech entrepreneur, contemporary thought leader, privacy expert, and one of the visionary inventors of social networking. His adventure in social media has lasted over 25 years through three award-winning p

Yesterday, KEEN ON featured a conversation with the technologist Gary Marcus about how we can ensure that AI works for us. Today, on our regular That Was The Week tech weekly roundup, Andrew and Keith Teare discuss the role of human agency in determining our tech future. For Keith, optimism in itself is what he calls a “false God”. It’s not enough just to hope for a better future, he reminds us, echoing Gary Marcus, but we all have a responsibility to go out and build it. Perhaps. But as Andrew reminds us, our supposedly common future is vulnerable to the whims of imminent trillionaires like Elon Musk whose wealth and power is now eclipsing most of the world’s nation-states. 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 writes regularly for Tech

Few artificial intelligence experts have been as outspoken or prescient as the author and entrepreneur Gary Marcus. In his new book, Taming Silicon Valley, Marcus takes on the new AI barons of Silicon Valley - billionaires like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who are building an AI future that works for them rather than for the rest of us. In technology, Marcus argues, human agency is all important. So Marcus’ new polemic seizes back the mantle from these Silicon Valley barons on its insistence that AI must work for us.GARY MARCUS is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience. An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of six books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kl

As Donald Trump’s 79 year-old Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross was the oldest first-time Cabinet appointee in American history. Ross’ mom, however - Agnes, a lifelong New Jersey schoolteacher and proud Democrat - probably wouldn’t have been proud of her boy. As he acknowledges in his new memoir, Risks and Returns, Agnes always wanted her son to attend law school and was far from thrilled when Wilbur, then known on Wall Street as the “King of Bankruptcy,” became associated with Trump over one of his notorious bankruptcies. But as Wilbur confessed to me, he’s still thinking, at the grand old age of 86, of making Agnes proud by going back to law school. Although, of course, that plan might be waylaid if Trump is, indeed, elected in November and invites the Wall Street financier back into his administration. Before being named President Trump’s secretary of commerce in 2017, Wilbur Ross had already earned a reputation as the “King of Bankruptcy” over his 55-year career on Wall Street. Often working on high-pr

At the debate last night, Kamala Harris opened her remarks by talking about the need for America to fix its housing crisis. And crisis it is, at least according to Jerusalem Demsas, a staff writer at The Atlantic who has written extensively on the increasing scarcity and rising cost of American housing. In her new collection of essays, On the Housing Crisis, Demsas suggests that the best way to confront this crisis is to aggressively construct new housing. Build Baby Build, in other words. And, for Demsas at least, the sooner the better.Jerusalem Demsas is a staff writer at The Atlantic where she is an established voice on the housing crisis and local democracy. Her writing spans issues from infrastructure, labor economics, and federalism to race, gender, mobility and the politics of exclusion. She was recognized for her work in 2023 by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) with the ASME Next Award for journalists under 30. Demsas is also a Visiting Fellow with the Center for Economy and Society at

At the debate tonight, there probably won’t be much talk about American education. Which is a shame - at least according to Josh Cowen, author of The Privateers, a new book about how radical conservative billionaires like Betsy De Vos have created a culture war to sell their idea of school vouchers. It’s all part of the right-wing Project 2025 vision, Cowen suggests, of collapsing the church-state boundaries and making American public schools mirror the country’s inequities and injustices. The alternative, Cowen suggests, is for Federal or State governments to fund these public schools more generously, thereby allowing all Americans to get a fair and decent education. Josh Cowen is a nationally recognized expert and writer on topics related to school choice, teachers and teaching, policy analysis, and education politics. He has studied school vouchers, school accountability, charter schools, and parental decision-making as part of major research teams in Louisiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. His writing on sch

The Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic is one of the world’s leading authorities on inequality. In this KEEN ON America conversation, we talked about Milanovic’s interpretation of the history of American economic inequality - from slavery to contemporary capitalism. Why has America become so much unequal over the last fifty years, I asked. And today, in what Milanovic sees as a post neo-liberal age, how does he imagine the future of economic inequality?Branko Milanovic obtained his Ph.D. in economics (1987) from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. He served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write his book on global income inequality, Worlds Apart (2005). He was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003-2005) and has held teaching appointments at the University of Maryland (2007-2013) and at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at

The Brooklyn based Rafil Kroll-Zaidi is a Princeton educated reporter formerly on the editorial staff of Harper's Magazine. And he is another kind of reporter too - a citizen- sleuth who makes six figures annually by reporting polluting trucks in New York City. Writing about this experience for New York magazine, Kroll argues that, in theory, at least, it’s a “win-win” for both himself and the environment. In practice, however, as he confesses, things aren’t quite as black and white when it comes to making a decent living as a reporter of idling trucks on the streets of New York City. Rafil Kroll-Zaidi is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and has been writing the journal’s popular Findings column, among other features, since 2007. Graham Roumieu is the author and illustrator of the celebrated Bigfoot “autobiographies” In Me Own Words, Me Write Book, and I Not Dead. His drawings appear in such publications as the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, and the Walrus.Named as one of the "100