Keen On

Remember that time in 1977 when Jesse Jackson debated KKK grand wizard David Duke on national tv? As David Masciotra reminds us, it was one of those now forgotten moments from the recent past that can help bring some clarity to today’s American politics. In particular, Masciotra argues, the 1977 debate underlines the idiocy of Kamala Harris’ refusal to go on Joe Rogan show. As Masciotra explains, this primetime tv debate in which Jackson crushes Duke shows why progressives like Harris should always take on ideological enemies Joe Rogan. Civil argument matters, Masciotra insists. Even if it involves jousting with people whose views you consider beyond the pale. David Masciotra is an author, lecturer, and journalist. He is the author of Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy (Melville House Publishing, 2024) I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (I.B. Tauris, 2020), Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky), Barack Obama: Invisible Man (Eyewear Publishers, 2017), and Metalli

Avid reader, global investor and German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, who devoured around 150 books in 2024, engages in a spirited New Year discussion about literacy, geopolitics, and the power of deep reading. Despite hand-wringing about America's reading decline, Schroeder remains optimistic about young entrepreneurs' intellectual curiosity, particularly in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Discussing his favorite 2024 reads, including Annie Jacobsen's chilling nuclear war scenarios and Oscar Jonsson's analysis of Russian military thinking, Schroeder illuminates how books offer a dramatically richer understanding of the contemporary world’s complexity than social media's soundbites. Pivoting to China's rising influence, the Washington DC based Schroeder notes how Chinese businesses are outcompeting Western rivals through superior service and pricing. His key message: America must focus on competitiveness rather than containment in an increasingly multipolar world swimming in what he

While most of us can at least hope for a happy new year in 2025, the same can’t be true for the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. That, at least, is the view of Michael Scott-Baumann, author of The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine. Given the ineffectiveness of the United Nations and the unwillingness of the United States to rethink its alliance with Israel, Scott-Baumann suggests, nothing is likely to change this year. So while there will be lots of talk of an Abraham Accords 2.0 under Trump, he predicts, the world’s most intractable problem will only become more miserably intractable in 2025. Indeed, given the increasing power of Netanyahu’s right flank and Trump’s indifference to the human suffering in Gaza and the West Bank, Scott Baumann suggests, things will probably only get worse for the Palestinians this year. 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 as a history teache

Marshall Poe runs the New Books Network, a podcasting platform incorporating over 25,000 individual podcasts from thousands of podcasters and many millions of downloads. 2024, he acknowledges, was a bad year for podcasting because Apple changed their metrics so that the audience numbers for most podcasts fell precipitously overnight. And 2025, he suggests, probably isn’g going to be much better with winner-take-all podcasters like Joe Rogan hogging most of the audience and profits. How could the internet be made more democratic again so that podcasters on platforms like the New Book Network and entrepreneurs like Marshall Poe can make a living from their work? Poe isn’t particularly hopeful, but suggests that a reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 might represent a beginning to restoring the leveling promise of the digital revolution. Marshall Tillbrook Poe is an American historian, writer, editor, and founder of the New Books Network, an online collection of podcast interviews with

Gary Marcus is amongst the world’s leading skeptics on the AI revolution. So it’s worth taking note when Marcus admits that “of course we are getting to AGI eventually”. No, he says, artificial general intelligence (AGI) won’t take place in 2027 or perhaps even 2050. But it will happen, he confidently predicts, by 2100. So that only underlines Marcus’ argument, made in his acclaimed 2024 book Taming Silicon Valley, of the desperate need to regulate AI before it regulates us. And it also contextualizes our short term preoccupation with corporate pioneers of generative AI technology like OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and xAI. As Marcus argues, it’s likely that the dominant AI technology that will get us to AGI by the end of the 21st century hasn’t even been invented yet. Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence, well known for his challenges to contemporary AI. He is a scientist and best-selling author and was founder and CEO of Geometric.AI, a machine learning company acquired by Uber. A Profes

Is it entirely coincidental that some of the leading figures in the MAGA movement - including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks - all grew up in Apartheid South Africa? Not according to Simon Kuper who raised the alarm about “Musk, Thiel and the shadow of apartheid South Africa” in a bracing September Financial Times column. But this is a reactionary shadow, Kuper warns, not just haunting the United States but most of the world. Kuper’s faith in globalization, he acknowledges, seems to be in retreat everywhere. And 2025, he laments, is only going to deliver more depressing news for those us who still consider ourselves liberals. So if the progressive age of global politics is over, I asked Kuper, then what is left for us to cherish in the new year?Simon Kuper is a journalist who writes for the Financial Times and publishes in newspapers and magazines around the world. He is one of the world’s leading writers on soccer. His book Football Against the Enemy won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year awar

Our job is to make Trump fail. That, at least, is the view of the writer Joseph O’Neill, whose essays in the New York Review of Books offer not just a powerful critique of Trump but also of the contemporary Democratic party which he describes as a “cancerous thing”. There’s a desperate need, O’Neill believes, for the Democrats to reinvent themselves as an populist alternative to Trumpism. And that means, he says, addressing the problem of angry young men who, he says, have become “cannon fodder” for social media personalities like Joe Rogan. Joseph O’Neill is the author of the novels The Dog, Netherland (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Breezes, and This Is the Life. He has also written a family history, Blood-Dark Track. He lives in New York City and teaches at Bard College.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

As the author of the well-received Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet, Seth Rogovoy knows his Dylan. So his critical review of the A Complete Unknown, the much hyped new movie featuring Timothee Chamalat as a young Dylan, is worth noting. Rogovoy questions the whole point of the movie, arguing that nobody - neither enthusiasts nor newbies to Dylan - learn anything from A Complete Unknown. And as the music historian Rogovoy - whose latest historical biography is of George Harrison - explains, this cinematic failure to present Bob Dylan in any kind of coherent framework probably reflects our broader contemporary cultural crisis. A Complete Unknown is a blob of a movie for our age of ubiquitous elevator music. Culture is simultaneously all around us and nowhere at all. The timing may just right for a new Dylan. But not for Timothee Chamalat’s one dimensional man.Seth Rogovoy is the author of Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison (Oxford University Press, October 1, 2024), Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poe

The Artificial Intelligence revolution has dwarfed everything else in tech during 2024. But according to Toby Walsh, author of the upcoming The Shortest History of AI, 2025 also promises to be a revolutionary year in the history of AI. The AI agents are coming, Walsh suggests, warning that 2025 might be the first year in which we will be able to quantify the job losses caused by smart machines. And then there’s regulation, the Australian based Walsh notes, predicting that in 2025 we are going to see more and more governments around the world directly confront the consequences of technology that is about to revolutionize the world. Toby Walsh is one of the world’s leading researchers in Artificial Intelligence. He is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales and leads a research group at Data61, Australia’s Centre of Excellence for ICT Research. He has been elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI for his contributions to AI research, and has won the prest

So what’s it to be in the Middle East in 2025: Mad Max style anarchy or a "Pax Hebraica" orchestrated from Israel? According to regional expert Soli Ozel, the Mad Max scenario is more likely - although, as he notes, many of us oversimplify the contemporary Middle East into false binaries such as the Sunni vs Shiite conflict or Iran vs the Arab world. That said, Ozel warns, the mostly cataclysmic 2024 history of the the region doesn’t bode well for 2025. Especially given America’s central role in Middle East and its unwillingness to confront the region’s central tragedy - the problem of Palestine. Soli Özel is professor of International Relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, a senior fellow at the Institut Montaigne as a senior fellow and a columnist for the Turkish daily Habertürk. Since 2002, Soli Özel has also contributed to Project Syndicate on different occasions, commenting on Turkish politics. He served on the board of directors of International Alert and i

Time waits for no one. As 2024 winds down, what are the key moments of a year that perhaps overpromised and underdelivered? According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch, six events in 2024 captured the year’s zeitgeist. There’s the November election and the tumult in the Middle East, of course. Then there’s the ongoing lawfare between Trump and the legal establishment as well as the Supreme Court’s creeping power. But Rauch ends his summary of 2024 more positively, finding two examples - one from the public sector, the other from private enterprise - suggesting that America can, indeed, continue to rebuild and reinvent itself in 2025. Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program and the author of eight books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a contributing writer of The Atlantic and recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His many Brookings publications include the 2021 book “The Const

As both a much published poet and cultural critic, Adam Kirsch brings an etymological sensibility to the great issues of our day. In his new book, On Settler Colonialism, Kirsch excavates the nonsense now taken for granted by many academics about the supposedly twin intrinsic evils of American and Israeli history. Unlike the European colonialists in America, Kirsch reminds us, Jewish settlers in Palestine didn’t wipe out the “indigenous” peoples of the region. While that doesn’t necessarily excuse the violence of the Zionist state, Kirsch acknowledges, it does remind us that packaging America and Israel as the evil “settler colonial” twins of world history is both childishly simplistic and wrong. Words matter in politics, Kirsch reminds us. Particularly in a conflict as irresolvable as the Palestine/Israel tragedy. Adam Kirsch is the author of several books of poetry and criticism. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirsch is an editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review section and has written for publication

Bloomberg columnist, Parmy Olson, won the FT Business Book of 2024 for Supremacy, her story of the race between Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Demis Hassabis’ Google DeepMind for control of the AI ecosystem. Given that Parmy Olson finished writing Supremacy at the end of 2023, I asked her what she would have added to her narrative with the hindsight of knowing what actually transpired in 2024. And what, exactly, does Olson expect to happen in 2025 - a year which will, no doubt, rival 2024 in determining which multi trillion dollar Silicon Valley behemoth will control our collective AI fate.Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.” which won the Financial Times best business book for 2024. 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

Yesterday, we featured a conversation between Andrew and That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare looking back at the major tech events of 2024. Today, Andrew and Keith look forward to the upcoming year for big tech. What will be the fate of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft in 2025? And who, if anyone, will win the multi trillion dollar race for AI supremacy in 2025?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 TechCrunch and publishes the “That Was The Week” newsletter.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broad

So how will future historians think about 2024? In tech terms, 2024 will probably be remembered as the year when AI began to become ubiquitous. Although, as Keith Teare and Andrew discuss in this special 2024 edition of THAT WAS THE WEEK, only hardcore techies like Keith are currently making the use of AI central to their lives. For mainstream users like Andrew, AI in 2024 remained an abstract promise. More concretely, however, 2024 - in Trump’s gamble that the multi billionaires of Silicon Valley can make America Great Again - has set the stage for 2025. So 2024 - in the most compelling narrative tradition of Trumpian reality television - has set the stage for 2025. 2024, then, will be remembered as the year before 2025. A prelude to the sequel. 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 aut

As Elon Musk continues to plot, with Trumpian glee, against the American Federal government, it is important to remind ourselves of the essential value of this state bureaucracy. As the founding president and CEO of the Washington DC based Partnership for Public Service, Max Stier has spent the last quarter century focused on making American government more efficient and accountable. And Stier’s warning about the incoming administration is critically important. Yes, he acknowledges, some of Musk’s misgivings about the inefficiencies of the Federal bureaucracy are fair, but that isn’t an excuse for a descent into what Stier describes as the patrimonial politics of MAGA in which the interests of Trump and of the American state are treated identically. The American Republic was founded against the 18th century absolutist conceit that L'État, c'est moi. So all Max Stier is doing, at the Partnership for Public Service, is defending the values of the Founders who, wanted to protect the Republic from a patrimonial s

The supposed “science” of eugenics is one of the most dangerous myths of the modern age. As Erik Peterson, author of The Shortest History of Eugenics explains, it not only was used by Nazi thugs to justify the Final Solution, but also has been deployed by American racists to justify slavery and inequality. And today, in a brave new world increasingly shaped by advances in biotech, Peterson warns, eugenics persists, having adherents who mistakenly believe that it can be used for the betterment of society.Erik L. Peterson, PhD, is Associate Provost and Associate Professor of the History of Science & Medicine at The University of Alabama. He publishes and teaches about the historical relationship between race and science in the United States and abroad.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. He is also the author of

There is a counter intuitive school of thought - represented by Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen - which suggests that America, for all its technological innovation, remains trapped by long term economic stagnation. So it’s no coincidence that the Austin based investor, consultant, and writer, Byrne Hobart’s co-authored new book, Boom, comes with enthusiastic blurbs from Cowen, Thiel and Andreessen. If we are to escape our current stagnation, Hobart explained to me when we met in Austin, then we might welcome economic bubbles such as our current AI craze. To get to a boom, he even seems to suggest, borrowing from the ideas of the great economic historian Carlotta Perez, we may even need to celebrate bubbles.Byrne Hobart is an investor, consultant, and writer. He is the author of The Diff, a daily newsletter covering inflection points in finance and technology. He is also a founding partner at Anomaly, a frontier tech investment firm.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andr

The iconic DLD conference will be holding its twentieth annual event in Munich next month. Founded in January 2005, DLD has hosted many of the world’s leading tech thinkers and entrepreneurs from both Europe and the United States. What most distinguishes DLD, however, is its community of loyal regulars whose presence in Munich in January promises a degree of certainty in an increasingly uncertain world. One of the most loyal DLDers is Jeff Jarvis, the prolific tech gadfly, always to found in the front row of the DLD auditorium, listening with great care to all the speeches. And in this conversation in celebration of DLD’s 20th anniversary, Jarvis both looks back to evaluate how the world has changed since January 2005 and looks forward to imagine the next twenty years. Jeff Jarvis is a national leader in the development of online news, blogging, the investigation of new business models for news, and the teaching of entrepreneurial journalism. He writes an influential media blog, Buzzmachine.com. He is author

Yesterday, we ran Bethanne Patrick’s five best novels of 2024. Today, we feature her top non-fiction of the year including new books about reality television, Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife and Handel's Messiah. ‘Tis the season. Enjoy!Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.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.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 addi