Keen On

Andrew C.M. Cooper is the author of the new book, The Ethical Imperative: Leading with Conscience to Shape the Future of Business. He is also an Associate General Counsel and Head of Patent Acquisitions at Meta. While he didn’t write The Ethical Imperative as a Meta person, it is still intriguing that one of Zuckerberg’s lawyers should be writing a book about corporate ethics, especially since he told me that corporations “should be in the business of social engineering”. But I’m not convinced. In my opinion, the business of social engineering should come from government. The ethical imperative of corporations is serve their investors & customers; while the ethical imperative of government is to serve their citizens. All else is business school happy talk.Andrew Cooper is an internationally recognized executive leader and apologist for compassionate business practices. He led as a history-making first Millennial and Black executive to serve as General Counsel of UPS Airlines, the world’s largest logistics

It’s ironic that Keith Teare, editor of That Was The Week newsletter, just spent two idyllic weeks in Europe, enjoying the Paris Olympics and London theater. Because his first newsletter on his return to the United States asks if “Is Europe Dying?” and suggests that innovation on the European continent has been killed by the regulatory bureaucratic state. More ominously, Keith argues, United States isn’t far behind Europe in the anti innovation regulation of state bureaucrats like the FTC Commissioner Lena Khan. So if we don’t watch out, Keith warns, we will soon be reading That Was The Week editorials asking if America is dying. 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”

We are living in interesting political times. A month ago, the Presidential election appeared over. Today, however, it appears as if it’s barely begun. So in my conversation today with the prolific columnist David Masciotra, I asked him if he glimpsed the outlines of a “Harrisist” ideology behind the avalanche of Kamala memes on TikTok. Is the Harris excitement simply a repeat of the Obama mania from 2008, or has something fundamentally changed over the last fifteen years? Then, of course, there’s Trump and his weird cult of fake masculinity. What does the wrestling-mania of the Republican party tell us about the fate of young men in 2020’s America? And how can progressive patriots like Bruce Springsteen make the American left great again?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, 2017), and Metallica by

What do Hum, Hitler’s People and The Hypocrite have in common? They are all recommended new books from KEEN ON’s best read regular guest, Los Angeles Times book critic Bethanne Patrick. As usual, she recommends six books, but - whether you are looking for a magically realistic novel about the Dutch resistance to Nazism or new non-fiction on Putin’s Russia or the Scopes Trial - they all offer great late summer reading. 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

Last month, we were in western Virginia talking to the pioneering regenerative farmer Joel Salatin about how American can fix itself one bite at a time. Today we are on the other coast, in western Oregon, talking to another regenerative farmer, Mimi Casteel. In contrast with Salatin’s Polyface Farm, Casteel’s beautiful Hope Well vineyard focuses on the production of wine. And yet, as Casteel explains, she and Salatin share a faith in the regenerative role of the soil in reinventing American agriculture. This is the first part of a two part conversation with Casteel. Next week, in a KEEN ON America interview, she talks more expansively about her love of American nature and her responsibility, as a citizen, to pass it on to future generations of Americans. Mimi is the daughter of Ted Casteel and Pat Dudley, co-founders of Bethel Heights Vineyard. Growing up working in the vineyard and winery, Mimi gained such an appreciation for the industry that she promptly left home after high school. Armed with a BA in Hist

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he wrote in 1948,George Orwell imagined the “Ministry of Truth” to be the central institution that Big Brother used to reinvent reality and make war on the recent past. Three quarters of a century later, Steve Benen, the Emmy award winning producer of the Rachel Maddow Show, revisits Nineteen Eighty-Four and sees the Republican party as a reincarnation of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. In his eponymous new book, Benen argues that the raison d’etre of today’s GOP is to wage war on both reality and the recent past. Ontologically and historically, then, today’s Republican party has literally become Orwellian - a particularly chilling reality given that almost half of the American electorate will vote for Republican candidates in November.Steve Benen is a producer on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show and the author of The MaddowBlog. Benen's articles and op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, Salon.com, and other publications. He's also

As author of the authoritative three volume Third Reich Trilogy, Richard J. Evans is probably the most respected scholar of Hitler’s Third Reich in the world today. And his latest book, Hitler’s People, is an attempt to make all-too-human sense of Nazi lieutenants like Goebbels, Himmler, Eichmann and Streicher. It goes without saying of course, that these men were all monsters. But Evans is also interested in the human qualities of these Nazis. What he discovers, he told me, are ordinary middle class German faces lurking behind the masks of mass murderers. Any of us could have been on of Hitler’s people, he seems to be warning us. And in a contemporary age in which the murderous Nazi cult of racism and violence is creeping back into mainstream politics, Evans observations about the ordinariness of evil are particularly jarring. Richard J. Evans is one of the world’s leading historians of modern Germany. He has served as Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge; president of Wolfson College,

In her new book, Freeman’s Challenge, the Harvard historian Robin Bernstein reveals the early 19th century origins of America’s for profit prisons. Telling the tragic story of William Freeman, an Afro-Native teenager guilty of what she calls the “terrorist” act of killing a white family, Bernstein simultaneously explores the origins of America’s first for profit prison in Auburn, NY. As she explains, there was and there still is an intimate connection between American incarceration and American capitalism - a chilling nexus which, for Bernstein, represents the import of slave “economics” into the for profit prison system. Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and professor of African and African American studies and studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadca

In an America riven with both civic discord and ignorance, how can we nurture a next generation of responsibly informed citizens? That’s the all important question Lindsey Cormack addresses in her new book, How to Raise a Citizen. There are no magical tricks to learning how to be a good citizen, Cormack says, no clever shortcuts or miraculous new technologies. Instead, it’s up to all of us to take responsibility for giving our kids the necessary knowledge to understand the workings of our democratic system. And that all begins at the local level, she insists, where the real business of American democracy gets done on a daily basis. Lindsey Cormack is an associate professor of Political Science and Director of the Diplomacy Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her first book, Congress and U.S. Veterans: From the GI Bill to the VA Crisis investigates the differences between legislative efforts and lip service paid to veterans by members of the US Congress. Her second book, How to Raise

There are two core critiques of AI. The first is that it is an existential threat because it replaces humans with algorithms. The second is that AI is a mirror that only compounds preexisting injustices. James Muldoon, an associate professor of management at Essex Business School and co-author of Feeding the Machine, fits into the second category. Reminding us that “AI is people”, he travelled around the world in search of the hidden human labor that is the powering the AI revolution. What he found was a huge precariat (estimated by the World Bank to be over 100 million people) who are doing the dirty human work that powers “artificial” intelligence. The AI revolution, then, for Muldoon, is only compounding the exploitative nature of labor in today’s increasingly inegalitarian global economy. It is the core problem with, rather than the solution to 21st century networked capitalism. James Muldoon is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Management at the Essex Business School, a Research Associate at the Oxford

How democratic is American “democracy”. Dramatically less so that it was. That’s at least the rather worrying conclusion of David Daley, the author of ANTIDEMOCRATIC, a new book which exposes what he says is “the far right’s 50-year plot to control American elections”. This half century plot was successfully realized in 2013, Daley told me, with the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now, he argues, individual states have the right to tamper with their electoral laws and hijack voting rights in America for their own political ends. It’s not quite a return to Jim Crow, Daley says, but it does reveal the worryingly antidemocratic foundations of the American political system. David Daley is the author of the national best-seller "Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count" (Norton/Liveright) and one of the nation's leading experts on partisan gerrymandering. He is a senior fellow at FairVote, a nonpartisan champion of election reforms. His journalism on redistricting and gerrymandering has app

Shad White has an uncanny resemblance to J.D. Vance. Born in a tiny town in Mississippi, White went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then Harvard Law School and is now the State Auditor of Mississippi. Like Vance, the lifelong Republican White is a converted Catholic whose faith informs his conservative, family centric politics. And, like JD Vance, White is an author. His new book, Mississippi Swindle, which he jokes might be called “Red Neck Elegy”, is the story of Brett Favre and the Mississippi welfare scandal that shocked America. One thing is for sure. This isn’t the last you will hear of Shadrack Tucker White. As he told me, he’s thinking of running for Mississippi Governor and he’s exactly the kind of articulate, smart and youthful conservative who, I imagine, will one day caste his ambitious eyes on the US Presidency. Shad White is the State Auditor of Mississippi. During his tenure, the auditor’s office has uncovered more waste, fraud, and abuse than any other time in state history. Shad is also a pro

If it’s lunchtime, it must be KEEN ON time. At least that’s what it seems, given the long menu of food guests recently on the show. First there was the lunatic regenerative farmer, Joel Salatin, fixing America one bite at a time. Then Nicola Twilley, the food blogger and historian of refrigeration. And don’t forget Andrea Freeman, who reminded us that even free school lunches aren’t really free. But our latest food guest, Lola Milholland, a Portland based Ramen noodle entrepreneur and food writer, might be the most entertaining of all. Milholland is the author of GROUP LIVING and Other Recipes, a rich stew of a memoir about her collectivist foodie parents and her passion for noisily slurping Japanese noodles. And my conversation with Lola covered everything from the non-sexual polyamory of group living to the deliciousness of the classic 1985 Japanese movie Tampopo. Eat, Lola, Eat. Recommended. Lola Milholland is a food-business owner, social-practice artist, and writer. Her work has been published by The Gua

Peter Wehner is the conscience of American conservatism. Having worked in three Republican administrations, the ex Republican is now a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Atlantic, writing compelling moral critiques of Trump and the authoritarian populism now dominant in the GOP. Many of you will have already read his latest Times piece, What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me - but what, I asked Wehner, once made the GOP "his” party and could he ever imagine rejoining it?Peter Wehner, an American essayist, is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times and a contributing writer for The Atlantic, two of the most prestigious media journals in the world. He writes on politics and political ideas, on faith and culture, on foreign policy, sports and friendships. Mr. Wehner served in three presidential administrations, including as deputy director of presidential speechwriting for President George W. Bush. Later, he served as the director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives. Mr. Wehner,

Were politics chess, liberals had white; they moved first. Conservatives had black; they countered liberalism’s opening moves. In time, the initiative changed hands. Conservatives, who began as anti-moderns, came to master modernity, for the right was in telling ways the stronger contestant. So write Edmund Fawcett in his exemplary intellectual history, Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition. As the author of the equally excellent Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, Fawcett is as well positioned as anyone to determine who is winning today’s grand ideological chess game between Liberalism and Conservatism. So, I asked Fawcett - in our bewildering age of Trump, Harris, Orban, Meloni, Starmer, Le Pen and JD Vance - is it liberals or conservatives who are most successfully reinventing their ideologies to master the desires of 21st century electorates?Edmund Fawcett was the Economist‘s Washington, Paris and Berlin correspondent and is a regular reviewer. His Liberalism: The Life of an Idea was published by Princeton

So what’s exceptional about America? According to the writer, film producer and scholar Jonathan Taplin, American exceptionalism lies its uniquely global cultural influence. For Taplin - the tour manager for Bob Dylan & producer of Martin Scorcese’s masterpiece Mean Streets - this reflects what he calls America’s right-brain power which dominated the world in the second half of the 20th century. Today, however, he says, left-brained tech magnates like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are all powerful and, as a consequence, are triggering an existential crisis of creativity in America. In this age of the algorithm, Taplin worries, the US will be just another unimaginative player in the global race to control the digital economy. Jonathan Taplin is a writer, film producer and scholar. He is the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and was a Professor at the USC Annenberg School from 2003-2016 in the field of international communication management and digital me

Much of the critical writing about authoritarianism warns that contemporary populism threatens democracy. But as Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein argue in their interesting new book, The Assault on the State, this global attack on legalistic government by wannabe dictators like Putin, Erdogan and Modi endangers not just democracy but also much of what we take for granted about the convenience of modern life. It’s a return to what they call the “patrimonialism” of The Godfather - a chillingly dysfunctional future in which to get a road fixed or a school built, we have to kiss the ring of a Don Corleone or a Donald Trump. Weird, eh?Stephen E. Hanson is the Lettie Pate Evans Professor in the Department of Government at William & Mary.  At William & Mary, he served as the Vice Provost for Academic and International Affairs from 2011 to 2022. Hanson received his B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University (1985) and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley (1991). He

In the 1970’s, J. Doyne Farmer built the first wearable computer which he used to predict the game of roulette. While this didn’t make him particularly popular in casinos, it did mark the beginning of a glittering scientific career in complexity and systems theory, as well as in theoretical physics and biology. And, along the way, Farmer founded a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to UBS in 2006 as well as working for a while as an Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos Labs. So when a guy as smart as Farmer - who now teaches both at Oxford and at the Santa Fe Institute — turns his big brain to economics, we should take note. In his new book, Making Sense of Chaos, Farmer explains how we can get to a “better economics for a better world” through what he calls complex economics. As a fusion of big data analysis and behavioral economics, Farmer is navigating a third economic way between the scylla of traditional free market economics and the charybdis of de-growth economics. Seriously smart stuff fr

According to the historian Matthew Warshauer, there was no giant conspiracy on 9/11. The real story about September 11, 2001, he argues in his provocative new book Creating and Failing the 9/11 Generation, is its impact on Gen Z who he believes should be renamed the 9/11 Generation. 9/11 and its disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he argues, have created a lost generation of young Americans without faith in the country’s institutions or elected officials. They’ve been “cast out of the Disneyland” of a unipolar world, he warns, and their cynicism and distrust is only compounding the seemingly never-ending political, economic and cultural crises of the United States over the last quarter century. Rather than the internet and social media, he believes, 9/11 is the root cause of America’s current age of anxiety. Matt Warshauer is a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, his under-graduate alma mater, where he learned that passionate, devoted professors can change lives. Originally bore

Earlier this year, the prolific American political journalist Sasha Issenberg came on the show to offer a playbook for winning elections in our disinformation age. And, on a recent trip to Los Angeles, I sat down with Issenberg in his Venice home to talk more broadly about the American political system for our KEEN ON AMERICA series. In particular, he addressed perhaps the most pressing issue of all about the future of American politics - how we might build more trust and transparency in both media and the system itself. Sasha Issenberg is the author of five books including THE VICTORY LAB, which upon its 2012 release Politico called “Moneyball for politics,” and the follow-up THE LIE DETECTIVES, published in March 2024 by Columbia Global Reports. His other books have covered topics ranging from the global sushi business to medical tourism and the same-sex marriage debate. He covered the 2008 election as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, 2012 for Slate, 2016 for Bloom