Keen On

Many are called, but few are chosen. In her late twenties, Deesha Dyer was still in community college. By the age of 31, however, she had become Michelle Obama’s social secretary in the White House. So how did this self-styled undiplomatic young woman become a member of the most exclusive club in the world? And what does her authentically irreverent attitude which she says, in her new memoir, creates the “best kind of trouble”, tell us about how to succeed in 21st century America?Deesha Dyer is an award-winning strategist, on-the-ground community organizer, and executive operations expert. She served as the White House social secretary during the Obama administration and is currently the founder and CEO of social impact agency, Hook & Fasten. She curated and instructed a study course called Imposter to Impact at the Harvard Kennedy School. Deesha’s entertaining and engaging style of storytelling allows her to inspire audiences around the world. She co-founded and operates organization, beGirl.world Globa

What’s it like to discover a Klansman in one’s own family? A few weeks ago, R. Derek Black, the son of a KKK Grand Wizard and an intimate family friend of David Duke, came on the show to confess the exceptional nature of his own family history. But for Edward Ball, the author of Life of a Klansman, the story of his great great grandfather, perhaps the most disturbing element of having a family history of white supremacy is its unexceptional quality. As Ball - best known as the author of the award winning Slaves in the Family - explains, around half of Americans could, if they wish, write a similar memoir. So Ball’s Klansman could easily be your Klansman too. “Whiteness and its tribal nature,” Ball warns, “are normal, everywhere, and seem as permanent as the sunrise.” Edward Ball is the author of several nonfiction books, including The Inventor and the Tycoon, about the birth of moving pictures in California, and Slaves in the Family, an account of his family’s history as slaveholders in South Carolina, which

We’ve been on a food & farming run this week. First, we talked with America’s “lunatic farmer,” Joel Salatin, about how regenerative agriculture can regenerate the United States. And we followed that up with the food blogger and writer Nicola Twilley who explained about how refrigeration has transformed not only our food, and our planet, but also ourselves. Our guest today, Andrea Freeman, makes food policy central to the politics of America from its foundations to today. Her provocative new book, Ruin Their Crops On the Ground is intended as a kind of Fast Food Nation for the Black Lives Matter era. From the genocidal Trail of Tears to the anything but “free” school lunches in America today, Freeman argues that food has been always used by American corporate and political interests as a weapon of conquest and control.Andrea Freeman, a pioneer in the field of food politics, is a professor at Southwestern Law School. A Fulbright scholar and author of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice, Freeman h

While Kamala Harris has announced that she wants to become the first Silicon Valley President, Donald Trump is speaking today at Bitcoin2024 in Nashville in a self-serving attempt to make Bitcoin Great Again. So where should Silicon Valley be putting its (ample) money in 2024? According to That Was The Week’s Keith Teare, tech is divided between pro Harris classical liberals like Reid Hoffman and pro Trump free market libertarians like Mark Andreessen. But the election, Teare warns, will really be all about America coming to terms with its own limitations - a reactionary idea that will find few supporters in forward thinking Silicon Valley. So, whoever wins the 2024 election, he suggests, the losers are likely to be innovative start-up entrepreneurs like Teare himself.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 o

A couple of days ago, America’s most controversial regenerative farmer, Joel Salatin, came on the show to explain how industrialized farming is killing our soil, our bodies and our souls. Today, the Los Angeles based food writer and podcaster Nicola Twilley offers a more nuanced account of the impact of industrialization on our food, our planet and ourselves. In her excellent new book, Frostbite, Twilley explains how industrialized refrigeration technology has revolutionized every aspect of the food cycle - from farm to table. Acknowledging its self-evident benefits (year round bananas, tomatoes & ice cream), Twilley also warns of the dark side of the refrigeration revolution, particularly its environmental impact which, she argues, is the central cause of global warming. Modify our refrigerated food economy, Twilley says, and the planet will cool down. Chilling.Nicola Twilley* is author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (Penguin Press, June 2024), and co-host of

Yesterday, we were in rural Virginia interviewing the pioneering regenerative farmer, Joel Salatin. Today, we are on an equally innovative farm in Houston, Texas, in conversation with Kimberley Meyer, author of Accidental Sisters. It’s called Shamba Ya Amani (Farm of Peace) and, as Meyer explains in her new book, it’s a place where five immigrant women are attempting to build their own American dream. As Meyer notes, American invention comes in all shapes and forms and what these five immigrant women are doing at the urban farm of Shamba Ya Amani is just as innovative as anything one might find in Silicon Valley.Kimberly Meyer is the author of Accidental Sisters: Refugee Women Struggling Together for a New American Dream (University of California Press, 2024) and The Book of Wanderings: A Mother-Daughter Pilgrimage (Little, Brown, 2015). Her work explores displacement, political and spiritual, and the ways that the relationships among women and between mothers and children can become a hopeful act of resistan

As one of America’s most outspoken pioneers of regenerative agriculture, Joel Salatin is popularly known as The Lunatic Farmer. Others have accused him of being a bio-terrorist, Typhoid Mary, a charlatan, and starvation advocate. Less of a lunatic and more of an agricultural visionary, however, Salatin has transformed his family’s Polyface Farms in idyllic western Virginia into one of America’s leading laboratories for non-industrial food production. So when I visited Joel at Polyface recently, we talked about the principles of regenerative agriculture and why the Lunatic Farmer believes that America can be healed, “one bite at a time”, if we can radically change what we eat.Joel Salatin, 64, calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer. Others who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture, and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson.  Those who don’t like him call him a bio-terrorist, Typhoid Mary, charlata

A hundred episodes ago, we had the author of Second Class, Batya Ungar-Sargon, on the show to talk specifically about how America’s elites have betrayed the country’s working men and women. So when I bumped into her at the recent Braver Angels convention in Wisconsin, we talked more broadly about her identity as an American and how she would like America to reinvent itself in the 21st century. What I admire about Ungar-Sargon is that she is hard to politically categorize, especially in her non Trumpian critique of America’s technocratic elites. Batya Ungar-Sargon is an American journalist and author. Ungar-Sargon is the opinion editor of Newsweek[and the former opinion editor of The Forward. She is the author of two books, the most recent of which is Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, which discusses the challenges faced by the American working class and the gap between them and the elite class.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amon

In the wake of Biden’s resignation and the coronation of Kamala Harris, it’s likely that this year’s election will be particularly divisive and vitriolic. We will hear endless hysteria about the election being the most important in American history, blah blah blah. But while I certainly don’t believe that American democracy is under existential threat, there clearly is a problem with the ugliness of political discourse. So what to do about it? Anne Snyder, editor-in-chief of Comment magazine and author of The Fabric of Character, has given a great deal of thought to strengthening what she calls “the middle ring” of morally formative institutions. And I caught up with Snyder at the recent Braver Angels convention in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to discuss how to work on a moral renewal of the United States. More easily said that done, of course, but Snyder’s voice is important in a country increasingly bereft of morally formative institutions.Anne Snyder is the editor-in-chief of Comment magazine and oversees our partn

As CEO of the AI start-up DoNotPay, Joshua Browder is one of Silicon Valley’s rising young entrepreneurs. Born in the UK and educated at Stanford, Browder is from a remarkable family of American innovators and activists. His great grandfather, Earl Browder, was head of the US Communist Party. His grandfather, Felix Browder, was one of America’s most brilliant mathematicians. And his father, Bill Browder, is an American investor, activist and high profile critic of Vladimir Putin. Given this unique lineage, I began my conversation with Josh Browder by asking him what being American meant to him.Joshua Browder is the CEO and Founder of DoNotPay.com, the world's first robot lawyer. DoNotPay has automated over 200 consumer rights processes for consumers, including cancelling subscriptions, lowering bills and obtaining refunds, among many others. To date, the company has won over 2m cases for its customers. Browder has been named as one of the “35 Innovators Under 35” by MIT Technology Review and one of the top le

Lauded by KEEN ON favorites like Dave Eggers & Dale Maharidge, J. Malcolm Garcia might be the Studs Terkel of contemporary American literature. Having worked as a social worker with San Francisco’s homeless community for 14 years, he then became an acclaimed journalist and winner of the Studs Terkel prize for writing about the American working classes. And now Garcia is publishing his first fiction, Out of the Rain, a novel about the people in a San Francisco homeless shelter. Garcia brings the wisdom of an experienced social worker and the eye of an prize winning writer to a problem which is the shame of wealthy American cities like San Francisco. J. Malcolm Garcia was born in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, IL. He attended Ripon College from 1975 to 1977. He transferred to Coe College in the fall of 1977 and graduated from Coe in May 1979. He wrote for The Coe Cosmos newspaper and was active in college theater. As a social worker, Garcia worked with homeless people in San Francisco’s Tenderloin distric

I was at the Liberalism for the 21st Century conference last week in DC where I bumped into an old friend and KEEN ON regular Jonathan Rauch. A Brookings Fellow and prolific author, Rauch is amongst America’s most thoughtful commentators on the contemporary crisis of liberalism and the rising popularity of “post-liberalism”. So, in the wake of Trump’s choice of JD Vance, a politician who has openly embraced the “post-liberal” moniker, I caught up with Rauch to get his take on a liberalism for the 21st century. Does John Stuart Mill’s classic 19th century theory of individual rights need to be reinvented for our networked age, I asked. And does the West need a revitalized international liberal consensus to confront not just China, but rogue states like Iran, North Korea and Russia.JONATHAN RAUCH, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is the author of eight books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and recipient of the 2

For all the “progress” in civil rights front over the last couple of generations, the wealth gap between white and black Americans hasn’t changed much. As Ebony Reed, co-author of best selling new book, Fifteen Cents on the Dollar, whites on average have 85% more wealth than blacks, a shockingly inegalitarian fact about a supposedly color blind democracy. Reed’s book is subtitled How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap and, as she hints, until American citizens address these dramatic economic inequalities between whites and blacks, the country will remained mired in its shameful history of injustice and discrimination.Ebony Reed is a seasoned journalist, editorial leader, and news strategist. She has extensive knowledge and experience in local, regional, and national journalism, business operations, communications, and diversity-related projects. Ebony joined The Marshall Project in January 2022 as its first-ever Chief Strategy Officer, leading strategy across the organization, managing communications,

In the wake of the failed Trump assassination attempt by what seems to be a conventionally lonely and bullied young man, more and more Americans are asking what has gone wrong. According to CNN correspondent Elle Reeve, online Americans - particularly lonely, alienated young men on networks like Discord and 4Chan - have swallowed the Black Pill of QAnon style conspiracy theories, neo-nazi racism & antisemitism, and a fascist celebration of male violence. Reeves interviews many of these online nihilists and argues that they have become prisoners of bullying gangsters like Richard Spencer, the openly neo-nazi activist. What Reeve reports about the 2020s is the next chapter in John Ganz’s argument about how the Clocks Broke in 1990’s America with the mainstreaming of neo-nazis like David Duke. Reeve’s story is particularly chilling because, for all her conversations with these young men, she doesn’t seem to have found an antidote to the Black Pill.Elle Reeve is a CNN correspondent whose work has won numerous

Trust a French literary theorist to think creatively about whether AI can think creatively. Laurent Dubreuil is a professor of French literature at Cornell and the author of the intriguing Harper’s piece, Metal Machine Music, which asks both if AI and we humans can think creatively. Using ChatGPT, Dubreuil ran a test at Cornell asking a bot and humans to compete poems written in English and then invited people to guess which were authored by AI and which by humans. The results of this creative literary experiment were surprising, particularly in terms of the common assumption that we humans are more creative than machines.Laurent Dubreuil is Professor of French, Francophone and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. In his research, Laurent Dubreuil aims to explore the powers of literary and artistic thinking at the interface of social thought, the humanities and the sciences. Dubreuil's scholarship is broadly comparative and makes use of his reading knowledge in some ten languages. Professor Dubreuil

I’m just back from the Liberalism for the 21st Century conference in DC which featured a lively discussion about digital misinformation between KEEN ON regular Jonathan Rauch and Renee DiResta, the author of Invisible Rulers. As the former manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, DiResta has been on the front lines of the disinformation wars and understands the chillingly close relationship between making something trend on social media and making it appear “true”. Her work focuses on those supposedly invisible people, our new ontological masters, who, she believes, turn lies into reality. Given that the 2024 election will be determined by which candidates’ version of reality is more ontologically convincing to the American electorate, DiResta’s well-informed perspective is an essential guide to how liberalism can not only survive but also flourish in the 21st century. Renée DiResta was the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teachin

Does America have problem with its boys and men? Yes, says author of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves, a previous guest on KEEN ON. Today’s guest, Niobe Way, a NYU professor of developmental psychology, give a more nuanced answer. The author of the Rebels With a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves and our Culture, Way argues that the crisis is one of a culture of “masculinity”. It’s our stereotyped “boy” culture which particularly troubles Way. What boys and men want, she argues, are close friendships and meaningful family relationships. But America’s “toxic” culture, with its focus on the supposedly masculine values of status and achievement, Way says, isn’t allowing its boys to be boys and its men to become real men.Niobe Way is Professor of Developmental Psychology at NYU, the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH; pach.org), creative advisor of agapi, and the Principal Investigator on the Listening Project. She was the President of the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA)

Few Americans know contemporary China better than Peter Hessler. The author of four prize winning books about life in China as well as the former China correspondent of the New Yorker, Hessler originally came to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996 and has been writing about the day-to-day life of the country ever since. In contrast with the geopolitical crowd with their bellicose nonsense about the totalitarian evils of Xi’s China, Hessler, whose twin daughters were educated in a local state-run elementary school, has spent the last quarter century talking with ordinary Chinese people about ordinary things. In his latest book, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, Hessler offers intimate narrative about two generations of students in China’s heartland. In an America unthinkingly preoccupied with the “China threat”, Hessler provides an accurate window onto real life in this much misunderstood country. Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 200

What a treat. LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick and I got the opportunity to talk today with the great Andrew O’Hagan, author of Caledonian Road, his new blockbuster novel about the state of contemporary Britain. It’s a fabulous read and O’Hagan was no less fab, generously dedicating an hour to our questions. As O’Hagan explained, for all his horror at the Dickensian squalor of contemporary Britain, Caledonian Road remains his most defiantly optimistic novel, particularly in its brilliantly uplifting ending. And it’s his most personally generous novel too. Caledonian Road took 10 years to finish and he acknowledges pouring the experience of his own life as a glamorous north London literati into its quasi-autobiographical narrative. Enjoy. Andrew O’Hagan, a Scottish novelist and essayist, is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a three-time nominee for the Booker Prize, the editor-at-large of the London Review of Books, and a contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in London.Bethanne P

Spy novelists often make excellent moralists and the American writer Daniel Silva, author of the Gabriel Allon series of best-selling thrillers, is a particularly sharp critic of contemporary morals. His new Allon thriller, A Death in Cornwall, focuses on money laundering, murder and mayhem in the art world. The novel is set in the contemporary United Kingdom of the (once) ruling Tory party where international criminals use expensive art to feed their vanity and launder their ill gotten cash. This conversation with Silva is part one of our focus this week on the fetid underbelly of the international art scene. Tomorrow, we’ll feature a conversation with the Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan, author of Caledonian Road, about the moral corruption of not just the UK’s politics and its cultural economy, but also of art critics themselves. Daniel Silva is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Unlikely Spy, The Mark of the Assassin, The Marching Season, The Kill Artist, The English Assassin, T