Keen On

From MAGA and the UK’s Reform Party to the German AfD, aggressively nationalist borders controls are back in political fashion. According to Laurie Trautman, an expert on immigration at Western Washington University, we can date much of this back to 2020 and the Covid-19 tragedy. The co-author of When the World Closed its Doors, Trautman sees the global Covid crisis as the unintentional trigger for much of what is being taken for granted around the world now in terms of limiting or even eliminating immigration. But Trautman, who directs the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University, offers a practical internationalist alternative to the reactionary nationalism of MAGA and the AfD. Dr. Laurie Trautman is the Director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University. She engages in a range of research on the US - Canada border, particularly in the Cascadia region. Topics include trade, transportation, human mobility, and security. In addition to working with facu

Nicholas Carr has been amongst the most persistently prescient observers of the digital revolution over the last quarter century. Take, for example, his 2012 essay "The Arc of Innovation Bends Towards Decadence," which, in many ways, foresaw our current technological and social predicament. Carr's thesis was that technological innovation increasingly moves toward fulfilling self-indulgent desires rather than addressing fundamental human needs, following a pattern similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Carr accurately predicted the shift from idealistic views of technology as tools for self-actualization to their current role in feeding narcissism and anxiety. The timing of his essay proved particularly significant, as 2012 marked a crucial turning point when smartphones became dominant and social media reached mass adoption. This period coincided with what social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt identify as the beginning of a sharp rise in anxiety and decline in self-confidence, especially among young peop

Is there really a data-driven science that enables us to predict and change human behavior?Mind Masters author and Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz certainly is a believer. But I wonder whether Matz’s observations about psychological targeting and data analysis through large language models represent anything fundamentally new or original. I’m also not convinced of her glib take on mental health applications. In contrast with Matz, I fear that AI-driven mental health monitoring could exacerbate rather than solve existing cultural problems. My advice: don’t trust people who call themselves “data scientists”. The data lies as much as humans. It’s how we use and abuse it that matters.Sandra Matz is the David W. Zalaznick Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School in New York. As a computational social scientist, she studies human behavior and preferences using a combination of Big Data analytics and traditional experimental methods. Her research aims to understand how psychological

Everything old is new again in international politics. According to Jill Kastner, co-author of A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion, today's international tensions over Ukraine, Taiwan and Greenland mark a return to historical normalcy after a brief period of global American unipolarity. Kastner explains that subversion—defined as hostile or unwanted action on a rival's territory—has been a constant tool of statecraft throughout history. She presents subversion as a rational choice between diplomacy and war, where states make cost-benefit calculations about their actions. Citing historical examples from Thucydides’ Athens and Elizabeth I's England to modern-day geopolitics, she explains how nations use subversive tactics when diplomatic channels fail, but war seems too costly. Let’s hope she’s right when it comes to heading off a Chinese war over Taiwan or an American invasion of Greenland. Dr Jill Kastner is an independent scholar and historian based in London. Her work focuses

What’s wrong with the U.S. economy? Not much according to Wall Street. But according to Adam Chandler, author of 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life, there’s a fundamental contradiction at the heart of American capitalism. While the U.S. leads in AI investment ($50 billion of $56 billion globally in 2020) and Wall Street performance, Chandler notes, there's significant labor unrest at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. He argues that while the American economy appears strong, many workers aren't seeing the benefits. He notes that real wages have declined over 40 years for people of color and those without college degrees, despite recent technological advances. He critiques the American ethos that equates hard work with success, arguing that this overlooks structural barriers and the role of public investment in success stories. Chandler advocates for better worker protections, clearer work-life boundaries, and stronger social safety nets, citing successful pandemic-era progra

This is a good one. Former mobster Louis Ferrante discusses the second volume of his history of the American mafia, Borgata: Clash of Titans, covering the critical period between 1960 and 1985 when the mob was at its height of power. The era began with the Kennedys' rise to power, where Joe Kennedy paradoxically used mob connections to help JFK win the 1960 election, particularly in Illinois and West Virginia. However, Robert Kennedy's aggressive pursuit of organized crime as Attorney General created deep animosity with the mob. The period was marked by the complex relationship between the mafia and Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters Union. While Hoffa wasn't a mobster himself, he needed mafia support to maintain his position as Teamsters president. The mob had significant control over the U.S. economy through their influence over unions, construction, and various industries. Ferrante presents hard evidence that the mafia, particularly Carlos Marcello, was involved in JFK's assassination, describing failed assassinatio

Addiction specialist and former meth addict Dr. Adi Jaffe challenges everything we take for granted about addiction and recovery. Opening our KEEN ON conversation with his own dramatic story of a SWAT team arrest that turned his young life around, Jaffe goes on to deliver some startling insights: nearly half of all Americans are hooked on something, whether it's drugs, porn, social media, or the latest "miracle" weight loss medications. The author of Unhooked: How to Free Yourself from Addiction Forever takes aim at America's puritanical approach to addiction, arguing that complete abstinence isn't the answer and that even Alcoholics Anonymous emerged from failed Prohibition policies. In a particularly provocative segment, he dismisses the common recovery mantra that "you're always one drink away from relapse" as absurd and potentially harmful. The conversation takes unexpected turns into America's complicated relationship with addiction, from Donald Trump's teetotaling narcissism (ie: addiction to himself) t

Paula Whyman's journey from bug-obsessed city kid to mountaintop conservationist is an inspiring environmental tale. Now the owner of a 200-acre Virginia mountaintop, she's traded her childhood fascination with cicadas for an ambitious ecological restoration project. Her new book Bad Naturalist chronicles this transformation. Despite the self-deprecating title, Whyman is dead serious about her mission. She's working to restore native plants and wildlife to her Virginia mountaintop, fighting invasive species, and challenging the notion that nature only exists in national parks. With 85% of American grasslands privately owned, she argues that individual landowners have a crucial role in conservation. Though she finds the concept of land ownership "weird" – questioning if she really owns the beetles and lichens – Whyman embraces her responsibility as a steward. Her regenerative agricultural project might seem idealistic, but each small victory, from a patch of restored meadow to the call of a bog quail, fuels he

It’s not just the MAGA crowd who are concerned with government waste and inefficiency. In a convincing Wall Street Journal op-ed, best-selling tech author Larry Downes questions the need for a thousand Social Security offices around the country. Downes argues that the federal government's resistance to digital transformation has resulted in staggeringly low user satisfaction rates - just 12% for federal government services. Despite more than 85% of federal workers being based outside Washington, there have been few serious attempts to modernize these services through e-government initiatives. While the incoming Trump administration's "Doge" team has talked about reforming government, Downes remains skeptical about implementation, citing political obstacles rather than technical challenges. He notes that while Estonia and Denmark offer successful e-government models, American reform efforts face unique hurdles, including congressional resistance to closing local offices and bureaucratic procurement processes t

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