Sitemap - 2023 - Keen On

How everyone, even Benjamin Netanyahu, has a soul: Noa Yedlin explains why literary humor isn't a funny thing and imagines the kind of character Netanyahu might be in a novel

Why bankers represents both the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of American capitalism: Gerard Epstein on how to bust the bankers' club and create a more equitable financial system for the rest of us

Against the chronic short-termism that undermines how we think about money and value: Charles Crowson explains why time really matters in economics

Why 2023 was the year in which we finally got to converse with AI: Kevin Surace explains why creative artists must master AI technology in 2024

The KEEN ON 2023 Fiction Awards: Bethanne Patrick's six favorite novels of the year

In Defense of Henry Kissinger's "pragmatic realism": Charles Kupchan critiques the illusional idealism that he believes has undermined American foreign policy over the last decade

Why the 21st Century will be the Asian Century: Kishore Mahbubani on the end of Western domination and the rise of Asian societies, economies and philosophies

International anarchy, murderous crime lords and the 21st century nation-state: Miles Johnson explains how the violence of today's international criminal gangs mirror the authoritarian politics of our age

How AI can fix the future of healthcare, education and climate: Mark Minevich imagines a planet positively powered by AI

Among the Criminal Bros: Max Marshall on a Fraternity crime story that reflects the rigged system of money and power in 21st century America

The victory of the gut over reason: Kevin Casas-Zamora worries about the fragile state of democracy around the world in 2023

On the Dire State of the Free Press in 2024: Andy Lee Roth explains how "solutions journalism" offers a more truthful alternative to corporate owned media in America today

Why AI will radically disrupt traditional internet search engines: Keith Teare on Google, OPenAI and the crisis of online search economics

How collaborating on #CrimeTime strengthened this couple's marriage: Jeneva Rose and Drew Pyne discuss their TikTok driven crime mystery based on an actual robbery in their Chicago apartment building

Is there really rampant anti-semitism at elite American universities like Columbia? Shai Davidai on what these universities should be doing to confront anti-semitism and foster a two-state peace between Israelis and Palestinians

The 19th century American explorer who exposed the brutality of the Russian imperial system: Gregory Wallance on the original George Kennan and his epic journey through the frozen heart of Russia

Wall Street's Assault on Democracy: Georges Ugeux explains how today's financial markets exacerbate inequalities, create unsustainable government debt and foment authoritarianism

Getting to Know Ella Fitzgerald Through Her Music: Judith Tick on the canonical jazz singer who transformed both American song and culture

Five of the Non-Fictional Best: Bethanne Patrick picks her favorite non-fiction books for 2023

How Not To Age: Dr Michael Greger offers a simple dietary approach to getting healthier as we get older

Why it's time stop declaring war on everything: David Keen on the "Wreckonomics" of how we now find ourselves locked into so many failed economic, environmental and political policies

How our brains mirror the history of human evolution: Min W. Jung on the neuroscience of imagination and abstract thinking

A Return to Normal Abnormality in Silicon Valley: Keith Teare on why even some of the most highly capitalized AI start-ups are now running out of runway and will not survive

In Praise of Ineffective Altruism: Amy Schiller on how philanthropy went wrong and how to fix it

Should we let go of Philip Roth? Hannah Gold gets into Roth's mind, his hands and his followers

In Defense of Trash Talk: Rafi Kohan on Muhammed Ali, Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Elon Musk and why talking smack is as old as the Bible

Why even the smartest machine vision won't eliminate bias: Jill Walker Rettberg on how algorithms are changing the way we see and are seen by the world

When Language Was Up For Grabs: Ben Lerner warns against falling in love once again with the promise of digital technology to democratize language

The First Neo-Liberal or the Last Conservative?

The First Neo-Liberal or the Last Conservative? Jennifer Burns on Milton Friedman, the most controversial American economist of the 20th century

Silicon Valley's First Double Unicorn: OpenAI’s dual personality disorder

Why American humor isn't really being cancelled by the woke police: Kliph Nesteroff's history of showbiz and its perennial culture wars

Why all great geniuses are also rebels: Bulent Atalay on how Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Newton, Beethoven and Einstein all shared similarly transgressive minds

The Closing of the American Conservative Mind: Peter Wehner on the nihilism of the evangelical right in America today

We live our lives in small details: Lauren Grodstein on why she changed her mind about writing a novel about the Holocaust

Why the "Words of Cesar Chavez" still matter: Peter Slen on the labor leader, Christian Socialist and voice of Hispanic America

The book that transformed how Americans think about economics: Peter Slen on the impact of Rose and Milton Friedman's 1980 defense of free market capitalism, "Free to Chose"

In defense of digital education: William B. Eimicke on how to level the learning curve and create a more inclusive and connected university

Is the current Gazan ceasefire a mirage?Jason Pack on Qatar, Iran, Biden, Hamas, Israel and the road to order in the disordered Middle East

Ten Ways of Winning Differently in the AI Age: Kate Bravery's truths about work, skills and education in the smart machine epoch

Digital Lennonism: Marga Hoek imagines how tech can solve some of the world's greatest challenges

The Last Ships from Hamburg: Steven Ujifusa on the race to save Russia's Jews on the eve of World War I

OpenAI , Sam Altman and the new war over capitalism in Silicon Valley: Keith Teare on the moral fight over technological progress triggered by the OpenAI brouhaha

Eight brilliant books to give this Xmas: Bethanne Patrick's list of literary gifts that will delight even the most discerning reader

The Shame of America's Six Million Homeless People: Kevin F. Adler on the forgotten humanity and broken systems causing today's American homelessness crisis

Why only humans can imagine the future: Margaret Heffernan on art, creative uncertainty and the insatiability of AI moguls like Sam Altman

How to protect our all-too-human superpower of creative thinking: Viktor Mayer-Schonberger on the guardrails needed to regulate big data companies like OpenAI

A Uniquely Glittering Literary Club: Christopher De Hamel on the remarkable people behind a thousand years of medieval manuscripts

So what, exactly, is "equality"? Darrin McMahon on the history, from antiquity to today, of this most elusive idea

Why women might make better spies than men: Anna Pitoniak on the art of espionage and the tradecraft of the spy novelist

How the October 7 tragedy might turn out to be a game changer in a good way: Israeli writer Assaf Gavron on why we must "try again" to make peace in the Middle East

Six all-too-human books about AI: Bethane Patrick on the mavens, mavericks and mythology writing our smart machine future

This was the week that the world dramatically changed: Keith Teare celebrates the beginning of the end of the pre AI age

A classic novel that not only shaped America but also captured the authentic voice of the African-American South: Peter Slen on Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God", an anthropological fiction set in a particularly rough period in American

Why genuine neutrality was mostly a myth in the Second World War: Neill Lochery on the flight of Nazi treasure through "neutral" countries after the war

How to write poetry on a smartphone: Best-selling poet and TikTok sensation Whitney Hanson on the anxiety of her generation and why social media makes physical events more "real"

The dark truth of Mexico as a mostly truant state terrorized by subsistence gangsters and haunted by hollow people: Azam Ahmed on the story of a missing daughter, a violent Cartel and a mother's quest for vengeance

Do great leaders make history or does history make great leaders? Moshik Temkin on the art of leadership from FDR, Malcolm X and MLK to Trump and Biden

How to accurately reconstruct the entire 13.9 billion year history of the universe: David Helfand on the power of atomic science to unveil the mysteries of unreachably remote time and space

Turning Mrs Dalloway into a novel set in the New York City of April 2017: Lisa Gornick on writing a New York story in the philistine age of the Taliban and Donald Trump

An Unprincipled Man for our Unprincipled Times: Rob Copeland on Ray Dalio, the billionaire Big Brother of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund on the planet

How early 21st century America resembles late 19th century Russia: John Gray on our post-liberal future

The double life of America's most notorious agent of betrayal: Major Garrett on Robert Hanssen, the FBI spy and weaver of a web of lies, both outrageously large and pathetically small

How to make the most of college: Ben Wildavsky on the art of using college to build a career

Why the American mass incarceration system is jarringly unamerican: Ben Austen on parole, prison and the near impossibility of change in the current American criminal justice system

In defense of literary flyover country: Peter Slen on Willa Cather's "My Antonia", the 1918 novel that captured the ideal of immigrant middle America

Orwell and his women: Bethanne Patrick on new feminist takes on George Orwell - the man , the husband and the writer.

Guilty by seven crimes and death by a thousand verticals: Keith Teare on Sam Bankman-Fried and Palo Alto, Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak, and Space X and X

How to get more women in science right now: Lisa Munoz on implicit bias, leaky pipelines, tokenization and other explanations for the persistent gender gap in science

Did the KGB really invent the idea of the Palestinian nation in the 1960s? Pierre Rehov on Iranian financed sleeper-cells in US universities and why he admires Hamas' "evil mind"

Overcoming the politics of black grief and white grievance in America today: Juliet Hooker on why American democracy is in desperate need of an radical expansion of its political imagination

The problem with stories about the Holocaust is that they are told by the survivors

A remarkable American hero at a time in which many Americans are no longer comfortable with the heroic ideal: Ronald C. White on the life of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the unlikely hero of Gettysburg

The problem with stories about the Holocaust is that they are told by the survivors: Daniel Finkelstein on the extraordinary coincidences enabling the survival of his mum and dad from both Hitler and Stalin

Zero to Zero: William Deresiewicz on what happens when the price of online content is driven down to zero

Where have all the Democrats gone? Ruy Teixeira on why the Democratic Party needs to tone down the volume on cultural issues if it's to rediscover its soul

How this month's "almost miraculous" Polish election might be a hopeful sign for democracy everywhere: Maciej Kisilowski on the promise and peril of representative democracy in a post authoritarian Poland

Does today's climate change crisis represent an existential threat to humanity? Antonello Provenzale contextualizes the contemporary crisis within a history of climate change from the earth origins to the Anthropocene

An enigmatic city teetering on the edge of the world: John Kampfner on Berlin, a city of ghosts and memories where he can still smell the Wall

A Theory of Everyone (but not Everything): Michael Muthukrishna on how human-beings are a new kind of animal and why we need to transform the world into the most efficient laboratory possible

Why Americans have the constitutional right to sometimes lie: Jeff Kosseff protects free speech in our digital age of misinformation

Is Sam Bankman-Fried a "trained-on-jargon" cyborg?

Eight literary tricks and treats to scare you this Halloween: Bethanne Patrick on "app-aritions", cultural ghosts and unfamiliarly familiar haunted houses

Why our cyborg AI future may already have arrived in the trained-on-jargon "person" of Sam Bankman-Fried: Hito Steyerl on pyramid schemes, on-boarding tools and the "mean" creativity of our AI age

Is the venture capital industry a big ponzi scheme? Keith Teare separates the hyperbole from the hysteria of VC techno-optimism

The American Shakespeare or trash of the veriest sort? Peter Slen on Mark Twain's ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, the adventurous story of a young man and young nation on a great and not-so-great adventure

A Graphic Diary of the War in Ukraine: Nora Krug on the contrasting realities of a Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist in the first year of Russian invasion

The Dismal Science investigates that most dismal of things - economic inequality: Branko Milanovic on visions of inequality from the French Revolution to the end of the Cold War

That Sinking Feeling of Falling Out of the Middle Class: Ray Suarez on his fear of being poor in the America of the inegalitarian Twenties

Celebrating a transcendental photography of nature that blurs art and science: Photographer Anand Varma on his lifelong wonder with the natural world

How to stand up to the apocalypse: Peter Sarris on Justinian, the 6th century Byzantine ruler who confounded a narrative of decline

The Fruit of the Gods or of the Devil? Alexander Sammon on the sordid history of the avocado, the thirstiest fruit on the planet

Why Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn't really like Nineteen-Eighty Four: Sandra Newman on Julia, Winston Smith and the totalitarianism of gender that George Orwell ignored in his masculine dystopia

How to Reawaken the American Dream: David Leonhardt on unions, constitutional reform, immigration and the need for a progressive populism

Why Generative AI could make artists extinct: Karla Ortiz warns about the existential "theft" at the heart of the AI revolution

Memoirs of a cranky old New York Gen X'er: Christian Lorentzen on the half-life of a literary critic in our digital age of cultural decay and disinformation

What makes humans so special? John Parrington on how human brains, unlike those of all other species, can turn matter into meaning

What the data tells us about the cancellation of the American mind: Greg Lukianoff on why today's cancel culture is as much of a threat to free speech as the McCarthyite Red Scare of the 1950s

Why an elite establishment economist is calling bullsh*t on the promise of the American dream: Jeff Fuhrer reveals the existential crisis of economic inequality now threatening the United States

Why Poland is still in therapy over its "complex" World War II history: Roger Moorhouse on the forgotten story of a Polish diplomatic rescue operation to save the lives of Polish Jews

How "responsible" was Benjamin Netanyahu for the events of October 7? Israel novelist Noa Yedlin on the worst thing that has happened to the Jewish people since the Holocaust

Broken bodies, broken homes, broken families & broken work: Alissa Quart reveals life on the edge in the world's richest country

How to resurrect the World's Greatest Detective: Sophie Hannah on her latest Agatha Christie sanctioned murder mystery HERCULE POIROT'S SILENT NIGHT

In Defense of Place: Seth Kaplan on how to repair American society, one zip code at a time

Should we celebrate or mourn technological abundance? Keith Teare weighs up the costs and benefits of abundant artificial intelligence

Why Oliver Wendell Holmes' book "Common Law" is most uncommon: Peter Slen on the 1881 legal classic that has profoundly shaped America

What is it about scientists that makes many of them so consensual and collaborative? Lorraine Daston explains how scientists have learned to cooperate with each other

Why the American Dream has turned into a nightmare for many Americans: Andrea Dobynes Wagner on life in the United States as a black woman with an invisible disability

Listening Once Again to Prozac: Peter D. Kramer offers a thirty year history of antidepressants and the remaking of the American self

The Impact of Small Things: Best-selling writer and Hollywood actress Annabelle Gurwitch on her experience of taking in a homeless couple in Los Angeles

Are handheld video games a valuable kind of art or are they a worthless technological curse? Jon Doyle celebrates the glory years of video gaming when handheld devices provided their users with a simultaneously social and intimate experience

Didn't we learn anything from COVID? Joe Nocera on why American capitalism needs to be radically reformed if it is to successfully confront the next pandemic

Burn Baby Burn: M.R. O'Connor on the life-giving force of fire to regenerate nature

Ten Years that Didn't Change the World: Vincent Bevins on the global mass protests of 2010-2020 that failed to change anything

The Canceling of the American Mind: Rikki Schlott on why she believes cancel culture is an existential threat to the free speech of both conservatives and progressives

The American Ant King who transformed our understanding of animal behavior: Richard Rhodes on E.O. Wilson and his scientific life in nature

Being less anxious about today's epidemic of anxiety: David Rosmarin on why anxiety is both normal and healthy and how we can thrive with it

The Big Fail or A Big Success? Bethany McLean on what the Covid pandemic reveals about strengths and weaknesses of American healthcare, innovation and capitalism.

It's a Horrible Situation..... I Wish I Could Sound More Cheerful: Former British Ambassador Alexander Hall Hall on Israel, Gaza and the New Global Disorder

The Care Economy as the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Premilla Nadasen explains why we need to bring care back to what she calls the "care" economy of healthcare and teaching

How to get to a regenerative future before we blow ourselves up: Trond Undheim on averting the end of the world by 2075

An obscure 1722 naval battle off the coast of West Africa which had a monumental impact on the history of America: Angela C. Sutton on the battle of Cape Lopez and the birth of chattel slavery as an American institution

Placing African-Americans at the center of their own story: Dylan Penningroth excavates the hidden histories of Black civil rights in 19th and 20th century America

Why cheap food isn't really cheap: Will Harris on the repellant nature of industrial farming and why the future of food should be local

What makes writing, speaking and computer programming similarly human activities: Michael Littman on why all humans, in our AI age, should learn a little programming

How to Take Liberties with History: Abby Smith Rumsey on what we should remember and what we should forget about the past

How to be Abe Lincoln: Jonathan Shapiro offers seven steps to finding a moral compass and living a worthy life

Why OpenAI could be worth $5 trillion by 2028: Keith Teare explains how OpenAI might already be the most valuable company on the planet

The Man Who Could See Around Corners: Peter Slen on Frederick Douglass and his 1845 autobiography about his life os an American slave

America in the Dillon era: Richard Aldous on Douglas Dillon and mainstream Republicanism in the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations

An American Gun for the age of Sandy Hook and Uvalde: Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson on the history of the AR-15, an assault weapon that captures contemporary America's love affair with technology, freedom and guns

How to transform yourself from a good girl into a bad bitch: Lisa Carmen Wang's bad bitch business bible for taking charge of your body, boundaries and bank account

On Netanyahu, populism and democracy

Why Food Stamps Work: Christopher Bosso's political history - and defense - of SNAP

Saving Bill Clinton's life and other tales from the operating theater: Craig R. Smith on his life as one of America's most celebrated heart surgeons

A New Deal to Save the Earth: John J. Berger outlines the three dimensions to solving the world's climate crisis

The Emotional Life of Populism in Israel: Eva Illouz on Netanyahu, Hamas and what the left has lost by not embracing the fear, disgust, resentment and love that determine democratic politics

The October weekend that changed the Middle East forever: Uri Kaufman compares the Yom Kippur war of October 1973 with the Simchat Torah war of October 2023

Tripping into our brave new psychedelic world: Andy Mitchell on his odyssey into the new reality of psychedelics

The Blood Years, then and now: Elana K. Arnold on book banning, book burning and what we can learn from Second World War books about good and evil

Disorder, Disorder, Disorder: Jason Pack and Alexandra Hall Hall order our disordered world

Ordering the Middle Eastern Disorder

Is peace there for the taking? Jason Pack on Israel, Gaza, the Middle East and beyond

The All American Bitch: Evelyn McDonnell on Joan Didion's artistic sensibility and moral clarity

Why politics needs to be relegated to its proper place: Alexandra Hudson offers timeless principles on how to heal society and ourselves

Claudia Goldin, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Economics, on women's journey to close the gender gap

The Myth of Progress: Erik J. Larson on Silicon Valley's failure to change anything of any significance since the Fifties

My Bath with Hitler: Kenneth Rendell on safeguarding history at a time when fakers are much smarter and more creative than their victims

The Human Tragedy and Political Shame of America's Mass Criminal Supervision System: Vincent Schiraldi on probation, parole and the illusion of safety and freedom in contemporary America

Iron Man, Ant-Man and our relentless thirst for parasocial super heroes: Joana Robinson and Gavin Edwards on the reign of Marvel Studios

The Right Female Stuff: Loren Grush on the story of America's first six female astronauts

Should environmentalists be utopian? Dickson Despommier imagines the perfect 21st century city

From Suicide Notes to Every Star That Falls: Michael Thomas Ford on 15 years that changed the world of teen mental health and sexual identity

Artificial Intelligence or Bust: Keith Teare on why AI might be the most important development in tech since the invention of the internet

Evil colonizers, brave explorers or clueless white men? Peter Slen on the geographical and literary exploits of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

The real McElroy: Isle McElroy on what it means to be a non-binary writer and how it might feel like to be born into the wrong body

The Taylor Swift or Lady Di of the early 20th Century: Shelley Fraser Mickle on Alice Roosevelt, the White House wild child

The Repressive Power of Artificial Intelligence: Kian Vesteinsson on the crisis of freedom on the internet in 2023

All the American demons are there: Jake Tapper on how returning to the late 1970's can help us understand the America of the early 2020's

Modern Britain and all that caper: Jonathan Coe on British chocolate, the Royal Family and its decision to marry the wrong Super Power

An Old Story Told Differently: Bethanne Patrick on 8 books reimagining the experience of first generation immigrants

Against the Romance of Transformation: Leon Weiseltier on America's love affair with the promise of personal and social change

Normalizing China: Gilles Guiheux on China's very ordinary history between 1949 and today

Against Green Capitalism: Charles Derber on how big money fuels extinction and what we can do about it

No, Men aren't Angels: Peter Slen on why the Federalist Papers is one of the ten books that has most shaped America

Dumb devices, dumb bureaucrats and dumb entrepreneurs: Keith Teare on FTC chair Lina Khan, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and why the iPhone is on the brink of becoming radically more intelligent

Why Disorder may be the New Order: Jason Pack on how the global system itself has gone rogue and no longer conforms with the textbooks

Why Artificial Intelligence will make us smarter: W. Russell Neuman presents AI as a progressive moment in human evolution

An Afterword to Words Themselves? Bethanne Patrick on six speculative novels which imagine a world saturated by AI

Should we punish innovation? Keith Teare on public and private investment markets, breaking up Google and paying to use X

The 10 books that have most shaped America: Peter Slen on Thomas Paine's COMMON SENSE

The White Man's version of Democracy in America? Brook Manville on the "Civic Bargain" that defines the history of democracy in western civilization

How to think faster and talk smarter: Matt Abrahams on speaking successfully when you're put on the spot

"I want you to be more selfish": Millennial therapist Sara Kuburic on how to discover your true self and change your life

The case against forgiveness: Myisha Cherry questions a forgiving God, Christian forgiveness and happy Hollywood moral endings

The Buried History of Jerusalem: Andrew Lawler digs up the political archeology of the world's most contested city

Untangling the twin three-way relationships shaping the contemporary Middle East: Ilan Eyatar on Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States

Nothing will ever be the same again: Hugh Eakin remembers the year when the United States bumped into Pablo Picasso and modern art arrived in America

How to ensure the survival of democracy: Josiah Ober on ancient Greece and Rome as models of self government by their citizens

There's No Them There, Only Us: Kerri Maher on the Jane Collective in the early 1970s and how to write fiction about an issue as divisive as abortion

On Power, Patriarchy and Privilege: Kemi Nekvapil offers a woman's guide to living and leading without apology

Is the American Constitution undermining American Democracy? Daniel Ziblatt on how constitutional reform can strengthen democracy in America

Blood in the Machine: Brian Merchant on what we can learn from the 19th century Luddites in our digital age of gig work and generative AI

Notes from the invisible underground: Kat Calvin on the 26 million American adults who have no government ID and, thus, in the eyes of the government, don't really exist

How the quest for respect can heal our divided world: Michele Lamont on rebuilding dignity in our age of anxiety , inequality and isolation

Why Justice is Coming to America: Cenk Uygur predicts that progressives are going to take over the country and how we are all going to love it

Confronting Amazon, Google and his own powerful family: John Sargent on his adventures and misadventures as CEO of one of the world's largest publishing companies

What's Your Lego? Bent Flyvbjerg on how to get big things done

Seeing through all the shtick: of parenting Gary John Bishop on how to grow up to become the parent your kids deserve

Is Web3 technology - Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, DAOs, NFTs et al - just the latest Silicon Valley hype? Alex Tapscott separates the signal from the noise on the internet's next economic and cultural frontier

Tyranny of an Ethnocratic Minority: Steven Levitsky on what an increasingly broken American political system has to learn from the democracies of Brazil and Argentina

When the stink became overwhelming: Corban Addison tells the true story of when large-scale farming went on trial in North Carolina

Your Face Belongs to Us: Kashmir Hill on a secretive startup's quest to end privacy as we know it

Eight novels to take to a desert island this Fall: Bethanne Patrick on new fiction about Haiti, Jamestown, 1984, Malaysia and women on the margins of the Vietnam war

On the Awesomeness of Globalization: Keith Teare explains why the next chapter of globalized technology will undermine the economic and political power of the nation-state

The Economic and Moral Case for Good Jobs: Zeynep Ton on why companies need to bring dignity, pay and meaning to everyone's work

How to stand up to a dictator

How to stand up to a dictator: Maria Ressa on courage, honesty, perseverance and why must all fight for our future

The shocking saga of big media malfeasance rivaling Succession for its sex, lies and betrayals: Rachel Abrams on the Redstone dynastic struggle, former CBS executive Les Moonves and their significance to the Me Too movement

Why AI threatens not just writing, creativity and thinking, but also democracy: Naomi S. Baron on how new tools like Chat GPT are stopping us knowing who we really are as individuals

The Long Life of a Radical Gerontologist: Ken Dychtwald on how to age with purpose

The $100 Trillion Wealth Transfer: Ken Costa explains why the handover of wealth from Boomers to Gen Z must revolutionize capitalism

Why digital transformation isn't about technology: David Rogers on how to rebuild organizations in our age of continuous change

The most brutal and gruesome siege in human history? Prit Buttar on the siege of Leningrad 1941-42

Watch out for those Jewish space lasers: Mike Rothschild on the Rothschilds and 200 years of anti-semitic conspiracy theories

How to direct the power of digital technology into economic and political progress: Simon Johnson on what we can learn from our 1000-year struggle over technology and prosperity to make our age of Generative AI more equitable

On the science of failing well: Amy Edmondson explains why we need to take smart risks which will result in more, rather than fewer, failures

Don't Look Away: Alexander Batthyany on terminal lucidity, the "soul" and our final journey when we cross over the border from life to death

Extremely Socially Online: Taylor Lorenz on the untold story of fame, influence, and power on the internet

How to break free of "equality feminism": Marcie Bianco on the lie of equality and the feminist fight for freedom

Taming the Street then and now: Diana Henriques on the New Deal, FDR's fight to regulate American capitalism and its relevance in Joe Biden's America today

Was Richard Nixon really a Southern Californian paragon of cheerfulness , hard work and decency? Paul Carter's defense of the only US President born and raised in California

The Dirty Secrets of our Material World: Ed Conway on the six physical commodities underpinning the global extractive economy

An Un-Whitewashed Story of America: Michael Harriot on AF History, Black Twitter and how he "discovered" America at 8.00 pm on November 4, 1980

Eight great non-fiction reads for the Fall: LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick on new books about video-gaming writers, Roman emperors, Rastafarian fathers, Jerusalem murders, American guns and the genealogy of the female body

Why money now is the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley: Keith Teare explains how cash has become king for both tech investors and entrepreneurs

When fictional characters turn out to be more authentic than real people: Lang Leav on anti Asian racism in Australia and her love of the early internet as a place where she could escape how she looks

How Bill Clinton betrayed progressive ideas and capitulated to the right: Nelson Lichtenstein on the failure of the Clinton presidency and the transformation of American capitalism

Five Elemental Ways of Building a Sustainable Future: Stephen Porder on how five core elements changed earth's past and will shape our future

If you want to understand America, you have to understand basketball: Rich Cohen on the 1987-1988 NBA's "greatest season"

Imagine an AI that customizes a musical soundtrack of our lives: Niclas Molinder on the opportunities and threats that AI offers the creative community

AI as our Guttenberg moment: Moritz Schularick, the President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, on the economic significance of today's AI revolution

AI as our Oppenheimer moment: Benedikt Franke, CEO of the Munich Security Conference, on the geo-political significance of today's AI revolution

One year that changed the world: Ludwig Ensthaler on the short but revolutionary history of Generative AI

There will be no stock market on a dead planet: Sandrine Dixson-Decleve on how to transform extractive capitalism into a regenerative model of equitable economic progress

Why truthful stories about nature should have neither beginnings nor endings: Martin Puchner on telling circular environmental stories

Why there is hope in the soil: Jan-Gisbert Schultze on the transformational promise of regenerative agriculture

What, exactly, is circular economics? Martjin Lopes Cardozo on the current state of the circular economy

The Age of the Sustainable City: Ian Goldin on how to make the 21st century city the heart of a new circular economy

Trust and the Tokenization of Value: Rachel O'Dwyer on the future of money in our age of the digital platform

Containing and Controlling AI: Mustafa Suleyman on how to strengthen the nation-state in the coming wave of radical technological disruption

Silicon Valley's Destruction of Reality: Jonathan Taplin on how 4 tech billionaires are selling us a fantasy future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto

I Must Resist: Michael G. Long celebrates the political and personal bravery of Bayard Ruskin on the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington

Why extraterrestrial life doesn't give a damn about us: Avi Loeb on the search for interstellar species and our future in the stars

Saving the Planet Five Times Faster: Simon Sharpe rethinks the science, economics and diplomacy of climate change

Exposing Beijing's Rotten Rules: Bethany Allen on how an authoritarian China is weaponizing its economy to confront the world

Eighteen Days in October: Uri Kaufman on the Yom Kippur War and the how it created the modern Middle East

SPACs, Scams and Hit Jobs: Keith Teare defends former SPAC king Chamath Palihapitiya from "hit job" accusations of scamming small investors

Nine Noteworthy Novels: Bethanne Patrick on fast, furious and fun reads for the dying days of summer

TECHNOSLEEP: Sleep sociologist Katherine Conveney on the technological past, present and future of sleep

Mr and Mrs Orwell's Invisible Lives

Mr and Mrs Orwell's Invisible Lives: Anna Funder shines a light on Eileen O'Shaughnessy, George Orwell's homosexuality, and patriarchy as doublethink

How billionaires have colonized the New York City skyline: Katherine Clarke on the race to build the world's most exclusive skyscrapers

Say Everything Everywhere: Scott Rosenberg remembers the digital origins of bulletin boards, blogging and the social media revolution

This Is Wildfire: Nick Mott on how to protect ourselves, our homes and our communities in the age of heat

Why Twitter and Facebook are like nuclear weapons: Umut Ozkirimli traces his personal history of social media from the 2013 Gezi Park uprising to his own cancellation in 2020

Why the Revolution Won't Be Retweeted: Ece Temelkuran on social media's failure to change the world

The New Heart of Darkness: Siddharth Kara on how the (rechargable) blood of the Congo powers our lives

Orwell, Orwell, Orwell

Playing Chess against Nature: Rafael Yuste explains how today's advances in neuroscience will eventually lead to a new Renaissance in understanding who exactly we are as a species

Sex, Faith and Murder in an Early 19th Century New England Mill Town: Bruce Dorsey on the first true crime story that captivated America

Why today's "Polycrisis" is akin to living in a hospice: Anya Kamenetz untangles the environmental, psychological, epidemiological, economic and political crises of our age

Why Big Tech threatens our civil rights, economy and democracy: Silicon Valley insider Tom Kemp warns about the existential dangers of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple

Can there be liberty in the Greater Middle East without democracy? Robert D. Kaplan on why Singapore offers a palatable political model for countries lying between the Mediterranean and China

Remembering the Digital Future: Ethan Zuckerman on the history of blogging, the Arab Spring and why there will never be another Twitter

The Silicon Valley Playbook for Existential Success: Behnam Tabrizi on why some companies succeed and others fail in the perpetual struggle to survive in today's innovative economy

On the Disinformation of Trump, RFK Jr and Putin: Lee McIntyre explains how we can fight for truth and protect democracy

What, exactly, is female beauty? Celeste Marcus on Bardot and Barbie as rival and perhaps incompatible types of beautiful women

Liberal Saint or Monty Pythonesque Sinner? D.J. Taylor uncovers a "New Life" for George Orwell that resurrects the iconic 20th century writer for a 21st century audience

8 inspiring non-fiction reads for the summer: Bethanne Patrick on books about New York City sex cults, the oceanic underworld, Ghanian confidence tricksters and American women, fathers and sons

What history teaches us about the future of venture capitalism: Keith Teare on how being a good investor requires us to overcome our emotions

Why Podcasters should NEVER read advertisements on their own shows: Jemima Kelly on the gross inauthenticity of podcasts and most other forms of "social" media

So how much would you pay for the Mona Lisa? Arturo Cifuentes explains the cost of art and why valuing paintings is like evaluating the price of real-estate

The Not-So-Secret World of Black Twitter: Deesha Philyaw on social media, the influencer generation and the loneliness of online existence

Getting Beyond the Happy Talk of Liberal Orthodoxy: Susan MacKenty Brady explains how men and women can begin talking fearlessly to one another again

The Woman Who Couldn't Wake Up: Quinn Eastman on Hypersomnia and the science of sleepiness

How Trust Works: Peter Kim on the science of how relationships are built, broken, and repaired

All of a sudden, there was all this freedom: David Winer on the origins of blogging, the self-publishing technology that has profoundly shaped the first quarter of the 21st century

If Life isn't a Movie, then How Should We Make Movies about Life? Olivia Rutigliano on Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 controversial film, "Le Mepris" (Contempt)

The Terrifyingly Exciting Promise of Nuclear Fusion: Matthew Moynihan on radically disruptive technology that, he promises, can conquer climate change and take us to Mars in a month

The Future of Money, Jobs, Climate and Failure: Andrew Hill on the Financial Times' best 15 business books from 2023

Dry Powder for a Dying Digital Economy? Keith Teare on the deepening venture capital crisis, how the innovators dilemma holds back Big Tech innovation, and why Substack is trying to reinvent the online media ecosystem

Did MTV Kill American Democracy? Kathryn Cramer Brownell on cable television and the fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News

Literary Insurrections and Memetic Apocalypses : Rion Amilcar Scott on the rise and (perhaps) fall of Black Twitter

The Scottish Coal-Miner's Daughter Who Took on the Bulgarian Cryptoqueen: Jennifer McAdam on her battle to take down Ruja Ignatova and her $27 Billion OneCoin Scam

The Seven Best Novels of the Summer: Bethanne Patrick on the literature of love, nostalgia, young call girls and valiant women

The Subversive Story of the B-52s: Scott Creney on one of the most iconic bands in American popular musical history

Feeding the AI Beast: Michael Wooldridge on the vast quantities of online data that have trained ChatGPT to mimic human language

Why America is Facing its greatest "Moral Moment "since the Civil War: Peter Wehner on the accountability of the Republican Party for Trump

Why We Need to Reoccupy Reality: Douglas Rushkoff on the Untethering of America between 2013 and 2023

How something really strange began to happen on social media in 2016

Bonfire of the Unicorns: Keith Teare on the near apocalypse for Silicon Valley billion dollar valued start-ups ("unicorns") and the impact of this meltdown on the broader innovation economy

Get Out of My Way

In Defense of the Abraham Accords

Remembering a first Tweet with the same bewitching nostalgia as a first kiss

Why 1968 was the year that broke American politics and how this could be repeated in 2024

Why Greta Gerwig's BARBIE is Cynical and Vapid

Why So Many Smart People Are Turning Against Democracy

If We Can Be Taught How to Write, Then Why Not Also Be Educated in How to Love?

How to go from a small handful of book sales to top of the bestseller list via a 16 second Tiktok

How Landscape Architecture should get us to Pause and then Reconnect with Nature

Following the Dirty Money in Today's Globalized Entrepreneurial Underworld

Springsteen as Odysseus

How the High Price of Money is Wrecking the Venture Capital Industry

Hot Reads for the Heatwave

The New York Street that Changed American Art Forever

Why Springsteen's NEBRASKA Matters So Much

A Real World War II Story: The Tragic Life of Ira Hayes

In Praise of Valiant American Women

How Barbie Dolls Up the Plasticity of our Surreal Times

Can the Men Be Saved?

The Gutenberg Parenthesis

Why Julian Barnes Will Never Write a Memoir or Autobiography

Why Conservatives Should Fear & Loathe AI

How To Be a Wise Teacher

The Netscape Moment When AI Gets a Brain

Imaging the Animal World as Nature's Great Maintenance Crew

Why the "very very excellent" OPPENHEIMER is a complicated film for our complex times

The Hidden History of American Democracy

Episode 1610: Our Oppenheimer Moment

Episode 1609: Why America Dominates the World

Episode 1608: The Fourth Turning is Here

Episode 1607: What Happens When Both Life and the Planet is Programmable?

EPISODE 1606: On the "Moral Ambiguity" Surrounding the American Decision to Drop Two Nuclear Bombs on Japan

Episode 1605: Why the Habsburg Empire is as much a guide to our 21st Century Future as our 19th Century Past

Episode 1603: Can Diplomacy Save American Democracy?

Episode 1603: Social Media For Dummies

EPISODE 1602: How to Learn to Look So that We Become the World Itself

Episode 1601: Why Americans Still Can't Talk to Each Other About Politics

Episode 1600: What a Cock Up!

Episode 1599: Black Americans, Civil Rights and the Roosevelts, 1932-1962

Episode 1598: Goodbye, Eastern Europe

Episode 1597: Into the Bright Sunshine of Human Rights

Episode 1596: How the Internet Has Become an Outrage Machine

Episode 1595: Why AI is Now the Analytical Brain AND the Creative Heart of our Economy

EPISODE 1594: Can Artificial Intelligence Be Moral?

Episode 1593: Why America's Blood-Sucking Super Rich Want to Live Forever

Episode 1592: Risking Everything in Pursuit of Truth and Beauty

Episode 1591: Enabling a Conversation Between Rural and Urban America

Episode 1590: Talking to the Mafia about Michael Jackson, Donald Trump and Jimmy Hoffa

Episode 1589: Why Lina Khan and Gary Gensler Should Be Fired

Episode 1588: A Real-Life Tragicomedy about our Destruction of the Earth

Episode 1587: What America's current drug binge reveals about the post neoliberal 2020s

Episode 1586: Why the Renaissance Still Haunts Us

Walt Zuckerberg: If you like Disneyland, then you're gonna love Threads

Episode 1584: Learning from the Deepest Oceans about How Life Begun

From Radical to Unifier to Martyr: C.W. Goodyear on James Garfield, the Most Pathologically Reasonable of American Presidents

Episode 1582: A Terribly Serious History of Philosophy at Oxford

KEEN ON Episode 1581: When a Czechoslovakian David Twice Beat the Soviet Goliath

Episode 1580: The Albert Einstein Effect

Episode 1579: Crime as a Catalyst for Social Change

The rise of Las Narcas - the drug ladies of Latin America

The Warnings of a Holocaust Scholar about Today's World of the Big Lie

How to Tell the American Story

Phew! When AI ate the internet

A Chilling Plot to Grab the World's Food and Water Resources

How to Get Beyond the Shame of Sexual Violence

America's First Great Naturalist

The Uncomfortable Truths Our Dogs Would Tell Us If They Could Talk

Why Novels Must Be More Believable than Non-Fiction Books

Remembering Judy Garland, Michael Jackson, the Spice Girls and Stevie Wonder

From Pizza and Meze to Ramen and Borscht: Unscrambling the Politics of National Dishes

Is most of rural America really plotting to destroy democracy?

On the Importance of Being Batshit Crazy

American Whitelash: Wesley Lowery on the cost of progress in an increasingly multiracial America

The American Dream of a "Tossed Salad": Luma Mufleh on reconciling her identity as a gay Muslim woman with an Arab-turned-American refugee

The 20th Century Corporation: Richard Langlois on the cultural and economic history of the modern American business enterprise

Pricing the Priceless: Paula DiPerna on how to quantify the planet and solve the climate crisis

Why 80% Isn't Good Enough: Matt Higgins imagines how the publishing industry and writers will be impacted by the coming AI storm

The Middle Eastern Maze: Itamar Rabinovich on Israel, the Palestinians and an inglorious seventy-five year history of mostly failed peace initiatives

Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

A Teacher's Journey: Adam Bessie's graphically dystopian take on education in the digital age of COVID and AI

Fireworks Every Night: Beth Raymer on her delightfully delusional father, male homelessness and why Florida "just is America"

The End of the Game: Roger Ballen on the existential ecological psychodrama of the destruction of African wildlife

Becoming Fully Me: Bethanne Patrick about how she escaped her double depression and wrote a memoir about it

Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World: Christian Cooper on birding, the flight of freedom and how we must positively bend the arc of justice

Why Big Tech is Getting Even Bigger: Keith Teare on how the biggest tech companies now control our economic and political fates

From Queer to Gay to Queer: James Kirchick on why he believes the theory of "queerness" is a "parasite" on the gay rights movement

How to Get Rid of Rich White Men: Garrett Neiman on uprooting the old boy's club in order to transform America

A Queer American Life: R.K. Russell on being black and bi-sexual in the National Football League

Winner Sells All: Jason Del Rey on the quarter century Amazon vs Walmart war for our wallets, bodies and souls

Animal Spirits: Jackson Lears on the American Pursuit of vitality from Walt Whitman and William James to Teddy Roosevelt and Donald Trump

How to Think Like a Philosopher: Peter Cave on the scholars, dreamers and sages who can teach us how to live

France and Marc Chagall in World War Two: Stephen Kiernan on the redemptive power of art to reconstruct a broken nation

The Purple Presidency 2024: C. Owen Paepke on how voters can reclaim the White House for "bipartisan" governance

Things You Wanted to Say But Never Did: Geloy Concepcion on his confessional photographic journal on Instagram

The Datapreneurs: Bob Muglia on why we should trust the promise of AI and its creators to build a better human future

Against Nostalgia: Mark Lilla on why progressives should reject nostalgia in thinking about both the past and future

In this regular weekly show with THAT WAS THE WEEK newsletter author Keith Teare, Andrew and Keith discuss why Keith was wrong in last week's show about Apple's new Vision Pro and how this revolutionary device might once again change everything

A Radical Amerikan Family: Santi Elijah Holley on the Shakurs - from the Black Panthers to Tupac

The Good Enough Job: Simone Stolzoff on how to reclaim our life from work

The Three Ages of Water: Peter Gleick on the prehistoric past, imperiled present and hopeful future of water

My Hijacking: Martha Hodes on her memoir of forgetting

Imagine a City: Mark Vanhoenacker writes a love letter from the sky to the world's greatest cities

As Rich as a Digital Croesus: Trevor Traina imagines a super app in which we can store all our Web3 data

In Defense of Big Girls: Mecca Jamilah Sullivan asks whether the American Republic was founded on anti-fat people principles

The Overlooked Americans: Elizabeth Currid-Halkett on the resilience of rural America and it means for the future of the country

Donna Cleanwell Leaves Home: Ana Castillo on her "truth seeking" fictional characters and her amusement at being considered the "grande dame of Chicana literature"

Conversations with Your Future Self: Hal Hershfield on how to escape the tyranny of the present and make tomorrow better today

The Chile Project: Sebastian Edwards on the story of the Chicago Boys and the downfall of neoliberalism

The Siberian Job: John Kleinheinz on how he got rich in post-communist Russia and what that experience taught him about the value of free markets and democracy

Crime and Punishment for the Jews: Paul Goldberg on "The Dissident", his new Cold War mystery about a group of refuseniks in Moscow in 1976

Having Pride in Pride: Abdi Nazemian on why he's happy being thought of as a queer writer

Here Begins the Global Age: Meredith Small explains how a 15th century Venetian monk drew a map of the world and foresaw the future

The Best of New York City Distilled into a Neighborhood Bar: Jon Michaud on the life and death of Coogan's, one of New York's most beloved saloons

Against the Fetishization of Identity: Umut Ozkirimli offers a leftist alternative to what he sees as the intolerance of "woke" politics

Body Neutrality: Jessi Kneeland on the psychology and spirituality of escaping body self-hatred

The Search for Justice in America: Jared Fishman on the cold-blooded murder of Henry Glover by the New Orleans Police Department after Hurricane Katrina

The Survivor's Story of a Gay Activist: Paul Burston on how we can all be heroes, just for one day

Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe: Kate Strasdin on fashion, fabric and femininity in 19th century England

The Most American of Americans: How African-American slaves embraced the new Republic's symbols of freedom in their fight for freedom

The Twisted Games We Play: Siena Sterling on twisted plots, twisted people and twisted writers like Highsmith and Dostoievski

The Italian Squad: Paul Moses on the true story of the immigrant cops who fought the rise of the Mafia

The Palestine Laboratory: Antony Loewenstein explains how Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world

The Heartbeat of the Wild: David Quammen's conservationist manifesto from landscapes of wonder, peril and hope

Do You Dream of Electric Sheep? Jordan Crandall on the appropriate literature for our new age of superintelligence

That Was The Week in Tech: Keith Teare predicts a failed Apple virtual reality headset but is more bullish on Twitter's reinvention as X

Message on an Envelope: Stephen Games rethinks the publishing industry by reimagining books as postcards

The 7 Deadly Myths: Alex Ryvchin on antisemitism from the time of Christ to Kanye West and the Ashburton Army

The Wounded World: Chad Williams on W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World World

Anything but Halycon: Elliot Ackerman imagines an America of President Al Gore in which there is technology that can resurrect dead people

Our Kids Will Ask Us What We Did: Skye Perryman explains why she is fighting to save American democracy

Like the Appearance of Horses: Andrew Krivak on war, language, memory and why ChatGPT will never understand beauty

The World as a Big Book Club: David Blake explains the resiliency of the physical book and why he is cautiously optimistic about the impact of AI on both publishing and storytelling

Carry Strong: Stephanie Kramer offers an empowered approach to navigating pregnancy and work

Talking Turkey: Soli Özel makes sense of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's return to political power

How to Scale Trust: David Samson on making tribes and tribalism work in the 21st century

Accelerated Minds: Neil Seeman unlocks the often destructive impulses that drive the entrepreneurial brain

A Lost Son in Russia: Brett Forrest on the tragic human collateral loss of the FBI's secret wars

On Our Worst Behavior: Elise Loehnen explains why women should be sinful

Living Beneath the Surface: Hugh Howey imagines the actual world as a science fictional version of reality

The Revenge of the Future

When the Heavens Went on Sale: Ashlee Vance on the historical precedents, environmental risks and business opportunities of colonizing space

Thomas Jefferson as America's Founding Plagiarist: David Fleming explains how Jefferson stole the words of the Declaration of Independence from Irish and Scottish migrants to North Carolina

The Shadow Docket: Stephen Vladeck on how the Supreme Court is using stealth rulings to undermine the American Republic

The Cult of the Asshole: Jeremy Sherman's psycho-proctological analysis of why there are so many assholes around these days

Celebrating Israeli Independence Day: Rick Richman on why he believes "Americanism" and "Zionism" are the most successful "isms" of the 20th century

How to Fix Democracy: Maciej Kisilowski on reconciling progressives and conservatives in Turkey, Poland and the United States

Why Today's Environmental Problems Aren't Existential: Steven Cohen's pragmatic approach to environmentally sustainable growth

Built to Move: Juliet and Kelly Starrett on the most essential habits to help us move freely and live fully

Why Hitchcock's "Vertigo" Still Matters: Ty Burr celebrates the 65th Birthday of this warped, phallic masterpiece about desire & impotence

Telling the Same Story Differently: Terry McDonell on writing about his mother, Irma

Resurrection of an Author

Why Facebook Matters :David Kirkpatrick remembers his first meeting with Mark Zuckerberg in 2006 and how social media has changed all of our lives since

Resurrection of the Author: Stephen Marche explains why Generative AI technologies like ChatGPT will make creators more valuable than ever

The Left and the Nation-State: Michael Walzer on what progressives today can learn from liberal nationalists like Thomas Jefferson and Guiseppe Mazzini

The Phoenix Economy: Felix Salmon on work, life and the price of lobster rolls in the new not normal

The Cult of Celebrity: Landon Jones on how America has devolved into a culture of fans and followers

Why Night Vision is the Right Vision: Mariana Alessandri on how the natural human condition might might be to live in darkness, anger and pain

Decision Sprint: Atif Rafiq on whether innovation is an art or a science

A Scientific Theory of Complexity: Neil Theise on Connection, Consciousness and Being

John Borthwick on the Intimacy of AI & Social Media Data

:Why Smart Machines Know Us So Well: John Borthwick on how today's AI revolution is being built upon social media data

Can the GOP Win the Independent Vote? Carl Delfeld on how Republicans existential challenge of reaching non-aligned voters

We Plan, God Laughs: Emma Nadler on how good and bad luck, like laughter and tears, are often inseparably connected

That Was The Week in Tech: Keith Teare explains why all this week's King Canute style talk about regulating AI is equally absurd and impractical

Why Asian Start-ups Outside China Matter: Bernard Moon on innovation in South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam

The Traffic Drug: Ben Smith on the Internet's fatal addiction to viral traffic

Andrew Tate, Mr Beast, KSI and a Viral Flood of Toxic Masculinity: Henry Mance on what it means to be a boy online in 2023

How to Fix Democracy Series 5 Launches

Remembering the Beginnings of our Social Media Age: Julia Angwin on her earliest memories of the blogging "revolution"

Jeff Jarvis remembers the history of social media

Uncovering the Sad Truth about Wonder Boy: Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans on Tony Hsieh and Silicon Valley's happiness myth

Turning the Traditional Super-Hero Narrative Upside Down: Leah Johnson on why it's more important for kids to save themselves than to save the world

Why Social Media Still Matters: Jeff Jarvis on the origins of blogging , what went wrong at Twitter and Facebook, and how he still believes in the social potential of the Internet

The 1963 Birmingham Campaign: Paul Kix on the ten weeks that changed America

Is American Capitalism Irredeemably Rotten? Brendan Ballou on Private Equity's Plan to Pillage and Plunder the United States

HELL TO PAY: Michael Lind explains how the suppression of wages and unions is destroying America

From Solitaire to Heartstopper: Alice Oseman on asexuality, authentic story telling and book banning

The First Lady of World War II: Shannon McKenna Schmidt on Eleanor Roosevelt's remarkable heroism during the War

The Miracle That the United States Needs Right Now: John Blake's personal story on how to get beyond race and racism in America today

Telling Our Stories Our Way: Angeline Boulley on the need to get beyond "trauma "in Native American literature

The Promise of Second Life: Amber Atherton on the rise (and fall) of virtual communities

Excellent Advice for Living (and Dying)

Excellent Advice for Living (and Dying): Kevin Kelly on how to become improbable versions of ourselves and why we should be intimate with our ancestors

The Art of Fictionalizing Non-Fiction: Katie Hafner on Kafka, Silicon Valley and the truish story behind her novel "The Boys"

Trump Was a Joke: Sophia McClennen on how satire makes sense of a President who didn't

Free and Equal: Daniel Chandler on what a fair society should look like

VC shrinkage, the end of screens, and sperm injected robots: Keith Teare on THAT WAS THE WEEK in tech for April 29, 2023

On Fathers and Sons: Charles Foran explains what his memories of his father teach us about himself and us

Bridging Istanbul with Kansas City: Kenan Orhan on the surprising links between the American heartland and the Turkish metropolis

From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic: Simon Winchester about the magical way in which knowledge is now transmitted

The Poetry of End Times:" Rishi Dastidar offers a post-apocalyptic jig and reel to dance around our climate crisis

If You Don't Adapt, You Fail: Peter Frankopan on what we can learn from history about today's environmental crisis

From Saddam to the Iraqi heavy metal scene: Faisal Saeed Al Mutar on resisting Al Qaeda, reading John Stuart Mill and eating a good kebab

An Uneducated Memoir: Christopher Zara on flunking out, falling apart and finding his worth in spite of not being "educated"

No, We Are Not Alone: Daniel Siegel explains how we must expand our idea of the "self" to include other people, other species and the earth itself

Halloween Comes Early to Silicon Valley This Year: The death of magazines, DVDs & Buzzfeed News as well as the near-death of Twitter

I Kick and I Fly: Ruchira Gupta on empowering girls to fight against child prostitution and sex trafficking

On God, Goodness & the Value of Persistence: Sam Adeyemi on why evangelicals should be encouraging their followers to think like "leaders"

The World and All That It Holds: Aleksandar Hemon on Sarajevo, Jerusalem and the political significance of "macaronic" language

Seeing Through the Smoke: Peter Grinspoon, MD, untangles the truth about marijuana

What's Love Got To Do With It? Genevieve Wheeler on witty banter, trashing talking and true romance in our social media age

Why nobody is taking any liberties at Liberties: Celeste Marcus on publishing an uncompromisingly high-quality literary quarterly in the age of Substack & TikTok

When the Medium Became the Message: Julia Angwin on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the origins of our age of advertising driven surveillance capitalism

American Madness

American Madness: Jonathan Rosen's tragic story about friendship, insanity and murder

The South Pacific, Then and Now: Tanis Rideout asks whether we should apologize for the sins of our colonizing ancestors

Soft Power 2.0: Daniel F. Runde on how America can reclaim global leadership in the 2020s

What Do White Women Want? Kimberlee Yolanda Williams on what it's like to rock the white woman's cradle

Is Antisemitism on the Rise? Philip Slayton discusses an ancient hatred in our age of identity politics

Those British Coronations: Jennifer Robson compares the crowning of Elizabeth II in 1953 with Charles III in 2023

On Children's Superpowers: Jarrett Krosoczka explains how art can enable kids to escape the unfortunate circumstances of their lives

That Was the Week in Tech

That Was The Week for 4/14/23: Keith Teare on Substack vs Twitter, Apple banking, and Betaworks' AI Camp

The Anxious Achiever: Morra Aarons-Mele on how to transform your biggest fears into your leadership superpower

How to Construct a Nervous System: Margo Jefferson on Ella Fitzergerald, Josephine Baker and the Refraction of her Life through Memoir Writing

Mediocre Monk: Grant Lindsley on what he learnt in his stumbling search for wisdom in a Thai forest monastery

Butcher on the Block; Matt Moore talks meat, butcher shops and where to find the best Lebanese food in America

The Point of No Return for American Democracy? Thomas Byrne Edsall on the Republican party's descent into "minority authoritarianism"

Nesting After Divorce: Beth Behrendt on how to co-parent in the family home after the marriage ends

Flying Green: Christopher de Bellaigue identifies the lies and the promise of an environmentally responsible airline industry

William Brewer: Psychedelic Therapy Saved My Life

Join me on Notes

How to Innovate: Sheena Iyengar on how, in our Age of Big Problems, we must learn to Think Bigger

On Mental Illness and the Mist of Consciousness: William Brewer explains how Psychedelic Therapy Saved His Life

On Roads Not Taken: Novelist Juliette Fay explains why regret is such fertile territory for fiction writers

Disrupting the Traditional Art World: Evrim Oralkan on how Collecteurs.com is transforming privately owned creative work into "public" digital art

A Tragic Grand Delusion: Steven Simon on the Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East

That Was the Week in Tech: Inspired by his wife, Gene, Keith Teare asks whether the market has hit the bottom

Nine Black Robes: Joan Biskupic on the historic significance of the Supreme Court's drive to the right

An Impossible Choice: Anjan Sundaram on the devastating personal costs of being a war correspondent in Africa

The Painful Joy of Remembering the Lives of Two Holocaust Survivors: Max J. Friedman on why he chose to write a memoir about his Holocaust surviving parents

Why We Should Blame Leaders, not Citizens, for Today's Crisis of Democracy: Larry Bartels on how democracy is eroding from the top

The Start-Up That Defines the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley: Jimmy Soni on the story of PayPal and its remarkable alumni who have shaped the 21st century

The Teen Mental Health Crisis: Hannah Murphy asks whether teens are paying with their sanity for their "free" social media

Complicate the Narrative: Rajiv Vinnokota on how to transform Americans into better citizens

Getting Kids to Hear the Trees: Brian Selznick on how to make a hopeful children's book about our environmental crisis

Why Philosophy Matters: Diana Janney on the philosophical foundations of her fiction

Getting Out of Saigon: Ralph White explains how he - as a 27-year old American banker - saved 113 South Vietnamese civilians

Welcome to the Age of Scientific Wellness: Nathan Price on why the future of medicine will be personalized, predictive, data-rich, and in all of our hands

How to Laugh in the Face of our Environmental Apocalypse: Aaron Sachs explain why dark comedy matters in the fight against climate change

George VI and Elizabeth: Sally Bedell Smith on the 20th century royal marriage that saved the British monarchy

I Can't Save You: Anthony Chin-Quee on how giving up his successful career in medicine "saved" him

Why We Need To Unwire from Big Tech: Gaia Bernstein on how to gain control over addictive digital technologies

Don't Be King Canute: Keith Teare's Open Letter against pausing generative AI

Retracing the Iron Curtain: Timothy Phillips on his 3,000 mile journey through the end and afterlife of the Cold War

The Problem to End All Problems: Michael Scott-Baumann on the tragically parallel histories of Israel and Palestine

A Memoir about Hardship and Tragedy: Nicole Chung personal story of class, anger and grief in an increasingly unequal America

The Last Catastrophe: Allegra Hyde offers an existential pitch for saving the planet

Is the Web3 Dead? Edward Lee on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and the seductive promise of creators taking control of their digital work

Why the Ideal of the "Self" is a Social Construction: Brian Lowery on the myth of rugged individualism and what this should mean for the America of the 2020s

How to Save Democracy? Eli Merritt offers advice and inspiration from 95 (mostly) democratic world leaders on how to save our democracy from demagogue like Donald Trump

An Archeology of the Soviet Century: Karl Schlogel offers an encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet Union

How To Fix Democracy: Samuel Issacharoff searches for glimmers of hope to strengthen democracies around the world

Retelling the stories of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Stephanie Marie Thornton imagines the lost words between the iconic 18th century feminist and her equally visionary 19th century daughter

American Humility and Hubris in Kabul: Jeffrey E. Stern on a many layered story of brotherhood and terror in the Afghanistan war

A Gutenberg Moment in the History of Medicine: Dr Robert Pearl offers 5 ways that generative AI is about to revolutionize healthcare

Digital McCarthyism: Keith Teare on the chilling anti=Chinese and anti-Communist hysteria in Washington DC against TikTok

How to Incentivize People to Change their Behavior: Uri Gneezy reveals how incentives really work

The Power of Hope: Carol Graham on how the science of well-being an save us from despair

Ancient Stories about the Future: Sabrina Orah Mark on telling fairy tales designed to wake us up

The New American Abnormal

Trump as the Road Runner: Kevin O'Brien, former Assistant US Attorney to the DOJ, on hush money, Stormy Daniels and the latest farcical chapter of the Donald Trump Show

How Data Happens: Chris Wiggins on a history of data from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms

When All Else Failed: Dana Sachs on the volunteers at the heart of the worst human displacement crisis in Europe since WW2

Our Brains on Art and Music: Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross on how the arts improve both individual and communal health

The New American Abnormal: Kerry Howley questions the seduction of a singular "truth" in the "Deep State" America of violent rumor, paranoia and perpetual surveillance

Who Doesn't Want to Reinvent Themselves? Joanne Lipman reveals the five laws of reinventing our lives and work

Why Water Matters: Natalie Koch untangles the weirdly connected environmental fates of Arizona and Saudi Arabia

Are You Drowning in Work? Nick Sonnenberg on how to reduce clutter and enable productivity

Do Women Make Better Murderers Than Men? Ren DeStefano on female serial killers and why she suspects everyone might have a murder in them

Great Kingdoms of Africa: John Parker Liberates African history from the colonial narrative of oppression, suffering and powerlessness

Hallucinations, Guardian Angels and The Third Man: Dr Ben Alderson-Day on the strange science and true stories of the unseen other

Keen On Keen: Andrew Keen on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, ChatGPT4 and the general state of tech in 2023

Appropriating the appropriators: Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai on why female novelists like herself should appropriate the voices of men

As the Crisis Deepens: A rather miserable Keith Teare on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and our lack of trust in ideas and institutions

Horror Literature as a Form of Realism: Leopoldo Gout on the living dead who layer Mexico City

Grasping at the Realities of Today's Banking Crisis: Brad DeLong on the new economic laws of our social media age

The Case for Cultural Appropriation: Martin Puchner on how culture is simultaneously owned by nobody and by all of us

Beijing 1949: Elisabeth B. Armstrong on the most consequential anti-colonial feminist conference that you've never heard of

How to Walk the Walk: Neil Gross on three police chiefs who defied the odds and changed American cop culture

Has World War One Ended Yet? Alice Winn on innocence, privilege, violence, sexuality and love in 1914-18 England

Broken threads, broken springs, broken idols, broken heads: Christopher Hobson on how everything everywhere - from the US and UK to Nigeria, Iraq, Lebanon and South Africa - is broken

The Last Russian Doll: Kristen Loesch on fictionalizing and feminizing the history of 20th century Russia

A 21st Century Money Revolution: Richard Duncan outlines the monetary policy that can make America great again

Celebrating International Women's Month: Tiffany Shlain on the history of feminism, tree rings and "Dendrofemonology"

The Power of Wonder: Monica C. Parker on the extraordinary emotion that can change the way we live, learn and work

The Death of American Politics: Peter Wehner on retribution, vengeance, forbearance and healing in Trump's America

Playing God: Mary Jo McConahay on why American Catholic Bishops are a threat to democracy

Bootstrapped: Alissa Quart on why we need to liberate ourselves from the "American Dream"

More Than a Glitch: Meredith Broussard confronts race, gender and ability bias in tech

A Murderous Women's History Month: Patti McCracken on some early 20th century Hungarian women who poisoned 160 men (plus a few females)

On Human Agency and the Language of Grief: Colin Campbell explains why grieving is the quintessential human activity

Are Mindfulness and Yoga the Luxuries of a Privileged Class? Susan Verde on childhood trauma, positive self-acceptance and her journey of healing

The (a)Morality of War: Ian Buruma on how some people actively collaborated with evil during World War II

The Silicon Valley Bank apocalypse: That Was the Week's Keith Teare on the death (and resurrection?) of SVB

What Gives You the Right? Jean Hanff Korelitz on Philip Roth, "The Human Stain" and a novelist's "right" to tell other people's stories

Why weren't the economic consequences of COVID more apocalyptic? Liz Hoffman on how government and companies successfully crash landed the COVID economy

Craig Seligman on Doris Fish, the rise of drag and why Ron DeSantis should dress up as a woman

The Noise of Typewriters: Lance Morrow remembers the golden age of American journalism

Empathize Empathize Empathize: Chris Shipley on how to "empower" the workforce in our post COVID world

How To Outrun Artificial Intelligence: Ashley Recanati on protecting YOUR job from the voracious smart machines of the AI revolution

Without a Female Doubt: Surbhi Sarna on how woman can go from underrated to unbeatable

42 Today: Michael G. Long on why Jackie Robinson's political legacy is at least as important as his sporting one

THE BIG CON: Rosie Collington on how the consulting industry weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments, and warps our economies

A Venture Apocalypse? Keith Teare on the collapse of start-up value, the failure of government to rein in Big Tech, and the relentless rise of AI

The Marriage Box: Corie Adjmi on her guilt at writing about "flawed" Jewish characters

Women Are the Fiercest Creatures: Andrea Dunlop on why today is such a rage-inducing time to be a woman

The New Language of Building: Reinier de Graaf on how our cities and buildings have been infected with the corporate doublespeak of "wellness", "innovation" and "livability"

A Radical Take on Putin's Invasion of Ukraine: Benjamin Abelow on how the West brought war to Ukraine

A Psychiatric Novel about Donald Trump: Peter Kramer fictionalizes the "Great Man's" inner life.

A Wooden World of Mud, the Stars and the Forest: Alexander Nemerov's Fable of America in the 1830s

50 Reasons to be Cheerful: Ryan Bernsten on why America isn't quite as divided as we are told

Gnar Country: Steven Kotler on how to stay "rad" while growing old

The New Deal's Unlikely Heroes: Derek Leebaert on FDR's Four Key Lieutenants and the World They Made

Workers of the World Unite, You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Blood: Kathleen McLaughlin on the Plasma Industry Sucking the Blood of the American Poor

The Indiana Jones of the Deep: Mensun Bound on the discovery of Shackleton's Endurance in the most hostile sea on earth

Why Has Children's Literature Become So Politicized? Kelly Yang on Roald Dahl, Ron DeSantis and the new culture wars over kids' books

That Was The Week in tech: Keith Teare on Section 230, an AI bubble, the new China-Saudi axis, and Sam Bankman-Fried's growing legal woes

Crisis, What Crisis? Paul Stephan on the world crisis triggered by our knowledge economy

The Big Myth: Erik Conway explains how American business taught us to loathe government and love the free market

Should We Be Outraged By the New York Police Department? Michael Hayes on Bill de Blasio, the NYPD & the Broken Promises of Police Reform

America as Injustice, Inc: Daniel Hatcher on how the US criminal justice system commodifies children and the poor

Our Meganets Nightmare: David Auerbach on How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities

We All Live in Palo Alto Now: Malcolm Harris' History of California, America and the World

Fictionalizing History: Jonathan Wilson on whether Palestine was a Jewish "state in waiting" during the 1930s

Should Law about Press Freedom be Rewritten for our Internet Age? Samantha Barbas on how the Supreme Court might be preparing to overhaul New York Times vs Sullivan

The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: Joel Warner on a notorious scoundrel, a mythical manuscript and the biggest scandal in literary history

Some People Will Believe Anything: Kelly Weill on Flat Earthers and other anti-scientific fundamentalists

I am Still With You: Emmanuel Iduma's reckoning with the silence, inheritance and history of the Nigerian Civil War

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: John Perkins on how China and the United States both seek world hegemony and what we can do about it

Remembering Africatown: Nick Tabor on America's Last Slave Ship and the Community it Created

Roger Cohen on our age of undoing

An Affirming Flame: Roger Cohen meditates on life, politics and how to rebuild our age of undoing

ChatGPT gets sexy, Tesla fails to startup & Google gets ready for its Supreme Court showdown: That Was the Week in tech for 2/17/23

The Inside Story of Social Media: Steven Levy on Friendster, MySpace, Facebook and TikTok

Black and Queer on Campus: Michael P. Jeffries on what life is like for Black LGBTQ students in American colleges today

Purposeful Curiosity: Costas Andriopoulos on asking the right questions that will change our lives

Go, Dorothy, Go! Lynn Cullen on the woman who gave up everything and changed the world

Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems: Thomas Halliday on paleobiology, croquet and the inevitable end of our species

How To Remember Auschwitz-Birkenau? Wojciech Soczewica on why we must never forget this unique monument to evil

What Would Other Species Tell Us If They Could Talk? POD author Laline Paull on telling "humanimal" stories in the voice of other species

Why Stress Can Be Good For Us: Ben Ramalingam on turning pressure into performance and crisis into creativity

When Will Silicon Valley Fix its Annoying Password Problem? Phillip Dunkelberger on digital technology that might finally kill the online password

Instapundit on the Blogging Revolution: Glenn Reynolds remembers the early 21st century birth of our social media age

Miss Aldridge Regrets: Louise Hare on how to write a successful second novel

No Miracles Needed: Mark Jacobson on how today's technology can save our climate and clean our air

Fragile Cargo: Adam Brookes on the the World War II race to save the treasures of China's Forbidden City

Freedom Moves: H. Samy Alim celebrates the Past, Present and Future of Hip Hop on its fiftieth birthday

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism: Why Capitalism and Democracy have fallen out of love and how to bring them back together

Welcome Me to the Kingdom: Mai Nardone's unvarnished fictional truths about life in contemporary Thailand

Burn the Boats: Matt Higgins on why we should all toss Plan B overboard

Why All Writing is Failure: Stephen Marche on the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer

Why Both America and Britain are Imprisoned in Empireland: Sathnam Sanghera on how the West has been shaped by its imperial past

Happy B'Day, Abe!! John Cribb on what both Republicans and Democrats can learn from the great Rail Splitter on Lincoln's 214th birthday

Bloodshed and Lies in Saudi Arabia: Jeed Basyouni on Mohammed bin Salman's Kingdom of Executions

Can Populism Survive? Massimo Morelli on the nature and future of Populism

A Week is a Long Time in Silicon Valley: Keith Teare on How Artificial Intelligence Is Now Unstoppable

The United Nations as Leviathan: Roland Rich on why we need to reinvent the UN

A Spiritual Void at the Core of the Influencer Industry? Emily Hund on on the sad quest for authenticity on social media

The Ghost at the Feast: Robert Kagan on America and the Collapse of the World Order 1900-1941

Hijad Butch Blues: Lamya H on how to unf**k the world

Revolutionary Roads: Bob Thompson gets into his gas guzzling VW in search of the American war of independence

Maybe Tech Isn't So Evil: Darlene Damm on the exponential technologies that could radically improve the lives of billions of 21st century people

WE DON'T KNOW OURSELVES

A Hacker's Mind: Bruce Schneier on how the powerful bend society's rules and how to bend them back

We Don't Know Ourselves: Fintan O'Toole on contemporary Ireland as a model for an open 21st century society

How to Fix a Broken Planet: Julian Cribb's advice for surviving the 21st century

An Assassin in Utopia: Susan Wels on the true story of a nineteenth-century sex cult and a President's murder

Rising Up Against Bullshit Healthcare: Sonali Kolhatkar on Why Americans Want a Government Run Health System

On the Ocean's Awesomeness: Farah Obaidullah explains why our lives depend on healthy oceans

Banking With Your Eyes Open: Robert Pickering on the rights and wrongs of contemporary banks and bankers

How to Fix Capitalism and Democracy? Raymond W. Baker on the "Invisible Trillions" that are Breaking American Society

From Doom to Bloom in 7 Days: Why Spring Has Arrived Unnaturally Early this Year in Silicon Valley

HOMO ECOPHAGUS: Warren M. Hern on how humans-beings have become a metastasizing cancer devouring our own ecosystem

How We Built the Wrong Internet: Thomas P. Vartanian on Rebuilding Cyberspace to Make it "Unhackable"

The Case for "Regime Change" in Iran: Majid Sadeghpour on why the Current Iranian Theocracy can't be Reformed

How to Kick Addictive Ideologies: Dr Emily Bashah on ending violence in Israel/Palestine

The Return of the Dissident Academic Model: Balazs Trencsenyi on the Invisible University for Ukraine

Eleanor Shearer on RIVER SING ME HOME: A post-slavery West Indian novel celebrating motherhood and female resilience.

When Everyone Leads: Julia Fabris McBride on what she claims as a "revolutionary approach" to fixing our toughest challenges

The Revolution WILL Be Podcasted: Zencastr founder Josh Nielsen on the democratization of professional podcasting

Will Donald Trump EVER Go to Jail? Elie Honig on Trump's Houdini-like Ability To Get Away With It

Why the Second World War Still Hasn't Ended in the Netherlands: Nina Siegal on Dutch Moral Complicity in the Nazi Persecution of Holland's Jews

Dean Koontz on how to Sell 500 Million Books and Why AI Engines like ChatGPT Will Never Replicate the Human "Soul"

What Will Things Be like in 60,000 Years time? Annalee Newitz imagines the future of species, real-estate, love and dogs who shun humans

The Death of Unicorns, the birth of AI and the irrelevance of social media: That Was the Week in Tech for 1.27.23

Journeys of a Humanitarian: How Jane Olson Emulated her Heroine Eleanor Roosevelt to Become a World Citizen

In the Nation's Service: Philip Taubman on George P. Shultz's UnTrumpian Role in Ending the Cold War

Why BLK ART matters: Zaria Ware on the Audacious Legacy of Black Artists and Models in Western Art

How Political Dysfunction in DC is Effing Up U.S. Democracy: Lee Drutman on Breaking the American Two=Party Doom Loop

Hunger, Loneliness and Misery at Work: Jon Clifton on the Global Rise of Unhappiness

This Is Not Who We Are: Zachary Shore on America's Struggle Between Vengeance and Virtue

No Longer Pale, Male or Stale: Valentine Low on How the British Royal Family is Transforming itself into a 21st Century Institution

Forget Generative AI: Margaret Heffernan on Why the Future is Up To Us

An American riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma

Say It Loud and Say It Proud: Natalie Lue on the Joy of Saying NO

Frank Vogl on the American Bankers and Politicians Enabling Kleptocracy Around the World

George McCalman's Illustrated Black American History: How to Honor Both the Iconic and the Unseen

What Will Become of Syria in 2023? Joby Warrick on the Future of a Catastrophe

Confessions of an Optimist: Publishing mogul Stephen Rubin on why he remains cheerful - even if 85% of books could have been written by a chatbot

Damian Dibben on the Venetian Renaissance, Color in Art, and why We Should All Visit Venice Once in our Lives

An Existential Healthcare Crisis? Dr Robert Pearl on how the U.S. Medical System is Now Deeply Resistant to All Innovation

A Peculiarly American Sickness: Paul Auster and Spencer Ostrander on BLOODBATH NATION

DLD 2023: Quantum computing, Auschwitz-Birkenau, designing living brains & ubiquitous AI

Danielle Clode on Koalas: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future

The End of one Silicon Valley Myth

A New Era in Silicon Valley?

The End of the Silicon Valley Myth: Why Big Tech now faces a Reckoning

01.20.23: That Was The Week in Tech

GEORGE KENNAN: A Life Caught Between the United States and the Soviet Union

Curtis White on Transcendence: How Art and Dharma Can Save Us in a Time of Collapse

Can an Updated Version of Dale Carnegie's 20th Century Help Us Fix Our 21st Century Future

Why the Best Lessons in Life are Experienced rather than Learned

The Revolt against Humanity: Adam Kirsch Imagines a Future Without Humanity"

LIFE ON MARS: IMAGINING THE FIRST CITY ON THE RED PLANET

Paul Auster on America as a "Bloodbath Nation"

Jacqueline Jones: What Does the Plight of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era Tells Us About the Struggle Today of All Americans For an Honest Living?

Jayne Ann Krentz: Genre Fiction Matters Because It Enables Writers to Address Perennial Moral Issues Like Honor and How to Distinguish Between Right and Wrong

Some Bleak Truths about Ukraine

Pico Iyer: Why Travel Writing is a Form of Memoir and How Covid Has Changed How We See the World

Jared Yates Sexton: Midnight in America? Why the Coming Crisis in the Republic Offers Hope For a Better Future

Angela Stent: Why 2023 Probably Won't Bring An End to the War in Ukraine and Other Unpalatable Truths From the Putin World

Corinne Sawers: Why the Pro-Market American Model of Confronting Today's Climate Emergency Might Offer the Most Realistic Way to Get to Net Zero

Jim Campbell on the Ponzi Boys: What Makes Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried the Same Type of Monstrous Human-Being?

Martha Nussbaum: Why Justice for Animals Means Eliminating the Word "Pet" and Perhaps Even Giving Citizenship to Other Species

Humility in place of Hubris

Brad Feld: The Tech Community Needs To Be Humble to Survive With What Will Be a "Challenging" 2023

Beezy Marsh: Remembering a London of 1946 in Which Fearsome Female Gangsters Ran the Show

Do animals have rights?

Leigh Goodmark on the Case for Abolition Feminism: Why We Need to Decriminalize Domestic Violence

Frank Smyth: Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only the Messenger: Why the Bad 2022 News About Gun Proliferation and Violence in America Will Probably Only Get Worse in 2023

Why the West should arm with Ukraine with missiles to hit Russian cities

Peter Pomerantsev: Why the "Evil" Russian Invasion of Ukraine Will Only End When the West Arms Ukraine With Missiles That Can Reach Russian Cities

Kevin Boyle: How to Escape the Culture-War Paranoia That Has Infected American Politics Since the Sixties

William Deresiewicz: Why 2022 Was a Good Year For American Liberals Fighting Against the Fundamentalism of Both Left- and Right-Wing Intolerance

Chris Schroeder: How to Read 100 Books in 2023 Without Going to Live in a Library or a Bookstore

Rick Wartzman: How Joe Biden Has Done More For Labor Unions Than Any President Since FDR and What to Hope For in 2023 to Maintain This Progress