Keen On America

In an America riven with both civic discord and ignorance, how can we nurture a next generation of responsibly informed citizens? That’s the all important question Lindsey Cormack addresses in her new book, How to Raise a Citizen. There are no magical tricks to learning how to be a good citizen, Cormack says, no clever shortcuts or miraculous new technologies. Instead, it’s up to all of us to take responsibility for giving our kids the necessary knowledge to understand the workings of our democratic system. And that all begins at the local level, she insists, where the real business of American democracy gets done on a daily basis. Lindsey Cormack is an associate professor of Political Science and Director of the Diplomacy Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her first book, Congress and U.S. Veterans: From the GI Bill to the VA Crisis investigates the differences between legislative efforts and lip service paid to veterans by members of the US Congress. Her second book, How to Raise a Citizen & Why it’s Up to You to Do It, aims to reinvigorate multigenerational political discussion and governmental know-how after examining the somewhat dire state of civic education in the United States. She earned her PhD in Government from New York University and is raising a daughter on the Upper East Side. She currently serves as the Secretary for Community Board 8 in Manhattan. Her research has been published in Political Behavior, Congress & the Presidency, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Science Research and Methods, American Politics Research, Politics & Policy, Politics Groups & Identities, Politics & Gender, The Journal of Gender Studies, Energy Economics, The Legislative Scholar as well as in popular outlets including the New York Times, The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, ProPublica, Roll Call, The New York Post, NBC News, the LSE USCentre, and The Hill, and more. She created and maintains the digital database of all official Congress-to-constituent e-newsletters in the DCinbox Project.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

There are two core critiques of AI. The first is that it is an existential threat because it replaces humans with algorithms. The second is that AI is a mirror that only compounds preexisting injustices. James Muldoon, an associate professor of management at Essex Business School and co-author of Feeding the Machine, fits into the second category. Reminding us that “AI is people”, he travelled around the world in search of the hidden human labor that is the powering the AI revolution. What he found was a huge precariat (estimated by the World Bank to be over 100 million people) who are doing the dirty human work that powers “artificial” intelligence. The AI revolution, then, for Muldoon, is only compounding the exploitative nature of labor in today’s increasingly inegalitarian global economy. It is the core problem with, rather than the solution to 21st century networked capitalism. James Muldoon is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Management at the Essex Business School, a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and Head of Digital Research at the Autonomy think tank. His research examines how modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and digital platforms can create public value and serve the common good. It explores how notions of freedom, power and democracy need to be rethought in a digital age and what we can do to harness the positive potential of new technology. His recent work has focussed on the hidden human labour of artificial intelligence and the global production networks that power AI. He also analyses how digital labour is changing across multiple sectors including ride hail, food delivery, domestic work, childcare and microwork.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

How democratic is American “democracy”. Dramatically less so that it was. That’s at least the rather worrying conclusion of David Daley, the author of ANTIDEMOCRATIC, a new book which exposes what he says is “the far right’s 50-year plot to control American elections”. This half century plot was successfully realized in 2013, Daley told me, with the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now, he argues, individual states have the right to tamper with their electoral laws and hijack voting rights in America for their own political ends. It’s not quite a return to Jim Crow, Daley says, but it does reveal the worryingly antidemocratic foundations of the American political system. David Daley is the author of the national best-seller "Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count" (Norton/Liveright) and one of the nation's leading experts on partisan gerrymandering. He is a senior fellow at FairVote, a nonpartisan champion of election reforms. His journalism on redistricting and gerrymandering has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, New York magazine and many other leading publications. He is the former editor in chief of Salon.com.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Shad White has an uncanny resemblance to J.D. Vance. Born in a tiny town in Mississippi, White went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then Harvard Law School and is now the State Auditor of Mississippi. Like Vance, the lifelong Republican White is a converted Catholic whose faith informs his conservative, family centric politics. And, like JD Vance, White is an author. His new book, Mississippi Swindle, which he jokes might be called “Red Neck Elegy”, is the story of Brett Favre and the Mississippi welfare scandal that shocked America. One thing is for sure. This isn’t the last you will hear of Shadrack Tucker White. As he told me, he’s thinking of running for Mississippi Governor and he’s exactly the kind of articulate, smart and youthful conservative who, I imagine, will one day caste his ambitious eyes on the US Presidency. Shad White is the State Auditor of Mississippi. During his tenure, the auditor’s office has uncovered more waste, fraud, and abuse than any other time in state history. Shad is also a prolific writer on fraud, and his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Hill, and other publications. He is a certified fraud examiner and holds degrees from Harvard Law, the University of Oxford where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Mississippi. He lives with his wife and three children in Flowood, Mississippi. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

If it’s lunchtime, it must be KEEN ON time. At least that’s what it seems, given the long menu of food guests recently on the show. First there was the lunatic regenerative farmer, Joel Salatin, fixing America one bite at a time. Then Nicola Twilley, the food blogger and historian of refrigeration. And don’t forget Andrea Freeman, who reminded us that even free school lunches aren’t really free. But our latest food guest, Lola Milholland, a Portland based Ramen noodle entrepreneur and food writer, might be the most entertaining of all. Milholland is the author of GROUP LIVING and Other Recipes, a rich stew of a memoir about her collectivist foodie parents and her passion for noisily slurping Japanese noodles. And my conversation with Lola covered everything from the non-sexual polyamory of group living to the deliciousness of the classic 1985 Japanese movie Tampopo. Eat, Lola, Eat. Recommended. Lola Milholland is a food-business owner, social-practice artist, and writer. Her work has been published by The Guardian, Gastronomica, Oregon Humanities, Meatpaper, Compound Butter, and others. A former editor for Edible Portland magazine, she currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and runs Umi Organic, a noodle company with a commitment to providing nutritious public school lunch. Her debut book, Group Living and Other Recipes, will be released by Spiegel & Grau on August 6, 2024.Lola was born in Portland, Oregon in 1985, the child of two counterculture parents involved in food and agriculture activism and cultural history. In college she became enthralled by studying the history of beef in Japan—forbidden by Buddhist and Shinto doctrine for more than a millennium, then widely propagandized, and now the focus of a couture-esque industry producing some of the most expensive beef in the world. From that time on, she’s had an intense fascination with the way that shifts in food culture reflect and influence larger cultural moments. The intersection of food justice, cultural history, and ecology is her favorite place to linger.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Peter Wehner is the conscience of American conservatism. Having worked in three Republican administrations, the ex Republican is now a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Atlantic, writing compelling moral critiques of Trump and the authoritarian populism now dominant in the GOP. Many of you will have already read his latest Times piece, What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me - but what, I asked Wehner, once made the GOP "his” party and could he ever imagine rejoining it?Peter Wehner, an American essayist, is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times and a contributing writer for The Atlantic, two of the most prestigious media journals in the world. He writes on politics and political ideas, on faith and culture, on foreign policy, sports and friendships. Mr. Wehner served in three presidential administrations, including as deputy director of presidential speechwriting for President George W. Bush. Later, he served as the director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives. Mr. Wehner, a graduate of the University of Washington, is editor or author of six books, including The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump, which The New York Times called “a model of conscientious political engagements.” Married and the father of three, he lives in McLean, Virginia. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Were politics chess, liberals had white; they moved first. Conservatives had black; they countered liberalism’s opening moves. In time, the initiative changed hands. Conservatives, who began as anti-moderns, came to master modernity, for the right was in telling ways the stronger contestant. So write Edmund Fawcett in his exemplary intellectual history, Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition. As the author of the equally excellent Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, Fawcett is as well positioned as anyone to determine who is winning today’s grand ideological chess game between Liberalism and Conservatism. So, I asked Fawcett - in our bewildering age of Trump, Harris, Orban, Meloni, Starmer, Le Pen and JD Vance - is it liberals or conservatives who are most successfully reinventing their ideologies to master the desires of 21st century electorates?Edmund Fawcett was the Economist‘s Washington, Paris and Berlin correspondent and is a regular reviewer. His Liberalism: The Life of an Idea was published by Princeton in 2014. The second in his planned political trilogy – Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition – was published in 2020, also by Princeton University Press. The Economist called it ‘an epic history of conservatism and the Financial Times praised Fawcett for creating a ‘rich and wide-ranging account’ that demonstrates how conservatism has repeated managed to renew itself.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

So what’s exceptional about America? According to the writer, film producer and scholar Jonathan Taplin, American exceptionalism lies its uniquely global cultural influence. For Taplin - the tour manager for Bob Dylan & producer of Martin Scorcese’s masterpiece Mean Streets - this reflects what he calls America’s right-brain power which dominated the world in the second half of the 20th century. Today, however, he says, left-brained tech magnates like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are all powerful and, as a consequence, are triggering an existential crisis of creativity in America. In this age of the algorithm, Taplin worries, the US will be just another unimaginative player in the global race to control the digital economy. Jonathan Taplin is a writer, film producer and scholar. He is the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and was a Professor at the USC Annenberg School from 2003-2016 in the field of international communication management and digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese's first feature film, Mean Streets, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until The End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe awards and chosen for The Cannes Film Festival five times. In 1984 Taplin acted as the investment advisor to the Bass Brothers in their successful attempt to save Walt Disney Studios from a corporate raid. This experience brought him to Merrill Lynch, where he served as vice president of media mergers and acquisitions. In this role, he helped re-engineer the media landscape on transactions such as the leveraged buyout of Viacom. Taplin was a founder of Intertainer and has served as its Chairman and CEO since June 1996. Intertainer was the pioneer video-on-demand company for both cable and broadband Internet markets. Taplin holds two patents for video on demand technologies. Professor Taplin has provided consulting services on Broadband technology to the President of Portugal and the Parliament of the Spanish state of Catalonia and the Government of Singapore. Mr. Taplin graduated from Princeton University. He is a member of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and sits on the Author’s Guild Council and the Board of the American Music Association. Mr. Taplin was appointed to the California Broadband Task Force and the City of Los Angles Technology and Innovation Council. He was named one of the 50 most social media savvy professors in America by Online College and one of the 100 American Digerati by Deloitte’s Edge Institute.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Much of the critical writing about authoritarianism warns that contemporary populism threatens democracy. But as Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein argue in their interesting new book, The Assault on the State, this global attack on legalistic government by wannabe dictators like Putin, Erdogan and Modi endangers not just democracy but also much of what we take for granted about the convenience of modern life. It’s a return to what they call the “patrimonialism” of The Godfather - a chillingly dysfunctional future in which to get a road fixed or a school built, we have to kiss the ring of a Don Corleone or a Donald Trump. Weird, eh?Stephen E. Hanson is the Lettie Pate Evans Professor in the Department of Government at William & Mary.  At William & Mary, he served as the Vice Provost for Academic and International Affairs from 2011 to 2022. Hanson received his B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University (1985) and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley (1991). He served from 2011–2021 as the Director of the Wendy and Emery Reves Center for International Studies, while also serving as Vice Provost for International Affairs at William & Mary. In 2016, William & Mary received the Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization from NAFSA: Association of International Educators. Hanson served from 2009–2011 as the Vice Provost for Global Affairs, and from 2000–2008 as the Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies, at the University of Washington, Seattle. Hanson is the author of Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), which received the 1998 Wayne S. Vucinich book award from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. He is the co-author (with Richard Anderson Jr., M. Steven Fish, and Philip Roeder) of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2001).Jeffrey Kopstein is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Irvine. In his research, Professor Kopstein focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, antisemitism, and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society, paying special attention to cases within European and Russian Jewish history. These interests are central topics in his latest books, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2018) and Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2023).Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In the 1970’s, J. Doyne Farmer built the first wearable computer which he used to predict the game of roulette. While this didn’t make him particularly popular in casinos, it did mark the beginning of a glittering scientific career in complexity and systems theory, as well as in theoretical physics and biology. And, along the way, Farmer founded a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to UBS in 2006 as well as working for a while as an Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos Labs. So when a guy as smart as Farmer - who now teaches both at Oxford and at the Santa Fe Institute — turns his big brain to economics, we should take note. In his new book, Making Sense of Chaos, Farmer explains how we can get to a “better economics for a better world” through what he calls complex economics. As a fusion of big data analysis and behavioral economics, Farmer is navigating a third economic way between the scylla of traditional free market economics and the charybdis of de-growth economics. Seriously smart stuff from one the world’s brainiest men. J. Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems Science at the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Chief Scientist at Macrocosm. His current research is in economics, including agent-based modeling, financial instability and technological progress. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to UBS in 2006. His past research includes complex systems, dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology. During the 1980s he was an Oppenheimer Fellow and the founder of the Complex Systems Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While a graduate student in the 1970s he built the first wearable digital computer, which was successfully used to predict the game of roulette.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe