Keen On America

Few Americans of any color or creed have had a legal career as historically rich or significant as Thelton Henderson. One of the earliest African-American graduates of Boult law school at UC Berkeley, Henderson was the first black attorney for the civil rights division of the US Department of Justice, going down to Mississippi in 1963 where he become familiar with MLK and many other civil rights leaders. He later became a Federal judge where he pioneered historic legal decisions regarding racial, environmental and gay rights. So it was a real honor for me to have the opportunity to sit down with Henderson at his Berkeley home to talk about his childhood, his memories of the Sixties and why, in his view, the success of the civil rights movement was as dependent on radicals like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael as it was on MLK and other moderates. And then, of course, there is Henderson’s own relationship with America which, like so many African-Americans, is tangled and frayed. No, he confessed, he won’t be celebrating raucously in 2026 on the 250th birthday of the American Republic. Especially if, as Henderson fears, a certain Donald J Trump, who he likens to Hitler, is once again President. Judge Thelton E. Henderson is a world-renowned federal judge whose commitment to advancing civil rights spans six decades and three continents. He was the first African American lawyer assigned to field service in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, where he worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As the second African American federal judge in the Northern District of California and its first African American chief judge, he authored groundbreaking civil rights decisions.  Born in Louisiana, Judge Henderson left the Jim Crow South with his mother and grandmother for Los Angeles. He excelled academically and athletically, becoming one of the first African Americans to earn a football scholarship to UC Berkeley. After serving in the Army, he returned as one of two African Americans at Berkeley Law. He graduated in 1962 and joined the DOJ. At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Judge Henderson was posted in the Deep South to gather information on voter suppression and monitor opposition to Dr. King’s peaceful demonstrations. After Henderson loaned Dr. King his rental car for a Selma rally, Alabama Governor George Wallace inaccurately told the press that a “high ranking” DOJ official had driven Dr. King to Selma. Rather than worsen a public relations problem for the Kennedy Administration, Henderson resigned. Returning to California, Judge Henderson helped establish, and directed, one of the first federally funded legal aid offices in the U.S. He was appointed Assistant Dean of Stanford Law School and launched its pioneering minority admissions program, which was replicated nationwide. In 1980, Judge Henderson was appointed to the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California. His courageous decisions included declaring prison overcrowding unconstitutional; placing the California prison system under monitoring to prevent cruel and unusual punishment; ruling for the first time in U.S. history that gays and lesbians are entitled to equal protection; declaring unconstitutional a law that eliminated affirmative action; and upholding environmental protections. He has advocated for civil rights globally, helping develop strategies to end apartheid. After retiring from the court in 2017, Henderson taught at Berkeley Law, where the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice advances his vision for a better world. Among his many awards are the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award, the California State Bar Bernard Witkin Medal and UC Berkeley’s 2008 Alumnus of the Year Award. At over 90 years strong, Judge Henderson remains a beacon for democracy, liberty and equality.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

Everyone deserves a second chance. The former Harvard professor of psychology Marc D Hauser has had a controversial academic career, having been investigated in a high profile case in 2010 by Harvard for supposedly falsifying research data. But Hauser, who quit Harvard in 2011, remains prolific and has a new book out this week, Vulnerable Minds, focused - perhaps not uncoincidentally, given Hauser’s own history - on giving children second chances to overcome trauma and thus lead happy lives. In our conversation, I didn’t bring up Harvard’s accusations against Hauser of fabricating and falsifying data. So I’m noting it here, as a reminder that we all - children and adults alike - deserve second chances to fully realize ourselves.Marc Hauser, PhD, is an educator, neuroscientist, and the founder of Risk Eraser, a program that helps at-risk kids lead healthier lives. He is a former professor of evolutionary biology and psychology at Harvard University and the author of over three hundred papers.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

According to Dr Damon Tweedy there a connection between the historic struggle for civil rights and today’s struggle for more mainstream mental healthcare. In 2016, Tweedy wrote Black Man in a White Coat, his bestselling reflections on race and medicine. And now the Duke University based doctor is back with Facing the Unseen, a book making the case for what he calls “centering” mental health in medicine. In both his new book and this conversation, Dr Tweedy argues for a more comprehensive and integrated approach in which people afflicted with mental illness have a healthcare system that prioritizes their full well-being.DAMON TWEEDY is a graduate of Duke University School of Medicine. He is a professor of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine and staff physician at the Durham Veteran Affairs Health System. He has published articles about race and medicine in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). His columns and op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and various other print publications. He lives outside Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, with his family.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

Today, on the eve of the total lunar eclipse of the sun, the media is full of practical guides about how to tilt our heads at this once-in-a-lifetime celestial event. But what about the metaphysical questions about the eclipse? What should it mean to us humans, both in terms of our existence on earth and to our planet’s uncertain future? According to cosmological poet Christopher Cokinos, author of the new STILL AS BRIGHT: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow, the eclipse should make us humble. It’s a sneak preview, Cokinos reminds us, of the inevitable fate of the earth when, in a billion years, the sun will be extinguished. And, he reminds us, it should also be a reminder of our ever-so-small place alongside other species in the vastness of universe. Christopher Cokinos is the author of three books of literary nonfiction: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (Tarcher/Penguin 2000); The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars (Tarcher/Penguin 2009); and Bodies, of the Holocene (Truman 2013). In 2016, the University of Arizona Press published his co-edited anthology (with Eric Magrane) The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide, which won a Southwest Book of the Year Award. The poet Gabriel Gudding selected his collection The Underneath as winner of a New American Press Poetry Prize, and it appeared in 2019. With Julie Swarstad Johnson, Cokinos co-edited Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (Arizona, 2020), which was featured on Planetary Radio, PBS’s “The Open Mind” and in Scientific American. He’s also the author of a poetry chapbook, Held as Earth (Finishing Line). His new nonfiction book, Still as Bright: A Backyard Journey through the Natural and Human History of the Moon, is just out from New York independent Pegasus Books. 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 this KEEN ON show, the music historian Sheryl Kaskowitz, author of A CHANCE TO HARMONIZE, narrates how FDR and his team of New Dealers saved America from the Great Depression - one folk song at a time. And she explains that there would have been on popular American folk music - no Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez or Bob Dylan - without FDR's Hidden Music Unit and its radical ambition to reinvent American communities in the depths of the 1930s. Sheryl Kaskowitz is a writer, editor, and audio storyteller based in Berkeley, California. Her new book, A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Tried to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time, comes out in April 2024 from Pegasus Books. Since earning her PhD from Harvard, Sheryl has written extensively about music in American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the role that music can play in civic life. Her first book, God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song, was published in 2013 to positive reviews (including pieces in The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor) and won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Book Award for music writing. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Slate, Humanities, and The Avid Listener. She appeared in the BBC audio documentary “Government Song Woman” and has been interviewed on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” WNYC’s “The Takeaway,” the Washington Post’s “Can He Do That?” podcast, the ABC News podcast “Start Here,” and the public radio news show “The Texas Standard.” Sheryl has received the Anne Firor Scott Mid-Career Fellowship from the Southern Association for Women Historians (2022), a Public Scholars Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2018), a Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress (2016), and research grants and awards from the American Musicological Society, Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, Music Library Association, and Society for American Music.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

Is there such a thing as an economic bubble? Not according to That Was The Week author Keith Teare who argues that all bubbles reflect innovation and promise (even if you lose your shirt by investing in tulips or dotcoms). While Keith still doesn’t seem to have met a bubble he wouldn’t invest in, his argument probably does make sense for the current “AI bubble” which many skeptics today are writing off as just more irrationally exuberant techno-babble. For all his critique of techno-pessimism, Keith himself sounded pessimistic this week about the future of innovation, arguing that it’s China now, rather than America, that captures the really disruptive spirit of Silicon Valley. Keith Teare is a Founder and CEO at SignalRank Corporation. Previously he was Executive Chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd - A UK-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. He was also previously the founder at the Palo Alto incubator, Archimedes Labs. Archimedes was the original incubator for TechCrunch and since 2011 has invested, accelerated or incubated many Silicon Valley startups including Around (sold to Miro), Millicast (Sold to Dolby), InFarm, Miles, Quixey; M.dot (sold to GoDaddy); chat.center; Loop Surveys; DownTown and Sunshine. Teare has a track record as a serial entrepreneur with big ideas and has achieved significant returns for investors.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

Is Trump really like Hitler? Last month, we did a show with the Hitler scholar, Peter Range, who argued that the Adolf Hitler of 1924 had much in common with the Donald Trump of 2024. And now we are back on the Trump-Hitler comparison train with Henk de Berg, author of the new Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying. What ties Trump and Hitler together, de Berg argues, is their ability to fabricate reality (ie: lie). Both men, de Berg explains, are masterful performers on a political stage. Both, he insists, are supremely skilled in operating in a society in extreme flux. Henk de Berg is Professor of German at the University of Sheffield, UK. His previous books include Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary Studies, which received a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award.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

In TRIPPED, his intriguing new history of drugs and postwar America, the German writer Norman Ohler makes LSD both a symbol and a metaphor for the history of the Cold War. Linking Nazi Germany, the CIA with what he calls “the dawn” of the psychedelic age, Ohler presents LSD — the revolutionary psychedelic drug invented by the Swiss pharma giant Sandoz which the Nazi tested as a “truth serum” in Dachau — as a weapon used by the American military-industrial complex to fight the Soviets. As with most anti Soviet CIA plots, of course, it was a bit of a farce - although Ohler’s thesis certainly offers an alternative way of interpreting trippy Cold War movies like Doctor Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate. And Ohler reminds us of the psychedelic age’s most lasting legacy - its influence on West Coast countercultural figures like Ken Kesey, Stewart Brand and Steve Jobs and their invention of the personal computer and internet.Norman Ohler is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blitzed, the non-fiction book The Bohemians about resistance against Hitler in Berlin, as well as the novels Die Quotenmaschine (the world’s first hypertext novel), Mitte, Stadt des Goldes (translated into English as Ponte City), as well as the historical crime novel Die Gleichung des Lebens. He was cowriter of the script for Wim Wenders’s film Palermo Shooting. He lives in Berlin.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 to put America back together? Few people have thought more about this Humpty Dumpty style challenge than Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the 2016 classic Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. So when I sat down with Hochschild for my new KEEN ON AMERICA series, we began by talking about what it means to her to be American and whether she’s ever felt like a stranger in her own land. Born in 1940, my sense is that Hochschild has spent much of her life grappling with what it means to be a progressive American in a mostly conservative country. The Berkeley based Hochschild has made two significant journeys to the American South - the first in early Sixties as a civil rights activist and the second, fifty years later, to research Strangers In Their Own Land. She talked about both journeys as a form of confronting and then resolving her ambivalence about what it means to be an American. These journeys, then, were her way of building what she calls “empathy bridges” with another America. We talked about the American future too. Hochschild believes the work of the sociologist, like the marriage councillor, is a resolve conflict by bringing people together. In contrast with the dark paranoia of many progressives these days, Hochschild is cautiously optimistic about bringing Americans back together. And this conflict-resolution approach, I suspect, will be familiar with many young Americans for whom therapy has been normalized as an essential feature of 21st century life. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, now available in paperback from The New Press, addresses the increasingly bitter political divide in America. A finalist for the National Book Award, and New York Times Best Seller, the book is based on five years of immersion reporting among Tea Party loyalists -- now mostly supporters of Donald Trump. Hochschild tries to bridge an “empathy wall” between the two political sides, to explore the “deep story” underlying the right that remains unrecognized by the left. Mark Danner calls the book “a powerful, imaginative, necessary book, arriving not a moment too soon." Robert Reich writes” Anyone who wants to understand modern America should read this captivating book." In its review, Publisher’s Weekly notes: “After evaluating her conclusions and meeting her informants in these pages, it’s hard to disagree that empathy is the best solution to stymied political and social discourse.” Her 2012 The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, explores the many ways in which the market enters our modern lives and was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. Her other books include: So How’s the Family?, The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, The Time Bind, The Commercialization of Intimate Life, The Unexpected Community and the co-edited Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. In reviewing The Second Shift (reissued in 2012 with a new afterword) Robert Kuttner noted Hochschild’s “subtlety of insights” and “graceful seamless narrative” and called it the “best discussion I have read of what must be the quintessential domestic bind of our time.” Newsweek’s Laura Shapiro described The Time Bind as “groundbreaking.” In awarding Hochschild the Jesse Bernard Award, the American Sociological Association citation observed her “creative genius for framing questions and lines of insight, often condensed into memorable, paradigm-shifting words and phrases.” A retired U.C. Berkeley professor of sociology, she lives with her husband, the writer Adam Hochschild in Berkeley, California.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

Like all immigrants who fled to the U.S. to escape civil war, Ismar Volic has a deep personal appreciation for American democracy. And Volic - a Bosnian refugee from the Yugoslavian civil war who is now director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College - fears that American democracy has now slipped into existential crisis and might only be fixable with the help of math. Thus Volic’s new book, Making Democracy Count, which explains how mathematics can not only improve voting and representation but can even be used to help fix a gerrymandered electoral map that reduces the value of many American votes to near zero. Ismar Volić is professor of mathematics and director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College. His work has appeared in publications such as The Hill, Cognoscenti, and Education Week.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