Keen On America

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

Becca Rothfeld’s much heralded new collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, challenges the American Puritan values of self-control and abstinence. Why have one meal when you can three, she asks, praising the New York City diner who orders and eats several plates of the same pasta dish. On the one hand, Rothfeld’s embrace of mess is a polemic against Marie Kondo and her fetishization of tidiness and order; on the other, it’s a challenge to the stuffiness of an American coastal intelligentsia for whom smallness and moderation have become not just moral but also political virtues. Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post’s Book World. Before joining The Washington Post, she served as assistant literary editor of the New Republic and worked toward her PhD in philosophy at Harvard, where she focused on aesthetics and the history of philosophy. Her debut essay collection, ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL, is now out. 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

According to David Masciotra, the real battleground for the future of American democracy lies in that no-man’s land between suburban and rural America - what he calls the “exurb”. It’s here, Masciotra argues in his new book EXURBIA NOW, that we can find the pathologies of a 21st century American totalitarianism. The America that Masciotra finds in these outer suburbs is the antithesis of Tocqueville’s small town America - a fragmented, alienating place without public space or communal interaction. What Masciotra uncovers is Marjorie Taylor Greene’s America and this grey often overlooked zone between suburb and countryside, he suggests is the Gettysburg of American democracy, the battleground which will determine the fate of the Republic in the 2020’s and beyond.David Masciotra is an author, lecturer, and journalist. He is the author of I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (I.B. Tauris, 2020), Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky), Barack Obama: Invisible Man (Eyewear Publishers, 2017), and Metallica by Metallica, a 33 1/3 book from Bloomsbury Publishers, which has been translated into Chinese. In 2010, Continuum Books published his first book, Working On a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen. His next book, Exurbia Now: Notes from the Battleground of American Democracy, is scheduled for publication from Melville House Books in 2024. Masciotra writes regularly for the New Republic, Washington Monthly, Progressive, the Los Angeles Review of Books, CrimeReads, No Depression, and the Daily Ripple. He has also written for Salon, the Daily Beast, CNN, Atlantic, Washington Post, AlterNet, Indianapolis Star, and CounterPunch. Several of his political essays have been translated into Spanish for publication at Korazon de Perro. His poetry has appeared in Be About It Press, This Zine Will Change Your Life, and the Pangolin Review. Masciotra has a Master’s Degree in English Studies and Communication from Valparaiso University. He also has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from the University of St. Francis. He is public lecturer, speaking on a wide variety of topics, from the history of protest music in the United States to the importance of bars in American culture. David Masciotra has spoken at the University of Wisconsin, University of South Carolina, Lewis University, Indiana University, the Chicago Public Library, the Lambeth Library (UK), and an additional range of colleges, libraries, arts centers, and bookstores. As a journalist, he has conducted interviews with political leaders, musicians, authors, and cultural figures, including Jesse Jackson, John Mellencamp, Noam Chomsky, all members of Metallica, David Mamet, James Lee Burke, Warren Haynes, Norah Jones, Joan Osborne, Martín Espada, Steve Earle, and Rita Dove.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

The Daily Mail called him the “Sith Lord” of the art world, the New York Times annointed him as the art world’s Patron Satan”, while the Wall Street Journal described him as the dealer the art world “loves to hate”. Californian voters aren’t too keen on him either, with only 0.24% voting for him in January as the Republican candidate for Diane Feinstein’s Senate seat. Yes, we’re talking about Stefan Simchowitz, the notoriously disruptive Los Angeles based entrepreneur who has built an enormously controversial art empire. So why, I asked Malibu’s self-styled enfant terrible, does almost everyone in the art world seem to hate him so much? And does he really believe, as he supposedly told another interviewer recently, that the US government should round up 150,000 homeless people in California and stick them into military camps?Stefan Simchowitz (born October 8, 1970) is the Los Angeles based art collector, art curator and art advisor who runs Simchowitz Gallery. He is a vocal proponent of social media as a legitimate way of discovering, distributing, and popularizing the fine arts, primarily using Facebook and Instagram as platforms for self-promotion, discovering new artists, and endorsing those he already manages.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