Keen On America

EPISODE 1883: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Amy Schiller, author of THE PRICE OP HUMANITY, how philanthropy has gone wrong and how to fix itAmy Schiller is a writer and political philosopher. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College. She has held additional fellowships at Stanford University, Bard College and City University of New York, where she received her Ph.D. Schiller’s debut book, The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong and How to Fix It, is forthcoming from Melville House in December 2023. Her writing has been published in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Daily Beast, and has been quoted in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, and Slate. She has also had a 15-year career in major gift fundraising consulting in a wide range of settings, from a major New York City dance company to international humanitarian nonprofits. Though philanthropy has been the center of her career, her writing encompasses cultural criticism on topics ranging from American Girl Dolls to queer Jewish films, gender, artificial intelligence, and memes about Beyonce.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

EPISODE 1882: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Hannah Gold, author of "Your Mind's in the Hands of Everything: Letting go of Philip Roth", about Roth's mind, his hands and his followersHannah Gold lives in New York City. Her work has been published by The Drift, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Nation. Her feature, "Your Mind's in the Hands of Everything: Letting go of Philip Roth",  appeared in the December 2023 issue of Harper’s Magazine.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

Episode 1881: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Rafi Kohan, author of TRASH TALK, about Muhammed Ali, Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Elon Musk and why talking smack is as old as the bibleRafi Kohan is an Atlanta-based writer, editor, and creative leader. He is the author of Trash Talk: The Only Book About Destroying Your Rivals That Isn’t Total Garbage, which is available for pre-order now (pub date: December 5th) and examines the art and science of talking s**t not just as a quirk of modern gamesmanship, but also as a deeply ingrained human behavioral phenomenon that has erupted across time, culture, and geography. With reporting that ranges from playground basketball courts and cricket grounds to insult-comedy stages, UFC mega fights, wrestling rings, military survival schools, and more, Trash Talk is the first-ever book to explore the topic, a “joyful, adventurous read” (Jeff Pearlman), and “very, very funny” (Anthony Jeselnik). Kohan’s first book, The Arena: Inside the Tailgating, Ticket-Scalping, Mascot-Racing, Dubiously Funded, and Possibly Haunted Monuments of American Sport, weaves together on-the-ground reporting, hundreds of original interviews, and deep-dive research into a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary examination of the modern American sports stadium. The book was a finalist for the 2018 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing and was lauded in the New York Times Book Review as “smart, readable, deeply reported and researched, engagingly personal, funny and often surprisingly poignant.” The Wall Street Journal dubbed Kohan “the Studs Terkel of stadium life.” Previously, Kohan served as deputy editor at The New York Observer, where he wrote a variety of long-form feature and cover stories, including a bombshell profile of Carmelo Anthony in October 2013, which broke the news that the star forward was going to test the free agent market. As a journalist, his writing has also appeared in numerous outlets and publications, including GQ (where he worked for five years), Men's Journal, The Wall Street Journal, Town & Country, Slate, Rolling Stone, The Ringer, ESPN, Vice, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, among others, covering everything from identity theft to the World Series of Birding to the New Orleans Police Department on Mardi Gras. (That last piece, written for GQ, was named “Notable” in The Best American Travel Writing anthology.) Most recently, Kohan worked at The Atlantic, as the executive editorial director for Re:think, the magazine's award-winning creative studio. He and his team executed ambitious content programs on behalf of dozens of brands, including HBO, Allstate, Lyft, Nest, Netflix, HPE, The North Face, Google, REI, Walmart, and many, many more. 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

EPISODE 1880: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Jill Walker Rettberg, author of MACHINE VISION,  about how algorithms are changing the way we see and are seen by the worldJill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), a Norwegian Center of Research Excellence that has received a €15 million grant from the Norwegian Research Council (2023-2033). She is also Principal Investigator of the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media (2018-2024). Rettberg is currently developing new research on how new language-based AI is impacting the kinds of stories we tell and that spread online. She argues that generative AI has deep cultural biases that are less easy to spot than the biases that are evident in, for example, facial recognition. This emerging work draws upon the research on AI and visual technologies in the Machine Vision project as well as on Rettberg's decades of narratological research into digital genres of storytelling, such as electronic literature, blogging and transmedia narrative.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

Ben Lerner, Poetry Editor of Harper's Magazine, warns about the dangers of digital technology in democratizing language. The podcast explores the blurred line between fact and fiction online, challenges in shaping historical memory, complexities of countering ideologies, and the impact of technology on writing and artistry.

EPISODE 1878: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Jennifer Burns, author of THE LAST CONSERVATIVE, the most controversial American economist of the 20th centuryJennifer Burns is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University and a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. She is the author of Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (November, 2023) and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009). An expert on this history of conservative ideas and politics, she has written for The NewYork Times, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, and Dissent, and has discussed her work on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and elsewhere.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

EPISODE 1877: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Kliph Nesteroff, author of OUTRAGEOUS, about the history of American showbiz and its perennial culture warsKliph Nesteroff was born and raised in a pacifist community in rural British Columbia. After being permanently expelled from high school for the content of a speech he delivered during a campaign for school president, he moved to Toronto and started performing stand-up comedy. Influenced by the Beat Generation, punk rock music, and his anti-war upbringing, Nesteroff primarily performed in underground bars, punk rock clubs, and alternative comedy venues. He quickly developed a cult following for the combative, insult-comic character Shecky Grey, which landed him on the cover of several Canadian free weeklies. After eight years of stand-up, Nesteroff became an advocate for the homeless, the mentally ill, and the drug addicted, accepting a position in an experimental clinic that nursed addicts with life threatening infections back to health. While working night shifts at the clinic, Nesteroff spent much of his time writing about stand-up comics from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, focusing on the mafia-run nightclubs that used to employ comedians. The articles were frequently published by the web-magazine of free form radio station WFMU. In 2011, Marc Maron began talking about Nesteroff's articles on several episodes of his WTF podcast, eventually extending an invitation to Nesteroff to appear on his program. After a 2012 appearance on WTF with Marc Maron, Nesteroff got a book deal with Grove Press to write the definitive history of 20th Century American stand-up. Released in 2015, The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy became a best-selling book and led to a television career. Nesteroff is a frequent talking head on countless programs and documentary films about comedy.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

EPISODE 1876: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Bulent Atalay, author of BEYOND GENIUS, about how Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Newton, Beethoven and Einstein all shared the same kind of transgressive mindsDescribed by the Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, NPR and PBS as a “Modern Renaissance Man,” Bulent Atalay is a scientist, artist and author. After his participation in a scientifically incongruous archaeological expedition to Mt. Ararat in Eastern Turkey — one in which the late astronaut James Irwin was also a member — the Washington Post carried the story, “Indiana Atalay and the Search for the Ark.” With roots in Turkey and England, Atalay now resides in the United States. His grandfather was a Turkish military officer who survived the Battle of Gallipoli in WWI, only to die while fighting against Lawrence of Arabia in 1916. His father was a military officer and diplomat who served as diplomatic courier to European capitals during WWII, and subsequently held successive assignments as military attaché to London, Paris, and Washington. Read "A Tribute to Kemal Atalay." He received his early schooling at Eton in England and St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware, the institution which served as the site of the 1989 Robin Williams film, Dead Poets Society. He went into physics by accident when a secretary in the admissions office at Georgetown University read his intended career as "physicist" instead of "physician," and he stayed in physics when he found he had latent interest in the field. His advanced education includes BS, MS, MA, PhD and postdoctoral studies, completed at Georgetown, Princeton, University of California-Berkeley, and Oxford University.  A professor of physics in Virginia now, he has previously been a member of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford, as well as the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein spent the last twenty-five years of his life. An accomplished artist, Atalay has presented his works in one-man exhibitions in London and Washington, and his two books of lithographs — Lands of Washington and Oxford and the English Countryside — can be found in the permanent collections of Buckingham Palace, the Smithsonian, and the White House. Ten years after its release by Smithsonian Books in April 2004, his best selling book, Math and the Mona Lisa, has had numerous printings in English, and appeared in thirteen languages. His last book, Leonardo's Universe, coauthored with former student Keith Wamsley, was released by National Geographic Books in 2009, and declared "... one of ten must-have books for the year," by the Britannica Blog writer. It has appeared in English and Japanese. In April, 2019, the National Geographic Society released the book as a "bookazine," abridged to 25,000 words with the title Leonardo da Vinci: Celebrating the Renaissance Man. Atalay's most recent book, Beyond Genius, identifying the common qualities and conditions crucial in producing Leonardo, Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, and Einstein,” five "transformative geniuses," who redefined their respective fields, is scheduled for release on November 7, 2023 by 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

EPISODE 1875: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to the anti Trump conservative Peter Wehner about the nihilism of the evangelical right in America todayPeter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. His books include The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era, which he co-wrote with Michael J. Gerson, and Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism. He was formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Wehner is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and his work also appears in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and National Affairs.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

EPISODE 1874 : In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Lauren Grodstein, author of WE MUST NOT THINK OF OURSELVES, about why she changed her mind about writing a novel about the HolocaustLauren Grodstein is the author of five novels, including the New York Times bestseller A Friend of the Family and the Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything.  Her forthcoming novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves will be published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in November, 2023. Lauren’s work has been translated into French, Turkish, German, Hebrew, and other languages, and her essays and reviews have been widely published.  She teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden and lives in New Jersey with her husband and children.  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