Kill Bill or Kill Keith? Why Using AI to Author Books Might Not Be in the Interest of Man
“It’s a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” — Keith Teare on the book he wrote with AI in a week Welcome to episode 2984 of the show. A week is certainly an age in AI time. Since last week’s “Who Owns Intelligence” show, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare has used AI to write an entire book entitled, surprise surprise, Who Owns Intelligence. No wonder, as Keith’s editorial this week puts it, AI has its enemies. These enemies, Keith insists — riffing off…
The Strange Death of the American Front Porch: Molly Brady on Land, Law, and the Lost Art of Neighborliness
What has made this moment feel different is not the anxiety about incivility, which has always been there, but rather the performance of it. It’s relentless.” — Molly Brady on incivility in the age of the smartphone Whatever happened to the American front porch? Builders killed it to save money, says the Harvard law professor Molly Brady — and with this death went one of the key stages on which Americans have practiced the art of being neighbors over the last 250 years. Brady is a contributor…
Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos: Is Ben Barnes the Last Moderate Texan Democrat?
“I could not get under oath and swear that I know exactly how Kennedy died in Dallas.” — Ben Barnes, who helped advance JFK’s fatal Texas trip In Texas, there’s nothing in the middle of the road, Jim Hightower famously quipped, but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. But Ben Barnes has spent seven decades disproving him. Elected as a Democratic moderate to the Texas legislature at 21, Speaker of the Texas House at 26, and lieutenant governor at 30, Barnes was LBJ’s premier protégé and…
The American Way of Violence: Mike McIntire on Guns, Greed, and a Daily Trickle of Bloodshed
“You didn’t have to look someone in the eye while you extinguished their life, and you could do it from a distance.” — Mike McIntire on what the gun changed Is there an American way of violence? Earlier this month, the film critic David Thomson blamed gory Hollywood movies, like Coppola’s Godfather, for glorifying it. Today’s guest has an even more brutal answer. According to Mike McIntire, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative journalist, it’s the gun…
The Seduction of the American Mind: Emily Eakin on Her Life in French Theory
“Theory said, it doesn’t matter what you’ve read. It’s how you read.” — Emily Eakin on the seduction of the Frenchmen When I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the Eighties, there was a bewildering rage for Frenchmen. Foucault in history, Derrida in literature, Althusser in political philosophy, Lacan in psychology. Not that anybody could quite explain what any of them meant — which only made their ideas even more compelling. It was the seduction of the American mind, especially its…
Who Owns Intelligence? The Smart Wealth of Nations
In 1776 — that same year America declared its independence — Adam Smith published the equally revolutionary The Wealth of Nations, his founding explanation of national economic value. Two hundred and fifty years later, Tim O’Reilly argues in the free-market Economist that Elon Musk and his fellow tech barons are building a monarchical form of capitalism that the proto-democratic Smith would have hated. Musk, O’Reilly reports, believes that SpaceX will become “worth more than the rest of…
The United States of Oddity: Madeleine Schwartz on How the World Sees America at 250
“What is happening today in America is part of a global political turn — and what’s odd is how little the American people seem to realize it.” — Madeleine Schwartz So we’ve finally arrived. America is 250 today. But where, exactly, have we come? How should we think about the United States of America on July 4, 2026? Rather than peering inwards, Madeleine Schwartz — the Paris-based founder and editor-in-chief of The Dial — reverses the lens. Her anthology, How We See It: The World Looks…
America's Grand Faustian Bargain: Alexander Mikaberidze on How the Louisiana Purchase Made the United States
Tomorrow, America will celebrate its birth. But the decisive moment, even the real birth of modern America, argues Alexander Mikaberidze in his new book The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America, may not have been 1776 at all. It was 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase. The year Thomas Jefferson bought the future from Napoleon Bonaparte. This was the moment the young American republic doubled its size in a single transaction, absorbed the heart of a continent and set…
Gerontocracy in America: Samuel Moyn on How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth
“Age is the modality in which class is lived in America today.” — Samuel Moyn Yesterday we had 91-year-old Mordecai Kurz on the show. Tomorrow, it will be 84-year-old Sally Quinn. But today’s guest, the Yale legal historian Samuel Moyn, has a bit of a problem with old people. His new book, Gerontocracy in America, argues that the old folks are hoarding power and wealth in America. For Moyn, Dylan’s Sixties anthem of “Forever Young” has soured into today’s reality of “Forever Old.” …
The Trouble with Trillionaires: Mordecai Kurz on Capitalism, Democracy, and the Second Gilded Age
“Between 1980 and 2019, the billionaires gained $25 trillion. By today it’s probably $35 trillion. The question is who will pay for reform? You go where the money is.” — Mordecai Kurz Keynes observed that in the long run, we are all dead. The nonagenarian Stanford economist Mordecai Kurz agrees. Which is why he has no patience for the tech utopians’ promise of abundance for all of us in the long run. And his new book, Private Power and Democracy’s Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support…
A Century of Orations: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal Listens to 2,500 Voices of the American Revolution
“As early as 1805, you had orators getting up there — barely twenty years after American independence was recognised by Great Britain — saying: the Republic is over. We’ve had it. So there is a tradition of calling it the end times.” — Nathan Perl-Rosenthal It’s less than three weeks until America’s big birthday bash. But what exactly will be celebrated this 250th Independence Day? In The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776, the historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal read some…
Save San Francisco’s Soul: Jonathan Weber on Technology and Politics in the City By the Bay
“The same creative and political forces that gave rise to [San Francisco’s] boom nearly engineered its collapse.” — Jonathan Weber In Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the quintessential San Francisco movie, the villain points to an old painting of the city and tells Jimmy Stewart that San Francisco has changed. The real city has been lost, he says. Somebody has stolen San Francisco’s soul. The veteran tech journalist Jonathan Weber is the latest writer to search for that soul. In City on the Edge:…