Keen On America

“They weaponized the fear, and the fear became institutionalized, and we internalized it.” — Janet Reitman

Back in 2022, the ex-Marine Elliot Ackerman came on the show to talk about The Fifth Act, his account of America’s humiliating end in Afghanistan. The New York Times Magazine contributing writer Janet Reitman’s new book, The Inheritance, also imagines post-9/11 America as a tragedy in five acts. But, in contrast with Ackerman’s military account, The Inheritance is an American story, focusing on what Reitman sees as the tragic fate of the country since September 11, 2001.

Reitman watched the towers come down from her Brooklyn rooftop and later found pieces of American Airlines in-flight meals that had drifted across the river and landed in front of her building. She is unambiguous about what came next. The world was with America, she reminds us, but instead we sought violent, often irrational revenge. She was in Iraq on bases displaying NEVER FORGET posters for a war that had nothing to do with the thing we weren’t supposed to forget.

To understand post-9/11 America, Reitman borrows George Packer’s method of quilting individual stories into a single narrative. So she writes about people like Nathan Damigo, a Marine who went to Iraq to avenge 9/11, came home with a condition the Corps denied existed, self-medicated, was cut loose without his benefits, went to prison, and concluded in his cell that the only family he could count on was his white race. So he founded Identity Evropa and became one of the leaders at Charlottesville.

While Reitman sees an American tragedy in a square-jawed veteran like Damigo, she doesn’t present him as a victim. Other characters in Reitman’s story are idealists — an FBI agent who leaks information because he believes citizens ought to know, a lawyer who spends twenty years defending Muslim clients — and not one of them, she says, regrets their choices. Much might have fallen on 9/11, but not individual agency. So while this post-9/11 history might be tragic, Janet Reitman’s The Inheritance remains a classically American story.

FURTHER READING

•   Janet Reitman, The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts (Random House, 2026)

•   Anand Giridharadas’s review in The New York Times — “How 9/11 Created a Nation of Fear”

•   George Packer, whose The Unwinding is the model for this kind of non-fiction narrative, on his turn to fiction with The Emergency: listen or watch

•   Kurt Andersen on The Breakup — the other distinguished chronicler of American unravelling who has shifted to fiction: listen or watch

•   Jacob Weisberg on Profiles in Cowardice, which takes a harder line on George W. Bush than his recent press has: listen or watch

•   The CDC on American exhaustion — 71.5% of American adults report fatigue

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. There was another road, and she is certain we could have taken it. This is the claim the whole book rests on, and she states it without hedging: she is a hundred per cent in the camp that says the response was a catastrophic overreaction. In the weeks after the attacks the world was overwhelmingly with America, and the option on the table was to ask seriously why so much of the non-Western world did not love it — a question that was answered instead with “they hate us for our freedom”, which she calls a non-answer. What we chose was revenge, in Afghanistan, which can at least be connected to 9/11, and then in Iraq, which cannot. She was there in 2004 and 2005 and remembers the posters on remote bases: images of the towers collapsing above the words NEVER FORGET, in a war the soldiers themselves largely knew had nothing to do with it.

2. The worst thing the Bush administration did was on the home front. Her book is not another deconstruction of the political decisions — she says there are plenty of those. What interests her is the arrangement whereby a very small number of people went to fight and everybody else was told to go shopping. Literally to go shopping, and to football games, and to thank people for their service. She describes those as performative patriotic acts that had the effect of insulating the country from what was being done in its name, and she notes that the soldiers she still keeps in touch with always hated being thanked, because the thanks were never followed by help with a job, housing or a medical bill. The other half of it was fear, deliberately spread, then institutionalised, then internalised — and she hears the same rhetoric recycled now, about Iran and a bomb that might one day be dropped.

3. Nathan Damigo is the line from Iraq to Charlottesville. He joined the Marines believing he would bring democracy to Iraq and avenge 9/11, and was disabused of both quickly. He came home with PTSD at a point when roughly a quarter of those who served in Iraq did, and when the Marine Corps was still in denial that the condition existed. There was no help, he denied he needed it, he self-medicated, and he ended up in prison where there was no help either. The military had cut him loose without even the standing to call himself a veteran. Sitting in that cell, he decided that democracy was a fraud and the only family he could rely on was his race. He came out, found a community online that had been looking for exactly him — handsome, articulate, blonde, square-jawed, a decorated-looking veteran — founded Identity Evropa, and led the torches at Charlottesville. Some of the young men he recruited now work in government and law enforcement.

4. The looped footage was a form of indoctrination. Reitman watched the towers fall from her Brooklyn rooftop and had debris from the aircraft land in her street, so she is careful about how she puts this. But one of her characters, the Dallas lawyer Marlo Cadeddu, spent the following year walking into convenience stores and seeing the same footage playing again, and again, under the words never forget — and began to wonder what it was doing to people. Reitman thinks the answer is that it worked. It embedded the imagery and the mentality in the minds of Americans who had been nowhere near New York and would otherwise have stayed at some distance from it, connected everybody to a single moment, and made them angry. She regards that as one of the genuinely blameable things.

5. Her characters are not the ones who lost agency. We are. Pressed on whether the people ...

Jensen Huang biographer Stephen Witt argued in a New York Times op-ed this week that the leather-jacketed Nvidia CEO is the most powerful engineer on Earth. It’s not hard to prove. Just look at who (sans leather jacket) was sitting right next to you-know-who at last week’s AI White House lunch.

America is run by lawyers, we were told by the China expert Dan Wang, and China by engineers. But nobody seems to have told either Trump or Huang. In his embrace of Huang’s supposed wisdom on unregulated AI, Trump is acknowledging the power of the engineer.

So would Jensen Huang make a better president than Donald Trump?

In our weekly tech roundup, That Was The Week tech news publisher Keith Teare voted for king Donald. Whatever Trump’s flaws, Keith argues, he is at least a politician. Society isn’t logical, Keith said. It’s chaotic and messy, and so should be run by messy, chaotic people. A society run by king Jensen would, Keith warns, end up “drone-like”.

But the Trump vs Huang choice might have already been made. Huang won’t appear on a ballot because he doesn’t need to. His five trillion dollar company is not only driving our economy but our politics too. Most importantly, Jensen Huang’s drone-like mindset of imagining society as an endless engineering problem is emerging as the AI policy of the current administration. Think of it as the ethic of the engineer. Only it claims there are no ethics, just engineering challenges and solutions.

Earlier this week, Hannah Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz reminded us that Arendt linked Plato’s ideal of philosopher kings with the utopian promises of 20th century totalitarian leaders. I don’t think she would have been too keen on philosopher engineers either.

ALSO THIS WEEK

•   Keith’s editorial, Men and Machines — subtitled Are You Afraid of Your Light Bulbs? — at That Was The Week — the line is Arvind Narayanan’s, from the Ezra Klein interview Keith builds the week around

•   Anthropic’s usage-policy change — worth reading before you form a view: it covers election interference, weapons and surveillance as well, and the cruelty clause is narrower than the headlines suggest

•   Jill Lepore at the Frankfurt Book Fair, urging publishers to declare their independence from Big Tech — the piece I sent Keith, to which he replied with a single word: dinosaur

•   Stephen Witt on this show last year, on the rise of Nvidia and its relentless chief executive: listen or watch

•   Anthropic’s Matthew Botvinick on Thursday, whose AI and Political Freedom is the engineering take on democracy that came up here: listen or watch

•   Kailash Satyarthi yesterday, arguing the exact opposite of Keith — that compassion has to be designed into AI at the foundation stage: listen or watch

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The argument isn’t whether to hand power to engineers. They have it. This is where Keith and I part company, and it took the hour to find the seam. He is strongly against ceding political power to engineers and does not think engineers and power belong in the same sentence. My position is that the sentence was written some time ago and nobody consulted us. Huang sits at the president’s right hand. The frontier labs decide what their products will and will not do. Whether or not engineers should be making moral decisions about technology, they are the ones making them, and the interesting debates — Huang against Amodei, say — are now intramural arguments among technologists with a few philosophers allowed in to watch.

2. Keith would rather have Trump as president than Jensen Huang. He said it flatly and I did not see it coming, because Keith is the techno-optimist in this partnership. His reasoning is that running a country means answering every question, not one question. If the only thing society had to decide was what to do about technology, he allowed, Huang might make a very good president. But take the question of how the wealth created by automation reaches ordinary people: that is not a Jensen Huang question. He may have an opinion on it, and an opinion is exactly what it would be — which is Keith’s definition of politics, and his reason for keeping engineers out of it.

3. Anthropic turned manners into a terms-of-service matter. The company updated its usage policy this week so that sustained abuse of Claude counts as a violation, alongside new clauses on election interference, weapons and surveillance. Anthropic says it bites only in extreme cases — repeated cruelty with no apparent purpose — and not on ordinary frustration, pushback, dark creative material or red-teaming. Keith’s objection is categorical: swap Claude for Facebook, or for Microsoft Word, and hear how it sounds. It is software. My answer is that software is now the medium we live in, so the house rules of the medium are not a trivial matter, and a firm is entitled to set them for its own product.

4. Keith’s position on values in AI is that there should not be any. Not compassion, which Kailash Satyarthi was arguing for on this show only yesterday. Not the female or maternal sensibility Geoffrey Hinton has been urging. Nothing. There should be intelligence, full stop, and a human should be able to ask it anything and get intelligence back without the thing having an opinion. His argument is that a model is trained on effectively all of human output, so every view is already in there, and to tilt it towards any one stream is to switch off everyone who disagrees. He regards Anthropic training Claude to push back on a user as the essence of anti-democracy. I think a perfectly neutral algorithm is the most utopian idea in the conversation.

5. His definition of populism is that the people are paying attention. And that it terrifies politicians, because an electorate with opinions is an electorate out of control. He will not accept Trump as a populist — Trump is the symptom of populism — and he points out that Orbán, who was supposed to be dismantling Hungarian democracy, was voted out of office in April. His prediction follows from all of it: AI will produce more populism rather than less, because it hands the same intelligence to everybody, and educated citizens have more opinions, not fewer.

ABOUT THE CO-HOST

Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation and the publisher of That Was The Week, the weekly technology newsletter this conversation is built around. A serial entrepreneur, he co-founded RealNames and the UK internet service provider Easynet, and was a found...

It’s always fun to have Nobel Prize winners on the show. Recently, we’ve hosted the journalist-dissident Maria Ressa, the economist Simon Johnson and the gloomy godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton. Today it’s the Delhi-based Kailash Satyarthi, who won the 2014 Peace Prize for his fight against child exploitation.

He is now trying to globalize the ideal of compassion. But for Satyarthi, compassion doesn’t mean kindness, empathy, mercy, or even pity. In his new book Karuna (a Sanskrit word that loosely translates into compassion), he defines it as a disruptive force. It means feeling somebody else’s problem as your own and then doing something about it. Which is why, keynoting the UN’s AI for Good summit in Geneva this July, he challenged the executives in the room to send their people to witness suffering. To see the 470 million children living in war zones, the 138 million working as labourers and slaves, the 270 million out of school. That, he guarantees, would make do-gooders genuinely compassionate.

Which brings us to artificial intelligence. Satyarthi is no fan of the AI arms race, which he thinks has left Big Tech’s engineers unable to identify the ethical point of their products. But he insists he’s not against the companies themselves and says he remains a believer in their potential humanity. Satyarthi certainly sees the power of AI to change the world. That’s why, last week, he came to Silicon Valley to talk about AI.

Geoffrey Hinton told me that he wants AI to acquire a female sensibility. Kailash Satyarthi, in contrast, wants compassion to define AI ethics. One day, no doubt, a compassionate bot, maybe named Karuna, will win a Nobel Prize. If so, we’ll certainly have them on the show.

FURTHER READING

•   Kailash Satyarthi, Karuna: The Power of Compassion (HarperCollins India, 2026) — also published in Hindi as Karuna: Samaadhaan ki Shakti

•   Globalising Compassion — Satyarthi’s own account of the idea, including the four components he sets out in this conversation: awareness, connectedness, feeling and action

•   The Satyarthi Movement for Global Compassion, launched in New Delhi in 2024, which is now the vehicle for the compassionate-leadership work in technology, governance, academia and the judiciary

•   Geoffrey Hinton on the show last year, warning about “alien beings that could take over” — the episode behind the question about building different values into the machines: listen or watch

•   Anthropic’s Matthew Botvinick on Thursday, arguing that a safe AI system dropped into an authoritarian setting is not a safe system — the mirror image of Satyarthi’s case: listen or watch

•   The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson, whose own conversation with Satyarthi about building compassion into AI models comes up here: listen or watch

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. Machines cannot feel, so the compassion has to come from the people building them. This is where he starts, and it is an engineer’s starting point rather than a moralist’s. Codes and algorithms cannot be compassionate and never will be, and he has no interest in pretending otherwise. What he objects to is the companion assumption that the machine is therefore neutral. It is not neutral, because it is made by people who arrive with their own biases, apprehensions, flaws and mindset, and all of that flows into the thing they build. The conclusion he draws is that compassion has to be a design principle at the foundation stage, carried through development and deployment, rather than a correction applied after the harm has been exposed.

2. Compassion, in his usage, is not kindness, and the distinction is the whole argument. He is emphatic about it, and he repeats the list twice in the hour: not kindness, not empathy, not mercy, not pity, not charity, not welfare. Those are good human traits and he does not disown them, but they are not what he means. Compassion as he has spent five decades redefining it is a disruptive, dynamic and transformative force, born from feeling the problems of others as your own and driving you to mindful action to solve them. Shorter: mindful and pragmatic problem solving. It has four components — awareness, connectedness, feeling, and then action — and the fourth is the one that separates his definition from every sentimental version of the word.

3. “AI for Good” invites the obvious follow-up question, which he put to the room in Geneva. Good for whom? He was keynoting the inaugural session of the UN’s AI for Good summit this July, in front of delegations from 177 countries and twelve thousand people from the tech sector, and the challenge he laid down was whether the good in question belonged to world leaders, governments and eight or nine companies. His numbers: 470 million children living in war zones, 138 million working as child labourers and child slaves, 270 million out of school. His practical ask is disarmingly small — send the engineers to spend a week or ten days in sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia, in the war zones of the Middle East, and he will organise the trip himself. His verdict on the race as it stands is that it is an arms race, and that in two years’ time only the regret will remain in our hands.

4. Morality is borrowed from outside; compassion is already inside. This is his quarrel with the responsible-AI vocabulary, and he extends it, politely, to the Pope, whose interventions on technology he otherwise endorses. Ethics, morality and religious sermons all come from outside, he argues, and their priorities keep changing, which is why the world still has its problems despite all the temples, mosques, churches and synagogues. Consciousness and compassion, by contrast, are twin sisters, biological and neurological and native to us. So the task is not to import a code of conduct but to ignite something that is already there — which is also why he insists that his argument is not a theological one, even when the conversation strays into Genesis.

5. The young people in his own office write better and think less. He calls the measurable version of all this the compassion quotient, and his claim is that most of us run a low one, caged by the layers that accumulate from identity to purpose to the prevailing definition of success; exposure to actual suffering raises it, as he has watched happen to the volunteers, researchers and journalists who spend a week in his ashrams. The observation that lands hardest, though, is domestic and unflattering to the technology. The youngsters who work for him can now produce a speech or an article better than he could think of — and there is not a single new creative idea in any of it, just the previous data and the old biases that came with it. The creative power and the inclusivity of the young, he says, are now the matter of concern.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Kailash Satyarthi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, jointly with Malala Yousafzai, for his...

“A human being is worth more than his opinions”, Hannah Arendt wrote to her Zionist friend Gershom Scholem in 1946, after he read her critical essay on Zionism and accused her of betraying the Jewish people. So how to value a human being? What, according to Arendt, are we worth? According to the Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz, our value lies in the power of friendship. That’s what he calls, in his new book, A World We Share. It’s what makes us human.

Berkowitz, who runs the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, reminds us that Arendt wasn’t a postmodern relativist who believed everyone’s opinions were equally credible. Facts mattered to her enormously — but a thousand facts about immigration will not verify migration policy, and two people with Harvard doctorates, especially if they are friends, can still disagree about how many people to let into America.

Nor is Berkowitz presenting Hannah Arendt as an anodyne centrist. For Arendt, he argues, people are plural and always will be so. We can, and should, have strong opinions that sometimes cause us to raise our voices in anger. But an argument, she believed, should end in disagreement rather than discord. So, when she and Scholem fell out all over again seventeen years later, this time over her argument about the banality of Nazi evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem, she hoped it wouldn’t affect their friendship. It’s our ability to disagree and reconcile (which isn’t the same as forgiveness) that makes us human, Arendt says. That’s what we should — indeed, must — share if we are to rebuild our broken world.

FURTHER READING

•   Roger Berkowitz, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press, 2026)

•   The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, which Berkowitz founded and directs

•   Yesterday’s episode featuring Anthropic’s Matthew Botvinick, author of AI and Political Freedom, articulating an engineer’s view of politics — listen or watch

•   Sherry Turkle on Artificial Intimacy — last week’s episode Berkowitz praises: listen or watch

•   Keri Leigh Merritt on the American dissident Lillian Smith, who, like Hannah Arendt, was An Inconvenient Woman: listen or watch

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. Better facts will not fix politics. This is the claim that puts Arendt at odds with almost everyone currently worrying about democracy. We tend to assume that misinformation is the disease and that better education, better journalism and better facts are the cure. Arendt did not believe it. Facts mattered to her enormously, but she insisted they have very little power to tell us what to do: twenty facts about immigration still will not settle immigration, and two people who have both been as well educated as it is possible to be can still disagree about Trump. Berkowitz traces the opposite assumption back to Plato, who watched Athens execute Socrates, concluded the many could not be trusted, and invented the philosopher king to rule in their place.

2. Reconciliation is not forgiveness. Arendt’s distinction here is precise and worldly rather than moral. Forgiveness, as she understood it, is Christian: it implies that you might have done the same, so you should not throw stones. Reconciliation claims nothing of the kind. It says that what you did was wrong, that I would not have done it, that I do not forgive you — and that I am nonetheless willing to love a world with you in it. The condition is that it runs both ways. Heidegger came to her after the war, went down on his knees and turned himself in, and she reconciled. Karl Jaspers never did, and the two of them had their worst row over it in Switzerland in the fifties, ending with each accepting that the other had made a different judgment.

3. And there are people you cannot have in your world. The last two chapters of the book are about the limits, which Berkowitz is at pains to point out are not the same thing as civility. Eichmann is the case that settles it. Arendt’s argument was never that he was a monster; it was that in a normal age he would have been an unremarkable civil servant whom nobody would have heard of. But he did not live in a normal age, and he became a willing and obedient servant of bureaucratic genocide. Her conclusion was not moral outrage but a judgment about what she could live alongside: she could not love a world in which such a person was simply readmitted to it, and so he had to die. The useful corollary, in Berkowitz’s formulation, is that the uncle whose opinions you cannot bear is generally not Eichmann.

4. Totalitarianism is organised loneliness. The line is Arendt’s, and Berkowitz keeps it on the Arendt Center’s website: if totalitarianism is organised loneliness, then the loneliness of modern life means totalitarianism is hardly a phenomenon of the past. His gloss is the darkest stretch of the conversation. Religion has lost most of its public meaning, the family has broken down, and the Western tradition — the banisters we lean on precisely because nobody can think all the time — has shattered. What is left is the atomised individual, and the movements that offer him meaning. Which is why Arendt held that the fundamental political problem of the age is not housing or immigration or even the environment, but meaninglessness, and why anyone hoping to see off fascism has to offer people a life that feels worth living.

5. There is no such thing as a two-week-old friendship. The third element of friendship, after conversation and respect, is simply duration, and Arendt was unsentimental about it. She knew W. H. Auden for twelve years, at one point turning up with Mary McCarthy to clean his notoriously filthy flat, and he proposed marriage; she still said they had met too late in life to become friends. Berkowitz, at fifty-eight, found himself making a list and ringing people up once a month because the friends he had were leaving New York or dying. The argument he draws from it is that friendship takes time nobody has any more, and that if machines are going to take the labour, it is the capacity most worth protecting on the other side.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where he is Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Human Rights. A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World is published by Yale University Press. He lives in New York.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States, hosted by Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not the Answer and How to Fix the Future. New episodes every day.

Matthew Botvinick works at Anthropic, where he leads the Anthropic Institute’s research on AI and the rule of law. His new book, AI and Political Freedom, focuses on AI’s risk to democracy and how we should respond to it. It’s important to note that for this Princeton University Press book, Botvinick doesn’t represent Anthropic. That said, the fact that he just happens to be a senior policy guy at Dario’s trillion dollar startup makes both Matt and his book particularly intriguing.

He obviously knows his AI stuff. He was previously senior director of research at Google DeepMind, and before that ran neural computation labs at Princeton and Penn. He has been doing what we now call deep learning since the early nineteen nineties, when it was called connectionist modelling and few imagined it would ever amount to a commercial product. Then he went back to school for a law degree. Yale, no less. So Matt is clearly an Ivy League-trained, smart logical guy. Somebody to be (mis)trusted.

His argument is that AI doesn’t invent a new threat to democracy so much as raise the stakes on the demagogue’s playbook. It’s that familiar Trump/Modi/Orbán/Bolsonaro game of splitting the people from the elites, then, once in office, rewiring the state to entrench power and muzzling anyone who objects. What AI adds, Matt worries, is populist fuel at both ends. Thus the dangerous flammability of our current politics. Job displacement manufactures exactly the insecurity demagogues feed on, and AI hands whoever wins a surveillance and censorship apparatus that no previous authoritarian could dream of. He also expects AI-driven national security crises, and notes that states of emergency are designed to expand executive power, which makes them very easy to abuse.

I pushed Matt on whether anyone should believe any of this from a senior Anthropic policy maker. He said no, and probably meant it. There is no reason, he argued, to trust anybody from Anthropic, or any newspaper either, because a marketplace of ideas doesn’t run on trust but on the strength of the argument.

Perhaps. But my bigger concern is the ethic of the all-too-logical engineer that Matt brings to politics. As I will discuss tomorrow with the Hannah Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz, Arendt argued that politics was anything but an engineering problem with quantifiable fixes. So when Matt promises AI enabling ancient Athens “at scale” through citizen assemblies, we should be wary. Not because this will end humanity or make Anthropic employees exorbitantly rich. But because politics isn’t code, and can’t be fixed by engineers.

FURTHER READING

•   Matthew Botvinick, AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond (Princeton University Press, 2026)

•   The author’s own page for the book: mattbotvinick.com

•   Adam Jentleson on Supermajority — the Democratic strategist on rebuilding a governing coalition: listen to that episode

•   Susan Neiman on whether Trump is evil — the philosopher on how half of America accepted him twice: listen to that episode

•   Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner on the patrimonial turn in American government: listen to that episode

•   Roger Berkowitz, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press, 2026) — Berkowitz is on the show tomorrow

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. AI doesn’t invent the threat. It raises the stakes. Botvinick is careful to say that AI does not create some exotic new danger to democracy. What it does is sharpen a vulnerability that democracies have always had, and which the American founders worried about explicitly. The pattern he calls the demagogue’s playbook begins with populist appeals that divide the people from an allegedly hijacking elite, and proceeds, once the demagogue is in office, to two objectives: rewiring the machinery of government to entrench power, and muzzling dissent by attacking the press and civil society. AI feeds the first stage and arms the second.

2. Job displacement is the fuel. The mechanism by which AI raises the risk is economic rather than technological. People who feel insecure about their livelihoods and their standing in society look to political leaders to solve problems they cannot solve privately, and that is precisely the demand that demagogues exist to meet. Botvinick is candid that he cannot predict the timeline, because how fast AI diffuses through the economy and how fast employers actually use it to replace labour are harder to forecast than the technology itself. His position is simply that serious displacement is coming and that we should prepare rather than argue about the date.

3. Emergencies and surveillance are the weapons. Two tools in particular worry him. The first is the state of emergency: he expects AI to cause national security crises, cybersecurity above all, and points out that states of emergency are not inherently anti-democratic but are intrinsically designed to expand executive power, which makes them very easy to exploit. The second, and the one he considers more serious, is that AI is an extraordinary instrument of domestic surveillance and censorship — for tracking political opponents, silencing them, and preventing the coordinated action that protest depends on. China, he notes, is not a hypothetical.

4. There is no reason to trust him, and he says so. Asked directly why anyone should believe an Anthropic employee with stock in the company, Botvinick did not reach for a reassurance. There is no reason to trust anybody from Anthropic, he said, just as there is no reason to trust any newspaper; the point of a marketplace of ideas is that it does not run on trust at all, but on the strength of arguments and the information people put into the open. AK pressed back that the marketplace of ideas is itself a contestable position rather than a self-evident truth, which Botvinick accepted without abandoning it.

5. Ancient Athens at scale. The hopeful half of the book rests on the deliberative democracy movement and the citizens’ assemblies championed by the Yale political theorist Hélène Landemore, whom Botvinick calls one of his heroes. These assemblies are good at putting people in a frame of mind to argue openly and from facts, but at present nobody knows how to run one much beyond a hundred participants. The question the book leaves open is whether AI can enlarge them to the scale of a republic without destroying the thing that makes them work — and Botvinick is explicit that this requires experiment rather than deployment.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Matthew Botvinick is a member of the technical staff at Anthropic, where he leads the Anthropic Institute’s research on AI and the rule of law, and a senior fellow at Yale Law School. He was previously se...

The retired money manager Greg Steinmetz has now written three books about very rich men. The first, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, was about the sixteenth-century Augsburg banker Jacob Fugger. The second, American Rascal, was about the nineteenth-century robber baron Jay Gould. The third, The President and the Oligarch, came out this week, and this time the rich man has a president as a co-star. It’s a book about the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Andrew W. Mellon.

Mellon was the third richest American of his age, behind Rockefeller and Ford. He was, above all, a banker, installed as president of his father’s small-town Pennsylvania bank while still in his twenties, and building it into one of the largest banks in the country. Warren Harding, reasoning that anyone that rich must know something about money, made him Treasury Secretary. He served Coolidge and Hoover too, eleven years in all, the second longest tenure in the department’s history.

And then, in 1934, Franklin Roosevelt came for him. Steinmetz’s revisionist argument is that FDR’s pursuit of Mellon was pure politics. Mellon, who by then was in his late seventies and out of office, had done nothing to him. His supposed crime was taking a tax write-off on art he had donated to a foundation, the sort of thing, Steinmetz claims, (rich) people do every day. Roosevelt’s own attorney general told him there was no case and a grand jury threw it out. Roosevelt pursued him in tax court anyway, until an unloved Mellon died with the matter unresolved.

Steinmetz suggests this is where the modern American fashion of deploying the tax code against political enemies begins. The irony is that Mellon’s paintings that triggered the persecution morphed into the National Gallery of Art — for which Roosevelt took the credit. Poor persecuted Andrew W. Mellon. Or, more accurately, rich persecuted Mellon. Unlike Steinmetz, I find it hard to feel sorry for such a miserable old sod who didn’t even have any fun with his wealth. Maybe Steinmetz’s next book should be about persecuted poor people. He’d find no shortage of subjects.

FURTHER READING

•   Greg Steinmetz, The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon, and the Triumph of Big Government (Simon & Schuster, 2026)

•   Greg Steinmetz, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger (Simon & Schuster, 2015)

•   Greg Steinmetz, American Rascal: How Jay Gould Built Wall Street’s Biggest Fortune (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

•   William Hitchcock on A Shadow Over the World — the companion revisionist case on FDR and the 1930s: listen to that episode

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The man who had no fun. Mellon was the third wealthiest American of his era, behind only Rockefeller and Henry Ford, and he appears to have enjoyed almost none of it. One contemporary journalist wrote that he looked like an accountant who had just lost his job. His English wife, brought over from horse country outside London, took one look at the smokestacks of Pittsburgh and within three years had taken up with an Englishman. Steinmetz describes a man who was never happier than when he was alone in the bank with a balance sheet, and likens him to Warren Buffett reading financial statements all day — except that Buffett at least plays bridge.

2. The vendetta. In 1934, with a midterm approaching and pressure building from Huey Long, Father Coughlin and Francis Townsend on his left, Roosevelt needed to demonstrate his progressive credentials without adopting their actual programmes. He chose to scapegoat Mellon, blaming him for the persistent unemployment and for the Depression itself. Mellon was by then in his late seventies and years out of office, and the case against him was a tax write-off taken on art donated to a foundation. Steinmetz is blunt about what followed: the attorney general said there was nothing there, a grand jury of ordinary working people threw it out, and Roosevelt pursued him in tax court regardless, until Mellon died with the matter still unresolved.

3. What actually caused the Depression. Steinmetz changed his own mind during the research. The stock market crash was not the cause, he argues, pointing out that the Nasdaq fell seventy per cent in the dot-com bust and produced only a mild recession. What turned a downturn into a decade was European: German reparations, German bank failures, and the indecision of central bankers across the Atlantic, compounded at home by the Federal Reserve’s refusal to put money into the economy — the Friedman and Bernanke diagnosis. On this reading, Mellon’s record at Treasury was in some ways the opposite of ruinous: he ran a surplus every single year, and paid down the debt built up by the First World War by cutting taxes rather than raising them.

4. The National Gallery. The strangest turn in the story is that the donation which triggered the prosecution ended in a gift to the American public. Mellon owned a hundred and twenty-nine masterpieces — Rembrandts, Titians, Raphaels — and he gave them, along with the money to build the building and endow its maintenance, to create the National Gallery of Art. He pointedly did not call it the Mellon Gallery. He and Roosevelt met one to one to discuss the gift while the tax trial was still grinding on, and Roosevelt took the credit for the museum. Steinmetz forecloses the cynical reading: Mellon was already dying of cancer, and the value of what he gave away dwarfed anything the tax case could ever have cost him.

5. The pendulum. The research also altered Steinmetz’s politics, and in an unexpectedly hopeful direction. He is unmoved by the argument that American democracy is finished. American history, he says, is a pendulum: Harding won sixty per cent of the vote in 1920, the biggest landslide since Washington, because voters wanted tax cuts and an end to inflation; by 1932 those same voters demanded relief and got it. He expects the same correction now, with the Democrats reversing much of what Trump has done. For all that his book is a grim story about persecution, he takes from it the conclusion that democracy tends to solve its own problems.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Greg Steinmetz was born in Cleveland, took his BA at Colgate and a master’s at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and spent fifteen years as a reporter, including as Berlin and London bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. He later became a securities analyst and a partner at a New York money-management firm, from which he is now retired. He is the author of The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, a biography of Jacob Fugger, and American Rascal, on Jay Gould. The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon, and the Triumph of Big Government is published by Simon & Schuster. He lives just north of New York City.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Everyone, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare breathlessly announced this week, is about to be offered an AI personal assistant. Or, to put it in Silicon-Valley-speak, a digital chief of staff. OpenAI unveiled Dot at its developer day. Meta already has Muse, Musk has Grok Bot, and a British start-up called Instinct raised a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation while adding group chat, so that an entire team can share this same digital master of the universe. My instinct is that Instinct might be the Pets.com of this bubble. I would check with my digital chief-of-staff, if I had one. Which I don’t.

The novelty, Keith insists, is the virtual machine. It’s a computer in the cloud that your agent owns, where it can run a browser, read your email and write code on your behalf. So we have one interface instead of the fifty chat windows that I use on Claude. No keyboard, no mouse, no screen. As a particularly wealthy and busy man, Keith has given five of these assistants access to everything (and I mean everything) he has: multitudes of credit cards, bank accounts, brokerage logins. He confesses to spending a combined thousand dollars a month on AI subscriptions. But the fruit of all this — his argument for our agentic future — is that he recently asked one of them, by voice, to find him a sub $40 Hoya lens hood with the correct thread. $1000 to save $40? Even a human chief-of-staff might flag that raspberry.

What do we become when we talk to machines? I asked Sherry Turkle this week. Idiots, I suspect.

Discussed also this week:

•       Nicole Nguyen in the Wall Street Journal on whether she would let an AI agent run her life.

•       David Robinson in The Atlantic on why he quit OpenAI, and why frontier labs should be run like nuclear plants or busy airports.

•       Adam Tooze in the Financial Times on why AI is not the Manhattan Project — and Evgeny Morozov, in the same paper, on AI sovereign wealth funds as techno-imperialism.

•       Steve Rattner’s six charts on why we need AI, including the case that Democrats rarely make — with a sting in the tail about kill switches.

•       Richard Waters in the Financial Times and Alex Kantrowitz on why Anthropic’s IPO feels so weird.

•       The New York Times on the religious scholars who met Anthropic and came away stunned.

•       That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter, with everything discussed here, and last week’s editorial.

Five Takeaways

•       Everyone Gets Offered One. The week’s actual news, in Keith’s reading, is not that everybody will have a personal agent but that everybody will be offered one. OpenAI announced Dot at its developer day, joining Meta’s Muse, Musk’s Grok Bot, OpenClaw and Hermes; the British startup Instinct raised a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation and added group chat, so that a whole team can brief a single agent. What these share, and what Anthropic conspicuously lacks, is the virtual machine: a computer running in the cloud that the agent owns, on which it can open browsers, handle email and write code. The effect is to abstract away the fifty separate chat sessions in the left-hand column and replace them with one relationship — a chief of staff that knows about your travel, your calendar, your book and your commercial dealings all at once. AK’s scepticism was practical: he has perhaps fifteen conversations going, knows which is which, and cannot see what the extra layer buys him.

•       A Thousand Dollars a Month. Pressed on what he actually spends, Keith eventually admitted to around a thousand dollars a month across personal and professional accounts, and accepted AK’s observation that this places him in the top fraction of a per cent of users. He has given five different agents access to everything — credit cards, bank accounts, stock accounts — on the grounds that the benefits are unavailable otherwise, and does not regard this as a privacy risk because the agent runs in an encrypted virtual machine he owns rather than inside a company. His example of the new convenience is almost comically small: asking by voice for a particular Hoya lens hood with the right thread for under forty dollars, and never visiting Amazon. The serious version of the claim is about interface. Dispense with the keyboard, the mouse and the screen, and any task that currently requires a browser can be done by talking while walking around Orange County.

•       The IPO That Leads With Its Liabilities. The strangest thread of the week. Richard Waters in the Financial Times and Alex Kantrowitz both wrote about how odd Anthropic’s flotation feels, and Keith offers an explanation: the labs have realized they are legally liable for whatever their models do, and in America they will certainly be sued. If AI ends up in everything, the liability is effectively infinite — plausibly larger than the valuations being discussed. Hence a leaked S-1 that discloses liabilities up front, which AK believes may be a first in the history of public offerings. Saturday Night Live caught the same thing in a sketch depicting Dario Amodei as a man simultaneously begging to be stopped and begging to be funded. Keith’s view is that Amodei chose this narrative and could have chosen another; Sam Altman, meanwhile, spent the week trying to find daylight between himself and Anthropic on exactly this question, and did not find much.

•       Run It Like a Nuclear Plant. David Robinson resigned from OpenAI saying its culture is broken, and argued in The Atlantic that frontier labs need the redundancy and slow, careful planning of nuclear power stations or busy airports. Steve Rattner, in a piece Keith admired for making the pro-worker case for AI that Democrats rarely make, ended with a sting: new products should be tested by a government entity, and should carry kill switches. Keith regards the kill switch as technically illiterate — the models are already running on millions of devices, and nothing short of a callback to the cloud would reach them, which would not touch the Chinese ones at all. On Robinson he is warmer, because the onus falls where he thinks it belongs: on the labs, to write better harnesses. He adds a factual point worth keeping: almost all the alarming AI behaviour so far has occurred in laboratory testing of unreleased models without those harnesses. His only complaint is that R...

“A book about truth needs to be truthful.” — Steven Rosenbaum

In April, the New York City based tech impresario Steven Rosenbaum came on the show to discuss The Future of Truth, his then new book about artificial intelligence. He warned that AI is a spectacularly good liar and that we should be concerned about the future of truth. A few weeks later, The New York Times reported that the book contained untrue quotations — among them one (mis)attributed to the notable tech journalist Kara Swisher.

No, you couldn’t make this story up (if you did, it would be called a lie). Not surprisingly, the world’s leading expert on truth (which he still claims to be) got mocked everywhere from Wired to the Daily Beast. But taking a leaf perhaps out of his fellow New Yorkers Roy Cohn and Donald Trump’s playbook, Rosenbaum has fought back. He claimed that these fake quotes came from ChatGPT, and spent the summer meticulously rewriting the book to eliminate its errors.

Rosenbaum is unusually frank about it. Even unapologetic. Defiantly so. He says he gave ChatGPT his own interview transcripts and asked for pull quotes, assuming that a machine given primary sources would return what was in them. Instead, he says, ChatGPT went rogue and decided it could improve a few of them. That said, Rosenbaum takes full responsibility for the original book. He admits he dropped the ball, and — for the first time publicly — thanks the New York Times reporter who wrote the original story. He also stripped every endorsement off the new edition, including Maria Ressa’s introduction, so that none of his illustrious friends might be embarrassed by the brouhaha.

I gave the masochist a hard time anyway. He didn’t much enjoy the comparison with Roy Cohn. But I meant it as a compliment. Declare victory and move on was the Cohnian mantra which he taught the current American President. And that’s exactly what Rosenbaum has done with this crazy AI story. What chutzpah! And it’s all true. Kind of.

Further Reading:

•       The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality by Steven Rosenbaum (Matt Holt Books) — the corrected second edition, with two new chapters, now on presale.

•       Benjamin Mullin’s New York Times report on the fabricated quotations, and Will Oremus’s follow-up in The Atlantic — both discussed here.

•       Prof Joe Cruz from Williams College arguing in the New York Times that teaching students to think need not mean teaching them to write — the controversial piece that opens the conversation.

•       Earlier this week on Keen On: Sherry Turkle on what we become when we talk to machines.

•       The Sustainable Media Center, which Steven Rosenbaum runs, and whose board includes fifty Gen Z members.

Five Takeaways

•       What Actually Happened. The errors were specific and few. Benjamin Mullin of the New York Times — who, as Rosenbaum notes drily, had the temerity to actually read the book he was writing about — found three. One was a misattributed citation on a quotation Meredith Broussard confirms she did say. The others were worse: text that appeared inside quotation marks and had never been spoken, including a line about Asimov’s laws of robotics given to Kara Swisher, who told the Times it sounded as though she had a stick up her backside. Rosenbaum’s account of the mechanism is the part other authors should read. He had fed his own primary-source interview transcripts into ChatGPT and asked it to pull quotations, assuming that a machine handed the actual words would return the actual words. In some cases it decided the first-person material could be made a little better. Across five versions of the manuscript there were nearly four thousand tracked changes and more than four hundred citations; a copy editor flagged the Swisher line, the citation was altered rather than the quotation checked, and nobody caught it. His own verdict is unqualified: he dropped the ball, and he is one hundred per cent responsible.

•       The Rewrite. His publisher, Matt Holt, did not immediately drop him; they said they would withhold judgment until he produced a detailed account of what had gone wrong. He hired a new fact checker, spent the entire summer working through the manuscript with new proofreaders, had it laid out again with a new index, and added two substantial chapters. The new edition is on presale now. Two decisions in that process deserve notice. He asked the publisher to strip every endorsement from the book — Maria Ressa’s introduction, Nick Thompson, Kurt Andersen, Michael Wolff — not because anyone demanded it but because he did not want friends and acquaintances forced into a public choice about whether to stand by him. And he went to Amazon to ask them to enforce their own policy against reviews by people who state in the review that they have not read the book; sixty-eight per cent of the ratings are one star. They did not really answer.

•       The Cross-Examination. AK gave no quarter, and Rosenbaum did not ask for any. The central charge: a man whose entire book argues that AI is a spectacularly good liar then trusted it to supply his quotations, in the book, without checking. Rosenbaum’s defence is that this was a year or more ago, when the models routinely produced fake URLs and fake DOI numbers and authors had not yet learned to distrust them — and that he is now in a large and growing club of doctors, lawyers, poets and nonfiction writers who have been caught the same way. He flatly rejected the distinction between a conversation like this one, where a slip costs nothing, and a four-year book with a team and a publisher behind it: told that the two were not comparable, he replied that he thought AK was absolutely wrong, and that the obligation to tell the truth is the same in both. Asked whether there was something Cohnian in his refusal to go quietly, he turned it round — he will take not agreeing with Roy Cohn as a badge of courage, and Trump can be added to the list.

•       Whose Fault Is It? Rosenbaum’s larger argument, and the one he came to make. He has asked several developers how hard it would be for an AI company to stop placing text inside quotation marks unless it can be reliably traced to a source. All three said it would be trivially easy. So why isn’t it done? Because, as he says the systems themselves will tell you if you ask, these companies want to grow quickly, and delivering confident answers that are occasionally wrong is a risk they are prepared to take. They are not, in their own account, in the truth business. His analogy — that a car manufacturer cannot disclaim responsibility for the brakes by telling drivers to pay more attention to the road — did...

“When Dylan was booed, at the festivals or on tour, even over in England — some of that was Tom Wilson’s fault.” — Steven E. Jones

Five years ago, the Los Angeles based Ron Brownstein came on the show to argue that 1974 was the greatest year in American cultural history. Steven E. Jones has a rival candidate. His new book, Everything Is Everything, makes the case for 1966. In contrast with Brownstein, Jones builds his argument not around a Hollywood star but around a record producer most people have never heard of.

Tom Wilson was born in Waco, went to Fisk and then to Harvard, where he read economics, ran a show on the college radio station and founded the Harvard New Jazz Society. He started his own label and produced a remarkably eclectic group of musicians including Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. Then he went to Columbia and was handed a young folk singer, a complete unknown. The rest is musical history.

Wilson was not only the man who encouraged Bob Dylan to go electric, but the man who transformed Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence into a worldwide hit. He signed Frank Zappa thinking he was getting a white R&B band. He produced the Velvet Underground and wrote Sunday Morning for Nico. He was Black, six foot four, impeccably dressed, and drove an Aston Martin. Cooler than 007.

“Everything is everything” was Wilson’s mantra. He meant it as an embrace of radical eclecticism, a refusal to commit to a single genre. Steven Jones dedicates 1966, the last truly eclectic musical year, to this remarkable record producer. Where have you gone, Tom Wilson? A musical nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Further Reading/Listening/Watching:

•       Everything Is Everything: Tom Wilson and Pop Music in 1966 by Steven E. Jones (Stanford University Press, September 29, 2026).

•       Rock Me on the Water: 1974 — The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics by Ron Brownstein, a previous guest on this show, and the rival candidate for the greatest year.

•       Irwin Chusid’s pioneering web archive on Tom Wilson, by way of WFMU — where Jones first discovered who had produced his Batman record.

•       Freak Out! (1966), The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) and Chelsea Girl (1967) — three Wilson productions worth hearing in sequence.

•       Dont Look Back (1967), in which Wilson briefly appears, and A Complete Unknown (2024), in which he appears more briefly still.

Five Takeaways

•       The Man Who Isn’t Quite in the Movie. Jones came to Tom Wilson through the first record he ever bought, aged seven, with his own pocket money: a Batman album, bought in a supermarket in 1966, which turned out at home to be a gloriously raunchy dance record and which his mother did not much care for. Only decades later, through the musicologist Irwin Chusid’s website, did he learn who had produced it. Wilson was born in Waco, Texas, spent a short time at Fisk and then went to Harvard, where he studied economics, presented a show on the college station WHRB and founded the Harvard New Jazz Society. He started his own label, Transition Records, and recorded early work by John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. When the label folded he went into the industry proper, arriving at Columbia in time to be assigned a young folk singer. He appears briefly in A Complete Unknown, which Jones enjoyed — but the film stages him as though he were the engineer, when every account describes a commanding presence running the room.

•       Everything Is Everything. The phrase was Wilson’s own, repeated so often on his promotional radio programme — distributed to DJs on twelve-inch discs to be played straight to air — that Jones took it for a title. It was already part of Black vernacular culture by the middle sixties, turning up in the literature of the Nation of Islam and audible in the studio chatter at the beginning of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, and it travels forward through Eric Burdon and the Animals to Lauryn Hill’s 1998 song and beyond. In other mouths it means something close to it is what it is, an acceptance of how things are. In Wilson’s it meant the opposite: a celebration of radical eclecticism, an insistence that the significant music always borrows and mixes, and a conviction that rock was mutating into a kind of meta-genre. He called himself, half-jokingly, the folk-rock czar. AK’s suggestion that the hopeless term world music might simply be renamed everything got an immediate yes.

•       What He Actually Did. The list is startling even by the standards of the period. He put electric instruments behind Bob Dylan, which is why, as Jones cheerfully concedes, some of the booing at the festivals and on the English tour was Tom Wilson’s fault. He took The Sound of Silence — a track from a failed album by a duo who had already broken up — hired session musicians, overdubbed electric guitar and drums, and released it without consulting either Simon or Garfunkel; it went to number one around the world. He arrived late to the first Velvet Underground record, re-recorded several key tracks, and added Sunday Morning from scratch because he wanted a potential hit, writing the vocal for Nico while the band were busy pushing her out. He then produced her solo album Chelsea Girl. He signed the Mothers of Invention after hearing them play something that sounded like straightforward R&B, believing, in Zappa’s telling, that he had signed a white R&B band — and then backed them anyway, funding Freak Out!, one of the first double albums in rock, and giving Zappa the freedom to bring in freaks off the street to chant and make animal noises.

•       A Year of Contradictions. Jones resists the tidy narrative in which 1966 is a peak and everything afterwards is decline. What he sees instead is a set of responses to immediate pressures, some of them creative and some of them frankly commercial: radio formats were multiplying and differentiating, FM was arriving as the underground alternative, and the industry needed different kinds of music to fill them and different audiences to sell them to. The result was the most plastic and superficial moment of the decade and its most inventive, at the same time. Warhol was everywhere that year — at the Batman premiere party, photographed with Nico dressed as Batman while he played Robin, making his own film Batman Dracula, presiding over the Dom where the Velvets played. At the end of the year the Monkees arrived, an American Beatles manufactured for television. Which is precisely the atmosphere, Jones argues, in which e...

“The United States is speed running into a more authoritarian model that the Russians have been living in for quite some time now.” — Dan Storyev

How to survive authoritarianism in the United States? Maybe we can learn from the Russians. At least according to the Russian-American Dan Storyev, co-author (with Maria Kuznetsova) of How to Survive Authoritarianism, a phrasebook which provides a hundred Russian words for the nasty political things Americans can see but can’t yet name.

Storyev’s premise is that America hasn’t got the vocabulary to describe its current predicament. The country has never lived under a dictatorship, he explains, so the language simply isn’t there. Russian history, on the other hand, is defined mostly by dictatorship. Storyev experienced Putin’s post-Soviet authoritarianism, his parents Brezhnev’s stagnation, their parents Stalinist totalitarianism, their ancestors one brutal czar or another. So the Russian language shaped itself accordingly, words becoming a way to both describe and resist the authoritarian reality of their lives.

Storyev provides us with phrases like “power vertical,” a chilling Kremlin euphemism for a country where a single desk decides everything (ie: the aspiration of the current White House). Then there’s the Russian word “byudzhetniki,” meaning the budget people, whose salaries come from the state and who are therefore expected to loyally show up at the rally and at the ballot box (ie: everyone who benefits from Trump’s $5,000 handout). And the “siloviki,” the men of force (ie: ICE agents). Best of all, “mnogohodovochka,” the multistep stratagem — Moscow’s way of explaining a catastrophe as a plan too clever for ordinary mortals to follow. Which is an unpronounceable way to understand everything from Elon Musk’s ridiculous DOGE debacle to Trump’s absurd war in Iran.

Further Reading:

•       How to Survive Authoritarianism: A Russian’s Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America by Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev (Liveright, 2026) — a hundred Russian idioms, from apparatchik to samizdat.

•       “Here’s What’s Happening in America, in Six (Mostly) Russian Terms” — the authors’ 2025 New York Times guest essay, and the seed of the book.

•       “Protests Are Not Emotional Support Groups” — their Persuasion argument about why the No Kings demonstrations failed, raised in this conversation.

•       OVD-Info — the Russian human rights watchdog whose English newsletter Storyev writes.

•       Earlier on Keen On: Gal Beckerman on how to be a dissident, Keri Leigh Merritt on Lillian Smith and Jacob Weisberg on cowardice in the MAGA age — all raised here.

Five Takeaways

•       A Phrasebook, Not a Prophecy. Storyev is careful about the claim he is making. The United States is not an authoritarian country, and he says so repeatedly. What exists is a looming threat, and a faction within the ruling class that would plainly like the country to become one. The trouble, in his account, is linguistic. Americans have never lived under a dictatorship, so they have no words for its early symptoms, while Russian is saturated with them. AK’s immediate objection was a good one: millions of Americans have lived under an authoritarianism of their own, whether under Jim Crow or during the McCarthy years, and surely they know the signs. Storyev conceded the point readily, observing that those communities developed a private vocabulary for the agents of the state which never reached the mainstream. His own formulation of the difference is the one that sticks. Russia has spent three centuries learning these models of government. America is speed running them.

•       Aesopian Language. The device at the heart of the book is an old one, invented by satirists under the czars and perfected in the Soviet Union: a way of attacking the state that everybody understands and no prosecutor can use. Storyev’s favourite example is mnogohodovochka, the multistep stratagem, which Russians now deploy sarcastically to describe the Kremlin’s habit of presenting every disaster as a master plan too subtle for ordinary minds to follow. The American equivalent arrived when the White House press secretary explained that journalists would understand the president’s thinking if only they had read more of The Art of the Deal. Among the young, Storyev argues, the same instinct now appears as irony poisoning: everything becomes a joke about itself, partly because jokes are harder to punish. AK brought in Lea Ypi on growing up in Hoxha’s Albania, where families spoke in opposites, and the artistic lineage that runs from Havel to Shostakovich to Tarkovsky. Resistance begins, Storyev says, in private language: first in your own head, then among friends, then with strangers. That is how movements start.

•       Breaking the Law. The one moment in the hour when Storyev abandoned his hedges. American liberals, he argues, are still debating whether what the administration does is legal, and have not yet absorbed the central fact about autocrats, which is that they write the laws themselves. At some point, therefore, resistance will mean breaking them. AK pushed back hard, and on two grounds: Trump was elected and can be unelected, and once lawbreaking is licensed so, eventually, is violence. Storyev clarified rather than retreated. He is not calling for a civil war; he is calling for an end to normalization. His article with Kuznetsova argued that the No Kings protests achieved nothing because protests are not emotional support groups. He points to Steve Bannon’s own formulation — we win or we go to prison — as evidence that at least one side has stopped thinking in electoral terms, and to the unitary executive theory as the blueprint for what Russians call the power vertical. He offers no solution and says so plainly. What he offers is a vocabulary.

•       The Words Themselves. Power vertical entered Russian in the late nineties, sold as a promise of order after the gangster decade, and came to mean that in the largest country on earth every decision is taken at one desk. The byudzhetniki, literally the budget people, are the teachers, doctors and students whose salaries come from the state and who are therefore expected at the rally and at the ballot box; Storyev’s American instances are the promised $5,000 payment should the Republicans hold the midterms, and Musk’s money in the Wisconsin judicial election. The siloviki are the men of force, whose ancestors are Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki, riding into towns on black horses with severed dogs’ heads at the saddle; his parallel is the recruitment of ICE, which AK was unw...