Keen On America

In his new co-authored book It’s On You, the English behavioral scientist Nick Chater exposes how the rich and powerful - the THEM - have convinced us that we're to blame for society's deepest problems. Can't lose weight? That's because YOU lack willpower—or so THEY would have you believe. But willpower, Chater argues, is a convenient myth. And that means the behavioral economists got it wrong too. Nudge theory doesn't work because human beings are far messier than the utilitarians assume. The answer isn't self-discipline. It's systemic change—and that requires politics, not self-help or even self-discipline. It’s transferring power back from THEM to YOU.

According to the New Yorker writer Nicholas Niarchos, Africa is rich in both raw materials and tragic paradox. We know about the continent's wealth in the rare earth minerals that enable our global transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. But it's contemporary African paradoxes that Niarchos describes in his important new book, The Elements of Power. There's the paradox of clean energy's dirty secret — the horrifying cost in African suffering of our insatiable thirst for the minerals that power our electric vehicles and solar panels. Then there's the paradox of the new scramble for Africa between what he calls the "amoral" Chinese and the "immoral" Americans. And finally there's Niarchos' own personal paradox (which he doesn’t disguise) of being the scion of two of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Europe while writing a book about some of the poorest and most exploited people on the planet.

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We all have our own favorite Robert Redford movie. But what's Redford’s most prescient film about today’s America? His Seventies trilogy about American politics — The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and All the President's Men — are all, in their own profound ways, lasting meditations on the United States. But of the three, it might be Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975) which has the eeriest relevance to contemporary America. For James Grady, whose equally classic 1974 thriller Six Days of the Condor inspired the movie, Three Days of the Condor speaks to both the all-encompassing paranoia and isolation of our age. It's the anti-James Bond film for our anti-James Bond age. "For a movie that was made fifty years ago to unearth the emotions we felt then, and the emotions we're feeling now — that's extraordinary," James Grady says. Yes. After a half century, the Condor has landed.

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Can Swiftynomics save America? That’s the intriguing thesis at the heart of Misty Heggeness’ new book about Swift’s impact on the American economy. Entitled Swiftynomics, it’s as much about Taylor Swift’s fans as it is about the megastar herself. “Taylor Swift is not moving mountains in local communities,” Heggeness acknowledges. “Her fans are. They are willing to fork out thousands of dollars, travel to another city, stay in hotels, get their hair done - that’s the real economic engine.” So Swiftynomics is really about what Taylor Swift unleashes, not who she is.

The Music Man was a 1957 Broadway show written by Meredith Willson, a musician from the small Iowa town of Mason City. The popular play (and later movie) featured a con man called Harold Hill who ripped off the naive people of River City, a fictional small town based on Mason City. Nearly seventy years later, Josiah Hesse, another Iowan from Mason City, sees the Music Man narrative replaying itself. As Hesse notes in his autobiographical new book, On Fire For God, today's Harold Hills are the megachurch salesmen who descend on small American towns to rip off the local community with their religious claptrap. "They know how to prey on people's fears," Hesse argues about these evangelical preachers, "how to locate the thing that's changing, that's new, and offer something that hearkens back to another era, a pure era of American wholesomeness." As another observant American midwesterner, Mark Twain, once quipped: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

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Few biographers can claim to know what it feels like to be Thomas Jefferson more than the Charlottesville-based historian Andrew Burstein. The author of many books about Jefferson, Burstein’s latest, Being Thomas Jefferson, offers an “intimate history” of the great man. From Jefferson’s views on love and race to his take on mortality, Andrew Burstein gets inside America’s most controversial and misunderstood Founding Father. And what he finds at the end of his voyage inside Jefferson is an intellectual Don Juan. “Jefferson’s language is his legacy,” Burstein concludes. “He wrote with a musical cadence, poetically, at a time when most political writers did not understand what he did about seducing the reader”.

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There was a time in the mid 20th century, the literary historian Gayle Feldman reminds us, when the book business was cool. Back then, New York publishing resembled Silicon Valley tech and the Mark Zuckerberg of his day was the Random House founder Bennett Cerf. In her new biography of Cerf, Nothing Random, Feldman tells the story of this celebrity entrepreneur, noting that he helped pioneer the publishing industry’s venture capitalist style business model which enabled hit authors like Ayn Rand or Dr Seuss to finance start-up writers like Cormac McCarthy. Those were the days, a slightly wistful Feldman reminisces. She’s right. If only today’s corporate publishing industry could recapture some of that Cerfian magic. Then books might become cool again.

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Trump’s Gazan dream is to overlay the complex human history with his own narcissistic real-estate fantasy. But for Maia Carter Hallward, co-author of a new contemporary history of Gaza, this once vibrant Mediterranean entrepôt linking Africa, Asia and Europe is now defined more by nightmare than dreams. “In peace studies, we talk about positive peace, which has rights, liberties, the ability to reach human potential - and we talk about negative peace, which is the absence of war,” Carter Hallward says. “I would say we have none of those in Gaza right now.” No negative peace, no absence of war. For Carter Hallward, that - alongside the more than 70,000 dead Palestinians - captures today’s Gazan tragedy.

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What if the right isn’t wrong - or, at least, totally wrong, about education? That seems to be the conclusion of James Traub, a liberal educationalist, who has spent the last year visiting the civics programs of American high schools. Neither the 1619 Project nor Trump’s 1776 Report seems to be the message of Traub’s account of these travels, The Cradle of Citizenship. Schools can help save our democracy, Traub concludes, by equipping American students to think their way through the complexities of their nation’s history. The point of a good education, he concludes, is to foster thinking rather than moral outrage or virtue seeking. More Homer in the classroom, and less social media. Those are James Traub’s old school principles for our new century.

Timing is everything. The versatile American journalist Kenneth Rosen was last on the show in early 2021 talking about troubled teens. Since then, Rosen has travelled extensively in the Arctic and has just published Polar War, a narrative about the chilling costs to both America and the world of the new Cold War in the Arctic. Timing is, indeed, everything, especially in the book business. But Rosen’s travelogue of melting icecaps and vanishing indigenous cultures offers an alternative take on the media’s current geo-strategic obsession with Greenland. "I worry most about the indigenous communities and their ways of life. This is the sustenance lifestyle that will be eradicated—something that we'll lose as a country and as humanity,” Rosen warns. “It's only a matter of time before the snow and ice melts forever." And when it’s gone, it’s gone. Then timing will be nothing.

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