Keen On America

Remember that time in 1977 when Jesse Jackson debated KKK grand wizard David Duke on national tv? As David Masciotra reminds us, it was one of those now forgotten moments from the recent past that can help bring some clarity to today’s American politics. In particular, Masciotra argues, the 1977 debate underlines the idiocy of Kamala Harris’ refusal to go on Joe Rogan show. As Masciotra explains, this primetime tv debate in which Jackson crushes Duke shows why progressives like Harris should always take on ideological enemies Joe Rogan. Civil argument matters, Masciotra insists. Even if it involves jousting with people whose views you consider beyond the pale.

David Masciotra is an author, lecturer, and journalist. He is the author of Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy (Melville House Publishing, 2024) I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (I.B. Tauris, 2020), Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky), Barack Obama: Invisible Man (Eyewear Publishers, 2017), and Metallica by Metallica, a 33 1/3 book from Bloomsbury Publishers, which has been translated into Chinese and Greek. In 2010, Continuum Books published his first book, Working On a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen. Masciotra writes regularly for the New Republic, Washington Monthly, Progressive, the Los Angeles Review of Books, CrimeReads, No Depression, and the Daily Ripple. He has also written for Salon, the Daily Beast, CNN, Atlantic, Washington Post, AlterNet, Indianapolis Star, and CounterPunch. Several of his political essays have been translated into Spanish for publication at Korazon de Perro. His poetry has appeared in Be About It Press, This Zine Will Change Your Life, and the Pangolin Review.

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.

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Avid reader, global investor and German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, who devoured around 150 books in 2024, engages in a spirited New Year discussion about literacy, geopolitics, and the power of deep reading. Despite hand-wringing about America's reading decline, Schroeder remains optimistic about young entrepreneurs' intellectual curiosity, particularly in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Discussing his favorite 2024 reads, including Annie Jacobsen's chilling nuclear war scenarios and Oscar Jonsson's analysis of Russian military thinking, Schroeder illuminates how books offer a dramatically richer understanding of the contemporary world’s complexity than social media's soundbites. Pivoting to China's rising influence, the Washington DC based Schroeder notes how Chinese businesses are outcompeting Western rivals through superior service and pricing. His key message: America must focus on competitiveness rather than containment in an increasingly multipolar world swimming in what he calls "an ocean of black swans."

As the co-founder of VC partnership Next Billion Ventures, Chris Schroeder invests in tech startups in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The latter is an ecosystem he knows well, having dedicated a year of his life to exploring it when writing the book Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East. Schroeder, who is also a startup advisor, knows the role of CEO inside out, having occupied it three times over. Schroeder started his career working for the U.S. government, before making the switch to a business development role at The Washington Post in 2000, where he would become CEO and publisher three years later. Schroeder has also served as the CEO of business-to-business data, analysis, and news provider Legi-Slate, and health and wellness platform HealthCentral, which he co-founded, grew to over 15 million unique monthly users and then sold in 2011.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

While most of us can at least hope for a happy new year in 2025, the same can’t be true for the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. That, at least, is the view of Michael Scott-Baumann, author of The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine. Given the ineffectiveness of the United Nations and the unwillingness of the United States to rethink its alliance with Israel, Scott-Baumann suggests, nothing is likely to change this year. So while there will be lots of talk of an Abraham Accords 2.0 under Trump, he predicts, the world’s most intractable problem will only become more miserably intractable in 2025. Indeed, given the increasing power of Netanyahu’s right flank and Trump’s indifference to the human suffering in Gaza and the West Bank, Scott Baumann suggests, things will probably only get worse for the Palestinians this year.

Michael Scott-Baumann is a graduate of Cambridge University and has an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He has 35 years’ experience as a history teacher and lecturer. He has traveled widely in the Middle East and worked as a volunteer under the auspices of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, with whom he conducted field work on the West Bank. He lives in Cheltenham, England.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Marshall Poe runs the New Books Network, a podcasting platform incorporating over 25,000 individual podcasts from thousands of podcasters and many millions of downloads. 2024, he acknowledges, was a bad year for podcasting because Apple changed their metrics so that the audience numbers for most podcasts fell precipitously overnight. And 2025, he suggests, probably isn’g going to be much better with winner-take-all podcasters like Joe Rogan hogging most of the audience and profits. How could the internet be made more democratic again so that podcasters on platforms like the New Book Network and entrepreneurs like Marshall Poe can make a living from their work? Poe isn’t particularly hopeful, but suggests that a reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 might represent a beginning to restoring the leveling promise of the digital revolution.

Marshall Tillbrook Poe is an American historian, writer, editor, and founder of the New Books Network, an online collection of podcast interviews with a wide range of nonfiction authors. He has taught Russian, European, Eurasian, and world history at various universities including Harvard, Columbia, University of Iowa, and, currently, the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Poe is the author or editor of a number of books for children and adults.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Gary Marcus is amongst the world’s leading skeptics on the AI revolution. So it’s worth taking note when Marcus admits that “of course we are getting to AGI eventually”. No, he says, artificial general intelligence (AGI) won’t take place in 2027 or perhaps even 2050. But it will happen, he confidently predicts, by 2100. So that only underlines Marcus’ argument, made in his acclaimed 2024 book Taming Silicon Valley, of the desperate need to regulate AI before it regulates us. And it also contextualizes our short term preoccupation with corporate pioneers of generative AI technology like OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and xAI. As Marcus argues, it’s likely that the dominant AI technology that will get us to AGI by the end of the 21st century hasn’t even been invented yet.

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence, well known for his challenges to contemporary AI. He is a scientist and best-selling author and was founder and CEO of Geometric.AI, a machine learning company acquired by Uber. A Professor Emeritus at NYU, he is the author of five previous books, including the bestseller Guitar Zero, Kluge (one of The Economist's eight best books on the brain and consciousness), and Rebooting AI (with Ernest Davis), one of Forbes's seven must-read books on AI.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Is it entirely coincidental that some of the leading figures in the MAGA movement - including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks - all grew up in Apartheid South Africa? Not according to Simon Kuper who raised the alarm about “Musk, Thiel and the shadow of apartheid South Africa” in a bracing September Financial Times column. But this is a reactionary shadow, Kuper warns, not just haunting the United States but most of the world. Kuper’s faith in globalization, he acknowledges, seems to be in retreat everywhere. And 2025, he laments, is only going to deliver more depressing news for those us who still consider ourselves liberals. So if the progressive age of global politics is over, I asked Kuper, then what is left for us to cherish in the new year?

Simon Kuper is a journalist who writes for the Financial Times and publishes in newspapers and magazines around the world. He is one of the world’s leading writers on soccer. His book Football Against the Enemy won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. His works are also widely read in translation. Born in Uganda, Kuper spent most of his childhood in the Netherlands and now lives in Paris.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Our job is to make Trump fail. That, at least, is the view of the writer Joseph O’Neill, whose essays in the New York Review of Books offer not just a powerful critique of Trump but also of the contemporary Democratic party which he describes as a “cancerous thing”. There’s a desperate need, O’Neill believes, for the Democrats to reinvent themselves as an populist alternative to Trumpism. And that means, he says, addressing the problem of angry young men who, he says, have become “cannon fodder” for social media personalities like Joe Rogan.

Joseph O’Neill is the author of the novels The Dog, Netherland (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Breezes, and This Is the Life. He has also written a family history, Blood-Dark Track. He lives in New York City and teaches at Bard College.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

As the author of the well-received Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet, Seth Rogovoy knows his Dylan. So his critical review of the A Complete Unknown, the much hyped new movie featuring Timothee Chamalat as a young Dylan, is worth noting. Rogovoy questions the whole point of the movie, arguing that nobody - neither enthusiasts nor newbies to Dylan - learn anything from A Complete Unknown. And as the music historian Rogovoy - whose latest historical biography is of George Harrison - explains, this cinematic failure to present Bob Dylan in any kind of coherent framework probably reflects our broader contemporary cultural crisis. A Complete Unknown is a blob of a movie for our age of ubiquitous elevator music. Culture is simultaneously all around us and nowhere at all. The timing may just right for a new Dylan. But not for Timothee Chamalat’s one dimensional man.

Seth Rogovoy is the author of Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison (Oxford University Press, October 1, 2024), Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet (Scribner, 2009), and The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music (Algonquin Books, 2000). Seth’s weekly cultural commentary can be heard on “The Rogovoy Report” on WAMC Northeast Public Radio Network on Fridays between 12:50 and 1 p.m. Seth has been a regular on-air contributor to WAMC for 30+ years. Seth’s Substack newsletter, Everything Is Broken, features original short essays and reviews on culture, politics, and life itself. Seth lives in Hudson, N.Y., with his wife, Linda Friedner, a media lawyer who works in book publishing.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Artificial Intelligence revolution has dwarfed everything else in tech during 2024. But according to Toby Walsh, author of the upcoming The Shortest History of AI, 2025 also promises to be a revolutionary year in the history of AI. The AI agents are coming, Walsh suggests, warning that 2025 might be the first year in which we will be able to quantify the job losses caused by smart machines. And then there’s regulation, the Australian based Walsh notes, predicting that in 2025 we are going to see more and more governments around the world directly confront the consequences of technology that is about to revolutionize the world.

Toby Walsh is one of the world’s leading researchers in Artificial Intelligence. He is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales and leads a research group at Data61, Australia’s Centre of Excellence for ICT Research. He has been elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI for his contributions to AI research, and has won the prestigious Humboldt research award. He has previously held research positions in England, Scotland, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland and Sweden.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

So what’s it to be in the Middle East in 2025: Mad Max style anarchy or a "Pax Hebraica" orchestrated from Israel? According to regional expert Soli Ozel, the Mad Max scenario is more likely - although, as he notes, many of us oversimplify the contemporary Middle East into false binaries such as the Sunni vs Shiite conflict or Iran vs the Arab world. That said, Ozel warns, the mostly cataclysmic 2024 history of the the region doesn’t bode well for 2025. Especially given America’s central role in Middle East and its unwillingness to confront the region’s central tragedy - the problem of Palestine.

Soli Özel is professor of International Relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, a senior fellow at the Institut Montaigne as a senior fellow and a columnist for the Turkish daily Habertürk. Since 2002, Soli Özel has also contributed to Project Syndicate on different occasions, commenting on Turkish politics. He served on the board of directors of International Alert and is currently a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. He was also an advisor to the Chairman the Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association (TÜSIAD) on foreign policy issues. He has guest lectured at Harvard, Tufts, and other US universities and has taught at UC Santa Cruz, John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the University of Washington, Northwestern University, the Hebrew University, Boğaziçi University and Bilgi University (Istanbul). He also spent time as a fellow of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford and was a visiting senior scholar at the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris. He was a Fisher Family Fellow of the “Future of Diplomacy Program” at the Belfer Center of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2013, he was a Keyman fellow and a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University. Soli Özel regularly contributes to the German Marshall Fund’s web site’s “ON Turkey” series. His work has been printed in different publications in Turkey and abroad, including The International Spectator, Internationale Politik and the Journal of Democracy. He also occupied the position of Editor-in-Chief at Foreign Policy Turkish edition. Soli Özel holds a Bachelor in Economics from Bennington College and a Master in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

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.