“We’ve learned how to tolerate acts of violence, acts of widespread death, disease — that other developed nations simply don’t tolerate. And that tolerance manifesting in myriad political failures — all of which go back to our refusal to maturely deal with mortality and issues of grief.” — David Masciotra

 

Earlier this week, we talked to Ece Temelkuran about her book Nation of Strangers, a manifesto about strangers finding one another. But for the cultural critic David Masciotra [https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/01/a-country-of-strangers-death-despair-and-indifference-in-the-us/], strangerdom is the problem rather than the solution. Contemporary America, he argues in his new essay A Country of Strangers [https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/01/a-country-of-strangers-death-despair-and-indifference-in-the-us/], has become a place of death, despair and indifference.

 

Masciotra takes his cue from Albert Camus’ 1942 novella The Stranger. Camus’ Meursault — the narrator of The Stranger — is a man completely detached from meaning. He attends his own mother’s funeral without feeling anything. He murders an Arab man on a beach without motive. He faces his execution with a shrug. Masciotra’s argument is that the United States has become Meursault writ large. America’s failure is existential rather than political. It is a failure to mourn — a sustained refusal to engage with death, grief, and the weight of history that produces a society of strangers who cannot connect with one another across race, class, or geography.

 

So is Masciotra right? Are we all Meursault now? What can Albert Camus teach us about America?

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Meursault and America: The Same Detachment: Camus’ The Stranger is narrated by Meursault — a man who attends his mother’s memorial without feeling, murders an Arab man on a beach without motive, and faces execution with indifference. The novel, Camus said, was his attempt to detail “man’s confrontation with absurdity in its nakedness.” Masciotra’s argument: this is America now. A country that has adopted Meursault’s emotional posture toward mass death. Columbine stopped the nation in 1999. Mass shootings now barely register. That is not political failure. It is existential failure.

 

•       A Failure to Mourn: Masciotra’s central thesis: America’s deepest problem is its refusal to mourn. Not guilt — he is careful to distinguish mourning from guilt. You can have a national memory that reckons with both what you celebrate and what you grieve. If the Founding Fathers are worth preserving in active memory, so are the people they enslaved. Never properly dealing with the Civil War allowed the resurgence of white supremacist movements. Never properly mourning mass shootings allows them to accelerate. The failure to grieve is not sentimental. It is political.

 

•       Is Meursault Autistic? The Spectrum Reading: Some contemporary critics read Meursault as someone on the autism spectrum — a man whose emotional detachment reflects neurodivergence rather than moral failure. Masciotra is skeptical. His reading: Camus’ portrait is one of moral refusal, not neurological condition. The distinction matters for the American parallel: if America’s indifference is a structural feature rather than a disease, the remedy is not therapy but political and cultural change. You can’t medicate a country into empathy.

 

•       The Colonial Murder and the Racial Hierarchy: Meursault murders an Arab man in French Algeria and feels nothing. Some critics fault Camus for not making colonialism more explicit. Masciotra defends Camus: Meursault doesn’t care about anything, including his own mother’s death. His indifference to his Arab victim’s humanity is the

What Albert Camus Teaches Us About America: David Masciotra on a Country of Strangers,

“If you write something you think is really fanciful today, tomorrow’s news headlines might be telling the exact same story. That’s the challenge of writing realism today — when everything feels so sci-fi and so dystopic.” — Fred Lunzer

 

Boy meets girl meets AI therapist. That is the premise of Sike [https://celadonbooks.com/book/sike/], the debut novel by Fred Lunzer [https://celadonbooks.com/book/sike/]. Adrian is a rap ghostwriter who has never met any of the rappers he writes for. After a relationship collapse, he signs up for Sike — a Facebook-style AI psychotherapy app that tracks your every move and emotion via smart glasses and guides you toward mental contentment. He meets Maquie, a venture capitalist and Sike refusnik. You can imagine the rest.

 

Sike is a self-consciously “realist” love story set in a world where AI therapy is ubiquitous. Lunzer wanted to write AI fiction that is realistic rather than dystopian or utopian. He started it speculatively. By the time he’d finished, ChatGPT had launched and what he’d once fancifully imagined had become reality. It’s the futuristic writer’s permanent predicament. Make the future believable before it becomes so familiar that we barely notice it. Turn science fiction into social realism.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       AI Fiction Without Dystopia: The Gap Lunzer Is Filling: Almost all AI fiction is either utopian or dystopian. James Bond loves gadgets. Most literary fiction treats technology as vaguely grubby and pushes it into genre. Lunzer’s ambition: find the realism. Write about a world where AI is already everywhere, the initial fears are already past, and we’ve reached the same ambivalent relationship with it that we have with our smartphones. We don’t know what model we have. We barely think about it. That’s where the interesting questions live.

 

•       Reality Caught Up Before He Finished: Lunzer wrote Sike speculatively. By the time he finished, ChatGPT had launched. William Gibson’s observation: the future is already here, just unevenly distributed. His corollary: if you write something fanciful today, it’s tomorrow’s news story. Lunzer’s solution to this perpetual problem is to stop writing near-future speculation and instead set the story in a world where the technology is already past its introduction — where the hype is over and the real reckoning begins.

 

•       Realism Is the Hardest Genre Right Now: Andrew’s observation: the best AI fiction is realist. Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun treats unimaginable things as taken for granted. That’s the technique. Lunzer agrees — and notes that realism is particularly hard to write now because everything already feels surreal. Trump, AI, the state of the world: if you’d described any of it thirty years ago, people would have called it fiction. The challenge of the realist novelist in 2026 is to find the quiet normality inside the chaos.

 

•       Non-Polarising AI Fiction: Lunzer deliberately avoided writing a book that slams Meta, or that is obviously pro- or anti-AI. He calls it non-polarised. In Sike, some characters love the AI therapy app, some refuse to use it. No one is obviously right. The book’s thesis — insofar as it has one — is that the interesting questions about AI are not the ones about whether it’s good or bad, but the ones that arise once you’ve stopped arguing about that and started living with it.

 

•       The Economics of Writing: Trenches, Not Glamour: Lunzer has a day job — AI researcher at Sony. Sike was his first published novel, not his first written. Before it: a travel narrative about the Japanese restaurant industry that went nowhere, and a novel about a global pandemic finished in early 2020 and over

Boy Meets Girl Meets AI Therapist: Fred Lunzer on Sike, Fictional Realism, and the Future of Love

“Vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression — not as the product of scientific misinformation. These debates have been proxies for existential concerns about justice and morality.” — Kira Ganga Kieffer

 

Are anti-vaxxers simply bizarre anti-science crazies egged on by conspiracists like RFK Jr? For Kira Ganga Kieffer [https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691224664/unvaccinated-under-god], author of Unvaccinated Under God [https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691224664/unvaccinated-under-god], what she calls “vaccine hesitancy” in America is actually a more complicated and prescient affair.

 

The prevailing narrative — that vaccine-hesitant people lack scientific facts or serve their own individual agendas — misunderstands what’s actually happening. Kieffer’s argument is that vaccine hesitancy is best understood as a kind of religiosity. Not in the narrow context of church doctrine, but in the broader sense of meaning-making, moral reasoning, and an intensely individualist relationship with the body that is deeply rooted in American evangelical and alternative-spiritual tradition.

 

This hesitancy, Kieffer shows, is not new. It has been present since the smallpox vaccine in the eighteenth century. What recurs across very different eras and very different communities is a set of metaphysical rather than scientific concerns expressed in the language of wellness, purity, and bodily sovereignty.

 

The most interesting political implication of Kieffer’s argument is that the same hyperindividualistic anti-modern instinct behind vaccine hesitancy also drives the wellness movement, the rejection of AI, and the political coalition that coalesced around RFK Jr. She sees this as a broad and growing constituency that neither party has fully understood nor spoken to. Rather than crazies, today’s anti-vaxxers might offer a window onto tomorrow’s American politics.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Vaccine Hesitancy Is Moral Meaning-Making, Not Ignorance: The dominant public health framing: vaccine-hesitant people lack scientific knowledge. Kieffer’s reframe: they are engaged in profound moral reasoning about the body, purity, parental responsibility, and the relationship between the individual and the state. The parent who fears the MMR vaccine is not asking a scientific question. They are asking: if I consent to this intervention and my child is harmed, am I responsible? That is a theological question — about guilt, intention, and moral agency — dressed in the language of health.

 

•       Evangelical Hyperindividualism Is the Root: Kieffer’s structural argument: American evangelical Christianity is, at its core, an individualist proposition. You are saved by your personal choices. This translates directly into the wellness culture’s logic of bodily salvation: you are saved from illness, aging, and death by your personal choices about diet, supplements, and vaccines. The individual body becomes the site of spiritual as well as physical salvation. This hyperindividualism is very American — and very old. It predates the wellness movement and will outlast it.

 

•       Vaccine Hesitancy Has Been Present Since the Eighteenth Century: Kieffer’s most important historical corrective: vaccine hesitancy did not begin with COVID, with MMR, or with the anti-vaccine movement of the 1990s. It has been present since the smallpox inoculations of colonial Massachusetts. What recurs across very different eras is not the same people or the same science — it’s the same core concerns: bodily purity, parental moral responsibility, and distrust of external authority over the body. Each generation clothes these concerns in the available language. Today it is wellness. Earlier it was religious freedom.</

Unvaccinated Under God: Kira Ganga Kieffer on Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America

“The rules-based system just hasn’t worked. China’s system is so opaque that you can’t see the subsidies. And when you’ve got China not interested in new rules and the US not interested in a referee, you’ve got two of the world’s biggest actors who aren’t on board.” — Soumaya Keynes

 

It would have been nice to get John Maynard Keynes on the show to get his critique of Trump’s trade war. But in the long run, we’re all dead — even old Maynard. So instead, we found his great-great-niece, Soumaya Keynes [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-to-Win-a-Trade-War/Soumaya-Keynes/9781668221310] — Financial Times columnist and co-author of How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-to-Win-a-Trade-War/Soumaya-Keynes/9781668221310].

 

Having already appeared on Jon Stewart this week, Soumaya has a bit of Keynesian star quality about her. But she’s also a first-rate economist. Her thesis is that the old rules-based trading system that her great-great-uncle helped design after World War II is gone. And it ain’t coming back. China’s subsidies are so opaque that rules can’t be written to constrain them, let alone enforced. The US is no longer willing to submit to a referee. Without the two biggest players, no rules-based system is meaningful.

 

So — now what? Keynes says we must think like a trade warrior. Donald Trump should leverage the tools available — but use them strategically. Trump’s error in his second term was not being tough on China while being too tough on everyone else, especially allies like Canada and Mexico.

 

Soumaya Keynes’ most contemporary idea might be her most Keynesian one. John Maynard Keynes proposed penalties for countries running large trade surpluses as well as those running deficits — recognising that global imbalances are a two-sided problem. That idea didn’t make it into the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement. Eighty years later, in equally anxious economic times, his optimistic great-great-niece is reviving it.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Can Trade Wars Be Won? Yes, Sometimes: The conventional wisdom: no one wins a trade war. Keynes and Bown agree — in theory. In practice, countries in a weaker position cave. History has examples: France in the late nineteenth century told its trading partners they were renegotiating treaties, and the smaller partners complied. Trump’s tariffs in his first term produced concessions. The problem is not that trade wars can’t be won. It’s that the smaller power’s only defence — coordinating with other smaller powers — is extremely hard to sustain. There’s always an incentive to cut a deal first.

 

•       China Is the Doper on the Sports Field: Keynes’s sharpest analogy: the global trading system is like a sports game that needs rules to ensure a level playing field. China’s subsidies — cheap credit, corporate handouts, opaque support for state-linked companies — are the equivalent of performance-enhancing drugs. The problem is that unlike doping in sport, China’s subsidies are invisible. You can write a rule saying China won’t give these handouts. But you can’t verify compliance. And without enforcement, rules are meaningless. The WTO has not solved this. Nothing has solved this.

 

•       Trump Was Right About China, Wrong About Everything Else: Keynes is careful here. She credits Robert Lighthizer in Trump’s first term with identifying China as the real problem and building a focused strategy. In the second term, Trump put tariffs on everyone simultaneously — which dissipated leverage, alienated the coalition of allies needed to pressure Beijing, and mixed up the problem of China’s subsidies with grievances against Canada, Mexico, and the EU. If you were genuinely tough on China, yo

How to Win a Trade War: Soumaya Keynes on Trump, China, and Her Great-Great-Uncle Maynard

“The end of labor means the end of paid slavery. And the opening up of freedom — that is to say, choice of how to spend your time. The only question, a big question, is how do you eat?” — Keith Teare

 

Does capitalism have a future in our AI age? For Musk, Silicon Valley’s baddest bad entrepreneur, the answer might surprise. Musk seems to think that in the long run, money and wealth will disappear in an age of abundant intelligence. Which, presumably, will include hundreds of billions of his own dollars. Although given Musk’s determination to sue and take money from OpenAI, some might be slightly sceptical of his real faith in a post-money cornucopia.

 

It’s not just Musk and That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare [https://thatwa.st/] who are reimagining capitalism in our AI age. The former World Bank chief economist, Branko Milanovic, drawing on Karl Marx and Adam Smith in equal measure, argues that if AI eliminates the labor component of production, things will become free — thereby creating the conditions for the destruction of capitalism. Keith agrees — and goes further than Milanovic. The end of paid labor, he insists, borrowing also from Marx, is not a catastrophe. It’s the end of what he calls “paid slavery” and the opening of genuine freedom.

 

I’m not so sure. If nobody has to work, we’ll all become bad artists. The cult of the amateur. The future is of bad entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and even worse artists. Hyper-capitalism in our age of AI.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Musk-OpenAI Trial: A Big Yawn That Cost Millions: An Oakland jury rejected Elon Musk’s claim against OpenAI in under two hours — not because OpenAI didn’t do what Musk alleged, but because the statute of limitations had expired. Someone should have caught this before two weeks of trial. Musk has vowed to appeal, but it’s hard to see how you get around a statute of limitations. Keith’s verdict: sideshow, big yawn, ego contest. The lawyers won. The real question — who owns OpenAI after it converts to for-profit — was never going to be answered here.

 

•       Sam Altman’s Credibility Problem: The New York Times took five takeaways from the trial, one of which was that Sam Altman has a credibility problem. Keith’s response: not new information. What the trial did reveal is the depth of mutual animosity between Musk and Altman — two people who, despite everything, share more beliefs about where AI is going than almost anyone else in the world. Keith on who he’d back in a Stalin vs Hitler choice: Stalin, 100 times out of 100. Which is not to say he’s enthusiastic about either.

 

•       Krugman on Europe: Right Analysis, Wrong Conclusion: Paul Krugman, touring Europe, argues that GDP per capita understates European quality of life. A third of US income buys more than a third of US lifestyle in Europe — healthcare, education, travel, housing are all significantly cheaper. Keith agrees with the analysis. His counter: Europe’s structural hostility to innovation means it can maintain its lifestyle but not grow it. The social democratic model is sustainable until it isn’t. It needs to unlock innovation or it will slowly fall behind. Hard to do when you’re spending your time writing regulations.

 

•       Milanovic’s AI Thesis: When Things Are Free: Branko Milanovic — Marxist and neoclassical economist — argues that if AI eliminates the labor component of production, value in the classical Adam Smith/Ricardo/Marx sense disappears, and things approach free. Keith agrees and goes further: this isn’t just Marxist logic, it’s classical economics. The organic composition of capital. If variable capital — mostly labor — tends toward zero, costs tend toward zero, prices tend toward zero, and the distinction between capitalism and its opp

Bad Entrepreneurs and Even Worse Artists: Does Capitalism Have a Future in the AI Age?

“Maps are communicating vast quantities of new knowledge that was only estimated. They convey this imaginative energy — an imaginative energy that maps today have lost, because today maps are so functional, so utilitarian.” — Peter Keating

 

In the sixteenth century, Spanish cartographers represented California as an island. They weren’t being careless. Nor were they drawing New Yorker covers. These 16th century cartographers were, instead, mapping the limits of both what they knew and what they imagined.

 

Cartography is as much an art as a science and maps always mirror how we see the world. Thus Peter Keating [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/peter-keating/power-lines/9781579658779/]’s beautifully illustrated new book, Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/peter-keating/power-lines/9781579658779/]. Assembling nearly 100 of history’s most consequential political maps, Keating’s thesis is that maps are not neutral. They are arguments. Every map centers something — a religion, an empire, a people — and pushes something else to the margins. The story of cartography, then, is the story of power.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       California Was an Island: The Power of Imagined Geography: In the sixteenth century, Spanish cartographers drew California as a large island off the coast of America. They weren’t being careless — they were mapping the edge of what was known and imaginable. Before any map can draw a border, Keating argues, it has to decide what is real. The T-and-O medieval maps placed Jerusalem at the center of the world, with the biblically admitted lands of Europe, Africa, and Asia radiating outward. Only slowly, and with great difficulty, did the Western cartographic tradition absorb the fact that there was a whole continent between their imagination and the Pacific.

 

•       The Oldest Tension in Cartography: Sacred vs Scientific: Keating identifies two traditions in constant tension throughout Western history. The cosmographical tradition: center what you know and believe, place your gods and sacred lands at the middle of the world, and mix fantasy with inquiry. The scientific tradition: starting with Ptolemy in ancient Greece and independently in ancient China, create maps that generals and kings could actually use to expand territory, find resources, and identify enemies. With Rome’s Christianisation, the cosmographical tradition dominated for nearly a thousand years. The Ptolemaic scientific tradition only re-emerged with the Renaissance and exploration.

 

•       Poland: The Most Erased Country in Cartographic History: Keating’s answer to his own question — which country has been wiped off maps most often yet survived? Poland. It disappeared from maps at least three times, divided and partitioned by more geographically fortunate powers — Habsburgs, Russians, Nazis — whose cultural and military might seemed overwhelming. And yet Poland survived every erasure in the hearts of its people. A 1956 map of Poland as a carnation, published by the communist government as a May Day celebration, reads — Keating argues — as subversive under the surface: a nation asserting its existence against the regime that claimed to represent it.

 

•       Lincoln’s Favorite Map: The Slave Density Survey: The most powerful map in the book: the 1861 Coast Survey, a non-ideological government project that shaded American counties by the density of enslaved populations. Lincoln studied it obsessively. He reasoned that where enslaved people were densest, Union troops could arrive as liberators and find support. Where they were rare — in predominantly white areas of the South — he could pursue accommodation and peace. The map shaped the Emancipation Pro

When California Was an Island: Peter Keating on the Cartography That Maps How We See the World

“Fascism is the term that is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary political discussions. We can talk about right-wing populism — but the type of politics they share with classic fascism is what I call red pill politics.” — David Ost

 

Please don’t use the F-word. At least to describe the politics of Trump, Orbán, Meloni, Netanyahu, Modi, Farage et al. Rather than fascism, the best way to demystify far-right populism is via the movie The Matrix through its idea of “red pill” politics.

 

David Ost [https://thenewpress.org/books/red-pill-politics/]’s new book, Red Pill Politics: Demystifying Today’s Far Right [https://thenewpress.org/books/red-pill-politics/], argues that to grasp the threat we need to stop stepping out of the Third Reich and into The Matrix. The red pill, borrowed from the 1999 dystopian classic, has been appropriated by the far right as a metaphor for seeing through the liberal hegemony they claim distorts reality. Popping a red pill himself, Ost argues that while today’s far right shares the essential DNA of classical fascism, it nonetheless operates in a world in which outright dictatorship isn’t viable. Mussolini, Ost warns, didn’t become totalitarian until four years after taking power. Fascism, then, is a process. It takes time. Even dystopias require patience.

 

The book is also a manifesto for left counter-politics. Yes, Law and Justice in Poland and Orbán in Hungary have both been voted out, Ost acknowledges. But in Poland, he warns, the Tusk government won power in 2023 and then governed timidly, afraid of alienating the center, failing its own base on abortion and LGBT rights, and then losing the presidential election. So the lesson from Eastern Europe is that economic left populism, not liberal caution, is the best antidote to red pill politics. Mamdani not Starmer. Otherwise the F-word will once again become a reality.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The F-Word Has Become Meaningless: Every application of “fascism” to Trump, Orbán, or Meloni is immediately met with the counter: “Are we killing you? Are we throwing you in jail?” And seemingly the matter is put to rest. Ost’s argument: the f-word has become a conversation-stopper rather than a conversation-starter. It lets the far right off the hook by setting the bar at Nazi-level violence. The actual threat — the delegitimisation of institutions, the treatment of opponents as traitors, the erosion of democratic norms — is already underway, without the gas chambers that the f-word implies.

 

•       Opponents vs Traitors: The Defining Distinction: In a democracy, you have opponents. You disagree with them, you campaign against them, you try to vote them out. In far-right politics, you have traitors. People who disagree with you are not legitimate participants in a political contest — they are enemies of the nation, people who do not belong, people who are working against the interests of the real people. This distinction — not violence, not the gas chambers, but the redefinition of legitimate opposition as treachery — is Ost’s clearest marker of the transition from normal democratic politics to something else.

 

•       Mussolini’s Four Years: How Long Before Dictatorship? When Mussolini first came to power, there were still elections. He tried to rig the game — to gerrymander, to use contemporary parlance — and institutionalise his authority. He only turned to outright dictatorship after four years in power. That was a different time. But the pattern — of coming to power through elections and then slowly making it impossible to be removed through elections — is not unique to Italy. Ost argues we may currently be in the equivalent of Mussolini’s first four years in several countries simultaneously.

 

•       What

Don’t Use the F-Word: David Ost on Why the Red Pill, Not Fascism, Demystifies the Far Right

“Retirement is a false construct created a hundred years ago by the government. It was basically created when Social Security was born. Prior to that, people worked until they died — because they didn’t live as long.” — Michael Clinton

 

At the ripe young age of 70, Michael Clinton [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Longevity-Nation/Michael-Clinton/9781582709628] hiked nine days to Everest Base Camp and ran the Tenzing-Hillary Marathon down. Now 72, he is president of his own longevity consultancy, a columnist for Esquire and Men’s Health, a private pilot, part-owner of a vineyard in Argentina, and the author of Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Longevity-Nation/Michael-Clinton/9781582709628] (Atria/Beyond Words, May 5, 2026).

 

Rather than about living forever, Longevity Nation dares us to redefine what the second half of our lives can look like. And Clinton wants us to reinvent society accordingly. A hundred years ago, he reminds us, only seven million Americans were over 65. Today there are 62 million, which will quickly grow to 80 million. The whole world is aging, and its institutions are not keeping up. Retirement, Michael Clinton explains, is a false construct invented a century ago by industrial age governments. Rewire, the septuagenarian marathoner says. Don’t retire.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       This Is What 72 Looks Like Today: Clinton’s opening provocation: at 70, he hiked to Everest Base Camp and ran the marathon down. He’s visited 125 countries, run marathons on all seven continents, holds two master’s degrees, and is a private pilot. His point is not to brag. It is that the cultural image of what 70 or 80 looks like has not caught up with the reality of what a subset of 70 and 80-year-olds — and, increasingly, a growing proportion of 70 and 80-year-olds — actually look like and are capable of. When he was 40, 72 seemed ancient. Now he is 72. It doesn’t.

 

•       GLP-1: Hotel California or Longevity’s First Democratised Drug? The sharpest exchange in the interview. Andrew’s framing: GLP-1 is Hotel California — you can check in but not check out. Stop taking it and the weight and inflammation return. Clinton’s response: yes, that seems to be the story right now, and nobody knows the long-term play. But GLP-1 is coming to Medicare this summer, price cut in half, and it may become the first truly democratised longevity drug — reducing obesity, inflammation, and cardiovascular risk across the income spectrum, not just for the wealthy. Exciting and uncertain in equal measure.

 

•       Retirement Is a False Construct: Social Security was created at a moment when most Americans died before collecting it. Life expectancy was 62. The retirement age was 65. The construct was built for a world that no longer exists. Clinton’s prescription: don’t retire. Rewire. You don’t have to do the same thing, but do something. Stay engaged. Stay purposeful. If you’re 65 and live another thirty years, the retirement construct — move to Florida, play golf, wait — is not merely insufficient. It is actively harmful to cognitive and physical health.

 

•       Longevity Nation vs Gerontocracy: Andrew raises the counter-argument: is longevity nation actually gerontocracy? Trump, Biden, Trump. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Nancy Pelosi. A class of elderly people who won’t step aside, hoarding power and preventing generational renewal. Clinton’s response: he is opposed to formal retirement ages for anyone. His answer to the political hoarding of power is not age limits but engagement — people need purpose, and purpose should be redirected, not cut off. Andrew’s unspoken counter: this is easy to say when you’re no

Don't Retire, Rewire: Michael Clinton's Longevity Nation

“Soccer matches are poorly designed experiments — you don’t necessarily find out which team was better. But any soccer fan will tell you that. Oftentimes, the better team does not win.” — Nick Greene, via a NASA scientist

 

On June 11, the World Cup comes to North America. Fifty-six years ago, I watched the searing injustice of Johann Cruyff’s Holland getting robbed in the 1974 final by Germany. Today I talk with someone who explains how this kind of injustice is built into the game’s DNA. Nick Greene [https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/how-to-watch-soccer-like-a-genius_9781419777172/] — long-suffering Newcastle United fan and author of How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius — has a new book, How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius [https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/how-to-watch-soccer-like-a-genius_9781419777172/], which tells us what architects, stuntwomen, paleoanthropologists and computer scientists tell us about the beautiful game.

 

What they tell us is that the game isn’t fair. One NASA scientist tells Greene that soccer is a “poorly designed experiment” because the low-scoring nature of the game means results don’t reliably identify the better team. Thus the dark fate of the free-scoring, brilliantly inventive Hungarians in 1954 and the Dutch in 1974. So if you want to watch the World Cup like a genius, don’t expect the best team to win the tournament. Which may explain why Greene suspects that England — where the pain of World Cup injustice is a national fetish — will win in 2026. On penalties probably. Arsenal style. After 120 minutes of goalless football.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Soccer Is a Poorly Designed Experiment: A NASA scientist published a peer-reviewed paper concluding that soccer is a “poorly designed experiment” — the low number of goals means results don’t reliably identify the better team. Greene’s observation: any soccer fan could have told him that, and saved the journal space. But this is also what makes the game what it is. Unlike basketball’s seven-game playoff series — which gives the best team enough chances to emerge on top — a single World Cup match, in a single-elimination tournament, means one error can have outsized consequences. The imperfect and the human are inseparable.

 

•       Justice Has Nothing to Do With It: The 1974 Dutch vs 2004 Greece: Andrew’s most painful memory: the 1974 World Cup final, where the magnificent Dutch side led by Cruyff was beaten by the Germans. The Dutch didn’t win, but they are remembered as one of the greatest teams in history. The 2004 Greek side, which won Euro 2004 by parking the bus and grinding nil-nil victories, actually won — and are remembered as a fluke. The lesson Greene draws: the shared understanding built into soccer watching is that winning is only one metric, and often not the most important one. It is an imperfect and profoundly human enterprise.

 

•       How to Appreciate Defense: The cliché American complaint about soccer is the low scoring. Greene’s response: this is partly a failure to appreciate defense, which in soccer can look like the absence of good offense. He discusses Italy’s history of outstanding defensive play — the Catenaccio system, Paolo Maldini, Beckenbauer — and the intelligence required to prevent goals. Andrew’s contribution: his wife, who watches American football, taught him that defense is where the sophistication lives. The same is true of soccer. The genius watcher watches the defenders.

 

•       VAR: Too Much, Going in the Right Direction: Greene’s measured verdict on VAR — video assistant refereeing. His worst case: when it ruins a goal celebration. The player scores, the crowd erupts, the flag goes up, three minutes of review, okay everyone start celebrating again. That destroys the ca

How to Watch the World Cup Like a Genius: Nick Greene on Why the Best Team Doesn’t Always Win

“The dangers are human, not AI. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what the AI does itself. In fact, even the idea that there is such a thing as the AI in itself is a mistake.” — Keith Teare

 

I’m in Korea this week. So rather than doing a traditional one-on-one That Was the Week [https://thatwa.st/] tech summary, Keith Teare [https://thatwa.st/] and I are trying something different. We invited Jonathan Rauch [https://www.brookings.edu/people/jonathan-rauch/] — Brookings Institution senior fellow, serial author and one of the most rigorous minds in Washington — onto the show to discuss AI.

 

Rauch had a simple mission. He wanted to find out why Keith Teare is just about the only person in the universe who believes that AI is benign. Jon had five buckets of doom to dump on Keith: labour market disruption, political upheaval, mental health and cognition, malicious actors, and the biggest daddy of all — AI developing consciousness, setting its own agenda, and killing everyone (even Keith).

 

But Keith maintained his Yorkshire stoicism under intense scrutiny from the analogue Rauch machine. AI is a word-counting machine, he explained. Large language models train on words, not experience. They split words into a probabilistic graph of correlations. When you ask a question, a large statistical engine fires, word by word. In that sense, he says, AI is no cleverer than a calculator. The idea that it has awareness, consciousness, or a plan is mythological. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what AI does itself. The dangers, he says, are human.

 

Jon wasn’t entirely reassured (his Brookings brand is scepticism, after all). What worries him most is that humans will handle these technologies irresponsibly. On that, he and Keith agree. The short-term labour disruption will be significant. White-collar service provision — legal, accounting, junior consulting — is already going. Jobs will go too. Work, Keith insists, will not. But nobody in politics is having the conversation about what comes next. Not JD. Not AOC. Only Keith and Jon.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       AI Is a Word-Counting Machine: Keith’s Core Argument: Large language models train on words and only words. They split those words into a probabilistic graph — how close is word A to word B? When you ask a question, a large statistical engine fires, producing output word by word. There is no awareness. There is no consciousness. There is no plan. The idea that such a system could develop its own agenda is mythological. It’s no cleverer than a calculator. It’s just a very big, very fast calculator. Rauch’s counter: the brain is also just dumb neurons. We get emergence from dumb neurons. Keith’s reply: what the AI can do is constrained by what humans allow it to do. The agency is human.

 

•       Doomerism as Business Model: Before engaging with any specific AI doom argument, Keith signals a prior: whenever there is ambiguity in a major technological change, a business model emerges to monetize doubt. It was true of nuclear power. It was true of climate change. It is true of AI. This doesn’t mean the fears are groundless — they wouldn’t sell if they weren’t reasonable. But it means they should be approached with prior scepticism. The doom argument works precisely because AI genuinely contains possible negative outcomes. The business model packages and amplifies those possibilities beyond their actual probability.

 

•       The Guardrails Are Human: Keith’s metaphor: AI sits in a prison where humans decide what the doors are. If you give it access to email, it can email. If you don’t, it can’t. It cannot take actions it has not been permitted to take. The word “guardrails” is commonly used, and it’s apt: the constraints on what AI can do ar

Can Keith Teare Convince Jonathan Rauch That AI Is Benign? That Was the Week, Special Edition

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