“The only reason to write history is because it helps us in the present. It’s not a vegetable. It’s not good for you.” — Katy Siegel


INTRO



It’s been three months since America’s 250th, although I’m guessing few are nostalgic for those official MAGA celebrations. That said, nostalgia is a feature rather than a bug of these types of anniversaries in America. Take, for example, What Was America? [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300284430/what-was-america/] by Katy Siegel [https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/art/people/faculty-staff/katy-siegel] and Elise Armani [https://brooklynrail.org/contributor/elise-armani/], a new book about the art, culture and politics of the Bicentennial era. Siegel and Armani are nostalgic for nostalgia. We don’t do anniversaries as we used to, they worry.

What Was America? opens with the African-American artist Benny Andrews [https://www.bennyandrews.com/biography], who feared exclusion from the Bicentennial celebrations and responded with a feverish six years of monumental paintings. Then there are the Bicentennial quilts which Siegel and Armani see as a metaphor for a nation whose strength has always lain in its diversity. Both leftist women in Northern California and the Daughters of the American Revolution quilted the Bicentennial. 1976, then, was a genuinely national celebration.

So how will we look back at this year’s celebrations in 2076 when America celebrates its 300th birthday? The final chapter in What Was America? is on how people in 1976 imagined the America to come. School kids predicted no pens and lessons taught by computers. One person worried there would still be no woman president. Nobody predicted President Donald Trump.

“It’s tough to make predictions,” Yogi Berra said, “especially about the future.” Where have you gone, Yogi Berra? Now, I’m getting nostalgic for nostalgia.


FURTHER READING



•   Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, What Was America? Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300284430/what-was-america/] (Yale University Press, October 2026). Siegel’s essay in Artforum [https://www.artforum.com/features/katy-siegel-1976-bicentennial-neoliberal-art-world-1234750788/] on what the bicentennial tells us about the art world that followed is the short version of the argument.

•   Benny Andrews, who opens the book — his biography and chronology [https://www.bennyandrews.com/biography]. The Bicentennial Series ran 1970 to 1975, one monumental painting a year. He also founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in his studio in January 1969, which protested the Metropolitan Museum’s Harlem on My Mind for planning an exhibition about Harlem without Harlem, and he served as Director of the Visual Arts Program at the NEA from 1982 to 1984 — the governmental role Armani refers to at 11:53.

•   Stanley Forman’s photograph, discussed at 29:09 — what happened that day [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soiling_of_Old_Glory] on Boston City Hall Plaza, 5 April 1976. The man with the flag was Joseph Rakes; the man being attacked was the lawyer and later academic Ted Landsmark. The book Siegel mentions is Louis P. Masur’s The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America [https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo215806928.html] — published in 2008 rather than recently.

•   The Ant Farm Collective, whose attempts to imagine the future close the book — their work and chronology [https://www.eai.org/artists/ant-farm/biography], including Media Burn and the Cadillac Ranch.

•   On the NEA’s growth under Nixon at 08:33: the chair who actually drove it was

What Was America? Katy Siegel and Elise Armani on the Bicentennial We Lost

“Scale” is such a loaded word. In Silicon Valley, it’s the thing-in-itself, the holy grail. So what happens if you scale up “scale”? You accelerate to Hyperscale [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/797020/hyperscale-by-paris-marx/], the title of a new book by the big tech critic Paris Marx [https://parismarx.com/], who has turned Silicon Valley’s holy grail against itself.

So what, exactly, does the H word mean? We say “big tech” which means everything and nothing. In his use of hyperscale, Marx means something very specific. His hyperscalers are multi-trillion-dollar conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta, who own the computation powering the AI revolution. These are the data center guys. Frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t.

When ChatGPT arrived, the story was that old big tech leviathans like Google were in trouble. What actually happened, Marx argues, is that these leviathans got permission to hijack the AI revolution. They had the models and data centers. What they didn’t have was cover, because the regulators were watching. Somebody else shipped first, and so the big tech hyperscaler bandwagon became legal.

Follow the money, Marx says. Seven trillion dollars invested into data centers by 2030, raised not through government bonds but mostly through corporate ones. Crypto’s collapse only hurt the people who bought crypto. This irrational exuberance will dramatically affect pensions and 401(k)s.

So I asked him the multi-trillion-dollar question. If this bet pays off, these companies become more powerful than ever. If not, we are all f&*ked. So, which is worse for a critic: hyperscale’s success, or its failure?

Marx is a man of the left. So he favors failure. Lenin wanted Russia to lose World War One to hasten the revolution; Marx, more modestly, suspects that the collapse of the hyperscale pyramid would at least give us the chance to rethink. And then what? Marx wants us to have “conversations” about the type of economy we want. Hyperconversations, more like. Very noisy ones.


FURTHER READING



•   Paris Marx, Hyperscale [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/797020/hyperscale-by-paris-marx/] — published today. Note the two editions carry different subtitles: the US edition is The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires (Crown), while the UK edition [https://www.foyles.co.uk/book/hyperscale/paris-marx/9781805227458] is Ambition, Power and the Relentless Rise of Data Empires. It is longlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year 2026. Kirkus review [https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/paris-marx/hyperscale/].

•   His podcast Tech Won’t Save Us [https://techwontsave.us/about/] and his newsletter Disconnect [https://disconnect.blog/about]. His previous book is Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation, which he returns to at 46:26.

•   Karen Hao, whom Marx cites in the book as the origin of the imperial framing — her episode of this show [https://keenon.substack.com/p/the-empire-strikes-back-karen-hao?r=ktr9], on OpenAI as a classic colonial power. Her book is Empire of AI (AK calls it AI Empires at 06:27).

•   Robin Wigglesworth on why the bond market, not the stock market, is where the real crisis comes — that episode [https://keenon.substack.com/p/a-fabulous-debt?r=ktr9]. His book is A Fabulous Debt.

•   The $7 trillion figure AK cites at 09:03 traces to McKinsey’s data-centre forecast [https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/charts/the-data-center-dividend] (about $6.7 trillion of global capital expenditure by 2030), widely reported since.

•   New York became the first state to pause hyperscale permits, under Executive Order 62 in J

Hyperscale: Paris Marx on the Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires

“My whole life has been coming up with ideas myself, and now AI can do that better than me.” — Bill Gross


INTRO



Bill Gross has been Mr Ideas Man since 1996 when he founded Idealab [https://www.idealab.com/] in Pasadena and started the hand production of startups. Today, he launches Idealab AI where the hand production of startup ideas is replaced by the algorithm. He fed seventeen million documents — news stories, expired patents, SEC filings, complaints on Reddit — through a thirty-thousand-token prompt built around the thirty-one methods he has used all his life, and out popped 1.2 million business ideas. The first batch cost a thousand dollars in tokens and produced thirty-two thousand ideas in an hour. He is giving all of them away.

“Holy shit, my life is over,” he thought.

Then he decided it was a superpower instead. Mr Ideas Man had come up with his greatest (and final?) idea.

His showcase algorithm-produced idea is a five-dollar-a-month app that locks in today’s gas price by hedging the pooled subscriptions on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Bill’s own system scored it 8.9 out of 10 against 32,000 rivals.

The business model inverts the usual one. Entrepreneurs pay nothing. Corporates with large R&D budgets and fat patent portfolios license the platform to mine their own IP, and they fund the giveaway. Universities are next. Bill is talking to one that would pay students fifty thousand dollars to come and build a company, rather than charging them fifty thousand to study one. As Chris Marquis argued [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opinion/business-school-mba-harvard-cornell-cambridge.html] in yesterday’s New York Times, business school as we once imagined it is over.

So where does the hope machine come in? I asked Bill whether the MAGA crowd might object to an American giving away his best ideas to the rest of the world. He was unmoved. Idealab AI is defiantly global from day one, and he is most excited about its power in Africa, the Middle East and South America, where young people and ideas are abundant.

“Bill, this is a hope machine,” thus exclaimed Ahmed El Alfi [https://flat6labs.com/fr/Team/ahmed-el-alfi/], the founder of the Flat6Labs accelerator in Cairo, having come to Pasadena to get a sneak preview.

I asked Bill what the machine can’t do. “Judgment,” he said. Which means mentors, advisors and investors matter more now, not less. But what about questions from interviewers? Hmmm. Holy shit, my life is over. Maybe Uncle Bill can build me a question machine.


FURTHER READING



•   Idealab AI launched on the day of recording. Bill gave the address on air as idealab.ai and his own email as bill@idealab.ai. The thirty-year parent company is at idealab.com [https://www.idealab.com/], and his 25 Lessons from 25 Years of Idealab [https://25-lessons.idealab.com/introduction/] is the long-form version of the methodology he has now handed to a model.

•   Bill’s 2015 TED talk on timing as the single biggest predictor of startup success, which he refers to at 25:55 — watch it [https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_start_ups_succeed]. He says the new platform now does this analysis automatically.

•   On the IP argument at 17:58: ProRata.ai, his venture to make AI companies pay publishers a revenue share, raised $40m and launched Gist in September 2025 [https://axios.com/2025/09/05/prorata-ai-search-tool-publishers].

•   Matthew Botvinick of Anthropic, whom AK raises at 08:39, on the risk AI poses to democracy — listen to that episode [https://keenon.substack.com/p/ai-and-political-freedom?r=ktr9], and his book AI and Political Freedom [https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9780691291277/ai-and-political-freedom] (

The Hope Machine (Holy Shit, My Life is Over): Bill Gross Gives Away 1.2 Million AI-Generated Ideas

Two straight days of murder in America. Yesterday we were in Ozark, Alabama with Matt Kessler [https://keenon.substack.com/p/murders-in-the-wiregrass?r=ktr9] investigating the gruesome murder of two young women. Today’s guest has spent four decades investigating homicidal crimes and continues to have the time of his life. Harold Schechter [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/harold-schechter/murder-by-the-numbers/9781523528219/] has written more than thirty true crime books, his latest being Murder by the Numbers [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/harold-schechter/murder-by-the-numbers/9781523528219/], an account of 199 chilling tales of true crime.

When it comes to crime, I asked the Queens, NY–based Schechter, is America special? On the murder rate, yes. He was just in Iceland, where he asked a retired homicide detective whether the country had ever had a serial killer. Oh yes, the man said. Around 1325. Some Viking. The difference is firearms, Schechter argues, and a frontier that closed within living memory.

But, he says, the appetite for murder isn’t uniquely American. Martin Dumollard was guillotined in a French village in 1862 before a crowd three times the size of the town. During the Terror, tradesmen sold guillotine earrings to the women and toy guillotines to the children, who took them home and decapitated squirrels.

Schechter is unimpressed by our current media panic over violent videos. He reminds us that Jesse Pomeroy, the Boston Boy Fiend, was blamed on dime novels. The Great Train Robbery was blamed for juvenile crime. Then radio, then television, then Psycho, then American Psycho, then The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, after which there was no detectable surge in chainsaw massacres. Manson took his cue from the White Album, Lennon’s killer from Holden Caulfield, Hinckley from Taxi Driver. And if one book has inspired more killers than any other, he says, it is the Bible.

What about gender — are all serial killers male? Schechter’s argument is that we count female serial killers differently. They poison their victims, often enjoying the deaths in real time. And they tend to kill family and children rather than strangers. Women like watching too. The audience for a trial about a mother who killed her children is usually overwhelmingly female, he notes.

So what about gentle Harold Schechter? Could he kill, I asked. Or is he the kind of guy who only likes to watch?


FURTHER READING



•   Harold Schechter, Murder by the Numbers: 199 Chilling Tales of True Crime [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/harold-schechter/murder-by-the-numbers/9781523528219/] (Workman, 6 October 2026).

•   Matt Kessler on the murders of JB Beasley and Tracie Hawlett, the episode AK opens on: listen or watch [https://keenon.substack.com/p/murders-in-the-wiregrass?r=ktr9].

•   The failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee on 30 September 2026, which AK raises at 39:07 — what happened [https://www.alaskasnewssource.com/2026/10/02/what-know-about-christa-pike-her-failed-lethal-injection-execution-attempt/]. Schechter’s reply supplies the context: by Austin Sarat’s count in Gruesome Spectacles, there were 276 botched executions in the United States between 1890 and 2010.

•   The Hegseth proposal to broadcast the execution of the Fort Hood gunman, and Pope Leo’s condemnation of the death penalty [https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/10/pope-leo-condemns-death-penalty-vance-vows-not-to-watch-hasans-execution-live] — the live news behind the public-execution discussion at 10:58.

•   Schechter’s Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment makes the dime-novel argument at length, and Deviant, Deranged and Fiend are the Ed Gein,

Murder by the Numbers: Harold Schechter’s 199 Chilling Tales of True Crime

Ah, the American South. So romantic. A few days ago we were in Clayton, Georgia, hearing about the dissident Lillian Smith, whose house was burned down for telling the truth about Jim Crow. Today we go south-west into Alabama, to Ozark, in the Wiregrass, the boondocks of the boondocks — a region named for a scrub that grows where nothing else will. Except for murder.

The Wiregrass, as the Birmingham, Alabama–based journalist Matt Kessler [https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/matt-kessler/the-wiregrass/] explains, has poor soil, no cotton, almost no plantations, and therefore, none of the southern decorum either. He has spent nine years there researching The Wiregrass [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/matt-kessler/the-wiregrass/9781538786376/], a new true-crime investigation into a case nobody has satisfactorily explained.

On 31 July 1999, JB Beasley turned seventeen. She and her friend Tracie Hawlett set out from the Alabama town of Dothan (peanut capital of the world) to go party-hopping in the Wiregrass. Searching for a field party with a keg, the two young women got lost. They stopped at a closed filling station in Ozark to use the payphone, and someone gave them directions that didn’t sound suspicious.

“Right out of the lot, left at the McDonald’s.”

The surveillance tape shows them leaving in the right direction. Their car was found by the roadside the next morning. At two in the afternoon somebody finally opened the trunk. Both girls were inside, shot in the head. Southern gothic murders most foul.

So what happened? The bodies sat in that trunk for five hours in a steaming Alabama summer, before an officer from out of town had the smart idea to open it. Trained officers then searched the car without gloves. A lead investigator tried to tow it back to Dothan, which would have destroyed the crime scene. Years later the car was quietly released and resold, with no paperwork stating who authorised it. A man named Johnny Barrentine confessed and was let go when the DNA did not match. And when Kessler rang the Ozark police for the file, he was told that everything before 2000 had been “accidentally” destroyed. Oops.

Twenty years on, a genetic genealogy search matched semen from the scene to Coley McCraney, a married preacher with no criminal record. He was convicted on four counts of capital murder in 2023 and is now serving life without parole. McCraney admitted to the sex, but denied the killing. The DNA is the only material evidence since nobody found a weapon. Kessler believes in his innocence, and suspects the police are implicated, though the officer he calls a person of interest will stay unnamed until you buy the book. Ah, the South.


FURTHER READING



•   Matt Kessler, The Wiregrass: A Tale of Murder and Retribution in the Deep South [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/matt-kessler/the-wiregrass/9781538786376/] (Grand Central, 6 October 2026). Kirkus [https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/matt-kessler/the-wiregrass/] calls it “a meticulous, urgent account of a case officially closed, but far from settled.”

•   The official record, against which his account should be read: the Alabama Attorney General’s statement on McCraney’s sentencing [https://www.alabamaag.gov/convicted-capital-murderer-coley-mccraney-sentenced-in-1999-murders-of-j-b-beasley-and-tracie-hawlett/] in June 2023, following conviction on four counts of capital murder.

•   In September 2024 the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction [https://www.wtvy.com/2024/09/20/appeals-court-upholds-convicted-killer-coley-mccraneys-conviction]. The defence had argued that Rena Crumb should have been allowed to testify that an Ozark officer, not McCraney, killed the girls — the same account Kessler describes here. Crumb subsequently recanted,

Murders in the Wiregrass: Matt Kessler on DNA, Doubt and the Deep South

On 16 October 1962, exactly sixty-four years ago, photos of Soviet missiles on Cuba were shown to President Kennedy and the world faced nuclear Armageddon. The definitive account of that thirteen-day crisis, One Minute to Midnight [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41412/one-minute-to-midnight-by-michael-dobbs/], was written by today’s guest, the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs [https://www.michaeldobbsbooks.com/michael.html]. He has now written about a crisis that few remember, but which he calls the climactic crisis of the Cold War.

It happened in 1983. In September of that year, the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner with 269 people aboard, among them the most anti-communist member of the United States Congress. A few weeks later a Soviet early-warning computer reported that America had launched its missiles, and a colonel named Petrov, alone in a bunker at one in the morning, decided on his own authority that the machine was lying. In November NATO ran a nuclear release exercise called Able Archer, which Moscow took for the real thing.

The difference between 1962 and 1983, Dobbs says, was twenty years of technology. Kennedy had thirteen days. Reagan, by his own estimate in his memoirs, would have had six minutes. Thus the title of his new book, The Six Minute War [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Six-Minute-War/Michael-Dobbs/9781668052594], subtitled Reagan, Russia and the Race to Automate Armageddon.

As the incoming Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, Dobbs had a front seat on the crisis. He arrived in Moscow just after the airliner came down, and his best material is anecdotal. He saw Russians bussed to a state-organised protest outside the American embassy, chanting on cue while jealously eyeing the Buicks and Cadillacs parked on the street. In a Moscow cinema showing Three Days of the Condor as anti-American propaganda, he watched the audience gasp — not at the dastardly CIA, but at the lavish contents of Robert Redford’s fridge.

Fast forward to today, and we get to the most worrying part of Dobbs’ analysis. The presidential crisis historian reckons we are now in a more dangerous period than at any point he can remember. We have more weapons, less warning, with our split-second decisions dependent on machines whose reasoning is increasingly hard for us humans to understand. Call the compounding annual risk one per cent. Multiply it across thirty years and the arithmetic isn’t reassuring. We might now be just a few seconds to midnight.


FURTHER READING



•   Michael Dobbs, The Six Minute War: Reagan, Russia, and the Race to Automate Armageddon [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Six-Minute-War/Michael-Dobbs/9781668052594] (Simon & Schuster)

•   His Cuban Missile Crisis book, One Minute to Midnight [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41412/one-minute-to-midnight-by-michael-dobbs/] (2008) — the thirteen days against which he measures the six minutes. Down with Big Brother and Six Months in 1945 complete his Cold War trilogy.

•   The National Security Archive’s declassified sourcebook on Able Archer 83 [https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/foia/2016-12-06/inside-able-archer-83-nuclear-war-game-put-us-soviet-relations-hair] — the NATO exercise the Kremlin read as cover for a first strike.

•   Eliot Cohen made the companion argument on this show: that the nuclear danger now sits with Pakistan and North Korea rather than Moscow and Washington. Listen or watch [https://keenon.substack.com/p/eliot-cohen-is-the-strategist?r=ktr9].

•   Harold James’s essay “Late Soviet America”, the gerontocracy parallel AK raises at 25:26 — among his Proje [https://www.project-syndicate.org/columnist/harold-james]

The Six Minute War: Michael Dobbs on Reagan, Russia, and the Race to Automate Armageddon

Last month Adam Kirsch [https://keenon.substack.com/p/is-that-really-a-flying-saucer?r=ktr9] was on the show arguing that our current obsession with UFOs represents a new kind of religion. Today’s guest, the international relations expert Alexander Wendt [https://mershoncenter.osu.edu/people/wendt.23], argues that today’s UFO obsession is the least of our problems. In his new book, The Last Humans [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-last-humans-9780197841167] (out today), Wendt’s worst-case scenario is that the UFOs are already here — and have been for some time.

While the Pentagon has conceded only that the objects are real and that it cannot identify them, Wendt extrapolates further. A recognition of the presence of UFOs would bring, he warns, both a crisis of global security and the demise of the traditional state system. Worst of all, he fears, would be a descent into a Hobbesian-style war-against-all.

Wendt is less worried about the invasion of the earth by little green men. If they had wanted to attack, he says, they would have done it when we fought with sticks rather than nukes. Instead, he worries about the social contract we have with the state. We obey the laws of the state because they keep us safe. Spacecraft that the Pentagon cannot identify, in airspace the Pentagon can’t defend, would leave that contract in tatters. What follows is not war with aliens but Hobbes’s great fear of a return to his dreaded state of nature.

So, as Wendt notes, “the threat of UFOs is not them. It’s actually us.” Rather than a new religion, they represent an old nightmare. Beam me up, Thomas Hobbes.


FURTHER READING



•   Alexander Wendt, The Last Humans: UFOs, Global Security, and the Threat to State Sovereignty [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-last-humans-9780197841167] (Oxford University Press, out 15 October 2026)

•   Adam Kirsch on We Want to Believe [https://globalreports.columbia.edu/books/we-want-to-believe] — the case that this is a religion, not a security problem: listen or watch
[https://keenon.substack.com/p/is-that-really-a-flying-saucer?r=ktr9]


•   Wendt’s 1992 article “Anarchy Is What States Make of It”, the piece that launched constructivism, and his Social Theory of International Politics — both listed at his Mershon Center page
[https://mershoncenter.osu.edu/people/wendt.23]


•   The June 2021 Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — the report [https://archive.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf] that, on Wendt’s account, changed the game


FIVE TAKEAWAYS



1. His thesis is that the danger is on our side of the encounter. He separates the craft from the question of who is flying them, and says the Defense Department has settled the first — after seventy-five years of denial it changed its mind, which he finds significant. On the second he is agnostic but unworried about attack: anything capable of getting here could have destroyed us long ago, when we were far weaker. The threat he describes is political. Our civilisation is organised around the assumption that we are alone, and the discovery that we are not would expose a state that cannot identify these objects, cannot stop them entering its airspace, and cannot protect anyone from them. That is the emperor with no clothes, and what it threatens is allegiance.

2. What he actually fears is Hobbes, not invasion. Once the news is out, people will disagree about what to do — shoot them down, worship them, ignore them — and there is no way to settle the argument, because nobody can get inside the craft to find out who is r

The Last Humans: Alexander Wendt on UFOs, Global Security and the Threat to State Sovereignty

“We don’t have to choose between AI and no AI. The bigger choice is what type of AI we want, and who we want in control of it.” — Ben Green


INTRO



In our age of AI, do we want to be ruled by all-knowing engineer kings [https://keenon.substack.com/p/crowning-our-engineer-kings?r=ktr9]? Not according to Ben Green [https://www.si.umich.edu/people/ben-green], a professor of information and public policy at Michigan, whose new book, Algorithmic Realism [https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262055703/algorithmic-realism/], presents “data science practices to promote social justice”. Unsexy? Yes. And that, according to Green, is the whole point of algorithmic realism. Such a down-to-earth use of AI is super unsexy by design, he explains.

Green’s critique is of Silicon Valley utopians who promote an algorithmic formalism. So he’s dismissive of the idea of “superintelligence” with its promise of curing cancer at the snap of a finger. He borrows from the sociologist Erik Olin Wright the idea of real utopias reached concretely, step-by-step. So he’s not exactly against algorithmic idealism. Just the lazy type that sees the world as an infinitely scalable laboratory.

Green describes working as a data scientist for the city of Boston and being asked to cut EMS response times. Instead of building some sort of super sexy algorithm, he went and talked to people, and found what was actually driving the call volume: mental illness, addiction and homelessness. Shaving two minutes off an ambulance would have done nothing for any of those people. What they built instead — and he is careful to stress the they — was a team trained to handle someone in a crisis and connect them to counselling and shelter. Super unsexy; and super useful.


FURTHER READING



•   Ben Green, Algorithmic Realism: Data Science Practices to Promote Social Justice [https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262055703/algorithmic-realism/] (MIT Press, 2026)

•   His earlier book, The Smart Enough City [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/smart-enough-city] — the same argument, made about city government in 2019

•   Green on DOGE: “Using AI to Reform Government Is Much Harder Than It Looks” [https://www.techpolicy.press/using-ai-to-reform-government-is-much-harder-than-it-looks/], at Tech Policy Press



•   My own case for the engineer kings, three days ago: Crowning Our Engineer Kings
[https://keenon.substack.com/p/crowning-our-engineer-kings?r=ktr9]


•   Matthew Botvinick of Anthropic on AI and Political Freedom — the inside-the-lab answer that Green doubts: listen or watch
[https://keenon.substack.com/p/ai-and-political-freedom?r=ktr9]


•   Sherry Turkle on Artificial Intimacy — the humanist case on AI: listen or watch
[https://keenon.substack.com/p/artificial-intimacy?r=ktr9]


•   Stephen Witt, Jensen Huang’s biographer, on the engineer king par excellence: listen or watch
[https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2490-stephen-witt-explains]



FIVE TAKEAWAYS



1. The engineer’s mindset is the thing he is actually arguing with. Not engineering itself, which he wants more of, but a particular habit of mind: that problems have neat optimal solutions, that facts and reason settle things, and that building more powerful tools will of itself improve society. What that leaves out is power — who gets to decide, what their incentives are, and whether the decision might be worth democratising. He puts the underlying assumption plainly: our goal is to build more and more powerful tools, and as our tools get more powerful they will inevitably work for the betterment of society. He thinks that is a fundamental misu

Super Unsexy By Design: Ben Green on Algorithmic Realism

Yesterday Janet Reitman [https://keenon.substack.com/p/janet-reitmans-inheritance?r=ktr9] described post-9/11 America, with its forever wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, as a tragedy in five acts. Today we meet a man who helped strategize one of those acts. Eliot A. Cohen [https://www.csis.org/people/eliot-cohen] was Counselor of the State Department under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 — in part responsible (“if that’s the right word” as he puts it) for America’s post-9/11 forever wars. Not that he feels deep remorse. Afghanistan was unavoidable, he says — no president would have refrained, and the Democrats would have done the same. While he was in favour of the Iraq adventure, he does admit that he never asked hard enough questions about whether America’s institutions were fit for that kind of war.

His new book, The Strategist [https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691269443/the-strategist], is a short introduction to thinking about war and politics. So is Cohen a realist or idealist when it comes to thinking about international relations? There are two kinds of people in this world, he responded, half jokingly, people who divide things into two and people who don’t. And given Cohen’s distrust of what he calls “purely linear descriptions of history where it’s all one thing or another”, he’s unambiguously in the latter category.

So who are the great strategists in history from whom we should learn about war and politics? For Cohen, Churchill ranks high, as does Lincoln. And how do contemporary American “statesmen” like Hegseth and Trump compare? “It’s like you’re dealing with two different species,” Cohen dryly notes.

There’s one question I half regret not asking. Janet Reitman’s new book, The Inheritance, is full of stories about people that the forever wars broke. Like the angry ex-Marine who was transformed into a leading neo-Nazi. So perhaps I should have asked Cohen about the human costs of Iraq and Afghanistan. If 21st-century America is to avoid more overseas tragedies, must the strategist also be a moralist? History isn’t so linear, he would probably have replied. As he says at the beginning of The Strategist: “you may wish to be done with war, but war is not done with you.”


FURTHER READING



•   Eliot A. Cohen, The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics [https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691269443/the-strategist] (Princeton University Press)

•   His weekly podcast with Eric Edelman, Shield of the Republic
[https://thebulwark.com/s/shield-of-the-republic]


•   Janet Reitman on The Inheritance — the five-act American tragedy Cohen declines to sign up to: listen or watch
[https://keenon.substack.com/p/janet-reitmans-inheritance?r=ktr9]


•   Elliot Ackerman on The Fifth Act, another five-act tragedy of how the Afghan war ended: listen or watch
[https://keenon.substack.com/p/elliot-ackerman-why-the-american-c23]


•   Jacob Weisberg on Profiles in Cowardice, which takes a much harder line on George W. Bush than Cohen: listen or watch
[https://keenon.substack.com/p/eight-profiles-in-cowardice?r=ktr9]



FIVE TAKEAWAYS



1. He will not call the whole thing a blunder, and he explains why. Asked straight out whether he shares Janet Reitman’s view that American foreign policy after 9/11 was one long miscalculation, he declined to comment on a book he hasn’t read and then gave the historian’s answer. A complicated mix. A great deal of miscalculation, which nobody can deny, and also some things that were successes. His objection is methodological as much as political: judgments made at the time always get amended by longer perspectives, and he dislikes purely linear

Eliot Cohen is The Strategist: How to Think About War & Politics

“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 [https://keenon.substack.com/p/elliot-ackerman-why-the-american-c23] the show to talk about The Fifth Act [https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-fifth-act-america-s-end-in-afghanistan-elliot-ackerman/85eba44c036b2175?ean=9780593492048&affiliate=132], his account of America’s humiliating end in Afghanistan. The New York Times Magazine contributing writer Janet Reitman [https://x.com/janetreitman?lang=en]’s new book, The Inheritance [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/604725/the-inheritance-by-janet-reitman/9781984854728/], 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 [https://keenon.substack.com/p/george-packers-emergency-when-facts?r=ktr9]’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 [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/604725/the-inheritance-by-janet-reitman/9781984854728/] (Random House, 2026)

•   Anand Giridharadas’s review in The New York Times [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/books/review/the-inheritance-janet-reitman.html] — “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
[https://keenon.substack.com/p/george-packers-emergency-when-facts?r=ktr9]


•   Kurt Andersen on The Breakup — the other distinguished chronicler of American unravelling who has shifted to fiction: listen or watch
[https://keenon.substack.com/p/when-america-broke-up?r=ktr9]


•   Jacob Weisberg on Profiles in Cowardice, which takes a harder line on George W. Bush than his recent press has: listen or watch
[https://keenon.substack.com/p/eight-profiles-in-cowardice?r=ktr9]


•   The CDC on American exhaustion —

An American Tragedy in Five Acts: Janet Reitman on the Inheritance of 9/11

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