“To explain the lives of people living in this moment, to look at the historical forces that are shaping all of us, you have to look at business and technology. In our period, what is it that’s shaping us? I would suggest it’s the long fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and the technology revolution that’s been happening in California.” — Alexander Starritt

 

How to write a novel about our times? For Alexander Starritt [https://groveatlantic.com/book/drayton-and-mackenzie/], it means juxtaposing friendship and ambition alongside the grand historical forces of the age. Just as George Eliot did in Middlemarch. Whereas for Eliot, those forces were the 1832 Reform Acts and the industrial revolution, Starritt’s forces are the 2008 financial crisis and the digital revolution.

 

His novel, Drayton and Mackenzie [https://groveatlantic.com/book/drayton-and-mackenzie/], longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year, follows two ambitious Gen X’ers through the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The 2008 crash, Starritt says, ruined the lives of many of his generation. Rather than being in a Gramscian interregnum, our brave new 21st century world is already visible. But in contrast with many progressive critics of our neo-liberalism age, Starritt isn’t apocalyptic about the future. Think of Drayton and Mackenzie [https://groveatlantic.com/book/drayton-and-mackenzie/] as Middlemarch and McKinsey. Revolutions will come and go, but, for Alexander Starritt, friendship and ambition are unchanging.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The First Novel on the FT Business Book List in 15 Years: The Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year longlist typically features books on China, AI, and tech giants. In 2025, for the first time in fifteen years, it included a novel. Starritt’s reading of why: there’s a gap. The literary and cultural worlds have become so estranged from the business world that very few writers are even attempting to write seriously about the forces that actually shape people’s lives. That gap, he says, says as much about the cultural moment as any quality the book itself might have.

 

•       George Eliot’s Method: Historical Forces as the Engine of Fiction: When George Eliot wrote Middlemarch, the historical forces she was dramatising were the Reform Acts and the industrial revolution. Starritt’s equivalent: the 2008 financial crisis and the California tech revolution. His method is Eliot’s — use a closely observed relationship (in his case, a male friendship rather than a marriage) as the engine through which the reader experiences history. The friendship gives the historical canvas an emotional charge. The historical canvas gives the friendship its full weight. Neither works without the other.

 

•       Male Friendship: The Most Important Relationship Nobody Writes About: We’ve all read too many books and seen too many films about romantic and sexual relationships. Starritt’s observation: there is another type of relationship — friendship — that is incredibly important to almost all of us, and that gets almost no literary attention. Drayton and Mackenzie is his attempt to take it seriously. The friendship between James (straight-lined, disciplined, brilliant) and Roland (impulsive, self-sabotaging, charming) evolves from incomprehension to something described by the Financial Times as “unbreakable” — and the reviewer admitted that by the end, their vision wasn’t the clearest.

 

•       The Post-Liberal World Is Already Here: Everyone quotes Gramsci’s interregnum — the old world is dying, the new one hasn’t been born yet. Starritt’s counter: the new world has already been born. You can see i

Drayton and Mackenzie: Alexander Starritt on How the 2008 Crash Ruined Everything

“When you’re in a world that is careening out of control, where we’ve broken through seven of the nine safe dimensions of safe operating space that scientists have discovered, it’s unrealistic in my view to focus on those little things and think that will lead to a real better outcome. What’s realistic is backcasting.” — Jeremy Lent

 

There Is An Alternative. That is the central argument of Jeremy Lent [https://mhpbooks.com/books/ecocivilization/]’s new book, Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All [https://mhpbooks.com/books/ecocivilization/]. Margaret Thatcher’s historically materialist TINA — THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE — was both the most seductive and disempowering message the neoliberal establishment ever produced. As long as everyone believes in the inevitability of free market capitalism, nothing will ever really change. Anti-agency is the name of agency. We just push for slightly higher carbon taxes and slightly fewer fossil fuel subsidies and give it the euphemism of “progress.” For Lent, however, this is environmental capitulation.

 

Jeremy Lent imagines a genuinely sustainable world — one where humans have a long-term relationship with the living Earth. From that vantage point, the steps that look realistic to the incrementalists seem timid or counterproductive. He reminds us that we’ve broken through seven of the nine safe operating dimensions that scientists have identified for a stable Earth system. No, incrementalism isn’t realism. Rather than progress, it’s a trance-like slide into the apocalypse.

 

Rather than state control or free markets, the alternative Lent introduces in Ecocivilization is the commons — Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s third way in which humans self-organise in the collaborative ways of the natural world. It is already happening, he says, in places as far apart as Cleveland, Ohio and Jackson, Mississippi. Maggie was wrong, the Anglo-American Lent insists. TINA is bunk. THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Consensus Trance: Why Nobody Is Freaking Out: Everyone knows who’s in and who’s out in Washington today. Everyone knows their team’s sports score. Almost nobody is aware of some of the bigger existential questions facing all of us. Lent’s explanation: we have media owned by billionaires who don’t benefit from people freaking out. The entire system is designed to lull people into what he calls a “consensus trance.” We broke through seven of the nine safe operating dimensions that scientists have identified for a stable Earth system. In normal times that would be front-page news every day. Instead: the news cycle moves on.

 

•       Backcasting vs Incrementalism: The Two Realisms: There are two ways to use the word “realistic.” Realistic given the forces of destruction and oppression all around us right now: push for slightly higher taxes on the uber-wealthy, slightly fewer fossil fuel subsidies. Realistic given what a genuinely sustainable world would actually look like: start from the destination and work backwards. The first kind of realism may be taking us in the wrong direction. Lent’s argument: when you’re in a world careening out of control, the timid steps of incremental realism are not realistic. Backcasting is.

 

•       The Commons: Ostrom’s Third Way: The political debate of the last hundred years has been between state control and free markets. Both have failed. Lent’s alternative, via Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom: the commons. Not the state owning things. Not markets extracting profit. Humans self-organising together in the way they evolved to do — collaboratively, cooperatively, with attention to the common good. Ostrom showed, empirically, that commons governance works. The Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland,

Ecocivilization and Our Discontents: Jeremy Lent on Why TINA Is Wrong

“I don’t look to companies to be moral guides. I want them to be good companies. When you invest in the stock market, you want them to be growing fast and making profit. That’s it. There’s nothing more to it.” — Keith Teare

 

If it’s Saturday, it must be our weekly tech show. Before we went live, That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare [https://thatwa.st/] told me it wasn’t a big news week. He was wrong, of course (as he often is). The really BIG news this week, which Keith conveniently missed, is that Anthropic overtook OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI startup. Dario Amodei’s AI startup raised $65 billion this week, putting its valuation at $900 billion, way ahead of OpenAI’s last round at $730 billion. Keith says, without any proof, that they’ve cooked their numbers. Which makes this week’s news even tastier.

 

The more interesting story, for Keith at least, is Sam Altman’s latest pivot: that humans need stakes in the AI platforms whose wealth they help create. Rather than Patagonia-style moral corporations (which Keith says would make him “throw up”), it should be the responsibility of the state or government to make capitalism more moral.

 

But even slippery Sam got outpivoted this week by Anthropic, who sent a co-founder to Rome to do a deal with the Pope. Leo XIV’s new encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” is Anthropic’s papal pivot. It’s the smart model for value investing in the AI age.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Anthropic Tops OpenAI — But the Numbers May Be Wrong: Anthropic raised $65 billion this week at a $900 billion valuation, overtaking OpenAI’s last round at $730 billion. The VCs backing it — Green Oaks, Sequoia, Altimeter, Dragoneer — are credible. Andrew’s argument: they’ve seen the books. Keith’s counter: the VCs are playing a different game. They expect two to three times their money at IPO and they’ll probably get it — not because the revenue numbers are solid, but because the only way is up right now. The real test: the S-1, which requires audited accounts. Keith’s prediction: the revenue numbers will look different when the SEC sees them.

 

•       Dario’s Credibility Problem — But Claude 4.8 Is Fantastic: Keith has consistently characterised Dario Amodei as “slightly juvenile” and has long been sceptical of Anthropic’s public positioning. This week he cites Om Malik and the All In podcast in support of the revenue numbers critique. But he is careful to separate the man from the product: Claude 4.8, released two days ago, is “fantastic.” At SignalRank, Keith’s firm, Claude rebuilt an entire agent valuation workflow in an hour that would have taken days manually. Andrew’s observation: Andrew is now Anthropic’s newest fan. He has replaced Spurs with Anthropic as his team.

 

•       Altman’s Pivot: From UBI to Ownership: Sam Altman has shifted his public narrative on AI and labour. Previously: UBI — universal basic income — as the answer to mass unemployment. Now: ownership. Humans need to own stakes in the AI platforms whose wealth they help generate. Not welfare. Not redistribution. Ownership. Keith’s verdict: it’s an interesting and significant move. More interesting than Amodei’s continued fearmongering about AI devastation. Andrew notes that Altman seems to have genuinely grown up in the last two months. His tone is markedly different.

 

•       Patagonia Capitalism Would Make Keith Throw Up: The week’s interview of the week: Eric Ries on Incorruptible, arguing that great companies stay great by choosing a higher moral purpose — the Patagonia model. Keith’s response: it would make him throw up. He doesn’t want companies to be moral guides. He wants them to be profit machines. Moral guidance is the job of politics. And politics, he acknowledges, is massively disappointing.

Anthropic Trounces OpenAI with Its Papal Pivot: Value Investing in Our AI Age

“The thirteen colonies that became the United States were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. We need to think about why some colonies rebelled and others did not.” — Sarah Pearsall

 

Earlier today, the historian Dominic Erdozain came on [https://keenon.substack.com/p/to-love-or-hate-the-united-states] the show to argue that American patriotism has the same exceptionalist Puritan roots as British imperialism. But not all historians of the American revolution would agree. Take, for example, Sarah Pearsall [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/707010/freedom-round-the-globe-by-sarah-m-s-pearsall/], author of Freedom Round the Globe [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/707010/freedom-round-the-globe-by-sarah-m-s-pearsall/], who turns 1776 inside out to present the American rebellion as a kind of world revolution. 1776 as 1917. American patriotism as an explosion of borderless humanity.

 

Pearsall argues that 1776 was as globally significant in its revolutionary promise as 1789, 1848 or 1917. She reminds us that there were at least 26, possibly as many as 32 British colonies in existence in 1775 — in the Caribbean, in Canada, in East and West Florida. And the radical ideas that drove the Declaration of Independence — security, happiness, respect — were being asserted simultaneously all over the world. So in Edinburgh debating clubs, Caribbean sugar plantations and West African castles, the American revolution was welcomed as a global revolution. Universal rather than exceptional. The Tea Party as the Storming of the Winter Palace.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       32 British Colonies, Not 13: The Forgotten Empire: People talk about the thirteen colonies as if they were all the British colonies in North America. They weren’t. There were at least 26, possibly as many as 32, depending on how you count groups of islands. British colonies in the Caribbean. In Canada. In East and West Florida. Each had its own relationship to the British Empire, its own internal tensions, its own calculations about the costs and benefits of rebellion. The question Pearsall asks — why did some rebel and others not? — is the question that opens up the global story.

 

•       The Caribbean Undermines the Slavery Thesis: There is a popular argument that the American Revolution was primarily fought to preserve slavery — that the colonists feared British abolition and revolted to protect the institution. Pearsall’s counter: if this were the main driver, the Caribbean colonies would have been the first to join. They were far more dependent on slavery than the mainland colonies. They did not join. The relationship between slavery and the revolution is genuinely complicated — not simple in either direction. The Caribbean story is the evidence that demands a more nuanced account.

 

•       From St Kitts to Kolkata: The Declaration’s Global Keywords: Pearsall’s organising device: she takes thirteen key words from the Declaration of Independence and finds the spark of each in a far-flung location. Security in the Six Nations cornfields of upstate New York, where it meant something very different to the Haudenosaunee than to the Philadelphia delegates. Happiness in the debating clubs of Edinburgh, where women were demanding it alongside men for the first time. Respect in the streets of Kolkata. This device lets her write about the globe without losing the Declaration as her anchor.

 

•       Americans Were Already Thinking Globally in 1776: One of Pearsall’s more surprising findings: Americans in 1776 were far more aware of global events than we tend to assume. They were reading about events in India. The Boston Tea Party is unintelligible without knowing that tea was an Asian commodity and t

1776 as 1917: Sarah Pearsall's World History of the American Revolution

“We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” — Randolph Bourne, via Dominic Erdozain

 

Should Americans be proud of their country? The Anglo-American historian Dominic Erdozain [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/795670/to-love-a-country-by-dominic-erdozain/] thinks not. His new book, To Love a Country [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/795670/to-love-a-country-by-dominic-erdozain/], argues that there’s a problem with American patriotism. Americans shouldn’t love their country, Erdozain says. It’s not a good place.

 

His argument is that American patriotism has the same Puritan root as British imperialism. The idea of a chosen people, a city on the hill, a nation with a special mission is a kind of moral virus. He says it infected America in the great awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has provided moral cover for slavery, military aggression abroad, and the denial of rights at home.

 

So what America needs, he argues, is a new set of foundational myths laid out by progressives like Jane Addams, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Martin Luther King Jr. This would establish a new kind of American patriotism which is forward-looking and internationalist rather than nativist or exceptionalist. Erdozain even gives Gandhi a shoutout as a model of American patriotism, although one wonders what the Indian pacifist would have made of this.

 

So what will the Atlanta-based Erdozain be doing on July 4? Hiding under his bed, perhaps, rather than enjoying the hotdogs and fireworks. In hiding from hundreds of millions of patriotic Americans.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Puritan Root of American Exceptionalism: The idea of America as a chosen people, a city on a hill with a special mission to the world, was not invented in America. It was inherited from English Puritanism. As it spread through the first and second great awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — what some scholars call the New Englandization of America — it became the canopy under which very different kinds of people sheltered. You didn’t have to be a Puritan in any theological sense. You just had to accept the premise that America was righteously exceptional. And once you accepted that, a great deal of scrutiny became unavailable.

 

•       Nationalism Is Immune to Failure: One of Erdozain’s sharpest observations, via historian Lindsey O’Rourke’s work on American interventionism: nationalism can absorb any amount of failure. The defeat in Vietnam, the disaster of Iraq, the failure of Afghanistan — a certain kind of nationalism insulates itself from the lessons these events might teach. It’s always someone else’s fault. It’s always a particular administration’s failure, never the national premise. This makes exceptionalism uniquely resistant to the ordinary mechanism of democratic accountability.

 

•       Randolph Bourne and the Patriotism of the Future: Erdozain’s most original historical recovery: Randolph Bourne, a radical journalist writing during the First World War, who argued that nativism and nationalism were European imports, backward-looking and derivative. Bourne’s phrase: “we must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” A patriotism faithful to the diversity of modern America — its bustling pluralism, its immigrant energy — cannot be built by looking backward to the founders. It must be built by looking forward to the founders we have not yet had.

 

•       Alternative Founders: Addams, Douglass, Garrison, King: Erdozain proposes replacing — or at least supplementing — the canonical founders with a different cast. Jane Addams, who said the question is not what can we teach

To Love or Hate the United States? Dominic Erdozain on the Problem of American Patriotism

 “I deliver it with the credibility of having won a district that Trump carried by 13 points. Not only how to speak to these voters, but how to win them back.” — Joe Cunningham

 

Yesterday’s guest was Alexandra Natapoff, co-editor of America Unfinished — a collection of essays by illustrious Harvard Law School professors grading the march toward justice in the United States over the last 250 years. America got about a C+ from this progressive clique. “Could do better” their report cards suggested.

 

Today’s guest is a very different kind of Democrat. Joe Cunningham [https://lifeofthepartybook.com/] is a lawyer and personal injury attorney in Charleston, South Carolina, a one-term US representative, and the author of Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America’s Trust and How They Can Win It Back [https://lifeofthepartybook.com/]. Cunningham got his law degree at Northern Kentucky University’s Salmon P. Chase College of Law. Harvard, he jokes, was his safety school.

 

In contrast with Harvard Law professors, Cunningham’s credibility is hard to dress up. He was the first Democrat to win South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District in over forty years, in a seat Trump carried by 13 points. He was also the first Democrat in elected office to publicly warn against Biden seeking re-election. His diagnosis of what went wrong is that the Democratic Party abandoned kitchen-table economic issues in favour of culture wars, dismissed legitimate voter concerns as bigotry, and told people what they should care about rather than listening to what they actually cared about. The party, he argues, replaced empathy with arrogance. It’s as if it’s been colonized by morally prickly Harvard Law professors. Professor Cunningham gives the Dems a D+. Could do significantly better.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Winning Trump +13: The Credibility Argument: Cunningham’s case for why his diagnosis should be taken seriously is not his ideology but his record. He won South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District in 2018 — a heavily gerrymandered seat that Trump had carried by 13 points — making him the first Democrat to hold it in over forty years. He was also the first elected Democrat to publicly warn against Biden seeking re-election. His prescriptions don’t come from a think tank or an op-ed page. They come from a man who has actually won where Democrats can’t win, and lost where Democrats keep losing.

 

•       The Party Replaced Empathy with Arrogance: Cunningham’s central diagnosis: the Democratic Party stopped listening and started lecturing. It told people what they should care about — immigration wasn’t an issue in West Virginia because West Virginia is far from the border. It told people the economy was fine when they couldn’t afford their bills. It dismissed legitimate concerns about crime, immigration, and cultural change as bigotry rather than trying to understand them. The result: voters who felt condescended to left. The party that was founded on speaking for ordinary people no longer speaks their language.

 

•       Big Publishing’s Progressive Insularity: The book didn’t get picked up by a major publisher. Cunningham was told, more or less directly, that a book this critical of the Democratic Party — of Biden, of Harris, of the party’s leadership — was too much. He published it himself, through South Battery Press, named for a street in Charleston. Andrew’s observation: isn’t this itself evidence of what the book argues? If progressive culture controls big media and big publishing, those institutions will inevitably filter out self-criticism and reinforce the insularity that caused the problem in the first place.

 

•       The Geriatric Oligarchy and the Technology Frontier: Cunningham uses th

Life of the Party: Joe Cunningham on How Democrats Lost America’s Trust and How They Can Win It Back

“As long as democracy is a collective endeavour of all the people who belong to it, in some sense it can never be finished — because we are constantly bequeathing to the next generation the opportunity and the freedom to have these conversations over and over again.” — Alexandra Natapoff

 

It’s less than six weeks until America’s 250th birthday. The official America 250 store is selling T-shirts while Harvard Law School is doing something slightly less commercial. 62 HLS professors have written 1,000-word essays, assembled into a single volume to be published on July 4. Entitled America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance [https://mitpress.mit.edu/], it’s co-edited by Alexandra Natapoff [https://mitpress.mit.edu/], a Harvard Law professor who spent years as a federal public defender in Baltimore. The title, of course, is borrowed from the Gettysburg Address, where Lincoln charged the living with completing “the unfinished work” of those who died in the Civil War.

 

So is America unfinished or is it just getting started? For Natapoff and other Harvard Law School professors like this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Jill Lepore, the answer is suitably complex. Yes and no and maybe. Everything all at once. The essays focus on 250 years of both justice and injustice in America. Perhaps the only thing all authors agree on is the central role of capitalism in the history of the United States. Follow the money, Natapoff suggests. Those dollars will transport the reader to the heart of the American story.

 

That said, America Unfinished will certainly cost you less than a three-year Harvard Law degree. And if you wait six months, the book will be available at no cost online. So follow the money. It will take you to some unexpectedly free places.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Gettysburg Address as the Title’s Source: The book does not merely allude to Lincoln’s famous speech — it reproduces it at the front, so readers can go back to the original. In the Address, Lincoln charged the living with completing “the unfinished work” of those who died at Gettysburg — the work of building a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Natapoff and Charles chose this frame because it captures both the challenge and the hope: democracy is unfinished in the sense that it demands active work from every generation. It is not a gift that has been fully delivered. It is a task being handed on.

 

•       America and Democracy Are Not the Same Thing: Andrew’s challenge — you use the words interchangeably — earns a concession. Natapoff’s work in criminal justice has led her to argue repeatedly that the American criminal system fails many tests of democracy: it is exclusive, inegalitarian, overly coercive, inconsistent with democratic principles. So ‘America’ and ‘democracy’ are not synonyms in the book. Many of the 62 essays disagree about the state of various pieces of governance. The book’s inquiry is whether it is fair to call any particular piece of American legal governance a democracy — which both editors consider a compliment, and not a certainty.

 

•       A Federal Public Defender in Baltimore: The Biography Behind the Scholarship: Before she became a law professor, Natapoff was a federal public defender in Baltimore’s federal courts. Her job was to be adverse to the federal government all day every day, defending some of the most vulnerable and dispossessed people in the city against the massive resources and power of the federal apparatus. Those years shaped everything: her subsequent twenty years of scholarship on criminal courts, plea bargaining, misdemeanors, and race and inequality; her book Punishment Without Crime; and her contribution to America Unfinished. In her read

Is America Unfinished or Just Getting Started? Alexandra Natapoff on 250 Years of Justice and Injustice in the United States

“I took it for granted that we were trying to make the world a better place. But I think in retrospect that was naïve. What kind of change? For whom? We kind of forgot to specify what the purpose of all this disruption was.” — Eric Ries

 

In 2011, Eric Ries [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Incorruptible/Eric-Ries/9798893311860] published The Lean Startup, a book that reflected the optimistic zeitgeist about disruptive Silicon Valley companies. Fifteen years later, in Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Incorruptible/Eric-Ries/9798893311860], Ries reflects today’s totally different zeitgeist about the value of companies inside and outside Silicon Valley.

 

Back in 2011, everybody loved tech. Ries, creator of the Lean Startup method and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, admits he was naïve in his positive view of disruptive corporations. In Incorruptible, Ries argues that corporate corruption is structural, rather than a problem of bad actors. As organisations grow (ie: become more disruptive), the systems that govern them — ownership, incentives, charters, accountability — quietly reshape behaviour. Success itself becomes a form of financial gravity, diverting companies away from their original purpose.

 

Ries proposes that we design organisations to be incorruptible from the beginning. It’s the Patagonia model. When the outdoor clothing company almost went bankrupt in the 1990s, their bank agreed to restructure their loans if they would suspend their charitable donations for a couple of years. No deal, the CEO said. The bank blinked and Patagonia remained Patagonia. Now, Ries argues, every corporation should try to emulate Patagonia and become the incorruptible corporation. We must all join Eric Ries in getting beyond the lean startup.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Corporate Corruption Is Structural, Not Ethical: For decades, we’ve explained corporate failures as problems of bad actors, moral weakness, or isolated scandals. Ries’ argument: that story doesn’t match reality. Again and again, companies founded with strong ideals drift toward short-term thinking, extractive behaviour, and mission abandonment — often despite the best intentions of people inside them. The failure is structural. As organisations grow, the systems that govern them — ownership structures, incentives, charters — quietly reshape behaviour. Success becomes financial gravity, bending companies away from their purpose.

 

•       The Patagonia Model: Organisational Strength, Not Moral Righteousness: When Patagonia nearly went bankrupt in the 1990s due to outsourcing to poor-quality foreign factories, their lead lender agreed to restructure the loans on one condition: suspend charitable donations during the restructuring. Reasonable request — any other company would have said yes. Patagonia said no. The bank blinked. Ries’ reading: this is not moral righteousness. It is organisational strength. The ability to resist external pressure and stay true to a core principle. That is what makes a company not just good but great. Also: Black Wednesday, the day of their layoffs, is still referred to by name inside the company.

 

•       The Wrong Distinction: For-Profit vs Non-Profit: Ries argues that the distinction between for-profit and non-profit is fundamentally a tax code distinction that has come to define how we think about organisations in ways that are misleading and harmful. He proposes a reframe: if profit means the maximisation of human flourishing, then the Smithsonian is very for-profit and Philip Morris is very non-profit. This reframe changes what we should demand of governance, of accountability, of what organisations are for. It is simultane

Beyond the Lean Startup: Eric Ries on Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Ones Stay Great,

“There is a pretty powerful strain in America today in which men feel some need to be violent and domineering to sort of prove their masculinity. And there’s sort of less intense but still prevalent strains that infect many other types of men.” — Jasper Craven

 

Today is Memorial Day — America’s annual celebration of its warriors and military ethic. But for Jasper Craven [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/God-Forgives-Brothers-Dont/Jasper-Craven/9781668087190], author of God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/God-Forgives-Brothers-Dont/Jasper-Craven/9781668087190], it should be a day of muted self-reflection rather than bellicose celebration. Especially in May 2026 with America involved in another ludicrous overseas war.

 

Craven’s argument is that from George Washington onwards, America has fused military manliness with a self-destructive masculine identity. Thus young men are trained at top military academies like West Point to be unthinkingly domineering and violent. But for Craven, America — a continent surrounded by oceans to the east and west and by friendly neighbours to the north and south — has no need for the unreflective militarism fetishised by its military academies and culture.

 

So what has West Point wrought? A nation of Pete Hegseths, Jasper Craven implies. Happy (ie: peaceful) Memorial Day everyone.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Military Manliness and American Identity: From Washington to Hegseth: From the Founding Fathers — most of whom were Revolutionary War veterans — America has explicitly fused military manliness with core masculine identity. Boys who want to define themselves as Americans have felt a need to be strong, to serve, to defend. The archetype has only been beefed up over time: through the steroid era and into the world of Navy SEALs and special operators. The result is a culture where men feel the need to be violent and domineering to prove their masculinity, from carrying AK-47s to protests to becoming ICE agents. The problem: the archetype has no relationship to actual national security needs.

 

•       West Point and the Civil War: A Fuse, Not a Remedy: West Point was created to produce a well-schooled officer class. What Craven argues: when you allocate massive resources to building a military, you will feel the consequences. Before the Civil War, West Point was segregated into northern and southern companies — which exacerbated tensions rather than building union. When war broke out, many West Point officers defected to the Confederacy, including Robert E. Lee, who had been superintendent. West Point officers on opposite sides then killed each other in their thousands. Many lawmakers called for West Point to be abolished. They were not heeded.

 

•       Race, Integration, and the Military’s Complex Legacy: Craven acknowledges the military’s partial role in racial integration: Truman’s executive order in 1948 desegregated the armed forces, which was a genuine milestone ahead of civilian institutions. But he is careful about what this means. Integration at the institutional level did not eliminate racism within the culture. And the same military that desegregated also produced the culture of violence, dehumanisation of the other, and misogyny and homophobia that Craven chronicles throughout the book. Partial credit is still only partial credit.

 

•       January 6th and the Politicisation of the Officer Class: In Trump’s first term, General Mattis and General Kelly and others demonstrated real courage in reining in Trump’s worst impulses. By the end of that term, they had all been replaced by loyalists. During the transition to Biden, Trump’s military cron

God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: Jasper Craven on the Damage West Point Has Done to American Boys

“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,

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