“We were still trying to change the world from the inside… and the empire struck back.” — Claire Stapleton on the Google Walkout

 

Earlier this week, the New York Times published an op-ed [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/opinion/artificial-intelligence-data-politics.html] on how to fight back against big tech which included a reading list from previous guests on the show like Karen Hao, Yanis Varoufakis and Astra Taylor. Not included was Claire Stapleton [https://bookshop.org/p/books/don-t-be-evil-bad-bosses-fake-promises-and-my-escape-from-big-tech-claire-stapleton/0a4a22ef13db45df]’s Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech [https://bookshop.org/p/books/don-t-be-evil-bad-bosses-fake-promises-and-my-escape-from-big-tech-claire-stapleton/0a4a22ef13db45df]. Partly, I assume, because this anti-Google jeremiad only came out yesterday.

 

An idealistic English major straight out of college, Stapleton joined Google in 2007, when few questioned Silicon Valley’s utopian language. Her first job was in Google’s ministry of truth, an internal communications department designed, as she now admits, to get everybody high on the mission. And that mission was to train Googlers into becoming obedient corporate cogs by neither blaming the system nor questioning authority.

 

While not exactly Winston Smith, she nonetheless rose in the bureaucracy. Rachel Whetstone (Steve Hilton’s wife) promoted Stapleton to the CEO’s communications team where, as the archivist of the sayings of the company’s two big brothers (Larry & Sergey), she became known as the “Bard” of Google. As an obedient corporate cog, she was both the message and the messenger. Until she wasn’t.

 

Like Orwell’s Smith, Google’s Claire Stapleton eventually turned her ministry of truth language on the ministry itself. In response to the $90 million exit package of a senior Google exec accused of sexual misconduct, she co-organized the Google Walkout of 20,000 employees. Two months later, her role was hollowed out. Then she lost her job. Not quite Room 101. No rats. But not a lot of fun.

 

So is Google evil? Stapleton doesn’t know. But the former Bard of Google acknowledges that Larry & Sergey’s promises of making the world a better place are no longer credible. Today, idealistic young college grads want to fight back against Silicon Valley. Today, nobody outside the internal communications department of Google, OpenAI or Anthropic believes that technology is making the world a better place. Like Claire Stapleton, we all now want to escape from big tech.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Getting High on the Mission. Google in 2007 wasn’t selling a job; it was selling a worldview — and Stapleton’s department, internal communications, existed to pump the mission, the values, and the founders’ folksy TGIF theater into a workforce growing by tens of thousands. The perks were the philosophy made visible: laundry, haircuts, dentists, masseurs — “letting Google be your housewife.” The indoctrination had a curriculum, too: Fred Kofman’s “radical accountability” training taught new hires to be players, not victims — which sounds empowering until you notice, as Stapleton did in a G-chat to her brother, that it means never blaming the system: “today I learned that if my team is dysfunctional, it’s my fault.”

•       The Bard of Google. Rachel Whetstone — ex-London, politically shrewd, now married to California’s Republican gubernatorial nominee — drafted Stapleton onto Larry Page’s communications when Page retook the CEO job, making her the archivist of the founder’s vision (until, in a twist she still can’t quite believe, he literally lost his voice). From there: Creative Lab, “the alchemist lab of Google’s branding,” wrapped in change-the-world gobbled

Is Google Evil? Claire Stapleton on Bad Bosses, Bullshit Jobs, and Her Great Escape from Big Tech

“Uncertainty is what tells you that science is reliable. It’s the people who are absolutely certain that you have to watch out for.” — Stuart Firestein

 

The physician-scientist Tony Fauci is having a rough week. His newly revealed diary has even disappointed traditional allies at The Atlantic and The New Yorker who see the hitherto liberal saint of the pandemic as both too intimate with power and too certain of his scientific assumptions.

 

Fauci’s fellow American scientist, Stuart Firestein [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/stuart-firestein/it-could-be-otherwise/9781541606739/], is having a better week. The Columbia neurobiologist has a new book out today, It Could Be Otherwise [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/stuart-firestein/it-could-be-otherwise/9781541606739/], which is a manifesto against scientific certainty. It’s the certain ones you have to watch out for, Firestein warns about those scientists intoxicated with the certainty of their own doctrines.

 

Science, Firestein argues, requires a blend of hubris and humility. So the great Isaac Newton needed real chutzpah to claim to understand the mind of the creator with only a few equations. The expert is, by definition, riddled by doubt. They should be the most uncertain person in the room. Thus for Firestein, Charles Darwin is a greater scientist than Albert Einstein because Darwin’s theory of life is premised on randomness.

 

So will contemporary science appear quaintly medieval in 500 years? Will 26th century man think of Darwin and Einstein like we moderns patronize Aristotle? Probably, Firestein suggests. In his Columbia course on ignorance, he tells his students that getting an A requires getting an F. We should all be so ignorant.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Watch Out for the Certain Ones. Firestein won’t defend Fauci’s certainties, but he explains them: science requires a blend of hubris and humility — without some hubris, nobody would attempt a discipline that is mostly failure, mostly time spent in the dark. What corrupts the blend is a culture that demands the opposite of humility: exams with one right answer instead of ranked possibilities, journalists who need a confident quote, a public that has made science the theology of the twenty-first century. The result is Firestein’s paradox of expertise: the real expert is the most uncertain person in the room, because expertise means seeing the holes, the missing data, the failures. Certainty grows with distance from knowledge.

•       True Enough. Truth gets a small t only. Borrowing from the Harvard philosopher Catherine Elgin, Firestein describes science as moving from one provisional truth to the next — “true enough,” always improving, never final. His favorite proof is John Maddox, Nature’s longest-serving editor, asked how many of the journal’s published papers would prove wrong: “Oh, that’s easy. All of them.” Not wrong-wrong — unsettled science is not unsound science; it is reliable and it will get better. In science, revision is a victory, which is why Firestein sincerely hopes that in five hundred years our best knowledge will look as quaint as medieval astronomy — which, he notes, was accurate enough for people who weren’t launching satellites.

•       Two Kinds of Uncertainty. Epistemic uncertainty is what we don’t know yet; ontological uncertainty is the irreducible complexity of the universe itself — so complicated it might as well be random. Every answer in the lab raises ten better questions, which is how the more we know, the less we know. And yet we thrive amid the not-knowing: lasers, GPS, and randomized drug trials are all built on uncertainty. Ninety percent of hypertension diagnoses are idiopathic — no known cause — while nine different families of medicine treat it successful

The Only Certainty Is Uncertainty: Stuart Firestein on Science in the Age of Tony Fauci

“Misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win.” — Curtis White’s motto for resistance

 

How to say no to fascism? Curtis White [https://mhpbooks.com/books/on-resistance], the literary thinker dubbed “the splendidly cranky utopian,” has published what he calls a “manifesto” of “resistance.” On Resistance [https://mhpbooks.com/books/on-resistance], the 75-year-old White told me, is his last work of non-fiction. He still has worlds to invent, novels to write. Enough with the manifestos.

 

But don’t expect a program. On Resistance is more of an anti-manifesto. “That’s not for me to say,” White responds when asked what, exactly, we’re supposed to do to resist fascism. His resistance is cultural. It’s an attitude. Borrowing from Ted Gioia’s subversive history of music, White likes the idea of “psychic treason.” Its patron saints are the first dropouts, romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge who rejected the military, clergy and family to write poetry in the countryside. But On Resistance isn’t simply sixties nostalgia. White, a veteran of Berkeley and the Haight, prefers the Nietzschean imperative to forget the past and move on to the next joyful deed.

 

So the only good manifesto is the anti-manifesto. If you want to say no to fascism, become a cranky utopian. Or at least pick up On Resistance.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Psychic Treason. White’s resistance is not conventionally political — Trump appears once or twice, party politics not at all. Borrowing “psychic treason” from Ted Gioia’s Music: A Subversive History, he argues that the arts are subversive by nature: sometimes formally, sometimes by allying with social movements. His founding example is the Romantics, the first dropouts — Wordsworth and Coleridge refusing the military, the clergy, and the family estate to write poetry in the countryside, declaring cultural war once the church was out of the way. The treason White wants is the one the arts commit constantly, whether or not anyone calls it politics.

•       Not Nostalgia — Nietzsche. The sixties made White: Berkeley in high school, San Francisco after, and the formative discovery that his country “had lied to me” and was indifferent to whether he lived or died. But On Resistance opens with the confession “I am living in a world that no longer exists” — and refuses to make anyone else live there. One chapter is bluntly titled “Forget The Beatles.” His position is Nietzschean: move on to the next joyful deed. And the rot, he insists, didn’t start with Trump but with Reagan — the decades-long withdrawal of public money from public goods, education above all.

•       The Three False Resistances. The book’s first half is ideology critique: our culture says resistance is unnecessary because it has already been provided — by philanthropy, virtuous corporations, and liberalism. White’s exhibits: Steve Jobs Buddha-branding the counterculture to sell machines to people who thought they were subverting something; the “big green” foundations (via Mark Dowie) taking over grassroots fights and defanging them; the Gates Foundation vaccinating children against polio downwind of a polluter it was invested in. Philanthropy, he argues, self-limits to protect the source of its own wealth. Patagonia may be the quiet exception that proves the rule.

•       Dropping Out, Together. White’s alternative is dropping out — plural: doing something else, and doing it with other people. The organic farms and farmers markets that have created communal well-being in most American cities; FC2, the author-run press he co-founded with Ronald Sukenick, past its fiftieth anniversary; the thriving-but-invisible independent presses — Graywolf, Coffee House, Rochester’s Open Letter — for which he’s now plotting a group Substack.

How to Say No to Fascism: Curtis White’s Anti-Manifesto of Resistance

“The human part is 99 percent. The AI part is maybe 1 percent — even if 100 percent of the manuscript was dumped onto the page by AI.” — Keith Teare on writing with AI

 

What is “real” authorship in our AI age? For That Was The Week [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/] publisher Keith Teare [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/], all authorship, even the most AI-enabled, is real. It’s the cave-dwelling Luddites who are the sloppy ones. For Keith, true creativity, in our age of Claude and Gemini, almost requires the use of AI.

 

A couple of weeks ago Keith confessed, or perhaps boasted, that he is writing an AI-assisted book entitled Who Owns Intelligence. This week, publishing discovered what happens when others play the same game without public acknowledgement. So we have the case [https://www.wsj.com/business/media/the-red-hot-book-at-the-center-of-an-ai-mystery-201c4665] of the “red-hot” debut novel, fought over by fourteen publishers, dropped overnight when the agent found AI in the mix.

 

“It’s a fantastic book,” the book’s agent acknowledged, before firing its less than transparent author. Which, for Keith, is precisely the scandal.

 

His position, argued in this week’s editorial “AI Detected,” is pretty absolute. Nothing is written by AI, Keith argues, because AI has no will. It doesn’t produce a single word unless asked. The human part is 99 percent, he says, even when 100 percent of the manuscript is spat out by the machine. So the real sin isn’t using AI but not acknowledging its use. So, on Who Owns Intelligence, Keith makes it crystal clear that “AI was heavily used in the writing of this book.”

 

I’m not so sure. Amazon is now infested [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html] with AI slop that requires no authorship. Besides, Keith clearly has no love of reading books. He admits to reading only a single volume in the last couple of years. And he’s still smarting from being, in his mind at least, ripped off by the publishing industry for his last published book some 40 years ago. He no longer needs to read books, he pronounces, because his world-view is already set. For a man who thinks he knows everything, AI isn’t scary. Maybe we should rename him Claude.

 

Postscript. Full Keith-style disclosure: these shownotes were produced with the help of Anthropic. When I fed Claude my draft, it responded: “‘Maybe we should rename him Claude’ is a closer I’m contractually obliged to enjoy.” Nothing, as Keith says, is written by AI. Although some algorithms seem to have cheeky opinions of their own. Maybe Anthropic should rename it Keith.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Nothing Is Written by AI. Keith’s absolutism starts from the machine’s lack of will: AI won’t produce a word unless a human asks. His Who Owns Intelligence — fifteen chapters, arguments, and references — was structured in ninety minutes from years of thinking; the AI produced a manuscript he then shaped, like a color grader working sliders in Photoshop. The human part is 99 percent even when the machine types every word. And authorship was never solitary anyway: Plato’s contemporaries thought writing itself degraded ideas, and no publisher will touch a book that hasn’t passed through an editor and a subeditor. If editing doesn’t change authorship, Keith asks, why would AI?

•       Transparency, Not Technology. The week’s cautionary tale: a debut novel fought over by fourteen publishers, dropped when the agent discovered AI — while conceding, in the same breath, “it’s a fantastic book.” For Keith the scandal is concealment, not composition: own the tool, as he now does with a strapline under his byline. The detection regime, meanwhile, is collapsing on its own inaccuracy — unive

Who’s Afraid of the AI-Enabled Author? On “Real” Creativity & Cheating in Our Age of AI Slop

“Not everybody needs therapy. I’m a therapist and I’ll tell you first.” — Amy Morin

 

Is an epidemic of mental weakness sweeping America? Readers of the Wall Street Journal certainly might think so, given a couple of recent articles. In one, it reports on burnt-out singles who are using spreadsheets to evaluate their dates. In the other, young adults are taking their phones to social events and letting AI do their talking. Sad. So I invited Ms Mental Strength herself, Amy Morin [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/789708/the-mental-strength-playbook-by-amy-morin/] — host of the Mentally Stronger podcast and author of The Mental Strength Playbook [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/789708/the-mental-strength-playbook-by-amy-morin/] — to ask what’s happened to American self-confidence in our AI age.

 

Morin sees it daily in her own therapy office with patients relying on ChatGPT to set boundaries with their mothers-in-law. In a world of information overload, she argues, we’ve come to believe there must be a medical solution to all our complexities — forgetting that relationships are an art, not a science, and that conflict and awkward silences are features of human life rather than bugs.

 

So the dinner-party guests who sneak off with their pocket supercomputers to the bathroom to ask ChatGPT for five “interesting” questions come back with canned questions that make them sound even less interesting. In contrast, Morin argues, real social confidence is built by taking risks.

 

And it’s no longer a risk, she suggests, to go to a therapist. It’s become the equivalent of slinking into the bathroom with your phone to prompt conversation. Yes, this therapist worries we live in an overly therapeutic culture. Anxiety is normal, Morin says. But ADHD diagnoses and even autism have become a kind of moral passport in America. It’s almost as if people should be anxious if they’re not anxious.

 

Her prescription is free. Not even the cost of a therapy session. Ask yourself, at the end of every day, what did I do today to grow mentally stronger? It’s like going to the gym. Build up your mental strength. Become self-reliant. The standard American fix. That will kick your therapy habit. That will end the epidemic of mental weakness now engulfing the United States.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       AI Is Doing Our Talking. The Wall Street Journal reports singles running spreadsheets on their dates and young adults letting AI script their conversations in person — and Morin sees the same thing in her therapy office, where clients ask ChatGPT how to set boundaries with their in-laws. The root, she argues, is information overload: because we can look up how to fix a sink, we assume there’s a scientific way to reject a suitor or confront a friend. But relationships are an art, not a science. There is supposed to be tension; conflict isn’t horrible; real human conversations — with questions, uncertainty, and lulls — are essential. What could be more important than managing your own relationships yourself?

•       Avoidance Never Builds Confidence. The dinner-party guest who hides in the bathroom asking ChatGPT for five interesting questions comes out asking canned questions and listening to no one — panicking about what was next on the list. Relying on technology for what makes us insecure, Morin argues, is avoidance dressed as help: skills we don’t practice diminish, so the app makes us worse, not better. Nor is the polished online persona sustainable — like fake photos on a dating profile, the eloquence collapses at the second coffee. Connection comes from vulnerability, not perfection: “I really struggle with X” bonds people; the perfect question does not.

•       Thirteen Things, Fifty Million Readers. Morin’s authority is autobi

No, Not Everybody Needs a Therapist: Amy Morin on America's Epidemic of Mental Weakness

“Evil is reductive. But the impact of the business is evil, even if the intent isn’t.” — Andy Hunter on Amazon

 

Network effects transformed Amazon from a startup internet bookshop into today’s $2.44 trillion everything store. The more ubiquitous its affiliate program became, the more powerful Amazon became. But, in today’s digital economy, winner-take-all might not be winner-always-take-all. These network effects, you see, can be subverted. They might even be used as weapons against a seemingly dominant player like Amazon.

 

Take, for example, Bookshop.org [https://bookshop.org/]. Founded by Andy Hunter [https://bookshop.org/] in 2020, this online bookstore has aggregated 3,000 independent bookstores, these affiliates contributing to a counter-Amazon network that already does 2% of Amazon’s book business and will, within the next thirty days, pass $50 million distributed to local bookstores.

 

When Hunter originally pitched the idea to Silicon Valley investors, they asked him if he could beat Amazon on price or speed. No. Then you don’t have a chance, they told him, because Americans only care about price and speed. But they were wrong. Since Bookshop.org launched in 2020, American bookstores have grown from 1,900 to 3,300, with 90% of these independents joining Bookshop.org and 98% of booksellers polling the company as a positive force. His is a winner-share-all marketplace where stores keep the full profit of their own sales, while a $4.5 million annual profit pool flows to any real brick-and-mortar ABA bookstore. Nobody gets rich, Hunter says, but everybody does okay.

 

Hunter suspects that if Bookshop.org grows to take 5% of Amazon’s book market, things might turn nasty. Could Amazon just buy Bookshop.org, I asked. No, Hunter responded, all his investors signed a clause barring a sale to any major US retailer. So even if I got hit by an Amazon delivery truck, he explained, his mission couldn’t be undone.

 

So is Amazon evil? Not exactly evil, he explains, since evil requires malignant intent. But Amazon is more like fishermen who overfish until the stock collapses and wrecks their ecosystem beyond repair. That classic tragedy of the commons. Hence Bookshop.org’s anti-Prime campaigns, which used Amazon’s “discount” holiday as a way of generating an extra $1.2 million for its affiliate bookstores.

 

Hunter wants to replace Amazon’s seemingly infinite scalability with a more moral kind of scale. He imagines a Bookshop.org for everything from hardware stores and art supplies to bikes and toys. Silicon Valley’s conventional winner-take-all economics would be replaced by a Robin Hood style winner-share-all model. Except for our tech bro friends, I suspect we would all be wealthier for it.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       “Americans Only Care About Price and Speed.” That was the verdict of a 2019 conference call with twenty Silicon Valley angel investors: if Bookshop couldn’t beat Amazon on price or speed, it had no chance. Hunter’s counter-pitch: enough people care about their values when they shop — if supporting a local bookstore is made just as easy. His sharpest insight was the affiliate economy: by 2019 the internet had become one giant funnel pushing every reader toward Amazon, with the New York Times, NPR, BuzzFeed, and celebrity book clubs all earning Amazon kickbacks on their book coverage. Bookshop’s universal link gave them an alternative that pays local bookstores instead. Nine months of rejection later, he had cobbled together $750,000 — with the publisher Morgan Entrekin introducing five of the original seven investors.

•       Winner-Share-All. Bookshop is a marketplace, like Etsy: over 3,000 bookstores plus affiliates from Literary Hub to The Atlantic to Dakota Johnson’s book club. Stores keep the full profit on their own s

The Robin Hood of the Book Biz: How Andy Hunter's Bookshop.org Is Standing Up to Amazon.

Should the American Pope debate the American president about good and evil? The shameless Trump, one suspects, would relish a noisy cage match with a rival American celebrity. But Leo XIV has quietly declined the invitation — a refusal that the Catholic scholar Jack Hanson [https://harpers.org/] insists is neither cowardice nor convenience. Rather, as Hanson argues in this month’s Harper’s cover story, “Radical Reformation,” [https://harpers.org/] it’s because the church has become the last global institution able to provide a coherent moral compass for our rootless times.

 

The great irony, Hanson notes, is that the church was the first victim of the legitimacy conflagration now engulfing every other institution. His history begins in 1870, when Rome lost the Papal States and, for the first time in a millennium, had no earthly kingdom to defend. Ever since, the church has been reorienting itself — lately, against political, economic and military power.

 

That opposition to worldly power was always a strand within the apostolic tradition, Hanson reminds us. Thus the Gospel’s “antinomian communists” who stayed behind in plague cities, Thomas More’s attack on private property, the 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day, liberation theology. What’s new is that the Vatican itself has embraced this political tradition of questioning Caesar.

 

Then came 9/11. In the war on terror, Hanson argues, the secular West redefined its enemy not as a rival religion but as religion itself — and the church stopped being Western civilization’s moral crown jewel. John Paul II’s opposition to the Iraq War was a preview. Leo XIV’s 40,000-word encyclical on AI — Magnifica Humanitas, complete with an apology for the church’s role in slavery — is a more mature realization of this radical reformation.

 

No wonder, then, that Leo has no interest in a cage match with Trump. “A direct debate with a president who’s going to be out of office in a couple of years isn’t in his interest. It’s too small a task,” Hanson explains. As the latest in a very long line of God’s representatives on earth, Leo is playing the long game. He can afford to wait out a noisy Caesar or two.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Last Moral Voice. Institutional legitimacy — of churches, states, the organs of governance and community — is in free fall, and the great historical irony, Hanson argues, is that the Catholic Church was the first institution to face that crisis. When Rome lost the Papal States in 1870, it lost a thousand years of political centrality and has been reorienting itself ever since. Over the last twenty years, the church has ceased to see the West as its spiritual home and reconfigured itself as a genuinely global institution — positioned, almost paradoxically, against power as such. Which is how the paragon of institutional crisis has returned as maybe the last moral voice on the global stage.

•       The Radical Tradition Was Always There. The subversive strain Hanson traces runs from the Gospel itself — the early Christians as “antinomian communists” who held everything in common and stayed behind in plague cities — through Thomas More’s attack on the enclosures (the first great critique of private property in Western history), Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, and Latin American liberation theology. Hanson doesn’t flinch from the two Thomas Mores problem — the property radical was also a persecutor of heretics — because the church is full of sinners; you wouldn’t need one otherwise. What’s new is that the Vatican itself now orients toward the radical tradition rather than serving as the avatar of institutional power.

•       9/11 Drove the Wedge. For most of the twentieth century the secular West treated the church as a civilizational feather in its

Should the American Pope Debate the American President? Jack Hanson on the Radical Reformation of the Catholic Church

“The statesman is an educator who leads through language — who gives a people the language they need to think about themselves.” — Steven B. Smith on what makes a statesman

 

Was Odysseus a statesman? The Yale political philosopher Steven B. Smith [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300281743/on-statesmanship/] — who, by the way, can’t beg, steal or borrow a ticket to Christopher Nolan’s cinematic epic — offers a cautious yes. While Odysseus wasn’t exactly a founder of states, he was, to borrow one of Homer’s favorite words, “polytropos” — which translates as many-sided, a master of the political adaptability that Machiavelli demanded of his Prince.

 

In his forthcoming On Statesmanship [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300281743/on-statesmanship/], Smith distinguishes the true statesman from the mere leader. All 195 states in the world have leaders, he says, almost none are blessed with statesmen. A genuine statesman, he explains, is an educator who leads his fellow citizens through language. So Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address gave Americans new words to think about themselves. Just like de Gaulle’s “certain idea of France” and Churchill’s uncompromisingly defiant language in 1940.

 

For statesmen, timing is everything. “Fortune is a woman,” Machiavelli advised his Prince, so she should be mastered adventurously. Many are called, few are chosen. But then they are unchosen. That same unbowed Churchill spent a decade in the political wilderness before 1940, then got booted out of office at the end of the war. Hegel called such figures world-historical individuals — used by history, then cruelly discarded. Ironically, it’s “great” men of history like Odysseus and Churchill who are most vulnerable to its female fortune.

 

On Statesmanship is equally clear about who doesn’t qualify for this exclusive club. Smith argues that Lenin, Hitler, and Napoleon might have founded states, but weren’t statesmen because they had no respect for the rule of law. Nor is the club purely Western, white, or male. Mandela, Havel, Gandhi, and MLK all qualify as “statesmen without states.” Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew makes the cut as a constitutionalist if not a democrat. Fortune might be a woman, but Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi mastered fate with more adventure than their male colleagues.

 

Political leadership these days, Smith says, is monopolized by either technocrats or demagogues. In fact, Smith can only name one true contemporary statesman — Volodymyr Zelensky who, he says, is “doing a stirring imitation of Winston Churchill.” Otherwise the world is drifting into Thucydides’ trap where the strong do what they like and the weak suffer what they must. Thus our longing for many-sided leaders like Odysseus. Which is why Nolan’s blockbuster is such a hit that Steven Smith has yet to see it.

 

One small footnote to this conversation. Afterwards, Smith sent me a note expressing a correction of how he described Obama:

 

“Reflecting back on the conversation, I was embarrassed about what I said about Obama lacking ‘civil courage.’ That is not exactly what I meant. Probably a better formulation would be to say that he lacked what Plato called ‘thymos,’ a kind of public-spirited anger. His rationality and ‘coolness’ — in many ways admirable traits — gave the impression that he was too aloof from the rough-and-tumble of politics. Anger and indignation when judiciously employed, as my former student Amia Srinivasan has argued, remain formidable tools in the statesman’s tool kit.”

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       A Leader Is Not a Statesman. There are 195 states in the world and every one has a leader; almost none has a statesman. The concept is an ideal of what leadership aspires to be, running from Plato’s Politikos and the philosopher-king to the

Why Volodymyr Zelensky Is the World’s Only Living Statesman: Steven B. Smith on the Leadership America Lacks

“It’s too easy to look back at sciences of the past and say they were all fools. The exact same thing is gonna happen two hundred years from now when people look back at us.” — Paul Stob on the lessons of phrenology

 

Step right up. Over the road from P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in 19th century New York stood the city’s more metaphorical circus — the Phrenological Cabinet, where admission was free and you could hold a murderer’s skull in your hand. After the Barnum museum, it was the second most popular show in town. Although back then phrenology — the supposed science of skull size and head bumps — wasn’t seen as the province of tricksters or clowns.

 

So who created this 19th century American obsession with skulls, who created the phrenology phenomenon? In his new book, Empire of Skulls [https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/empire-of-skulls/], the Vanderbilt scholar Paul Stob [https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/empire-of-skulls/] tells the phrenology story through the wealthy Fowler family — Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte — who financed and promoted this American circus. It was the Fowlers, Stob explains, who shaped phrenology into the intellectual glue of 19th century American progress and convinced reformers like Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of its social value.

 

The appeal was self-improvement, that most American ideal. In Europe, your skull was your fate; in Fowler’s America, you could supposedly reshape your brain like a bicep in order to grow new bumps. A gym for skulls. And, in P.T. Barnum fashion, it toured, bringing replica skull collections to the utopian communes of mid 19th century America. And in good (or bad) American fashion, this bunk often had a darker subtext with skulls pilfered from native burial mounds and, inevitably, a slaveholding phrenologist wing.

 

Not everyone bought a ticket. Mark Twain visited Lorenzo Fowler’s London depot incognito and was told his skull shape indicated an absence of humor. Three months later, he reappeared, this time as Twain, and got the reverse prognosis. But what finally killed phrenology wasn’t Twain but the hitherto unparalleled bloodshed of the Civil War. Not even the Fowlers could glean much positive from the mountains of actual skulls at Gettysburg or Antietam. The circus had ended. Now it’s the Fowlers who are the freaks. We gawk at them rather than their skulls. Step right up. The show must go on.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Intellectual Glue of American Reform. From the 1830s to the 1860s — the era of reform — practically every movement to improve the young republic was led by believers in phrenology: abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, prison and education reform. Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, Stanton, and Mott were all sympathetic; Orson Fowler barnstormed Massachusetts with his Amherst friend Henry Ward Beecher, who swore by phrenology for the rest of his life; John Brown Jr. worked at the Fowlers’ Phrenological Cabinet until Bleeding Kansas called him west. The reason was one word: improvement. Even the enslaved, the phrenologists argued, must be freed — because every human being deserves the chance to improve.

•       Curl Your Brain Like a Bicep. European phrenology said your skull was your fate. The Fowlers Americanized it: exercise a mental faculty, they taught, and the brain deposits new gray matter that literally pushes out the skull — self-improvement you could measure with calipers. Parents brought children for readings, returned years later, and found the head had grown just as prescribed: to the Fowlers, concrete proof. The ideal male head measured twenty-three inches around, the female twenty-two — women started in a different place, but nothing said they couldn’t climb. And in 1843’s Hereditary Descent,

An American Circus of Skulls: Paul Stob on Phrenology, the P.T. Barnum of Pseudosciences

“There is the burden of being homeless and the burden of being judged for it.” — Saumya Roy on poverty in America

 

How does the world look at America in the MAGA age? This is our third conversation drawn from How We See It [https://www.thedial.world/how-we-see-it], a collection of essays about America from the excellent new publication The Dial [https://www.thedial.world/]. In the first, The Dial’s Paris-based editor Madeleine Schwartz [https://keenon.substack.com/p/the-united-states-of-oddity] offered a very French version about the oddities of Trump’s America. In the second, the Turkish novelist and commentator Kaya Genç [https://keenon.substack.com/p/from-istanbul-with-love] gave us his view from Istanbul. Today, we have a take on America from the Indian-born Saumya Roy [https://www.aljazeera.com/author/saumya-roy], Al Jazeera’s San Francisco correspondent and the author of Castaway Mountain [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678938/castaway-mountain-by-saumya-roy/], a book about the wastepickers of her hometown Mumbai.

 

Saumya Roy’s inside-out America is the one glimpsed from the back of a San Francisco cab, whose Indian driver told her he’d walked here from Mumbai. In her Dial essay, Roy compares the poverty of her hometown, Mumbai — the subject of Castaway Mountain — with the homelessness outside that San Francisco cab. The comparison isn’t quite what you’d expect. Mumbai’s poverty is vaster and more dehumanizing — a hundred thousand street people against San Francisco’s eight thousand. But in Mumbai Roy finds a social kind of poverty, whereas in San Francisco it’s atomized and isolating. In the land of personal responsibility, she reports, there’s a double burden of being on the street: being homeless, and being judged for it. Some of the street people Roy meets even shower at a gym each Christmas so their families won’t know their predicament.

 

And yet Roy still recognizes the American dream. She reports that it often burns brighter in a Mumbai slum — where a young gig worker told her he wants to be “the Elon Musk of India” — than it does in America itself. That dream can be real, she says, just as it can be cracked. From the back of her San Francisco cab, Saumya Roy sees both Americas.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       “I Walked from Mumbai to the US.” A cab driver’s five-word answer contains the whole story. In the popular imagination, Indian America is the America of tech CEOs and startup founders; beneath it are millions — many undocumented — who chased the same dream, work small jobs, and were left behind by the wave. San Francisco, Roy observes, is a boom and bust town — dot-com, social media, now AI — and the American dream is a wave: catch it and you make an amazing life; miss it and you may end up sleeping in the subway car of the world’s richest city. The dream, she says, can be fulfilled — and the dream can be cracked.

•       The Double Burden. Mumbai’s poverty is vaster and more dehumanizing than anything in America — children dying of tuberculosis in their teens, perhaps 100,000 people on the street against San Francisco’s eight thousand. But it is social: even at a distance you see cooking smells, cradles, families living together on the sidewalk. American homelessness struck Roy as profoundly isolated — everything owned in a shopping cart, riding the train aimlessly because no one is waiting anywhere. And the ideology of personal responsibility cuts both ways: if success is earned, failure must be deserved. Hence the double burden — being homeless, and being judged for it — and the people who shower at a gym each Christmas so their families won’t learn where they live.

•       What Is Growth For? The AI boom is minting $250 million research sala

How to Walk from Mumbai to San Francisco: Saumya Roy Navigates the Cracks in the American Dream

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