“Obituaries are about life, about the lives that people have lived. Death only figures in one sentence.” — Sam Roberts

 

This is, remarkably, episode 3,000 of Keen On America — three thousand conversations since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010. Fitting, then, that today’s guest has written nearly 1,500 obituaries for the New York Times. Sam Roberts [https://www.rizzolibookstore.com/product/are-they-dead-yet-art-obit] is a reporter on the Times’ obituaries desk and has a new book about the art of the obit entitled Are They Dead Yet? [https://www.rizzolibookstore.com/product/are-they-dead-yet-art-obit]

 

We recorded this a week before airtime, so I began by asking who’s going to die in the interim. He wasn’t sure — but noted that the Times keeps 2,000 advance obituaries ready. There are, he added, never enough. Beware, though, the Rockefeller curse. Roberts wrote David Rockefeller’s advance obituary, whereupon he learned that three other Times reporters had written Rockefeller advance obits — and all three were dead. (Rockefeller made it to 101.)

 

Borrowing from Citizen Kane, Roberts hunts for the Rosebud moment, the epiphany that defines a life. He hunts for the soul of the subject, not the résumé. Hence his cheerful paradox that obituaries are about life, whereas death only figures in one sentence. As for famous last words, he’s a skeptic — most were composed later by better writers. The real ones, he suspects, are “help,” or “get me a drink.”

 

And the obituarist’s own Rosebud moment? We have to go back to Brooklyn when he was a six-year-old boy. His father walked him to the corner to watch the Rosenberg funeral procession pass. “I want you to see history as it’s happening,” he explained. Half a century later, Roberts got David Greenglass to admit he had lied about the testimony that sent his own sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair.

 

From the Times’ Portraits of Grief after 9/11, Roberts learned the book’s deepest lesson. There are no ordinary lives. Who would you miss more — your mayor or your mailman? Or maybe your obit writer (or even your podcaster)? Sam promised that if he died before airtime, he’d call. The phone hasn’t rung. I’m still going too. On to episode 3,001.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       2,000 Obits, Never Enough. The Times keeps some 2,000 advance obituaries on file, regularly updated — and people still surprise the desk (and presumably themselves) by dying unexpectedly. Print once had a deadline or two a day; now there’s a deadline every minute. The occupational hazards are real: three Times reporters wrote advance obits of David Rockefeller and predeceased him — Roberts, the fourth, survived to see his run when Rockefeller died at 101. And the genre changes its readers: “no man who has seen his own obit is ever the same again.” Alfred Nobel, mistakenly obituarized as dynamite’s merchant of death, endowed the Nobel Prizes in response — proof that a premature obituary can be the most consequential document a man ever reads.

•       The Rosebud Method. Roberts’ organizing device comes from Citizen Kane: the Rosebud moment, the epiphany — a teacher, a meeting, an accident — that changed the trajectory of a life and made it worth recording. The model, via The Economist’s Ann Wroe, is the soul rather than the stenography: Wikipedia has the chronology; the obituary hunts the essence. Advance obits are never vetted by their subjects — facts checked, yes; the portrait, never — because an obituary is a news story, not a eulogy. And the form’s great secret is optimism: obituaries are about life. Death gets one sentence. (Famous last words, meanwhile, are mostly posthumous fiction. The real ones: “help,” or “get me a drink.”)

•       Giuliani, Trump, Ep

Are They Dead Yet? Sam Roberts on the Art of the Obit

“By operating in secrecy, they’re able to avoid or evade accountability — and, in many instances, engage in anticompetitive behavior or even fraud.” — Renée M. Jones on unicorns

 

Twelve years ago there were 39 unicorns — private companies worth a billion dollars or more. Today there are over 1,400, collectively valued above $7 trillion, with the twin beasts of Anthropic and OpenAI at the front of the herd, driving the entire American economy. A good thing, surely?

 

Not according to Renée M. Jones [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674296350], the SEC’s chief regulator of corporate finance from 2021 to 2023 and author of Untamed Unicorns: Why Startup Finance Is Broken and How to Fix It [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674296350]. The former SEC big game warden worries that this stampede of wild unicorns might be driving the entire American economy off a cliff.

 

Her problem isn’t that these private companies exist. It’s that we know almost nothing about them. That’s because of changes in the law since the Nineties that have lifted the hundred-investor cap on private funds, thereby enabling them to mushroom from under $1 trillion to $17 trillion. Add secondary markets where insiders quietly cash out, and the IPO becomes optional. And so we know almost nothing about companies like Anthropic and OpenAI with private valuations in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

 

The result is what Jones calls the founder-friendly model of Facebook, Uber or Airbnb. With super-voting shares at ten votes apiece, founders effectively choose their own bosses, thereby stripping investors of the power to discipline anyone. Think Travis Kalanick and Mark Zuckerberg. Think Theranos, WeWork and FTX.

 

Unicorns are named, of course, for their impossibility. Not so long ago, nobody could imagine a private company worth more than a billion dollars. However, with $7 trillion now on the table, Jones is concerned about the health of the American startup economy. On the brink of the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs, I fear Renée Jones might be right about the dangers of a real crash triggered by the stampede of these mythical creatures. Jurassic Park is now playing in Silicon Valley. Pass the popcorn.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The $7 Trillion Secret. The unicorn was named for its rarity: 39 existed twelve years ago. Today there are more than 1,400, worth over $7 trillion — roughly 1,100 in America, nearly 300 in China — and the biggest of them shape the economy while disclosing essentially nothing. That is Jones’ target: not the billion-dollar valuations but the secrecy. A billion-dollar private company faces neither the disclosure rules nor the governance requirements of a public company its size, which means accountability arrives only by accident — a scandal, a frustrated investor, a whistleblower calling a reporter. Everything else stays dark.

•       How the IPO Died. Startups once went public within five to seven years, for two reasons: growth capital lived in public markets, and the 500-shareholder rule forced large private companies to register — it’s reportedly why Google and Facebook held their IPOs at all. Both reasons were legislated away. NSMIA (1996) uncapped private funds, whose assets exploded from under $1 trillion to $17 trillion; the JOBS Act (2012) moved the trigger to 2,000 shareholders with employee shares exempt; and secondary markets — Forge Global, Nasdaq Private Market, EquityZen — let insiders cash out without a prospectus. The IPO became a liquidity event rather than a necessity. Only AI’s bottomless capital hunger, Jones notes, is pushing OpenAI and Anthropic toward the public markets at all.

•       Founders Choosing Their Bosses. The founder-friendly model gives startup founders super-voting shares — ten vote

Is Jurassic Park Playing in Silicon Valley? Renée Jones on the Unicorn Stampede in Startup Finance.

“There is a big chasm between defeat and surrender. Surrender is inherently a political decision.” — James M. Scott

 

Exactly eighty-one years ago, on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped its second nuclear device on Nagasaki. Three days earlier, on August 6, the Enola Gay dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima. Little Boy and Fat Man. Our nuclear Rubicon had been crossed.

 

Three days in August that changed the world. These historic 72 hours are the subject of Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324065487], by James M. Scott [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324065487], America’s foremost chronicler of the Pacific War. This new book, Scott reveals, grew out of Black Snow, his history of the firebombing of Tokyo. But whereas Black Snow was a military study, he explains, Empire of Ashes [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324065487] focuses on Truman, Hirohito and the politics of nuclear warfare. By August 1945, Scott argues, Japan was already defeated. So surrender was a political decision — one that required a weak, figurehead emperor to summon the power to save his country from an even darker apocalypse.

 

Should America regret these August days? Harry Truman certainly didn’t, Scott notes. In fact, in 1958 Truman even held a press conference in Independence, Missouri, to fire back at Hiroshima’s city council when it suggested that he should. Nor does Scott render much of a moral verdict of his own. “Nobody needs to hear James Scott in Charleston, South Carolina tell you what it is you should think,” he explains, suggesting that we can all make up our minds by reading Empire of Ashes.

 

So two bombs, somewhere between 150,000 and 246,000 civilian deaths, and no crime? That, oddly enough, might be the biggest tragedy of those three days in August 1945 that changed the world forever.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Defeat Is Not Surrender. Scott’s organizing insight: as destructive as it was, the atomic bomb was inherently a political weapon, aimed at the chasm between a nation defeated and a nation willing to say so. Surrender is a political act — and Japan’s politics ran through Hirohito, ostensibly the center of political, cultural, and spiritual life, in practice a figurehead bypassed by militarists who had consolidated power through the 1920s and ’30s under the standing threat of assassination. His first peace soundings had to be conducted incognito, for fear of his own army; not until June 1945 does he rise to the occasion. Truman, by contrast, emerges as strong and morally serious — a First World War artillery officer who inherited the Okinawa bloodbath, approved the invasion of Japan, chose what he saw as the lesser evil, and then stopped all further atomic use the moment surrender came.

•       The Firebombing Precedent. Would FDR have made the same call? “Absolutely. No doubt about it.” The moral threshold had already been crossed on March 9, 1945, when Curtis LeMay abandoned precision bombing and burned Tokyo — 105,000 men, women, and children in a single night, the most destructive conventional raid in history. The Pentagon braced for public outrage, monitoring editorials, radio, and the floors of Congress. None came; Time wrote that “properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves.” LeMay took the green light and burned 64 cities — 170 square miles — before the first atomic bomb ever fell. War Secretary Henry Stimson confessed his amazement to his diary; FDR, with every opportunity to rein it in, said nothing. When Elliott Roosevelt later claimed his father would never have dropped the bomb, Stimson publicly corrected him.

•       The Second Bomb Mattered More. Scott’s most counterintuitive argument: Nagasak

Three Deadly Days in August: James M. Scott on Truman, Hirohito & the Two Bombs That Ended the War

“Intelligence is 100 percent human. AI is a tool created by humans to distill, digest, and distribute intelligence.” — Keith Teare

 

The working class died this week — at least in Palo Alto. Delivering the eulogy in our regular That Was The Week [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/] tech summary is my co-host Keith Teare [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/]. “Humans create intelligence,” (whatever that means) the Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur tells us. And so, in our AI age of supposedly abundant intelligence, he pronounces, human knowledge “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies.”

 

Check your pockets, everyone. Silicon Valley has another freebie for you. With AI, the entrepreneur promises, intelligence is democratized. Everybody gets it. We will all have the intelligence of a Nobel laureate at our fingertips. Even Keith.

 

And so he attacks Daron Acemoglu, the Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist who has called for a “pro-worker AI.” But, for Keith — a council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose lifetime ambition was to evacuate the working class — this is “complete bullshit.” Acemoglu’s ideas, he says, are an example of the “fetishization of workers” when, in fact, we should be celebrating the end of the “working class.”

 

What Acemoglu is calling for in his pro-worker AI manifesto is more government planning for today’s transition to the AI epoch. But Keith disagrees. So I asked him three times what government should do while AI kills the working (and middle) class. “Allow it to happen,” he finally answers. “A good upheaval.”

 

Good? The former “worker” will lack jobs, wages, healthcare, housing. Even food in an America now eliminating food stamps. No matter. Let them eat intelligence.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Humans Create Intelligence. Keith’s editorial thesis distinguishes individual intelligence — where experts live, and always will — from the collective sum of everything all humans, living and dead, have ever contributed. That collective stock was once locked in encyclopedias, libraries, and universities; for the first time, AI can aggregate, distill, digest, and distribute it, at a price falling toward everyone. Knowledge, he writes, “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies” — but note the fine print: experts don’t disappear in this democratization. If anything, they get elevated: the expert reading an AI’s output about viruses understands it very differently than the rest of us.

•       The End of the Age of Heroes? Noah Smith’s much-shared essay argues that AI ends the era of the mathematical hero — and that’s fine, since most people (truck drivers, financial advisers, executive assistants) never got to be heroes anyway. Keith’s rebuttal turns on his central distinction: AI and intelligence are not the same word. There is no evidence, he argues, that AI creates new knowledge — it understands and distributes the existing stock. Innovation still takes individuals, and those individuals now start from a far higher floor, leveled up to everything already known. Heroes don’t go away; they multiply. In the world of AI, he suspects, every single teacher becomes one.

•       “What Even Is Pro-Worker AI?” The week’s main event: Daron Acemoglu — via Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion interview and an Atlantic essay, with What Happened to Liberal Democracy out next week — wants AI agencies, grant programs, and public competitions to build “pro-worker AI.” Keith’s verdict: “complete bullshit.” The middle-class “fetishization of workers” is paternalistic; the wage is a temporary power relationship between employer and employee; and the end of the working class is precisely the progressive outcome — says the council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose aspiration was not to be working c

Let Them Eat Intelligence: A Silicon Valley Eulogy for the Working Class

“Democracy didn’t fall out of the sky. It was earned. It was created, and it was made manifest through protest.” — Gloria Browne-Marshall

 

Yesterday [https://keenon.substack.com/p/the-banality-of-the-deal], Casey Michel described a United States of Oligarchy where the wealthy cosy up to dictators and destroy democracy. Today, Gloria Browne-Marshall [https://www.beacon.org/A-Protest-History-of-the-United-States-P2145.aspx] describes a parallel America. In A Protest History of the United States [https://www.beacon.org/A-Protest-History-of-the-United-States-P2145.aspx], she explores 500 years of profound protest to what Michel coins the banality of the deal. If Casey Michel described the few who own the country, then Gloria Browne-Marshall chronicles the many who made it.

 

Her thesis is that a nation born of protest has been protesting with itself ever since. So Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while owning the teenaged Sally Hemings. Democracy is protest’s child, not its parent. Rather than just falling out of the sky, she argues, American democracy was earned by protesters like her great hero, Daisy Bates, the Little Rock organizer whose mother was murdered by a white mob.

 

So where’s the protest now? “Too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” Gloria Browne-Marshall argues. Thus our Covid silos and the capitulating law firms. Her prescription for this malaise is, of course, to get out on the streets. She reminds us that the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, with its quarter of a million protesters, is coming up at the end of the month. So it’s been done before. And will be done again. The United States of protest rather than of oligarchy. That’s who we are. Sometimes, at least.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       A Nation in Protest with Itself. America was born of protest — the Declaration itself was a protest document — and has argued with itself ever since: the empire builder rolling over the rights of others on one side, liberty-and-justice-for-all on the other. Jefferson embodies the conflict: theorist of protest, author of the Declaration, slaveholder at Monticello with the teenaged Sally Hemings. And the artists matter as much as the marchers, Browne-Marshall argues, in a hand-off from Monday’s Curtis White conversation: the Depression photographs that moved a government, The Grapes of Wrath doing what no pamphlet could — art brings the humanity of the issue to the fore.

•       Democracy Didn’t Fall Out of the Sky. Asked about the d-word, Browne-Marshall answers that she expected it to be dissent. Democracy came by way of protest: the workers, the women, the marginalized earned rights nobody was volunteering to hand over. Vernon Dahmer was burned alive in his Mississippi home in 1966 — in a democracy — for trying to vote; Seneca Falls in 1848 became the Nineteenth Amendment only in 1920. The Voting Rights Act gave nobody the vote; it protected a right people were dying to use. And protest’s victories hide in plain sight: the end of mandatory retirement at 65, disabled children in mainstream classrooms — all of it protested into existence.

•       January 6 and the Meaning of Nonviolence. Is January 6 a protest? Yes, she allows — a protest with criminal consequences, like any protest that turns violent; rob a bank and call it a protest against poverty and the consequences still arrive. Nonviolence, meanwhile, is the most misunderstood word in the American vocabulary: a philosophy — Gandhi to Bayard Rustin to King — in which protesters will not strike back even when attacked. It is not a standard that applies only to Black protesters while the actual violence, historically, comes from those attacking them. January 6, with its gallows, its ransacked offices, and its hunted offici

The United States of Protest: Gloria Browne-Marshall on the Engine Room of American Democracy

“Jared Kushner is one of the most powerful American diplomats of the twenty-first century — and he has no skill set to speak of that I can see.” — Casey Michel

 

Four years ago, the muckraking journalist Casey Michel [https://us.macmillan.com/author/caseymichel] came on this show to discuss how the United States has built the greatest money-laundering scheme in history. That pre-Trump 2.0 America, he says, looks quaint. His new book, United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy [https://bookshop.org/p/books/united-states-of-oligarchy-how-america-s-wealthiest-ally-with-dictators-weaken-the-u-s-and-destroy-democracy-casey-michel/b116495950939985], describes an American casino where the Trump family has become the dealer with a perennially stacked deck.

 

The word “oligarchy” comes with 2,500 years of baggage. Aristotle, not averse to aristocracy, nonetheless warned of the rule of the few. Teddy Roosevelt preferred “plutocracy” as a way of describing the baronial rule of the late 19th century American capitalists. And, of course, it took a Roosevelt — the sickly scion of upper-crust New York — to dilute his own oligarchic caste with anti-trust law and inheritance & progressive income taxes.

 

Exhibit A in this American oligarchy is Jared Kushner, who has leveraged his father-in-law’s rotten casino to ally with dictators and destroy democracy both in America and around the world. Michel says Kushner has “no skill set to speak of” — apart, of course, from an insatiable greed for wealth and power. The banality of the deal.

 

So what to do? Michel is waiting for a 21st century Teddy Roosevelt — he names Talarico and Ossoff — who will tax and perhaps even prosecute Kushner and his fellow oligarchs. But I fear he is waiting for Godot. Teddy isn’t coming back. Nor is FDR. Don’t expect the banality of the current highly lucrative deal to end anytime soon.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Child’s Play. The anonymous shell companies and mystery donations of American Kleptocracy — dire enough in 2022 — now read as quaint. The scale has exploded (crypto, prediction markets, AI as accelerant), and so has the shamelessness: a Qatari luxury airliner gifted to a sitting president, and a $1.8 billion slush fund that will compensate January 6 rioters while granting Trump’s family, inner circle, and “associates” carte blanche from tax audits, past and future. America has had corrupt administrations — Grant, Harding, Nixon — but nothing, Michel argues, on this magnitude. Trump himself is symptom rather than cause: the culmination of trends decades in the making. “Shameless does not begin to describe it. I have to laugh — otherwise, I’m sure I’d just be crying.”

•       From Aristotle to the Trillionaire. Aristotle popularized oligarchy: rule of the few — who must also be the wealthiest. Teddy Roosevelt preferred “plutocracy,” and the Founders fought over “aristocracy”; Michel meets the 2020s where they are. The through line he found in the research: America’s anti-oligarchic champions come from inside the elite — above all TR, the sickly, bloodlet, electroshocked child of upper-crust New York who grew into the singular force against concentrated wealth: inheritance tax, progressive income tax, and a bully pulpit used without apology. Today’s benchmark: Gilded Age fortunes — Rockefeller’s $30 billion in modern terms — are pocket change beside centibillionaires and America’s first, briefly minted trillionaire.

•       Exhibit A: Jared Kushner. One of the most powerful American diplomats of the twenty-first century — Israel and Gaza, Russia and Ukraine, the Gulf — with, in Michel’s judgment, no skill set to speak of: a string of failures from 666 Fifth Avenue to the New York Observer,

The Banality of the Deal: Casey Michel on the United States of Oligarchy

“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

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