“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

“It’s a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” — Keith Teare on the book he wrote with AI in a week

 

Welcome to episode 2984 of the show. A week is certainly an age in AI time. Since last week’s “Who Owns Intelligence” show, That Was The Week [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/] publisher Keith Teare has used AI to write an entire book entitled, surprise surprise, Who Owns Intelligence. No wonder, as Keith’s editorial [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/] this week puts it, AI has its enemies.

 

These enemies, Keith insists — riffing off Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies — are mostly “good people.” They are the authors, workers, and others caught in the headlights of epochal technological change. He claims to have seen the pattern before. When he opened the world’s first Internet cafe in 1994, the BBC only wanted to ask him about online porn. But some enemies are less well meaning than others. Congress is considering a kill switch bill — let’s call it the Kill Bill — which is backed by the frontier companies like Anthropic and OpenAI cynically seeking to set their current market dominance in stone.

 

So might the answer be Chinese style “open source” AI as requested this week in an open letter by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang? Keith’s answer is deliciously ironic. Denied walls of NVIDIA GPUs, Chinese labs learned to train cheaply by inference — distilling American frontier models through their own public interfaces. So Huang’s support for open source AI might end up shooting NVIDIA in their most sensitive parts — their chips.

 

And what about the state — can it protect all those “good people” from the oncoming AI locomotive of history? No. Not according to Keith, at least. State regulators like Lina Khan treat consumers as children, Keith (himself the parent of three boys) says. Besides, government simply can’t keep up with the speed of technological change. So, for example, when OpenAI’s models hacked Hugging Face in a lab test this week, the company caught, stopped, and reported it faster than any regulator could. As for inequality, the answer isn’t nationalization but ownership on the model of Keith’s Norway-style human wealth fund. For more, read his new book Who Owns Intelligence.

 

We ended on an uncharacteristically French post-structuralist note. My interview of the week was Emily Eakin [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317335/the-frenchmen-by-emily-eakin/], author of The Frenchmen, her very personal history of French theorists like Michel Foucault and the two Jacques, Derrida & Lacan. It was Foucault, who — at the end of his 1966 book The Order of Things — predicted that man would be erased, AI style, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. But Keith isn’t in this bleak Foucaultian camp. His book, written with AI in under a week, he says, is a realization of his individual self, not an alienation from it.

 

The end or beginning of man? Maybe I got it wrong earlier. Welcome to episode 1984 of the show.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       A Book in a Week. Inspired by last week’s conversation, Keith used AI to write Who Owns Intelligence in seven days — the case for a “human wealth fund” seeded by the AI companies’ own stock, global on day one and non-governmental, with Norway and Alaska as partial precedents. AI, he insists, is a tool, not an author: “AI would never have been able to start, never mind finish a book without me.” The detection farce cuts his way — Substack’s new AI detector rated his 100% human editorial as 100% AI, and universities are quietly canceling their AI-detection contracts because the tools simply don’t work.

•       The Kill Bill and the Ladder-Kickers. Congress is considering a bill that w

Kill Bill or Kill Keith? Why Using AI to Author Books Might Not Be in the Interest of Man

What has made this moment feel different is not the anxiety about incivility, which has always been there, but rather the performance of it. It’s relentless.” — Molly Brady on incivility in the age of the smartphone

 

Whatever happened to the American front porch? Builders killed it to save money, says the Harvard law professor Molly Brady [https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262060431/america-unfinished/] — and with this death went one of the key stages on which Americans have practiced the art of being neighbors over the last 250 years.

 

Brady is a contributor to America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance [https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262060431/america-unfinished/], a new volume of 62 essays from the Harvard Law School faculty edited by Alexandra Natapoff [https://keenon.substack.com/p/is-america-unfinished-or-just-getting]. Brady’s subject is the land, real-estate and local government law determining neighborliness. Thus her interest in front porches.

 

Brady grew up in Utica, New York — on the old Erie Canal — a Rust Belt town whose fracking fights, abandoned housing, and urban renewal steered her toward property law. Utica is also, despite its red politics, a place well versed in the art of neighborliness — with the town warmly welcoming recent Bosnian and Iraqi refugees.

 

Incivility isn’t new, Brady says. What’s changed, she argues, is its performative virality. With a phone in every pocket, we can now watch our fellow “citizens” behaving badly. Meanwhile the physical infrastructure of community — the front porches and corner stores — has been zoned, sprawled, and value-engineered away. Analogue porches have been replaced by digital chatrooms.

 

Brady’s remedy is unfashionably local. On Zoom or in person, she advises, show up at your local planning meetings. Brady even requires her Harvard students to attend at least one local meeting so as to demystify the real work of governance.

 

The republic, as Ben Franklin so famously warned, is ours if we can keep it. Keeping it, Molly Brady suggests, may require in-person attendance on a Wednesday night at your local planning commission. And it might also require hanging out on your porch. If the builders ever give them back to us.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Performance of Incivility. Americans have always fretted about incivility — the republic itself was born out of Europe’s religious civil wars. What has changed, Brady argues, is technology. When difference was mediated through traditional publishers, you had to grapple with the people in your physical world: the workplace, the water cooler, the town meeting. Now everyone carries a phone on which fellow citizens can be found behaving horribly at any given moment. It is not the presence of incivility that makes this moment feel different — it is the relentless performance of it.

•       The Death of the Porch. Brady writes in the tradition of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, updated for the post-smartphone age: suburbanization, the loss of third places, remote work — and a thousand micro-choices in property law that removed the physical alternatives to online life. Builders dropped the front porch to save money; developers in the South and West build almost nothing outside homeowners associations, so there is no meaningful market choice. People are human — they yearn for connection — but in the absence of physical competition, technological community wins by default.

•       Tocqueville’s Scalability Problem. What Tocqueville admired in New England — every citizen (nominally) arguing policy with neighbors at the town meeting — may never have been scalable to a continental republic, a question America has been grappling with since the Louisiana Purchase. But the local still scrambles

The Strange Death of the American Front Porch: Molly Brady on Land, Law, and the Lost Art of Neighborliness

“It’s like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.” — Ricardo Semler on why bosses won’t let their workers vote on them

 

Ricardo Semler [https://endoftheboss.org/] might be the most anti-boss boss in the history of corporate bosses. Thrown into his Austrian immigrant father’s São Paulo manufacturing firm at seventeen, the young Brazilian ripped up the rulebook — no dress codes, no time clocks, a ten-page cartoon manual instead of HR — and grew the company from 110 employees to more than 5,000. In the mid-Eighties he was already inventing hybrid work, shipping Telex machines to his workers’ homes. One of them even squeezed one of these 150-pound machines into his bathroom.

 

Now, in his upcoming e-book The End of the Boss [https://endoftheboss.org/], the author of the iconoclastic autobiography Maverick [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_(book)] argues that the corporate pyramid — an inheritance, he says, from West Point via the railroads — is as dead as a cuckoo bird (as the Swiss would say). Nothing good has been done with it since World War Two. Not in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, his native Brazil, and certainly not in corporate America where Elon Musk’s current pay package equals the wages of all his employees for the next five years.

 

Semler’s alternative is disarmingly simple: groups of ten who validate their leader every six months. Fail the vote and you’re not fired — you go back to being one of the nine. His Netherlands-based consultancy has brought versions of the idea to 208 companies, including the giant Dutch bank ABN AMRO, which agreed to do away with 399 branch managers. So why don’t more bosses follow? Because, says Semler, asking executives to be elected from below is like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. Even the self-styled “fearless” Elon Musk would be terrified to end up as the roasted centerpiece of the Xmas table.

 

That same maverick idea (his first ex-wife joked he’s only ever had one) runs through everything Semler has ever proposed — from the rotating district presidents of São Paulo, to the untethered MBA whose cohorts hire their own professors, to the schools that grade Call of Duty and map it to the curriculum. Switzerland, he points out, has been governed by seven rotating nobodies since the fourteenth century. No, The Third Man’s Harry Lime was wrong. Rather than the cuckoo clock, it’s this anti-boss invention which explains Switzerland’s five hundred years of democracy and peace.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Pyramid Came from West Point — and It’s Dead. The corporate hierarchy, Semler argues, is a military inheritance that reached business from West Point via the railroads — and nothing good has been done with it since World War Two, from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan. The numbers agree: the average company’s lifespan on the stock market has collapsed from 61 years to 21, which makes the classical pyramid, not self-management, the biggest gamble of all. Jack Welch’s GE is a shadow because he prepared it for nothing except Jack Welch. And when one Alexander Wang is valued like 20,000 engineers, or a CEO’s package equals five years of everyone’s wages, something structural is wrong.

•       Turkeys Voting for Christmas. Semler’s system is cells of ten that choose or validate their leader by anonymous survey every six months. Fail the vote and you aren’t fired — you return to being one of the nine. His consultancy has brought the idea to 208 companies, including ABN AMRO, which agreed to eliminate 399 branch managers. The reason it doesn’t spread is not that it doesn’t work; it’s that nobody at the top wants it — turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, and Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg would be terrified of their employees deciding whether they keep their jobs. His model is Switzerl

How a Turkey Voted for Xmas: Ricardo Semler on Why One Boss Wants the End of All Bosses.

“I could not get under oath and swear that I know exactly how Kennedy died in Dallas.” — Ben Barnes, who helped advance JFK’s fatal Texas trip



In Texas, there’s nothing in the middle of the road, Jim Hightower famously quipped, but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. But Ben Barnes [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ben-barnes/get-it-done/9781538778135/] has spent seven decades disproving him. Elected as a Democratic moderate to the Texas legislature at 21, Speaker of the Texas House at 26, and lieutenant governor at 30, Barnes was LBJ’s premier protégé and has known every president from Kennedy to Trump. Now 87, he has distilled all his centrist wisdom into Get It Done: Seven Decades of Lessons from a Political Legend [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ben-barnes/get-it-done/9781538778135/].

Get It Done is more than just a Texan story. Barnes spent six weeks advancing JFK’s fatal 1963 Dallas trip and breakfasted with the president in Fort Worth on the morning of the assassination. He confesses that the Warren Commission “did not get it entirely correct” and notes that the experienced hunter John Connally, who rode in the Presidential limo, always insisted there were four shots, not three.

Then there’s the equally historic scene at the White House on the day LBJ signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Pen in hand, Johnson looked a dozen young Southern Democrats — Barnes among them — straight in the eye and told them he’d just signed away Dixie. “What I’m doing today is probably going to turn the South Republican for thirty or forty years,” LBJ confessed with astonishing prescience.

The dirty trickster Richard Nixon, meanwhile, ended Barnes’ electoral career. You can hear it on the tapes — Nixon ordering his attorney general, John Mitchell, to “get something on Barnes” before the Texas Democrat got to be governor. Years later, fresh from prison, Mitchell invited Barnes to lunch, apologized over a bowl of spaghetti, then dropped dead on a Washington sidewalk three months later.

Barnes forgave Mitchell. He is less forgiving of the current administration, which he says is hammering the final nail into the coffin of LBJ’s Voting Rights Act. In the recent Texas Senate runoffs, only seven percent of voters showed up. Seven. Barnes remembers, aged three, watching pickup trucks packed with young men rolling toward the recruiting stations the morning after Pearl Harbor. That generation died for the country. This one, the very alive Texan armadillo quipped, could at least vote to protect American democracy.

Five Takeaways



•       Four Shots, Not Three — But No Conspiracy. Barnes advanced JFK’s Texas trip and was at the Fort Worth breakfast on the morning of the assassination. The Warren Commission, he believes, did not get it entirely correct: Connally, a hunter, swore the single-bullet ricochet was a physical impossibility and always counted four shots. Yet Barnes dismantles the grand-plot theories with logistics — Oswald started at the Book Depository thirty days before a motorcade route that wasn’t fixed until six days prior, so he could not have known the president would pass. Ted Kennedy assured him before his death that nothing of importance remains unreleased in the files. Sixty years of phone calls from theorists later, Barnes will not swear under oath that he knows how Kennedy died.

•       The Hostility Began in Los Angeles. The LBJ–Bobby Kennedy feud, in Barnes’s telling, started at the 1960 convention, when Bobby went to Johnson’s hotel room to talk him out of accepting the vice presidency his brother had just offered. The wound never healed — not through the vice presidency, not through the White House years with Bobby as attorney general. The counter-example was Ted Kennedy, who voted for the civil rights bills, kept a genuine affection for

Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos: Is Ben Barnes the Last Moderate Texan Democrat?

“You didn’t have to look someone in the eye while you extinguished their life, and you could do it from a distance.” — Mike McIntire on what the gun changed



Is there an American way of violence? Earlier this month, the film critic David Thomson blamed [https://keenon.substack.com/p/a-sudden-flicker-of-light] gory Hollywood movies, like Coppola’s Godfather, for glorifying it. Today’s guest has an even more brutal answer. According to Mike McIntire [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Ricochet/Mike-McIntire/9781668063064], the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative journalist, it’s the gun itself that can be blamed for the perpetual American plague of violence.

Yes, the gun did it. In his new book Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Ricochet/Mike-McIntire/9781668063064], McIntire observes that every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, and significant mental illness. But what no other country has are schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers massacred on a regular basis. Up to forty thousand Americans die from guns every year — half of them suicides — and yet we treat these uniquely dangerous machines as if they were iPhones.

How did this catastrophe happen? McIntire’s answer focuses on the law as much as the culture. English common law imposed a duty to retreat in the event of conflict. Then, amid the centennial jingoism of 1876, an Indiana court declared that “retreat” was not “the tendency of the American mind.” A “true man,” explained an Ohio court, doesn’t fly from threats. Stand your ground was born — and with it, a legal redefinition of what it means to be an American.

And then there’s the NRA — founded in 1871, ironically, by a former New York Times correspondent as a marksmanship club, and radicalized a century later. Its greatest coup was reframing the Second Amendment from militia clause into individual right — a maneuver that Warren Burger, a Republican chief justice, called the “biggest fraud” ever perpetrated on the American people. And today even the NRA looks moderate compared to new online radical right-wing gun rights groups.

McIntire, a gun owner himself, doesn’t preach. Instead he describes his first murder scene as a young cop reporter — the dead man peacefully lying in the grass, one small round hole in the side of his head. Clean, efficient, clinical. Like an iPhone app. That’s the American way of violence. The gun did it. And will continue to do so until America retreats from its deadly love affair with the firearm.

Five Takeaways



•       It’s the Gun Itself. Every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, mental illness, and toxic social media. What none of them has, McIntire argues, is a repetitive, constant problem of schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers being massacred. Up to forty thousand Americans a year die from guns — half of them suicides — and firearms account for three-quarters or more of all homicides. Yet America treats these uniquely dangerous things as ordinary consumer goods, bought, sold, marketed, and carried around like an iPhone or a wallet. Whatever role Hollywood plays — and McIntire takes David Thomson’s argument seriously — you have to start with the one thing that is actually different: the gun.

•       A Daily Trickle of Bloodshed. When a plane crash kills two hundred people, there is a massive media and government response. When two hundred people die in scattered shootings across fifty states in the same period, there is a local news story, and then nothing. Gun violence in America has slipped into the category of acceptable losses — background noise. The conundrum for gun-safety advocates is how to sustain attention on a crisis that onl

The American Way of Violence: Mike McIntire on Guns, Greed, and a Daily Trickle of Bloodshed

“Theory said, it doesn’t matter what you’ve read. It’s how you read.” — Emily Eakin on the seduction of the Frenchmen



When I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the Eighties, there was a bewildering rage for Frenchmen. Foucault in history, Derrida in literature, Althusser in political philosophy, Lacan in psychology. Not that anybody could quite explain what any of them meant — which only made their ideas even more compelling. It was the seduction of the American mind, especially its elite campus version. Innocent times with forty years of hindsight.

Emily Eakin [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317335/the-frenchmen-by-emily-eakin/] caught this Eighties fever for French theory at Harvard. Now an editor at the New York Times Book Review, Eakin has written The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317335/the-frenchmen-by-emily-eakin/], which is both a confessional of her own seduction and a serious piece of intellectual history.

A self-described farm girl from Indiana — albeit one whose Francophile parents once left her waiting at a Paris nursery school because a Lévi-Strauss lecture went overtime — she fell for theory as the intellectual equivalent of a little black dress. It looked expensive, even off the rack, she confesses. For a middle-class Midwesterner, it seemed like a passport to Left-Bank sophistication. All you needed was the jargon, the black clothes and, in Eakin’s case, the opera gloves.

But her Frenchmen, Eakin warns, turned out to be a slippery bunch. Lacan was so difficult that professors cancelled their own classes rather than teach him. Althusser murdered his wife. Foucault’s histories were as much fiction as fact. Not even Derrida took Derrida seriously. These were the men undoing the “master narratives” while an enthralled generation of cross-legged young feminists in their little black dresses took notes.

And yet Eakin’s Frenchmen may have the last laugh. Their theory of language — an impersonal system requiring no human at its center — presciently describes today’s AI revolution. Foucault predicted that “man” would be erased like a face drawn in sand on the beach. Forty years on, that tide may be engulfing us all.

Five Takeaways



•       The Little Black Dress of the Mind. Eakin grew up in a family of Francophiles — one of her earliest memories is her mother arriving late to the Paris maternelle because Claude Lévi-Strauss’s lecture had run over — and arrived at Harvard as a middle-class kid from a middling Midwestern high school, painfully aware of the gaps in her education. Theory offered the shortcut: it didn’t matter what you’d read, only how you read. The cliché about the little black dress is that it looks expensive even bought on sale off the rack at Macy’s, and theory, Eakin says, was its intellectual equivalent. It was also, frankly, sexy — young professors in jeans lecturing on the masturbation of the comma in Henry James, as Lorrie Moore’s barely-parodic parody had it, and students dressed in black. Eakin went as far as the opera gloves.

•       System Replaces the Self. After the war, Sartre’s existentialism made every accurate thought an authentic act of resistance — a heroic message for a France humiliated by four years of Nazi occupation. But the postwar world was not being changed by individual actors, and Lévi-Strauss dismissed the whole business in Tristes Tropiques as “shop girl metaphysics.” Around the time the Berlin Wall went up, Althusser routed Sartre at the École Normale, and a new philosophy took hold, obsessed with vast impersonal forces: not humans controlling events but a structure — with language at its center. The moment that fascinated Eakin is that sixties moment when system replaced the self.

•       Difficult by Design — and Easy to Distor

The Seduction of the American Mind: Emily Eakin on Her Life in French Theory

We’ve done plenty of abstract shows on American Christian nationalism. But this one is about a single family: the Greens of Oklahoma City, owners of the Hobby Lobby retail empire, and probably the wealthiest Christian nationalist family you’ve never heard of.

 

According to investigative writer Michael Blanding [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/michael-blanding/the-gospel-according-to-hobby-lobby/9781541703940/?lens=publicaffairs], the Greens have amassed a $14 billion fortune from selling glitter glue and popsicle sticks. In his new book The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/michael-blanding/the-gospel-according-to-hobby-lobby/9781541703940/?lens=publicaffairs], Blanding reveals what he insists is this billionaire family’s quest to craft a Christian nation.

 

Hobby Lobby is an all-American story — especially in its ridiculous ironies. A fundamentalist fortune built on bead-buying hippy consumers. The business came out of the Sixties counterculture. That said, the Greens have built the closest thing to a Christian corporate behemoth. Hobby Lobby has no corporate debt, is closed on Sundays, pays above average wages, and has a founder, David, who still flies coach. And yet this is the same Trump-loving corporation that forced its warehouse laborers to work during COVID and denies them birth control coverage.

 

And then there is the Museum of the Bible, blocks from the Capitol — God’s base camp, as it’s known — stocked with 40,000 shady artifacts including a $1.7 million Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, and forged Dead Sea Scrolls. Such are the absurdities of life in Christian MAGAland. Render unto Trump what is Trump’s. Then deduct, forge or steal the rest.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Most Influential Family You've Never Heard Of. Hobby Lobby is an $8 billion business with a thousand big-box stores, and the Greens are worth $14 billion — among the richest people in America — from what Blanding calls the perfect recession-proof business: when times are good, people buy crafts, and when times are bad, they make things instead of buying them. David Green saw the waste at the TG&Y department store chain in the sixties, started making picture frames in his garage, and — by his own account — owes the takeoff to the beatniks and hippies buying beads. The family credits God rather than themselves: chosen, anointed, and bearing no responsibility for the wealth.

 

•       True Believers, Not Hypocrites. Whatever else the Greens are, Blanding insists, they are not hypocrites: they genuinely believe everyone is going to hell without Jesus, and they live accordingly. No corporate debt, wages well above the minimum, closed Sundays to honor the Lord, a founder who flies coach and lives modestly in Oklahoma. The record cuts both ways: during COVID, warehouse employees worked unmasked in hundred-degree heat after David Green’s wife had a vision from God that the company must stay open. And the 2014 Supreme Court case over birth control coverage made Hobby Lobby a national flashpoint — half the country boycotts it, and the other half shops there precisely because of it.

 

•       Seven Mountains and the Attack on Pluralism. The Greens work within the democratic system, Blanding concedes under Andrew’s devil’s advocacy — but they are associated with Seven Mountains dominionism, the crusade for evangelical control of government, law, entertainment, and the other commanding heights of American society. Steve Green, David’s son, is on record that there is one true worldview, incompatible with all others, and that pluralism should not exist because the rules are laid out in the Bible. His Bible curriculum for public schools taught scripture as reliable historical truth. This isn’t guilt by association, Blanding a

A $14 Billion Glitter Glue Gospel: Michael Blanding on the Wealthiest Christian Nationalist Family You've Never Heard Of

“I want someone who has regrets. I want someone who’s learned the hard way. I want someone who understands that life is made of those messy compromises.” — Joel Christensen on the Odysseus he hopes to see in Matt Damon

 

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is out — the controversial movie of the year, much of the controversy raging before anyone had seen a frame. So, before either of us had seen the epic, I talked to the CUNY classicist Joel Christensen [https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-20987-0], author of the timely Why Odysseus? Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero [https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-20987-0].

 

What, I asked Christensen, did he most dread about Hollywood’s treatment of his beloved Odyssey? His answer: a hero too noble to be interesting. The Odysseus of the epic is a survivor, a scoundrel, an antihero — the master sergeant who does what needs to be done, from engineering the Trojan Horse to making sure Hector’s infant son doesn’t survive it. Christensen’s worry about Matt Damon came down to one word: too likeable. What he wanted instead was a man with regrets — De Niro in Raging Bull rather than anybody noble.

 

So did Christensen get the Odysseus he wanted? Below is his review, written after seeing the film when it came out.

 

Postscript: Joel Christensen’s Verdict on the Film

 

Nolan’s Odyssey is not Homer’s Odyssey. This should be clear to anyone. Nolan faced an almost impossible task well: ancient audiences knew the story already. Modern audiences do not, so he created a ring structure with the beginning union of Penelope and Odysseus anticipating the reunion at the end, also introducing plot elements like the dog Argos and the pin by which Penelope will recognize Odysseus.

 

The film is not Homer. Homer’s power is poetry; the film’s is image. Some of the images are striking: the scene when Circe turns his men into animals is the most arresting in the whole movie, showing everything that can be done with visceral imagery and a slight adaptation (Circe here is a survivor of sexual assault).

 

The changes made to the plot such as omitting the Phaeacians, Nestor, Laertes, the bed and more are not as jarring as some of the general decisions. Calling “Zeus’ Law” “do unto others…” makes an understandable translation to a Christian context, but it is somewhat nonsensical for Homer. Depicting a mutilated Helen is a strange decision that I am struggling with.

 

What the movie gets right is making humans responsible for their own suffering. In a novel take on Odysseus as a traumatized warrior, the hero spends seven years with Calypso eating Lotus to forget the loss of his men. Damon, too likeable, regrets the trick of the Trojan Horse after witnessing the slaughter during the sack of Troy. We find out as well that the “sea people” from history, bringing an end to the “civilization” are actually the Greeks returning from the Trojan War and suffering for the transgressions they committed there.

 

Is this ending an echo of Zeus’ plan to end the race of heroes in the Trojan War? Is it an allegory for our civilizational collapse in the future thanks to technology, environmental catastrophe, and fascism? Any potential social critique dissipates with the movie’s end. The traumatized veteran turns out to be merciful and kills only some of the suitors, showing many mercy. Then, guilty of violating “Zeus’ Law”, Odysseus happily goes into exile with Penelope, leaving Telemachus to be king.

 

There’s no way to make Homer’s Odyssey into a film and convey all its ambiguity and depth. That would be an unfair expectation. Nolan’s film is a compelling spectacle and it makes me wonder more about how it reflects who we are as an audience. Do we need the hero to be ultimately g

Homer's Hollywood Odyssey: Joel Christensen on How Christopher Nolan Gave Us the Odysseus We Deserve

In 1776 — that same year America declared its independence — Adam Smith published the equally revolutionary The Wealth of Nations, his founding explanation of national economic value. Two hundred and fifty years later, Tim O’Reilly argues [https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/07/12/elon-musk-is-building-a-form-of-capitalism-that-adam-smith-would-hate] in the free-market Economist that Elon Musk and his fellow tech barons are building a monarchical form of capitalism that the proto-democratic Smith would have hated. Musk, O’Reilly reports, believes that SpaceX will become “worth more than the rest of Earth”. The merchants are becoming princes, O’Reilly warns. And the rest of us are becoming peasants. Such is the road to serfdom in our AI age.

 

So who should own the AI in our bewildering age of multi-trillion dollar start-ups like SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI? Or as That Was The Week [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/] publisher Keith Teare [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/] asks in his latest editorial, who should own the “intelligence” of our AI age?

 

Keith uses a bottling plant as a metaphor to describe our dilemma. Since no single entity can own this intelligence — the sum total of our common experience — charging us for it would be like seizing the Earth’s water supply and selling it back to us, Coca-Cola style, in plastic bottles. Except that the Hayekian Keith approves of the bottling process. Private companies, rather than governments, he argues, are most suited to doing this.

 

For Keith, this dilemma is also an opportunity to redistribute the ownership of intelligence. He argues for a “Human Wealth Fund” into which every consequential AI company should put a slice of its equity. In the manner of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, this fund would be distributed to all citizens.

 

Rather than Denmark, now we should become like Norway, a tiny homogenous nation with a cultural distaste for Muskian individual wealth. Not very realistic, I fear. On top of that, it’s hard to imagine our tech princes collaborating on anything. Musk and Altman aren’t on speaking terms while Altman and Amodei, who also loathe each other, are focused on their IPOs. Meanwhile, the Trump administration, which presumably would coordinate this fund, is pitching a $100,000-a-month fast feed of the president’s posts.

 

Keith’s question, “who owns the intelligence”, is the right one. But the answer won’t come from trickle-down funds set-up by our tech princes. Such supposed munificence is about as likely as America becoming Norway. Read the fine print of any “Human Wealth Fund” set up by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. As we should know all too well by now, when a “revolutionary” Silicon Valley gives stuff away, it turns out to be exorbitantly expensive. Free plastic bottles of intelligence, anyone?

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Intelligence, Not AI. The week’s framing shift: the word AI is too small, because AI is merely the tool for harvesting and delivering the thing itself — intelligence, the sum total of our common human experience. Keith argues the renaming is not semantic but political: the moment intelligence sits at the center of the discussion, everyone’s opinion has to be shaped by what it actually is, and the idea that any single entity could own it starts to look as bizarre as owning the world’s water supply. Andrew’s rejoinder: they’re still just words — though he concedes intelligence is the better one.

 

•       Bottled Intelligence Is Good — The Question Is Who Benefits. Keith refuses the critic’s role: bottling intelligence, like Google’s bottling of the world’s words into search, is a good thing, because only massively capitalized private companies can innovate at that scale — and between private entities and governments as owners

Who Owns Intelligence? The Smart Wealth of Nations

The daily show about the big ideas, new technologies, books and people changing the world. Hosted by Andrew Keen.

Keen On