Keen On America

“If your opening position is: your views are beyond the pale, you are deplorable, there is no space for you in democracy — then how on earth do we expect anything other than revolutionary conservatism as a response?” — Maciej Kisilowski
 
For Americans concerned about the fragility of their democracy, Poland offers some reassuring news. Having experienced its own illiberal blip, democracy in Poland now seems amongst the healthiest in Eastern Europe. So what does a democracy only created in 1989 teach America as the old republic braces for its surreal semiquincentennial celebration?
 
The Vienna-based constitutional scholar Maciej Kisilowski is the author of Let’s Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design. In this bestselling 2025 book, Kisilowski argues that Poland is a map of where other Western democracies could go. If they choose to.
 
Poland elected its first illiberal conservative government in 2005. Hungary followed in 2010. Both explicitly served as models for Donald Trump — relatively tamed in his first term, unshackled in his second. Like the United States, Poland is a relatively rich country with per capita GDP growing an astonishing 650% in a single generation. So, Kisilowski argues, the conventional argument that Poland embraced illiberalism in response to economic hardship is mostly wrong. Instead, what triggered illiberalism in Poland was culture, particularly the compressed, accelerated challenge to traditional identity — national, male, religious — that EU accession triggered in Central Europe.
 
Kisilowski, who teaches at Central European University, might have entitled his book Let’s Agree to Disagree. Poland’s solution to this cultural crisis of identity is what Kisilowski calls “subsidiarity” — genuine decentralisation that allows both conservative communities to remain traditional and liberal cities to become progressive, all within a common democratic framework. He warns both the left and the right that if you tell people their views are somehow foreign, it’s entirely rational for them to want to smash their “foreign” democracy.
 
This is the Polish model of a viable 21st century democracy. Ironically, it’s a Madisonian warning about the dangers of faction. The “deplorable” gambit always backfires. Péter Magyar’s remarkable victory in Hungary — a staunch conservative ending Orbán’s 16-year mafia-style illiberal chapter — offers the Hungarian model of Kisilowski’s argument. So this July 4, worried Americans might read Let’s Agree on Poland. Or reread James Madison.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Central Europe as the Leading Indicator: Poland and Hungary Before Trump: Poland elected its first revolutionary conservative government in 2005 — sixteen years before the January 6 insurrection. Hungary followed in 2010. Both were explicitly cited as models by the architects of Trump’s political project. Kisilowski’s argument: what happened in Central Europe is not a regional anomaly but a leading indicator of what happens when open society’s challenge to traditional identity is concentrated and rapid rather than gradual. The walls of liberal democratic institutions were weaker in Warsaw and Budapest. They will not hold indefinitely in Washington or London either.
 
•       It’s Not the Economy, Stupid: The Case Against Materialist Explanations: Poland and Hungary are economic opposites. Hungary was the “happiest barrack” of the Soviet bloc but fared poorly after 1989. Poland was among the poorer countries of the bloc and grew 650% in per capita GDP in one generation, with a Gini coefficient below France’s. Same revolutionary conservative politics. Opposite economic trajectories. Kisilowski’s conclusion: the materialist explanation — people turn right because of economic hardship — is flatly wrong. The driver is identity: the compressed, accelerated challenge to national, male, and religious identity imposed by EU accession conditionality in a decade.
 
•       The Deplorable Problem: Why Exclusion Rationally Produces Authoritarianism: Kisilowski’s most politically pointed argument: if your opening position to conservatives is that their views are beyond the pale, they are deplorable, there is no space for them in democracy — then it is entirely rational for them to break democracy. Not irrational. Not manipulated. Rational. If there is no space for me inside the system, I must break the system. That is what revolutionary conservatism is: a rational response to liberal exclusion. The solution is not to validate the views. The solution is to demonstrate that there is a place for those people and their communities within a democratic framework. That is the Madisonian insight.
 
•       Subsidiarity as the Solution: Conservative Communities, Liberal Cities, Common Framework: Kisilowski’s constitutional proposal, worked out with co-authors from the full ideological spectrum, is subsidiarity: genuine decentralization that allows conservative rural communities to be conservative and liberal cities to be liberal, within a common democratic framework. Budapest, in Magyar’s Hungary, should get strong autonomy to pursue the more liberal policies its electorate wants. Warsaw and Kraków should be able to differ. The European Union is, in this reading, the model: different countries, different cultures, one framework. The alternative is winner-takes-all, which always produces a revolutionary reaction from the losers.
 
•       Peter Magyar and Hungary: Proof of Concept for the Compromise Strategy: Magyar’s extraordinary victory in Hungary — winning a constitutional majority against a 16-year right-wing regime rightly called a mafia state, in elections skewed heavily toward the government — is, in Kisilowski’s reading, direct evidence that the compromise strategy works. Magyar is a staunch conservative and former member of the Orbán government. He won because he demonstrated to far-right voters that there was a place for them and their views within democratic Europe. The 2 million liberal Budapest voters who voted for him did so not because they like his conservatism but because he was unquestionably preferable to Orbán. Kisilowski made sure Magyar got the book.
 
About the Guest
 
Maciej Kisilowski is Associate Professor of Law and Strategy at Central European University (CEU) in Vienna. He is co-editor (with Anna Wojciuk) of Let’s Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design (Oxford University Press, 2025). He is a Europe’s Futures Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School. He writes frequently for Project Syndicate, Politico, and The EU Observer.
 
References:
 
•       Let’s Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design by Maciej Kisilowski and Anna Wojciuk (Oxford University Press, 202...

“The Gross National Product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” — Robert F. Kennedy, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968
 
It is June 5, 1968. An eleven-year-old English boy is watching the assassination of Bobby Kennedy on his black and white television. That little boy is Tim Jackson — now one of Britain’s most influential critics of capitalism. He had no idea then that RFK would change his life. It happened years later, when Jackson discovered a speech Kennedy gave in Kansas in the spring of 1968. It was a speech that changed the way Tim Jackson thought about economics.
 
The March 1968 speech, one of the first of RFK’s presidential campaign, was delivered at Phog Allen Fieldhouse, University of Kansas. It opened with a joke at the expense of rival Kansas State University. Then Bobby turned deadly serious. For the first time (at least for a Presidential candidate), he attacked the very idea of the Gross National Product itself. RFK argued that GDP quantifies all the worst stuff including air pollution, cigarette advertising and jails. But it doesn’t measure the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It quantifies everything except that which makes life worthwhile. Then fetishizes the data. Worse than wrong, Bobby Kennedy suggested, GDP makes data evil.
 
For Jackson, who has spent his career mulling over the idea of economic growth, RFK’s Phog Allen Fieldhouse speech came as a revelation. Indeed much of his later thinking, including his 2021 award-winning book Post Growth: Life After Capitalism, is indebted to this March 1968 speech. Almost sixty years later, in our ever-more-quantifiable age of data-centres, it’s a speech that appears uncannily prescient. Both Tim Jackson and Bobby Kennedy are right to remind us that there is an alternative to quantifying progress. There is, indeed, life after GDP. And it can’t be measured.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       An 11-Year-Old Watching the Assassination on His Birthday: Tim Jackson was born on June 4. On the night of June 4–5, 1968, after the California primary, RFK was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Jackson — watching on a black and white television in the UK — remembers thinking: oh no, not again. His aunt had just sailed for America from Southampton. Is this the country she is going to? Two high-profile assassinations. Violence as a condition of American political life. He had no idea then that RFK would become important to him professionally two or three decades later.
 
•       The Kansas Speech: GDP Measures Everything Except What Makes Life Worthwhile: The speech RFK gave at Phog Allen Fieldhouse, University of Kansas, March 1968 — one of the first of his presidential campaign — opened with a joke at the expense of rival Kansas State University and became one of the most prescient political speeches of the 20th century. Kennedy attacked GDP directly: it counts air pollution, cigarette advertising, and the jails for the people who break the law. It does not count the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
 
•       The Two Wrong Turns of Post-War Capitalism: Jackson’s account: fossil fuels made mass production possible; the Great Depression revealed the danger of overproduction; the post-war solution was to persuade people that having more stuff is what matters. Two big mistakes were embedded in that solution. First: material consumption is not all we are — we have social, relational, spiritual needs that GDP ignores. Second: more production does more environmental damage. Both wrong turns are what Kennedy was already diagnosing in Kansas in 1968. Both are what we are now living with in extremis.
 
•       The Trillionaire and the 2 Billion: The interview is recorded the day after the world’s first trillionaire arrived on the scene. Jackson’s response: this is an obscene amount of money for one person to have, while 2 billion people lack access to clean water and electricity. The same structural observation could be made about the 1850s: monarchs parading luxury while the people around them starved. The trillionaire is not a new phenomenon. He is the latest expression of an economic system that was always building toward this endpoint.
 
•       They Created a Desert and Called It Peace: In the Kansas speech, RFK quoted Tacitus on Rome: “they created a desert and called it peace.” Jackson applies it directly to today’s America: what is it to be a citizen of the affluent West only on the back of a flattened Gaza, a distant war, the creation of violence to preserve a failing hegemonic empire? Bobby was saying: we have values around social justice. We have a fragile planet. These are what matter. Bernie Sanders said the same things. AOC picked up the mantle. The message is unchanged. It is still Kansas, 1968.
 
About the Guest
 
Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). He is the author of Post Growth: Life After Capitalism (Polity Press, 2021; winner of the 2022 Eric Zencey Prize for Economics) and Prosperity Without Growth (2009/2017; Financial Times book of the year). He is also an award-winning BBC radio dramatist. He lives in Guildford, Surrey.
 
References:
 
•       Post Growth: Life After Capitalism by Tim Jackson (Polity Press, 2021).
 
•       RFK’s University of Kansas speech, March 18, 1968 — delivered at Phog Allen Fieldhouse, Lawrence, Kansas.
 
•       Tacitus, Agricola — “they created a desert and called it peace,” quoted by RFK in the Kansas speech.
 
•       Kerry Kennedy, Ripples of Hope — referenced in the conversation.
 
•       Andrew Keen’s forthcoming book: Where Have You Gone, Bobby Kennedy? My Search for a Lost America — the RFK book this conversation feeds directly into.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts<...

“Just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. The agent is the unacknowledged legislator of the literary field.” — Laura McGrath
 
We think of publishers and editors as the ultimate tastemakers. As those godlike gatekeepers controlling what we read. But if you’re looking for literary gods, Laura McGrath argues, then you need to look at literary agents rather than publishers or editors. Her ten-year project, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, is the first serious scholarly account of the literary agent’s astonishingly powerful role in shaping what America reads. Except, of course, the Middlemen are actually Middlewomen — since 80% of literary agents are women.
 
The numbers are striking. Just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. McGrath interviewed 75 of them over ten years. Shelley called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world. McGrath’s agents are the unacknowledged legislators of the literary field. They shaped postmodernism (Candida Donadio and Pynchon, Heller, Gaddis). They launched the debut novel as a literary form. They made the short story collection viable. And 25 of them control more than half of the prizes.
 
So will AI replace the agent? In operations, perhaps, McGrath acknowledges — the slush pile is overwhelming and smart machine assistance is welcome. But in creative work — in the business of writing, editing, translation, cover design, and above all taste — she thinks not. No algorithm will ever learn the Catch-22 of publishing — separating the Thomas Pynchon or Joseph Heller from all the dross. And no bot (male or female) is ever going to host a three-martini lunch in Manhattan.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Literary Agent as the New Gatekeeper: Replacing the Publisher: In the early 20th century, publishing was shaped by the taste of individual publishers: Bennett Cerf at Random House, Alfred and Blanche Knopf at their imprint, Max Perkins at Scribner’s. Those days are over. Publishers are now conglomerates where individual editors may have excellent taste but no single figure shapes the house. Into that vacuum has come the literary agent — who now operates, McGrath argues, exactly as the great publishers once did: as the primary tastemaker, the person whose aesthetic and commercial judgment shapes what America reads.
 
•       25 Agents, Half the Prizes, 80% Women: The Numbers: McGrath’s most striking statistical finding: just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. Twenty-five people. The field is 80% women — hence the tongue-in-cheek title — and 73% white. Agents tend, McGrath found, to represent authors who resemble themselves. One answer to the question “why is contemporary literary fiction so white?” is: because agents are. And agents, because they work on contingency fees rather than salaries, face severe financial pressures that concentrate power at the top of the profession.
 
•       The Unacknowledged Legislators: Agents Shaped American Literary History: McGrath’s book is full of literary history rewritten from the agent’s perspective. Sterling Lord persisted past dozens of rejections to place On the Road for Kerouac. Candida Donadio — Pynchon’s, Heller’s, Gaddis’s, and early Philip Roth’s agent — championed maximalist, experimental writers whom no one was interested in, and built the social network of editor relationships that made postmodernism possible. The debut novel as a cultural form, the persistence of the short story collection despite poor sales, the rise of the New York novel — all are, in McGrath’s account, partly agent-made.
 
•       Can White Male Writers Not Get Published? No: Andrew raises the complaint he hears from white male writers: that they can no longer get published because of diversity initiatives. McGrath’s answer is flat. No. She thinks it’s silly. The number of books published each week is staggering. Being able to see some success on the part of writers of colour does not diminish the work white men are doing. The complaint, she notes, circulates every ten years, typically after a boom in support for writers of colour. We are in another round of this cycle. There will be another one in a decade.
 
•       Will AI Replace the Literary Agent? In Operations, Maybe. In Taste, No: Andrew’s closing question: will AI replace the middlemen? McGrath draws the distinction she heard at the US Book Show: AI in operations (slush pile management, contract tracking), yes, possibly. AI in creative work — writing, editing, translation, cover design, and above all taste — she hopes not. An algorithm is built on priors. It narrows the window of possibility endlessly, replicating itself. That is not what a good literary agent does. A good literary agent is looking for books that surprise, frustrate, and thrill. No algorithm has learned to take an author out for a three-martini lunch.
 
About the Guest
 
Laura McGrath is an assistant professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. She was formerly the associate director of the Literary Lab at Stanford University. She is the author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Princeton University Press, April 28, 2026). She writes the textCrunch Substack on literary and publishing culture.
 
References:
 
•       Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction by Laura McGrath (Princeton University Press, April 28, 2026).
 
•       Earlier on KOA: Gayle Feldman on Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built — the companion episode referenced at the opening.
 
•       Sterling Lord (agent for Kerouac), Candida Donadio (Pynchon, Heller, Gaddis, Roth), Andrew Wylie — agents profiled in the book.
 
•       Andrew Keen, Cult of the Amateur (2007) — referenced as Andrew’s own defence of gatekeepers.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube

“AI companies are taking advantage of our natural tendency to ascribe an inner life to our interlocutors. They profit when you think the chatbot cares.” — Kate O’Neill
 
If we don’t like someone, we call them a fascist. And if we like them, we say they are a humanist. The F and H words. Both meaningless in our sloppy, bot-infested age. But maybe I’m just a cranky anti-humanist. Even anti-human — whatever that means.
 
Or maybe I’m being harsh (moi?). Humanism certainly is all the rage in our AI age. Corporate consultant Kate O’Neill likes the word so much that she has built her brand around it. The self-styled “Tech Humanist” is the author of Tech Humanist, the host of the Tech Humanist Show, and a frequent speaker on the TED circuit.
 
So how to use the H word without sounding like Claude or ChatGPT? O’Neill argues that what makes us human is our quest for meaning. The M word. That’s what distinguishes us from the bots. But as Kazuo Ishiguro warns in Klara and the Sun, we are fast arriving at a point when the bots are better than us at extracting meaning from the world.
 
So did Kate O’Neill pass the Keen Test (reverse of Turing)? Did the Tech Humanist say anything that would have eluded Claude? Or have we already arrived at Ishiguro's bleak terminus where the bots are more skilled at infusing the H word with meaning than we are?
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       What Is Tech Humanism? Aligning Business and Human Outcomes: O’Neill’s definition: technology shapes human experiences at scale, and it does so almost always in service of a business objective that is accelerating its advance. The purpose of tech humanism is to find the business objectives that need to be met and align them with human outcomes that are rewarding and fulfilling for people. This means using technology to amplify the alignment between business and human outcomes — rather than simply making the business more successful. It is, she acknowledges, not the habit of most business leaders. But it is a habit that can be developed.
 
•       You Sound Like a Bot: Andrew’s Challenge: Andrew’s opening challenge: O’Neill sounds exactly like a well-prompted language model. She uses the h word (humanism) and the m word (meaning). What is she saying that Claude couldn’t say? O’Neill’s answer: meaning is not a word but a phenomenon. It is what emerges from the combination of embodied sensory experience and language — the way humans encode meaningful experiences with language in their brains. As far as we know, this is a uniquely human capability. Machines process information statistically. Humans process it meaningfully. That distinction is, she argues, precisely the gap that matters.
 
•       AI Companies Profit When You Think the Chatbot Cares: O’Neill’s sharpest observation: we are constituted to look for inner life in the things we interact with. We give nicknames to our cars and talk to our toasters. At this early stage of interacting with large language models, it is entirely natural to assume there is a consciousness on the other side. The problem: AI companies are actively taking advantage of that natural tendency. They profit from it. The more people believe the chatbot genuinely understands them, the more they use it. That manipulation is real and it is working. Developing critical thinking about AI interactions is, O’Neill argues, now a form of self-defence.
 
•       The Intersection of Meaning and Scale: O’Neill’s key contribution to the tech humanism conversation: the problem with technology is not technology itself but the scale at which it operates. A single interaction with a biased algorithm is annoying. A billion such interactions, aggregated and accelerated by a business objective, reshapes society. The tech humanist’s job is to ensure that when we deploy technology at scale, the outcomes remain aligned with human meaning rather than with the extraction of human attention. This, she says, is both a business problem and a civilisational one. The two are, in her view, inseparable.
 
•       A Message to 2126: What We Valued About Ourselves: Andrew asks O’Neill: it is 2126. Humans and machines are indistinguishable. What do you say to whoever is listening? O’Neill’s answer: hello from the past. What we valued about ourselves was our ability to understand each other — intellectually, emotionally, sympathetically, empathetically. We could come into our interactions by holding space for what the other person feels and cares about. And we could, even when we disagreed, create more shared understanding by virtue of having the conversation. That is a beautiful thing, she says, whether we are distinctly human and distinctly machine or increasingly a blend of both.
 
About the Guest
 
Kate O’Neill is founder and CEO of KO Insights and is widely known as “the Tech Humanist.” She was one of the first 100 employees at Netflix and has held roles at Toshiba and founded the analytics firm [meta]marketer. She is named to the Thinkers50 global ranking of top management thinkers. She is the author of What Matters Next: A Leader’s Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions in a World That’s Moving Too Fast (Wiley, January 2025), Tech Humanist (2018), A Future So Bright (2021), and Pixels and Place (2016). She advises Google, IBM, Microsoft, the United Nations, Harvard, and Yale. She hosts The Tech Humanist Show on YouTube.
 
References:
 
•       What Matters Next: A Leader’s Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions in a World That’s Moving Too Fast by Kate O’Neill (Wiley, January 2025).
 
•       Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021) — the novel discussed in the conversation’s closing section.
 
•       Victoria Hetherington, The Friend Machine — referenced by Andrew in the conversation on AI companionship.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube

“I considered it elder abuse. She put him through the paces, not only before the debate, but after. She should have gotten him out of there immediately.” — Sally Quinn on Jill Biden and the debate
 
Today’s guest is amongst America’s most verbal octogenarians. No, not you-know-who. Sally Quinn is the illustrious Washington DC hostess, writer and commentator. The almost 85-year-old does improv comedy every Sunday, ballroom dancing every week and Zen Buddhist meditation every Monday night. Her novel, Silent Retreat, is now out in paperback. And she’s working on her memoir, tentatively entitled Never Invite Sally Quinn.
 
Certainly Jill Biden won’t be inviting Sally Quinn any time soon to one of her tête-à-têtes. Quinn’s account of what went wrong with the Biden presidency is sharply personal. Her late husband, legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, had dementia. She watched his cognitive decline from inside, and the parallels with what she observed in Biden were, she tells me, too close for comfort. Jill Biden’s decision to keep Joe running after the debate, when she privately suspected he’d suffered a stroke, was, in Quinn’s word, “elder abuse.”
 
Silent Retreat, set at a monastery in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is about the sexiness of silence. A prize-winning reporter and the venerable Archbishop of Dublin fall in love in enforced silence. Anything but elder abuse. But autobiographical? Probably not. As Ben Bradlee used to tease her over breakfast, it’s always been hard for not-silent-Sally to keep her mouth shut.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Army Brat Who Became Washington’s Most Powerful Hostess: Quinn grew up as an army brat, moving from posting to posting with her military father. She arrived in Washington after college, did a stint as social secretary to the Algerian ambassador, and was then hired by Ben Bradlee to write for the Washington Post’s new Style section — the first style section in the history of American journalism. She and Bradlee eventually married. Their home in Georgetown became the hub of Washington’s social and political life for decades. She describes herself not as a powerhouse but as someone who “really lucked out.” An army brat who knew how to work a room.
 
•       Gerontocracy Is Real — But People Who Keep Going Are Different: Quinn agrees with Samuel Moyn that American gerontocracy is a genuine problem: people who lose their cognitive sharpness should not be running organizations or countries, and the tragedy is that no one can know in advance who will lose it and who won’t. But she draws a distinction: the problem is not old people, it’s old people who have stopped growing. She surrounds herself with younger people, particularly younger journalists, because of their energy, idealism, and optimism. She is still working full time. The issue is not age. It’s vitality.
 
•       Biden and Jill: Elder Abuse: Quinn’s account of the Biden presidency is the most personal Andrew has heard. Her husband Ben Bradlee had dementia. She knows the signs. She watched Biden lose it, got a knot in her stomach every time he spoke publicly. The debate was her worst nightmare. Everyone in the White House knew what was happening and wasn’t telling the truth. And Jill Biden — who now admits she thought he had had a stroke after the debate — raised his arm in a victory salute the next day and took him off to campaign in North Carolina. Quinn’s verdict: “I considered it elder abuse.”
 
•       Silent Retreat: A New Yorker Writer and an Archbishop Fall in Love in Enforced Silence: The novel grew from Quinn’s own annual visits to a Trappist monastery in Virginia’s Berryville. She is a woman who once failed to stay quiet for three days — or so her husband thought — and who found to her surprise that she loved it. The novel: a prize-winning reporter whose marriage is falling apart, and an Archbishop of Dublin whose faith is in crisis, check into the same monastery for a silent retreat. They can’t speak to each other. They speak to the monk instead. The novel is told through those confessions. Kirkus: “an unholy brew of lust and faith.” Airmail: “a bodice ripper with a fillip of Roman Catholic ritual.”
 
•       Improv, Ballroom Dancing, Zen Buddhism, and Dinner by Candlelight: Quinn’s account of how she stays alive at 84 is the most energetic thing in this conversation. Improv comedy every Sunday for two and a half hours — performances after the class, with people half her age. Ballroom dancing every week. Zen Buddhist meditation every Monday night for two hours. Working out every day. Writing her Washington memoir. And hosting small dinner parties — six or eight people, candlelight, good food, a lot of wine — as a form of community-building in what she calls the toxic environment of today’s Washington. The memoir’s title: Never Invite Sally Quinn. Andrew has already secured an invitation to the next dinner party.
 
About the Guest
 
Sally Quinn is a longtime Washington Post journalist, columnist, television commentator, Washington insider, and one of Washington’s legendary social hostesses. She is the author of Silent Retreat (Simon & Schuster), Finding Magic, The Party, Happy Endings, Regrets Only, and We’re Going to Make You a Star. She was the founder and moderator of On Faith, the Washington Post’s religion website. She lives in Georgetown, Washington DC.
 
References:
 
•       Silent Retreat by Sally Quinn (Simon & Schuster). In paperback.
 
•       Episode 2945: Samuel Moyn on Gerontocracy in America — referenced at the opening.
 
•       Ben Bradlee — Quinn’s late husband, executive editor of the Washington Post during Watergate, referenced throughout.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
 
Chapters:...