Keen On America

Andrew Keen
Keen On America
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  • Keen On America

    Where Are the Firefighters? Jonathan Vigliotti on How Los Angeles Was Left to Burn

    13/05/2026 | 44 min
    “All the warnings were there. It was almost a carbon copy — the same warnings that were ignored before Paradise, ignored again before the Palisades. And nobody was held accountable.” — Jonathan Vigliotti
     
    On January 7, 2025, the Palisades Fire ignited in Los Angeles. Over the first few hours of the fire, the second-largest city in America had no firefighters on the front lines and no coordinated evacuation. Residents fought the flames with garden hoses.
     
    “Where are the firefighters?” somebody, running from the fire, screamed into a live television shot.
     
    Where, indeed, were Los Angeles firefighters? Jonathan Vigliotti — CBS national correspondent, Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award winner — was there from the beginning. His new book, Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles, is the searing firsthand account of the tragic failure of the Los Angeles authorities to respond to the fire.
     
    The story Vigliotti tells is not new. In some ways, it is a carbon copy of the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise in Northern California. First as tragedy then as farce: inadequate evacuation routes, uncleared fuel loads, officials who failed to act were repeated almost exactly in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. More than eighty people died in Paradise and more than thirty in the LA fires. The economic damage in LA will likely make it the costliest natural disaster in US history. And when the LA mayor and the Californian governor appeared in the first press conference after the fires broke out, Vigliotti reports, all Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom were talking about was the 2028 Olympics.
     
    The political reckoning has not happened, Vigliotti warns. Bass is still mayor and Newsom is a Presidential frontrunner for 2028. California’s current governor’s race is dominated by homelessness and crime. Wildfire — the existential threat to the state, the one where more than $2 billion in taxpayer money was pumped into agencies over several years with more than half a billion unaccounted for — is barely mentioned.
     
    The fires will be back, Vigliotti warns. Maybe this year for the World Cup, maybe in 2028 for the Olympics. So where are the firefighters?
     
    Five Takeaways
     
    •       Where Are the Firefighters? The Central Question: Vigliotti was on scene from the first moments of the Palisades Fire. What struck him was not the scale of the flames — he’d seen wildfires before — but the absence of any official response. No firefighters at ground zero. No coordinated evacuation. The traffic gridlock that formed within an hour of ignition blocked fire trucks from getting through. Residents fought embers with garden hoses. A man running from the hillside screamed into Vigliotti’s live shot: “Where are the firefighters?” That question became the question of the disaster — and the book.
     
    •       A Carbon Copy of Paradise: The 2018 Camp Fire destroyed the Northern California town of Paradise. More than eighty people died. Before it happened: weeks and months of warnings about inadequate evacuation routes, uncleared fuel loads, and officials who failed to act. The same warnings, in almost identical form, were issued for Pacific Palisades and Altadena before January 7, 2025. They were ignored in the same way. The LA fires killed more than thirty people and will likely be the costliest natural disaster in US history. Nobody has been held accountable. Nobody has been fired.
     
    •       The Olympics Come First: Vigliotti’s most damning reporting: in the first press conference after the Palisades Fire broke out, Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom were already talking about the 2028 Olympic Games and Los Angeles’s ability to rebuild in time. The fires were still burning. The framing was already: how do we make this a story of resilience and recovery? Vigliotti’s counter: the story is not resilience. It is accountability. The question is not whether Los Angeles can rebuild. It is whether it can avoid the same disaster happening again.
     
    •       $2 Billion, Half a Billion Unaccounted For: California’s taxes are already among the highest in the country. More than $2 billion in taxpayer money was pumped into homeless-related agencies over several years. More than half a billion was unaccounted for. And the agencies responsible for wildfire prevention and emergency management are chronically underfunded. Vigliotti’s argument: it is not that Californians need to pay more taxes. It is that the taxes they pay need to go to the right agencies. The budget for fighting climate change and protecting communities from fire is dwarfed by the budget for crime. Fire kills more people.
     
    •       The Political Reckoning That Hasn’t Happened: California’s governor’s race, in the wake of the deadliest and costliest fire season in recent memory, is dominated by homelessness and crime. Wildfire — the existential threat to the state — is barely mentioned. Nobody in the political class, Vigliotti reports, has come to him asking for advice or analysis. He is not holding his breath. His warning: this summer, and every summer, the fire will come back. The conditions that created the Palisades disaster have not been remedied. Los Angeles is not ready.
     
    About the Guest
     
    Jonathan Vigliotti is a CBS News national correspondent and Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award winner. He is the author of Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles (Atria/One Signal, May 12, 2026) and Before It's Gone: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America. He is based in Los Angeles.
     
    References:
     
    •       Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles by Jonathan Vigliotti (Atria/One Signal, May 12, 2026).
     
    •       Lizzie Johnson, Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire — the companion book on the 2018 Camp Fire, referenced in the interview.
     
    •       Watch Duty — the wildfire monitoring app Vigliotti mentions as standard equipment for California residents.
     
    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 2,900 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
  • Keen On America

    What Would You Do With the Last 19 Minutes of Your Life? Vincent Yu on an Apocalypse that Fizzled

    13/05/2026 | 38 min
    “They’re all me. Every single one. I see them almost as if they’re inoculated on various petri dishes, and the petri dishes are all put into this pressure-cooker situation — that of a missile alert.” — Vincent Yu
     
    So what would you do with the last 19 minutes of your life? That’s the question Vincent Yu plays with in Seek Immediate Shelter. Triggered (so to speak) by a 2018 Hawaii missile alert of an apocalypse that fizzled, Yu’s novel is about a false alarm that sent Asian-American residents of a small Massachusetts town into 19 minutes of existential panic. Seek Immediate Shelter really starts after the fictional all-clear. Because now everyone has revealed their cards. The real games begin.
     
    F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. Seek Immediate Shelter is really a novel about third acts, not second. The first act is normal life. The second is the nineteen minutes of terror. The third — the one that really matters — is the reckoning: the mother who used the alert as an excuse to cruelly insult her daughter; the man who hit the gas and sped away from his family; the woman who confessed her unrequited love. So all clear does not mean all right. The missile alert strips away all the lies of daily life. What’s left is a truth as explosive as any missile.
     
    Five Takeaways
     
    •       The Third Act, Not the Second: F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives — and Yu’s novel is a direct argument against that claim. But the book’s real focus is the third act: not the nineteen minutes of terror (the second), but the aftermath. The mother who used the alert as permission to say something cruel. The man who sped away from his wife and child. The woman who confessed her love. These are the decisions people made when they thought it was the end. Now they have to live with them. All clear does not mean all right.
     
    •       The Petri Dish Method: Yu has a background in biology and no formal training in fiction. He approaches writing scientifically: characters as specimens on petri dishes, a missile alert as the experimental conditions. The pressure-cooker situation strips away the social armour and reveals the character beneath. His goal was not cruelty but pressure — there’s a difference. He feels profound empathy for every character. When asked if any are based on real people: they’re all me. Every single one.
     
    •       Asian American Silence and the Langston Hughes Principle: Yu originally wrote the characters without race. But honesty required him to make them Asian American — citing Langston Hughes’s argument that a Black poet cannot write outside of race even if he wants to. Asian American fiction has long focused on immigrant trauma and the difficult parent-child relationship. Yu wants to push beyond that: third- and fourth-generation stories, people who are simply American. The missile alert forces the silence of striving and quiet excellence to break. What’s underneath is the novel’s real subject.
     
    •       Can AI Write This Kind of Novel? Yu has never used AI for his writing and — he admits — hasn’t been curious enough to try. His verdict: AI is nowhere close to writing a novel like this. Some genres, with more uniform rubrics, are more vulnerable. But the distinctive cadences of AI writing are currently easy to detect. He is, however, optimistic: the proliferation of AI-generated plots may make readers more discerning, better at recognizing tropes, more hungry for genuinely fresh storytelling. AI might, paradoxically, sharpen the audience for literary fiction.
     
    •       The Cuban Missile Crisis, Trump, and COVID as Crucibles: Andrew’s provocation: was the Cuban Missile Crisis actually good for America? Did it force a national reckoning? And might Trump and COVID do the same? Yu is reluctant to apply this logic to countries — he deals in characters. But at the individual level: yes. A crucible that forces you to confront what you most cannot bear to part with, what truly matters, can be clarifying. The novel’s premise is that the missile alert was such a crucible. The broader lesson may be that we are all living through one.
     
    About the Guest
     
    Vincent Yu is a fiction writer and sales manager at W. W. Norton/Liveright. He is the winner of the 2021 Ashley Bourne Prize for fiction from Ploughshares and the author of Seek Immediate Shelter (Flatiron Books, May 5, 2026). His short fiction has been published in Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Able Muse, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
     
    References:
     
    •       Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu (Flatiron Books, May 5, 2026).
     
    •       The 2018 Hawaii missile alert — the real-life false alarm that inspired the novel.
     
    •       Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) — the essay Yu cites on writing within race.
     
    •       Episode 2898: James Lasdun on The Family Man — the companion episode on fiction’s capacity to go where journalism cannot.
     
    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 2,900 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:
  • Keen On America

    A Nation of Strangers: Ece Temelkuran on Rebuilding Home in a Homeless World

    11/05/2026 | 41 min
    “We’re losing home on so many different levels. Physically. Politically. Morally. And after AI, spiritually — because language, our spiritual home, is taken away from us. We now have to share it with an unhuman entity.” — Ece Temelkuran
     
    Do you feel homeless — physically, politically, morally or spiritually? That’s the question posed by Ece Temelkuran’s new book Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century. Shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction, the narrative is structured as a series of letters from one homeless stranger to another. Temelkuran left Turkey in 2016, after threats to her life made staying untenable. After seven years of exile — in Beirut, Tunis, Oxford, Paris, Zagreb, and now Berlin — she has written both her own and our story in today’s globalized, populist age.
     
    She’s been called everything from a 21st century Hannah Arendt to a “ruthless Cassandra.” And yet she retains faith in the future — as a defiant stance, a can-do-no-other attitude against rootlessness and loneliness. The wisdom of survival, Ece Temelkuran argues, lies with refugees, exiles and migrants like herself. This nation of strangers are rebuilding home in our homeless world.
     
    Five Takeaways
     
    •       Four Kinds of Homelessness: Temelkuran identifies four simultaneous crises of home. Physical homelessness: refugees, migrants, the displaced. Political homelessness: people who no longer recognize their countries, who feel unrepresented by any party, who cannot feel that they belong where they are. Moral homelessness: people who see the cruelty of our times and find no institution — state, court, international organization — capable of stopping it. And spiritual homelessness: the loss of language as our innermost home, now shared with AI. Four levels of being unhoused at once. That is the human condition of 2026.
     
    •       Minneapolis as a Nation of Strangers: The week the book was published in the US, Minneapolis happened — ordinary people forming human chains to resist ICE agents. Temelkuran’s reading: that was a Nation of Strangers in action. People who had never met, people from different communities who owed each other nothing in the old sense, holding on to each other because they recognized a shared condition. Not an ideology, not a party, not a leader — just strangers building a home together in real time. That, she says, is what the book is about.
     
    •       Digital Refugees: When Elon Musk bought Twitter, millions of people fled to Mastodon, Bluesky, and other platforms — behaving, Temelkuran observes, exactly like refugees. Looking back at the old home while building a new one. Checking both simultaneously. She asks: why did no one think to occupy Twitter? To say: this is ours, not yours? Her conclusion: our political imagination has become extraordinarily limited. We accept displacement, digital or physical, as inevitable. We do not think to resist it by occupying the space rather than fleeing.
     
    •       Gaza and the Move-On Ideology: Gaza was the ultimate test of how much humanity can swallow. Temelkuran draws an arc from Colin Powell’s tube in the UN Security Council in 2003 — when a global anti-war movement was brushed aside — to today. Each time people mobilize and are ignored, they lose a little more faith in themselves, in politics, in institutions. What devastated Temelkuran most was not the bombing but Jared Kushner at Davos presenting his PowerPoint for a seaside resort in Gaza. That, she says, is what neoliberal morality looks like. Move on. That is the lowest of the low.
     
    •       The Pioneers of History: Refugees as the Advance Guard: Temelkuran resisted writing her own story for years — she came from a leftist family where talking about yourself was suspect, and she feared being seen as a victim. What changed: she realized her story intersected with the story of the masses. The wisdom of survival — how to remake home from scratch, how to survive with dignity, how to rebuild identity after losing everything — belongs to refugees, exiles, and migrants. These are the pioneers of history. Soon everyone will need what they know. That is why their stories matter now.
     
    About the Guest
     
    Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish writer, political thinker, and public speaker. She is the author of Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century (Simon & Schuster, May 2026), shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction; How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism; and Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World. She was born in Turkey and is based in Berlin.
     
    References:
     
    •       Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century by Ece Temelkuran (Simon & Schuster, May 2026).
     
    •       How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism by Ece Temelkuran — the book that made her reputation in the West.
     
    •       Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World by Ece Temelkuran — the second book, between How to Lose a Country and Nation of Strangers.
     
    •       Episode 2894: Marc Loustau on why Orbán lost and how to defeat Trump — the companion episode on defeating fascism from within the system.
     
    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 2,900 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:
     

    (00:31) - Is Ece still retaining faith in the future?

    (01:47) - Faith as a stance: like Martin Luther, here I stand

    (02:30) - How to Lose a Country and what comes next

    (02:57) - Minneapolis as a Nation of Strangers

    (04:00) - Four kinds of homelessness: physical, political, moral, spiritual

    (04:35) - AI and the loss of language as spiritual home

    (05:10) - Why this book now — and why it’s the most personal <...
  • Keen On America

    That Sounds Incredibly Boring: Keith Teare's Vision of our Jobless AI Future

    10/05/2026 | 32 min
    “You can’t be confident about human decision-making. You can be confident on the potential of technology. Humans are quite capable of making both wrong and bad decisions.” — Keith Teare
     
    Is a jobless AI future really something to celebrate? That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare certainly thinks so. His editorial “Civilization: What Is Worth Doing” this week imagines a future in which nobody has to work unless they choose to, basic necessities are no longer scarce, leisure time is abundant, and governance fades to near-invisibility.
     
    I’m not so sure. As I told Keith, “That sounds incredibly boring. I don’t want to live in that kind of society.”
     
    The conversation this week has been civilizational. A few days ago, the podcaster Patrick Wyman came on the show to argue that history is mostly unintentional and unexpected. But Keith says civilization is broadly linear and tends, if not toward justice, toward progress. Wyman says civilizations are plural and never inevitable.
     
    “Why History Keeps Happening” is how Wyman put it. The end and the beginning of history are, thus, delusional. We are, then, always in the middle of history. That’s the wisdom missing from all the ridiculous hysteria about AI. It’s just one chapter in our history. The promise that AI will create mass abundance is as somnolent as the fear it will wipe out our civilization. Pass the Soma.
     
    Five Takeaways
     
    •       Civilization: Singular or Plural? Wyman’s argument: civilizations are plural, nonlinear, full of failure and unintended consequence. Keith’s counter: civilization — singular — is the long arc of human progress collectively, broadly linear over two hundred years. Both are right at different scales. Andrew’s instinct: we’re in a nonlinear moment masquerading as progress. Keith’s: we’re at a fork in the road. That much they agree on. The more interesting question is who controls which direction the fork takes.
     
    •       Paul Ehrlich and the Limits of Forecasting: Norman Lewis’s cautionary tale: Paul Ehrlich predicted in the 1970s that population growth would exhaust the Earth’s resources within a generation. He was famously, totally wrong. Andrew’s application: most people are probably wrong about AI right now — both the doomers and the optimists. The future is not the thing you think you’re heading toward. The Wyman principle: history keeps happening in directions nobody predicted.
     
    •       The Pyramid of Change: Keith’s model for how history gets made. Agents of change form a pyramid. At the top: a small number of people who have a much larger influence on what happens than everyone at the base. Most people receive change rather than make it. Those who step outside the norms and make things happen — those are the ones who make history. The question of our moment: who is at the top of the pyramid? And do they share your values? Or anyone else’s?
     
    •       AI Panic in the Media: Reflecting, Not Forming: Nirit Weiss-Blatt’s research into ten studies on AI coverage: the media is overwhelmingly negative. Keith’s reading: media reflects opinion rather than forming it. Negativity around AI is a reasonable reaction to not knowing. When you don’t know, you can believe anything, and most of the available influence is negative. If AI delivers real benefits, opinion will change, and media will follow. Andrew’s reading: the cause is genuine uncertainty, not media panic.
     
    •       Keith’s Utopia: “That Sounds Incredibly Boring”: Keith’s vision: everyone eats, everyone is warm, nobody has to work unless they choose to, leisure time is abundant, paid labour replaced by a society that provides for all, governance shrinking toward irrelevance as satisfaction rises. Andrew’s verdict: “that sounds incredibly boring. I don’t want to live in that kind of society.” The Germans, Keith notes, will still be putting their towels out at dawn to claim the beach. Some scarcities will always remain.
     
    About the Guest
     
    Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew’s regular TWTW co-host.
     
    References:
     
    •       That Was the Week: “Civilization: What Is Worth Doing” by Keith Teare.
     
    •       Norman Lewis, “The Future Is Not Scarce,” Nervous.
     
    •       Nirit Weiss-Blatt, “What 10 Studies Revealed About AI Panic in the Media.”
     
    •       Ezra Klein, “Why the AI Job Apocalypse Probably Won’t Happen,” The New York Times.
     
    •       Episode 2897: Patrick Wyman on Lost Worlds — the companion episode on civilization’s unintended consequences, directly referenced in this conversation.
     
    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 2,900 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:
  • Keen On America

    Hong Kong Burning: Simon Elegant on the 2019 Protests

    09/05/2026 | 50 min
    “It was a completely unthinking exercise in cost-cutting that made no sense in terms of the newspaper. I think perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper, it made sense.” — Simon Elegant on being ‘eliminated’ by the Washington Post
     
    Hong Kong in 2019. A dismembered body is found in a landfill. A disgraced police superintendent is called back from internal exile to solve it. The city around him is burning. Rather than a John Woo movie, this is the setting for a Simon Elegant thriller. Born in Hong Kong, former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine, most recently the Washington Post’s man in China until Jeff Bezos “eliminated” him three months ago — Elegant has written the definitive Hong Kong novel.
     
    First and foremost, City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong is a crime thriller. Superintendent Killian Tong — half-Chinese, half-Irish, loved by no one in his department — investigates a murder while his sister is noisily demonstrating on the other side of the barricades. But the book doubles as a compressed history of Hong Kong: from Palmerston’s “barren rock” in the 1840s — seized from China after the opium wars — through the ninety-nine-year lease, the handover in 1997, and the slow strangulation of the “one country, two systems” promise.
     
    Elegant is neither a hardline China hawk nor an apologist for Beijing. Yes, he credits the British with a relatively enlightened administration — from its public housing to the uncorrupt civil service that inspired the Singapore model. But he is also clear about what happened after 1997. Hong Kong people assumed Beijing would honour the Thatcher-Deng terms, and then discovered, to their horror, that they had no rights. It was a silent coup rather than a gaudy takeover of power. And so the 2019 protests — when a million people went onto the streets — are not just a backdrop to City on Fire but also the real-life stage on which Hong Kong burnt.
     
    Five Takeaways
     
    •       Enlightened Colonialism — With Caveats: Was Hong Kong an example of enlightened British colonialism? Elegant says: relatively, yes. The administration was light-handed. The public housing was so good that Singapore copied it. The civil service was — after 1972, when they had to create the ICAC following a police corruption scandal — genuinely clean. Milton Friedman praised the free-market model. But it was also racialized: the upper levels were almost entirely white Anglo, and the Chinese were largely excluded from administrative power. Governor Jock MacLehose changed this. Enlightened colonialism, Elegant concludes, is not a contradiction in terms — but it is relative. Compared to the Belgian Congo, Hong Kong was paradise.
     
    •       One Country, Two Systems: A Promise Broken: The terms negotiated by Thatcher and Deng in the 1980s guaranteed Hong Kong’s autonomy until 2047. Hong Kong people assumed these terms were real and would be adhered to. They were not. The first attempt to pass a national security law came in 2004. There were mass protests in 2014. In 2019, a million people — in a city of six million — were on the streets. Beijing’s choice was not between crushing them or not. It was between blood in the streets and a silent coup. They chose the silent coup. The national security law of 2020 was the final instrument. There is no longer any meaningful “one country, two systems.”
     
    •       The Policeman as Moral Complexity: Elegant’s decision to make his protagonist a policeman — rather than a protester — is the novel’s central artistic choice. Superintendent Killian Tong is not a villain. He is a man caught between institutions he has served his whole life and a conscience that knows what’s happening is wrong. His younger sister is on the other side of the barricades. The murder investigation forces him to confront not just the crime but the system that made it possible. Elegant wanted to write about moral complexity, not propaganda — and the only way to do that was to give the story to the person most implicated in the system.
     
    •       Bezos ‘Eliminated’ the Washington Post’s Foreign Staff: Simon Elegant’s final paycheck from the Washington Post used the word “eliminated.” He was one of 35-40 foreign correspondents let go in a single exercise — one of the biggest foreign staffs at any American newspaper. No one, he says, can explain what the thinking was, or if there was any. Every person he meets in Washington has cancelled their subscription. The Post still has excellent national security reporters, but in terms of foreign coverage it is, Elegant says, “doomed.” His conclusion: “perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper, it made sense.”
     
    •       Hemingway’s Iceberg, Applied: What did writing fiction teach Simon Elegant after a career in journalism? The iceberg principle, which Hemingway described: seven-eighths of a book — the knowledge, the research, the reported detail — should sit below the waterline. Only the tippy-top should be visible. The weight of the knowledge gives the visible surface its authority. The book started at 128,000 words — every reported detail jammed in. By the third or fourth round of cuts with the editor’s blade, it was 75,000. The lesson: don’t jam in your entire notebook. Fiction goes more directly into the heart. It bypasses the brain and seeks a different truth.
     
    About the Guest
     
    Simon Elegant is a journalist and novelist born in Hong Kong. He was Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine and most recently China bureau chief for the Washington Post. He is the author of City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong (Pegasus Crime, May 5, 2026), A Floating Life (Ecco/HarperCollins), and A Chinese Wedding (Piatkus). He is based in Kuala Lumpur.
     
    References:
     
    •       City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong by Simon Elegant (Pegasus Crime, May 5, 2026).
     
    •       Episode 2870: Eyck Freymann on Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China — the companion episode on Taiwan and the growing China crisis.
     
    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 2,900 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 Pod...
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Nobody asks sharper or more impertinent questions than Andrew Keen. In KEEN ON, Andrew cross-examines the world’s smartest people on politics, economics, history, the environment, and tech. If you want to make sense of our complex world, check out the daily questions and the answers on KEEN ON. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best-known technology and politics broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running show How To Fix Democracy and the author of four critically acclaimed books about the future, including the international bestselling CULT OF THE AMATEUR. Keen On is free to listen to and will remain so. If you want to stay up-to-date on new episodes and support the show, please subscribe to Andrew Keen’s Substack. Paid subscribers will soon be able to access exclusive content from our new series Keen On America – keenon.substack.com
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