Keen On America

“I deliver it with the credibility of having won a district that Trump carried by 13 points. Not only how to speak to these voters, but how to win them back.” — Joe Cunningham
 
Yesterday’s guest was Alexandra Natapoff, co-editor of America Unfinished — a collection of essays by illustrious Harvard Law School professors grading the march toward justice in the United States over the last 250 years. America got about a C+ from this progressive clique. “Could do better” their report cards suggested.
 
Today’s guest is a very different kind of Democrat. Joe Cunningham is a lawyer and personal injury attorney in Charleston, South Carolina, a one-term US representative, and the author of Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America’s Trust and How They Can Win It Back. Cunningham got his law degree at Northern Kentucky University’s Salmon P. Chase College of Law. Harvard, he jokes, was his safety school.
 
In contrast with Harvard Law professors, Cunningham’s credibility is hard to dress up. He was the first Democrat to win South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District in over forty years, in a seat Trump carried by 13 points. He was also the first Democrat in elected office to publicly warn against Biden seeking re-election. His diagnosis of what went wrong is that the Democratic Party abandoned kitchen-table economic issues in favour of culture wars, dismissed legitimate voter concerns as bigotry, and told people what they should care about rather than listening to what they actually cared about. The party, he argues, replaced empathy with arrogance. It’s as if it’s been colonized by morally prickly Harvard Law professors. Professor Cunningham gives the Dems a D+. Could do significantly better.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Winning Trump +13: The Credibility Argument: Cunningham’s case for why his diagnosis should be taken seriously is not his ideology but his record. He won South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District in 2018 — a heavily gerrymandered seat that Trump had carried by 13 points — making him the first Democrat to hold it in over forty years. He was also the first elected Democrat to publicly warn against Biden seeking re-election. His prescriptions don’t come from a think tank or an op-ed page. They come from a man who has actually won where Democrats can’t win, and lost where Democrats keep losing.
 
•       The Party Replaced Empathy with Arrogance: Cunningham’s central diagnosis: the Democratic Party stopped listening and started lecturing. It told people what they should care about — immigration wasn’t an issue in West Virginia because West Virginia is far from the border. It told people the economy was fine when they couldn’t afford their bills. It dismissed legitimate concerns about crime, immigration, and cultural change as bigotry rather than trying to understand them. The result: voters who felt condescended to left. The party that was founded on speaking for ordinary people no longer speaks their language.
 
•       Big Publishing’s Progressive Insularity: The book didn’t get picked up by a major publisher. Cunningham was told, more or less directly, that a book this critical of the Democratic Party — of Biden, of Harris, of the party’s leadership — was too much. He published it himself, through South Battery Press, named for a street in Charleston. Andrew’s observation: isn’t this itself evidence of what the book argues? If progressive culture controls big media and big publishing, those institutions will inevitably filter out self-criticism and reinforce the insularity that caused the problem in the first place.
 
•       The Geriatric Oligarchy and the Technology Frontier: Cunningham uses the phrase “geriatric oligarchy” — the same phenomenon Andrew has been calling a gerontocracy — to describe Congress’s inability to grapple with technology, AI, and social media. The vast majority of members of Congress cannot understand the problems that are emerging: social media preying on children, identity theft, artificially inflated prices, the environmental impact of data centres. The party needs new leaders who understand these issues. The answer to data centres is not a blanket ban — it’s community-level decisions and proper regulation.
 
•       The Party Needs Bloodletting, Not Just Rebrand: Cunningham’s sharpest prescription for the Democratic Party: a coming-to-Jesus moment or genuine accountability for what led to 2024. After the debate, Democratic officials stood outside the White House claiming Biden was fine. His staff said he’d go to bed earlier, wake up later, and shorten his workday — as if this would reassure Americans. Cunningham’s verdict: lessons will be repeated until they’re learned. The party needs a Newsom-level confrontation — real winners and real losers — not the bloodless triangulation it currently offers. Only then can it earn back trust.
 
About the Guest
 
Joe Cunningham is a personal injury attorney and former US Representative from South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, the first Democrat to win that seat in nearly forty years. An attorney and ocean engineer by training, he was the Democratic nominee for Governor of South Carolina in 2022. He is the author of Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America’s Trust and How They Can Win It Back (South Battery Press, May 20, 2026). He lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife Ashley and their children.
 
References:
 
•       Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America’s Trust and How They Can Win It Back by Joe Cunningham (South Battery Press, May 20, 2026). Available at lifeofthepartybook.com.
 
•       Episode 2922: Alexandra Natapoff on America Unfinished — the preceding episode referenced at the opening; the Harvard Law contrast.
 
•       Episode 2912: Michael Clinton on Longevity Nation — the gerontocracy argument directly referenced.
 
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.
 
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Chapters:
 

(00:31) - Introduction: Natapoff’s Harvard Law vs Cunningham’s Charlesto...

“As long as democracy is a collective endeavour of all the people who belong to it, in some sense it can never be finished — because we are constantly bequeathing to the next generation the opportunity and the freedom to have these conversations over and over again.” — Alexandra Natapoff
 
It’s less than six weeks until America’s 250th birthday. The official America 250 store is selling T-shirts while Harvard Law School is doing something slightly less commercial. 62 HLS professors have written 1,000-word essays, assembled into a single volume to be published on July 4. Entitled America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance, it’s co-edited by Alexandra Natapoff, a Harvard Law professor who spent years as a federal public defender in Baltimore. The title, of course, is borrowed from the Gettysburg Address, where Lincoln charged the living with completing “the unfinished work” of those who died in the Civil War.
 
So is America unfinished or is it just getting started? For Natapoff and other Harvard Law School professors like this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Jill Lepore, the answer is suitably complex. Yes and no and maybe. Everything all at once. The essays focus on 250 years of both justice and injustice in America. Perhaps the only thing all authors agree on is the central role of capitalism in the history of the United States. Follow the money, Natapoff suggests. Those dollars will transport the reader to the heart of the American story.
 
That said, America Unfinished will certainly cost you less than a three-year Harvard Law degree. And if you wait six months, the book will be available at no cost online. So follow the money. It will take you to some unexpectedly free places.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Gettysburg Address as the Title’s Source: The book does not merely allude to Lincoln’s famous speech — it reproduces it at the front, so readers can go back to the original. In the Address, Lincoln charged the living with completing “the unfinished work” of those who died at Gettysburg — the work of building a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Natapoff and Charles chose this frame because it captures both the challenge and the hope: democracy is unfinished in the sense that it demands active work from every generation. It is not a gift that has been fully delivered. It is a task being handed on.
 
•       America and Democracy Are Not the Same Thing: Andrew’s challenge — you use the words interchangeably — earns a concession. Natapoff’s work in criminal justice has led her to argue repeatedly that the American criminal system fails many tests of democracy: it is exclusive, inegalitarian, overly coercive, inconsistent with democratic principles. So ‘America’ and ‘democracy’ are not synonyms in the book. Many of the 62 essays disagree about the state of various pieces of governance. The book’s inquiry is whether it is fair to call any particular piece of American legal governance a democracy — which both editors consider a compliment, and not a certainty.
 
•       A Federal Public Defender in Baltimore: The Biography Behind the Scholarship: Before she became a law professor, Natapoff was a federal public defender in Baltimore’s federal courts. Her job was to be adverse to the federal government all day every day, defending some of the most vulnerable and dispossessed people in the city against the massive resources and power of the federal apparatus. Those years shaped everything: her subsequent twenty years of scholarship on criminal courts, plea bargaining, misdemeanors, and race and inequality; her book Punishment Without Crime; and her contribution to America Unfinished. In her reading, the experience of her clients — people facing off against the federal government — is now more widely shared than it used to be.
 
•       It’s the Money, Not the Lawyers: Dan Wang’s recent book Breakneck contrasts China, run by engineers, and America, run by lawyers. Natapoff’s counter, via the book’s economic governance essays: it’s much more complicated than that. Six very different scholars who disagree about almost everything converge on a perhaps surprising answer: it’s the money. Financial interests, corporate interests, the ownership class — in one way or another, they’ve been running America. The lawyers helped. They were part of the management scheme. But they weren’t making the decisions. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
 
•       Molly Brady’s Essay: Property Law and the Destruction of Community: Asked to pick her favourite essay without starting a fight with 61 colleagues, Natapoff flags the very last one: Professor Maureen “Molly” Brady on property law. Brady argues that property law has permitted suburban sprawl and the destruction of physical community — the kind of infrastructure that makes analog life (libraries, neighbours, public space) possible — while being profligate in its support for social media and the dispersed, thinner version of community. She exhorts us to remember how law has contributed positively to communities we are proud of, and to stand up for that vision. For Natapoff, it captures both the critical nature of this moment and why lawyering still holds out some important promise.
 
About the Guest
 
Alexandra Natapoff is the Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, and a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School. She began her legal career as a federal public defender in Baltimore. She is the author of Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (Basic Books) and Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice (NYU Press). She is co-editor, with Guy-Uriel Charles, of America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance (MIT Press, July 4, 2026).
 
References:
 
•       America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance, co-edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel Charles (MIT Press, July 4, 2026). Open access from January 2027.
 
•       Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (Basic Books, 2018).
 
•       Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future — referenced in the interview as the “America run by lawyers” contrast.
 
•       Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863) — reproduced at the front of the book; the source of the title.
 
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 ...

“I took it for granted that we were trying to make the world a better place. But I think in retrospect that was naïve. What kind of change? For whom? We kind of forgot to specify what the purpose of all this disruption was.” — Eric Ries
 
In 2011, Eric Ries published The Lean Startup, a book that reflected the optimistic zeitgeist about disruptive Silicon Valley companies. Fifteen years later, in Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, Ries reflects today’s totally different zeitgeist about the value of companies inside and outside Silicon Valley.
 
Back in 2011, everybody loved tech. Ries, creator of the Lean Startup method and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, admits he was naïve in his positive view of disruptive corporations. In Incorruptible, Ries argues that corporate corruption is structural, rather than a problem of bad actors. As organisations grow (ie: become more disruptive), the systems that govern them — ownership, incentives, charters, accountability — quietly reshape behaviour. Success itself becomes a form of financial gravity, diverting companies away from their original purpose.
 
Ries proposes that we design organisations to be incorruptible from the beginning. It’s the Patagonia model. When the outdoor clothing company almost went bankrupt in the 1990s, their bank agreed to restructure their loans if they would suspend their charitable donations for a couple of years. No deal, the CEO said. The bank blinked and Patagonia remained Patagonia. Now, Ries argues, every corporation should try to emulate Patagonia and become the incorruptible corporation. We must all join Eric Ries in getting beyond the lean startup.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Corporate Corruption Is Structural, Not Ethical: For decades, we’ve explained corporate failures as problems of bad actors, moral weakness, or isolated scandals. Ries’ argument: that story doesn’t match reality. Again and again, companies founded with strong ideals drift toward short-term thinking, extractive behaviour, and mission abandonment — often despite the best intentions of people inside them. The failure is structural. As organisations grow, the systems that govern them — ownership structures, incentives, charters — quietly reshape behaviour. Success becomes financial gravity, bending companies away from their purpose.
 
•       The Patagonia Model: Organisational Strength, Not Moral Righteousness: When Patagonia nearly went bankrupt in the 1990s due to outsourcing to poor-quality foreign factories, their lead lender agreed to restructure the loans on one condition: suspend charitable donations during the restructuring. Reasonable request — any other company would have said yes. Patagonia said no. The bank blinked. Ries’ reading: this is not moral righteousness. It is organisational strength. The ability to resist external pressure and stay true to a core principle. That is what makes a company not just good but great. Also: Black Wednesday, the day of their layoffs, is still referred to by name inside the company.
 
•       The Wrong Distinction: For-Profit vs Non-Profit: Ries argues that the distinction between for-profit and non-profit is fundamentally a tax code distinction that has come to define how we think about organisations in ways that are misleading and harmful. He proposes a reframe: if profit means the maximisation of human flourishing, then the Smithsonian is very for-profit and Philip Morris is very non-profit. This reframe changes what we should demand of governance, of accountability, of what organisations are for. It is simultaneously an economic and a political argument.
 
•       Civic Infrastructure: The Political Dimension: Ries’ book ends with a chapter on what he calls civic infrastructure — the kinds of organisations that set the rules of the road for others. He argues that the principles of incorruptible design apply not just to companies but to the institutions of governance. The darkness of the current political moment is, for him, partly a failure of organisational design. When this darkness passes, he argues, the generation that follows will have to rebuild civic infrastructure in the way the generation that survived the Depression built the institutions that governed the second half of the twentieth century.
 
•       The Anakin/Padamé Problem: Ries’ Mea Culpa: Ries opens with a reference to the famous internet meme — Anakin says he’s going to change the world, and Padamé asks: for the better? He grins mischievously. Ries used to find it funny. Then it stopped being funny. When he wrote The Lean Startup, he assumed the purpose of disruption was to make the world a better place. He took it for granted. He now thinks that was naïve. The lesson: you have to specify the purpose. What kind of change? For whom? That is the question that Incorruptible is trying to answer.
 
About the Guest
 
Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, The Leader’s Guide, and The Startup Way. As a founder, he has put his ideas into practice with the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), Answer.AI, Virgil, and IMVU. He is the author of Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great (Authors Equity/Simon & Schuster, May 26, 2026). He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
 
References:
 
•       Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great by Eric Ries (Authors Equity, May 26, 2026).
 
•       The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (Crown Business, 2011).
 
•       The Startup Way by Eric Ries (Currency, 2017).
 
•       More information and bonus materials at incorruptible.co.
 
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
Sp...

“There is a pretty powerful strain in America today in which men feel some need to be violent and domineering to sort of prove their masculinity. And there’s sort of less intense but still prevalent strains that infect many other types of men.” — Jasper Craven
 
Today is Memorial Day — America’s annual celebration of its warriors and military ethic. But for Jasper Craven, author of God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, it should be a day of muted self-reflection rather than bellicose celebration. Especially in May 2026 with America involved in another ludicrous overseas war.
 
Craven’s argument is that from George Washington onwards, America has fused military manliness with a self-destructive masculine identity. Thus young men are trained at top military academies like West Point to be unthinkingly domineering and violent. But for Craven, America — a continent surrounded by oceans to the east and west and by friendly neighbours to the north and south — has no need for the unreflective militarism fetishised by its military academies and culture.
 
So what has West Point wrought? A nation of Pete Hegseths, Jasper Craven implies. Happy (ie: peaceful) Memorial Day everyone.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Military Manliness and American Identity: From Washington to Hegseth: From the Founding Fathers — most of whom were Revolutionary War veterans — America has explicitly fused military manliness with core masculine identity. Boys who want to define themselves as Americans have felt a need to be strong, to serve, to defend. The archetype has only been beefed up over time: through the steroid era and into the world of Navy SEALs and special operators. The result is a culture where men feel the need to be violent and domineering to prove their masculinity, from carrying AK-47s to protests to becoming ICE agents. The problem: the archetype has no relationship to actual national security needs.
 
•       West Point and the Civil War: A Fuse, Not a Remedy: West Point was created to produce a well-schooled officer class. What Craven argues: when you allocate massive resources to building a military, you will feel the consequences. Before the Civil War, West Point was segregated into northern and southern companies — which exacerbated tensions rather than building union. When war broke out, many West Point officers defected to the Confederacy, including Robert E. Lee, who had been superintendent. West Point officers on opposite sides then killed each other in their thousands. Many lawmakers called for West Point to be abolished. They were not heeded.
 
•       Race, Integration, and the Military’s Complex Legacy: Craven acknowledges the military’s partial role in racial integration: Truman’s executive order in 1948 desegregated the armed forces, which was a genuine milestone ahead of civilian institutions. But he is careful about what this means. Integration at the institutional level did not eliminate racism within the culture. And the same military that desegregated also produced the culture of violence, dehumanisation of the other, and misogyny and homophobia that Craven chronicles throughout the book. Partial credit is still only partial credit.
 
•       January 6th and the Politicisation of the Officer Class: In Trump’s first term, General Mattis and General Kelly and others demonstrated real courage in reining in Trump’s worst impulses. By the end of that term, they had all been replaced by loyalists. During the transition to Biden, Trump’s military cronies at the Pentagon went dark. January 6th was largely carried out by military veterans. More than 100 senior retired military officers penned an op-ed supporting what Trump had done. In Trump’s second term, the politicisation of the officer class has only accelerated. The non-political professional officer class is now divided.
 
•       ROTC, Not West Point: Craven’s Prescription: Craven’s preferred model: ROTC — military training supplemental to traditional liberal arts education. Survey data shows ROTC officers, because of exposure to Plato, Shakespeare, and the rest, are more well-rounded and better thinkers than West Point graduates. At West Point, it is essentially all STEM. Craven’s prescription: introduce the humanities, expose cadets to civilians, break the silos. Ideally, West Point could become a national university that includes military programmes alongside the training of doctors and aid workers. The military-civilian divide is as much the military’s creation as the civilian’s.
 
About the Guest
 
Jasper Craven is a freelance reporter covering the military and veterans’ issues. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Politico, The Baffler, and the New Republic. He is the author of God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood (Atria/One Signal Publishers, May 19, 2026) and the co-author, with Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early, of Our Veterans. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
 
References:
 
•       God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood by Jasper Craven (Atria/One Signal Publishers, May 19, 2026).
 
•       Sebastian Junger, Tribe — referenced in the publishers’ framing as a companion text.
 
•       Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning — referenced as a companion text.
 
•       Episode 2907: Brandon Webb on Puddle Jumpers — the companion episode referenced at the opening; the pro-military counterpart to Craven’s critique.
 
•       Episode 2909: Adrian Goldsworthy on Athens vs Sparta — also referenced at the opening.
 
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

“We’ve learned how to tolerate acts of violence, acts of widespread death, disease — that other developed nations simply don’t tolerate. And that tolerance manifesting in myriad political failures — all of which go back to our refusal to maturely deal with mortality and issues of grief.” — David Masciotra
 
Earlier this week, we talked to Ece Temelkuran about her book Nation of Strangers, a manifesto about strangers finding one another. But for the cultural critic David Masciotra, strangerdom is the problem rather than the solution. Contemporary America, he argues in his new essay A Country of Strangers, has become a place of death, despair and indifference.
 
Masciotra takes his cue from Albert Camus’ 1942 novella The Stranger. Camus’ Meursault — the narrator of The Stranger — is a man completely detached from meaning. He attends his own mother’s funeral without feeling anything. He murders an Arab man on a beach without motive. He faces his execution with a shrug. Masciotra’s argument is that the United States has become Meursault writ large. America’s failure is existential rather than political. It is a failure to mourn — a sustained refusal to engage with death, grief, and the weight of history that produces a society of strangers who cannot connect with one another across race, class, or geography.
 
So is Masciotra right? Are we all Meursault now? What can Albert Camus teach us about America?
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Meursault and America: The Same Detachment: Camus’ The Stranger is narrated by Meursault — a man who attends his mother’s memorial without feeling, murders an Arab man on a beach without motive, and faces execution with indifference. The novel, Camus said, was his attempt to detail “man’s confrontation with absurdity in its nakedness.” Masciotra’s argument: this is America now. A country that has adopted Meursault’s emotional posture toward mass death. Columbine stopped the nation in 1999. Mass shootings now barely register. That is not political failure. It is existential failure.
 
•       A Failure to Mourn: Masciotra’s central thesis: America’s deepest problem is its refusal to mourn. Not guilt — he is careful to distinguish mourning from guilt. You can have a national memory that reckons with both what you celebrate and what you grieve. If the Founding Fathers are worth preserving in active memory, so are the people they enslaved. Never properly dealing with the Civil War allowed the resurgence of white supremacist movements. Never properly mourning mass shootings allows them to accelerate. The failure to grieve is not sentimental. It is political.
 
•       Is Meursault Autistic? The Spectrum Reading: Some contemporary critics read Meursault as someone on the autism spectrum — a man whose emotional detachment reflects neurodivergence rather than moral failure. Masciotra is skeptical. His reading: Camus’ portrait is one of moral refusal, not neurological condition. The distinction matters for the American parallel: if America’s indifference is a structural feature rather than a disease, the remedy is not therapy but political and cultural change. You can’t medicate a country into empathy.
 
•       The Colonial Murder and the Racial Hierarchy: Meursault murders an Arab man in French Algeria and feels nothing. Some critics fault Camus for not making colonialism more explicit. Masciotra defends Camus: Meursault doesn’t care about anything, including his own mother’s death. His indifference to his Arab victim’s humanity is the point, not an evasion. The parallel to America: the hierarchy of victims, where Black Americans have historically ranked lower in the eyes of law and institution. David Shipler’s 1997 book A Country of Strangers documented the same failure of Black and white Americans to actually talk to one another.
 
•       You Are the First Close White Friends I’ve Had: Masciotra’s friend Alana — a highly educated, cultured Black woman who lived in Chicago — once told him and his wife: “You are the first close white friends I’ve had.” They said the same back. This, Masciotra argues, is the country of strangers in daily life. Not the horror stories of overt racism. The quieter failure of self-imposed segregation that persists in a society that preaches diversity but, judging from its own behaviour, doesn’t really want it.
 
About the Guest
 
David Masciotra is a cultural critic and the author of six books, including Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy, I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters, and Mellencamp: American Troubadour. He has written for the Progressive, the New Republic, Liberties, and many other publications about politics, literature, and music. His Substack is Absurdia Now.
 
References:
 
•       A Country of Strangers: Death, Despair and Indifference in the US by David Masciotra, CounterPunch, May 1, 2026.
 
•       Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942). Camus’ novella, the primary text of the conversation.
 
•       Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel — referenced in the conversation.
 
•       François Ozon, The Stranger (2024 film) — the adaptation that prompted the essay.
 
•       David Shipler, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (1997) — referenced in the conversation.
 
•       Episode 2903: Ece Temelkuran on Nation of Strangers — the companion episode referenced at the opening.
 
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) - Introduction: Temelkuran’s nation of strangers and Masciotra’s country of strangers

(01...