Keen On America

“President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were, in fact, working with the CIA to kill Castro. The CIA wasn’t plotting behind the Kennedys’ back.” — Mark Allen

A few days ago we had the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs on the show talking about the thirteen days in 1962 when John F. Kennedy saved the world from nuclear annihilation. That was him at his best, the Kennedy we want to remember. Today we have the JFK we want to forget. The one who was passing envelopes to the Chicago Outfit via Judith Exner, a twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, while his brother was busy putting mobsters in prison.
Mark Allen, a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney, knew Exner. He flew out to California in 1991 to get the rest of the JFK story from her. She told him that she carried not only messages but money between Kennedy and the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, beginning before the 1960 election.
All this is in A Dangerous Beauty, a new book Allen has written with the Los Angeles writer Tricia Aurand. Frank Sinatra introduced Exner to both Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana — JFK at the Sands in February 1960, Giancana at the Fontainebleau a few weeks later. Nobody disputes Exner’s familiarity with either man. It’s the envelopes that historians have spent fifty years trying to decipher. Especially given all the conspiracy theories about the interconnectedness of the Kennedys, the mob, the CIA, Castro and Dallas.
The twist in A Dangerous Beauty is not what we expect from a book about JFK’s tangled relations with a beautiful young woman. If Exner was telling the truth, Allen and Aurand argue, then the Kennedys knew exactly what the CIA was doing to Castro, because they themselves were running the operation. Which destroys the premise underneath every rogue-agency theory of Dallas. So Allen and Aurand are anti-conspiracy theorists. The CIA, they suggest, probably wasn’t behind the 1963 assassination.
Allen is agnostic on who shot the president. What he wants to demolish is the idea that JFK was betrayed and even murdered by his own government. A conspiracy theory that, he warns, is being peddled today by, of all people, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

FURTHER READING

•   A Dangerous Beauty: The Kennedys, the Mob, the FBI, and Judith Exner, the Woman Who Linked Them All (Post Hill Press), with a foreword by Patt Morrison.
•   The Church Committee investigated CIA assassination plots in 1975. Exner testified that September, three months after Giancana was shot dead in his basement.
•   Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), gave Exner’s courier account a chapter and broad acceptance. It changed few minds.
•   Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, is the recent bestseller on the wider pattern.
•   Mark Allen, “RFK Jr.’s conspiracy theories do a disservice to his father,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 7 July 2023 — his dismantling of the three stories RFK Jr. tells about his father and the CIA.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Mark Allen is a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney and a longtime student of the Kennedy presidency. He came to the subject through the JFK assassination and interviewed Judith Exner in the last years of her life, after Anthony Summers made the introduction. He lives in Sarasota, Florida. Tricia Aurand is a writer and screenwriter in Los Angeles. A Dangerous Beauty is published by Post Hill Press, with a foreword by Patt Morrison.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“We have to be willing to lose elections. That is the very essence of a democracy.” — Michael G. Miller

Will the midterms be free and fair? With only six days to go, these are now the questions about American democracy that we most fear. But much of this nervousness might be misplaced. Rather than militiamen in balaclavas, the real damage to American democracy was done quietly, thirteen years ago, by five Supreme Court justices.
That, at least, is the view of Michael G. Miller, a Barnard political science professor. With the Brennan Center’s Kevin T. Morris, Miller has written An American Problem, a book accusing John Roberts’ 2013 Supreme Court of breaking Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Act. The book title is LBJ’s, from the speech he gave a week after Selma, when he told Congress that denying the vote was neither a Northern problem nor a Southern one. The law Johnson got is, according to Miller, the most effective Congress has ever passed. Its sword was section two, which let citizens sue if their voting rights were compromised. Its shield was something called “preclearance,” which meant that local authorities required the Federal government’s explicit permission before tampering with any kind of electoral logistics.
The 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder took away this shield. Without preclearance, Miller argues, local authorities started tampering again — closing polling places, redrawing wards, purging rolls. Often there was no evil intent — but it impacted Black voters anyway. He and Morris built a national voter file running back to 2008 and found that in the counties that lost preclearance, the gap between white and Black turnout widened sharply after the ruling. That means hundreds of thousands of Black votes were never cast. John Roberts’ Supreme Court broke LBJ’s Voting Rights Act, Michael Miller says. Forget martial law. With Shelby County v. Holder, five Supreme Court justices created the most existential threat to American democracy.

FURTHER READING

•   An American Problem: How the Country Built — and the Supreme Court Broke — the Voting Rights Act (Princeton University Press, October 2026), by Michael G. Miller and Kevin T. Morris.
•   Shelby County v. Holder (2013) — the 5–4 ruling that ended preclearance, with Roberts’s majority and Ginsburg’s dissent.
•   Johnson’s “American Problem” address to Congress, 15 March 1965, delivered a week after Selma and the source of the book’s title.
•   Kevin T. Morris is a senior research fellow at the Brennan Center, where much of the underlying voter-file work lives.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Michael G. Miller is associate professor of political science at Barnard College, where he has taught since 2014, and works on election law, election administration and political behavior. An American Problem is written with Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“Why would you want the guy who is good at coding to decide what we all do? Why would you want the guy who built the pyramids to actually run Egypt?” — Noam Cohen

The war movie is back in vogue. Only this time it’s Hollywood turning its guns on Silicon Valley. There’s the four-hour Musk doc, an upcoming Sam Altman satire entitled Artificial, Nathan Fielder’s love/hate Elizabeth Holmes picture, and now The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s assault on the Facebook-Zuckerberg complex. The Sorkin movie is, of course, a follow-up to the 2010 biopic, The Social Network, which he wrote. Sorkin both writes and directs the sequel. If he turns it into a trilogy, Sorkin should probably star as Zuck.
Brooklyn-based Noam Cohen, former New York Times tech writer and author of The Know-It-Alls, has seen both Sorkin movies. His critique is that The Social Reckoning is a passive-aggressive legal brief with the wrong defendant. He notes that Zuckerberg is barely in it. The movie’s heroes are a Wall Street Journal journalist and an internal Facebook whistleblower. But the drama, Cohen argues, is about whether anyone can reach a man who built the attention economy, but pays attention to nobody. The problem is that Zuckerberg is played by Jeremy Strong as a robot. So it’s an AI movie without the bots. The only drama in Strong’s Zuck is his absence of drama.
Noam Cohen thinks that Sorkin’s The Social Network got the origin story wrong, which he explains more fully in a recent Harvard Magazine piece. Cohen, who also went to Harvard, argues that Facemash didn’t represent Zuck’s wounded masculinity. Instead, it was a test of how to lure an audience, and those first weeks of TheFacebook were spent tuning the thing for addictiveness. So there’s nothing accidental about the accidental billionaire.
My own take on Sorkin’s two movies is that in the first, Zuck comes across as the randy son of a NY dentist, while in this latest one, he matures into that dentist. The kind who barely talks, pulls out all your teeth, and then charges you a fortune. All for your own good, of course. As if he’s doing you a favor. Just as Hollywood is doing all of us a favor by turning a NY dentist’s son into the Antichrist. Do we really need this kind of altruistic war movie? I think not.

FURTHER READING

•   The Social Reckoning (Sony/Columbia, 9 October 2026), written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg, Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz, from Horwitz’s Facebook Files reporting.
•   “How Facebook Escaped Harvard” — Noam Cohen’s Harvard Magazine piece, and the source of the argument he makes here.
•   Cohen is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball (The New Press, 2017).
•   Richard Cooke, The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia (Norton), which Cohen reviewed; his Bloomberg piece is “Wikipedia Taught Us How to Trust AI”.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Noam Cohen wrote about technology for the New York Times for many years and is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball. He writes for Harvard Magazine, Bloomberg and others, and lives in Brooklyn.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“It would be lovely to imagine that writing comes out of some instinct to compose works of great literature. It absolutely doesn’t. It’s a side effect of accountancy.” — Jonn Elledge

“Borders Are Back, Baby” we proclaimed last year to celebrate Jonn Elledge’s appearance on the show to talk about his 2025 work A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders. And now the prolific Elledge, currently residing in the bosom of London’s lower east side in Bethnal Green, is back to talk about his latest book A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions. In Blighty, by the way, it’s entitled 31 Inventions That Built Our World. America gets the extra (brief) invention. Not that we’re counting.
Elledge’s most prosaic invention isn’t exactly Archimedean. Writing was invented, he says, because somebody had to count the grain. Once ten thousand people live in one place you need not only a granary but a way of recording what’s in it. And of course, laws protecting grain owners from thieves.
Et voilà (rather than eureka!).
Thus came mathematics, literacy, politics, accountancy and eventually literature. So what we think of as civilization owes itself to urbane places like Bethnal Green. Without such hotspots, you wouldn’t be able to read this. No wonder some of our most glittering cultural figures — Mick Jagger, John Grisham, Robert Plant — studied accountancy. You can’t always count what you want. Not even a history of cities in 32 1/2 inventions.

FURTHER READING

•   Jonn Elledge, A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions (The Experiment, 13 October 2026). The UK edition is 31 Inventions That Built Our World.
•   The extra American chapter is on the Los Angeles streetcar conspiracy. The other cut chapters are free on his Substack.
•   Elledge created and ran CityMetric at the New Statesman, and also wrote A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders and Conspiracy, with Tom Phillips.
•   The theory he couldn’t name at 17:20 is urban scaling — Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt’s finding that productivity rises faster than population, building on Alfred Marshall on agglomeration.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. Why Ideas Cluster

There is no technical reason a bank or a tech firm needs to sit next to its rivals — and yet they always do. Elledge puts it down to the sheer density of interactions: more people having more conversations, so more chances for ideas to collide. It is also why Britain worries that Manchester and Birmingham underperform Lyon and Munich.

2. Napoleon Moved at Caesar’s Speed

In 1800 armies crossed Europe no faster than they had two thousand years earlier. You could cover twenty miles a day, so politics happened at twenty miles a day. Nation states are not really possible until the railways of the 1830s. It is the Roman Empire, Elledge notes, not the Italian one.

3. Gilgamesh Already Knew

The oldest surviving work of literature, from Uruk four thousand years ago, already splits the world between the walled city — comfortable, advanced, faintly decadent — and the wild country beyond, which is more dangerous and more authentic. Brexit and the Rust Belt are running on the same fault line.

4. The Empty State Building

Two architects raced to build the tallest tower, each secretly adding height beyond the published plans. Both topped out in the autumn of 1929, exactly as America discovered it had too much office space. The Empire State Building stood half empty for years and acquired the nickname.

5. The Tube Has Warmed the Ground

Edwardian posters invited Londoners to cool off on the Bakerloo line on hot days. A century of trains in unventilated tunnels has since raised the temperature of the earth around them, and nobody is sure how to undo it.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Jonn Elledge is a British journalist and author. He created and ran CityMetric, the New Statesman’s urbanism site, and was an assistant editor there; he has written for the Financial Times, the Guardian and the i. His books include A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders, The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything and, with Tom Phillips, Conspiracy. He writes The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything and lives in London.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“If you have a space of democracy that is closing, you have infinitely more leverage to act before it closes than after.” — Paul Rogat Loeb

The Impossible Will Take a Little While is an anthology of essays, speeches, memoirs and poems about perseverance & hope in troubled times. Edited and introduced by Paul Rogat Loeb, the anthology came out in 2004, in the middle of the Bush years and the Iraq war, and now has 125,000 copies in print. Colleges assigned it across the curriculum. One of the founders of the Natural Resources Defense Council told Loeb he reached for it at the points where he had hit the wall and wasn’t sure he could keep going.
In 2026, many of us feel we’ve hit a wall and aren’t sure we can keep going. So it’s apt that Loeb has reworked his book to suit what seems to be our particularly troubled times. Classic essays from Havel, Mandela, Neruda and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail all remain in the anthology. But this edition has also been comprehensively rebuilt. New work includes Navalny’s prison journals, essays from Jesmyn Ward & Rutger Bregman and a chapter on the South Korean coup. What’s changed over the last couple of decades, Loeb says, is the routinization of surveillance, the attacks on democratic institutions, and the daily reality of climate disaster.
Hope, Loeb reminds us, isn’t blind optimism. His most hopeful stories in the new anthology are about people who weren’t heroes. In Seoul in December 2024, as troops moved to shut the parliament, one detachment stopped for ramen noodles. They had their orders, Loeb says, but food came before politics. In Norway in 1942, eleven thousand teachers simply declined to teach fascism. So history often isn’t made by Havel, MLK or Mandela-style heroes. Hope, then, lies in the action and sometimes inaction of ordinary people. In Seoul noodle restaurants or Norwegian classrooms or on the streets of Minneapolis.

FURTHER READING

•   Paul Rogat Loeb, ed., The Impossible Will Take a Little While (Basic Books, 13 October 2026). Full contents and excerpts.
•   Loeb also wrote Soul of a Citizen and Generation at the Crossroads, and founded the nonpartisan Campus Election Engagement Project. More.
•   The Korean chapter is Jungmin Choi’s “Lightsticks and K-Pop”. The Norwegian teachers are Loeb’s own essay, “Refusing to be Quislings”.
•   The Berlin story AK asks for is the Rosenstrasse protest of February 1943.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. He Doesn’t Believe the Arc Bends

Asked whether the arc of history bends toward justice, Loeb says no. It can bend, depending on how we act. What he has instead is Havel’s distinction, written in 1986 when the Czech dictatorship looked permanent: optimism expects things to turn out, hope is what lets you act when they might not.

2. Panels on the Ground in Pakistan

Solar output doubled in two years, then again in one. Pakistani farmers skip the permits and the installers and simply lay panels on the ground — a third of the grid displaced in a year, and panels now turning up in wedding dowries. But prices collapsed because the German Greens pushed through subsidies. Citizen action made the technology cheap.

3. Berlin, 1943: The Wives on Rosenstrasse

Pressed on whether readers might cast themselves as martyrs when Mandelstam’s Russia and the present are nothing alike, Loeb concedes it at once. Then the counter-example: the non-Jewish wives of Jewish men gathered outside a Berlin collection point until the men were released. He won’t claim it could have beaten the Nazis. Only that it happened.

4. King’s Letter Was About the Elites

Rereading Letter from Birmingham Jail, Loeb says it clicked. King’s target — the white man of goodwill whose silence does more damage than the Klansman — maps onto the elite law firms and university presidents. Ordinary people, he says, have come out of this year better than the elites.

5. Act Before the Space Closes

In Buenos Aires he met a young Russian couple. She protested when Navalny came home; then the protests shrank, the cost rose, and now none of them do. The lesson is leverage: a closing democracy gives you infinitely more of it than one that has closed.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Paul Rogat Loeb is an American writer and activist who has spent forty years on civic engagement and social change. He is the author of Soul of a Citizen, Generation at the Crossroads, Hope in Hard Times and Nuclear Culture, and the editor of The Impossible Will Take a Little While, now in a revised third edition from Basic Books. He founded the nonpartisan Campus Election Engagement Project and guides.vote, has lectured at more than 400 campuses, and lives in Seattle.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.