Keen On America

“A book about truth needs to be truthful.” — Steven Rosenbaum
 
In April, the New York City based tech impresario Steven Rosenbaum came on the show to discuss The Future of Truth, his then new book about artificial intelligence. He warned that AI is a spectacularly good liar and that we should be concerned about the future of truth. A few weeks later, The New York Times reported that the book contained untrue quotations — among them one (mis)attributed to the notable tech journalist Kara Swisher.
 
No, you couldn’t make this story up (if you did, it would be called a lie). Not surprisingly, the world’s leading expert on truth (which he still claims to be) got mocked everywhere from Wired to the Daily Beast. But taking a leaf perhaps out of his fellow New Yorkers Roy Cohn and Donald Trump’s playbook, Rosenbaum has fought back. He claimed that these fake quotes came from ChatGPT, and spent the summer meticulously rewriting the book to eliminate its errors.
 
Rosenbaum is unusually frank about it. Even unapologetic. Defiantly so. He says he gave ChatGPT his own interview transcripts and asked for pull quotes, assuming that a machine given primary sources would return what was in them. Instead, he says, ChatGPT went rogue and decided it could improve a few of them. That said, Rosenbaum takes full responsibility for the original book. He admits he dropped the ball, and — for the first time publicly — thanks the New York Times reporter who wrote the original story. He also stripped every endorsement off the new edition, including Maria Ressa’s introduction, so that none of his illustrious friends might be embarrassed by the brouhaha.
 
I gave the masochist a hard time anyway. He didn’t much enjoy the comparison with Roy Cohn. But I meant it as a compliment. Declare victory and move on was the Cohnian mantra which he taught the current American President. And that’s exactly what Rosenbaum has done with this crazy AI story. What chutzpah! And it’s all true. Kind of.
 
Further Reading:
 
•       The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality by Steven Rosenbaum (Matt Holt Books) — the corrected second edition, with two new chapters, now on presale.
•       Benjamin Mullin’s New York Times report on the fabricated quotations, and Will Oremus’s follow-up in The Atlantic — both discussed here.
•       Prof Joe Cruz from Williams College arguing in the New York Times that teaching students to think need not mean teaching them to write — the controversial piece that opens the conversation.
•       Earlier this week on Keen On: Sherry Turkle on what we become when we talk to machines.
•       The Sustainable Media Center, which Steven Rosenbaum runs, and whose board includes fifty Gen Z members.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       What Actually Happened. The errors were specific and few. Benjamin Mullin of the New York Times — who, as Rosenbaum notes drily, had the temerity to actually read the book he was writing about — found three. One was a misattributed citation on a quotation Meredith Broussard confirms she did say. The others were worse: text that appeared inside quotation marks and had never been spoken, including a line about Asimov’s laws of robotics given to Kara Swisher, who told the Times it sounded as though she had a stick up her backside. Rosenbaum’s account of the mechanism is the part other authors should read. He had fed his own primary-source interview transcripts into ChatGPT and asked it to pull quotations, assuming that a machine handed the actual words would return the actual words. In some cases it decided the first-person material could be made a little better. Across five versions of the manuscript there were nearly four thousand tracked changes and more than four hundred citations; a copy editor flagged the Swisher line, the citation was altered rather than the quotation checked, and nobody caught it. His own verdict is unqualified: he dropped the ball, and he is one hundred per cent responsible.
•       The Rewrite. His publisher, Matt Holt, did not immediately drop him; they said they would withhold judgment until he produced a detailed account of what had gone wrong. He hired a new fact checker, spent the entire summer working through the manuscript with new proofreaders, had it laid out again with a new index, and added two substantial chapters. The new edition is on presale now. Two decisions in that process deserve notice. He asked the publisher to strip every endorsement from the book — Maria Ressa’s introduction, Nick Thompson, Kurt Andersen, Michael Wolff — not because anyone demanded it but because he did not want friends and acquaintances forced into a public choice about whether to stand by him. And he went to Amazon to ask them to enforce their own policy against reviews by people who state in the review that they have not read the book; sixty-eight per cent of the ratings are one star. They did not really answer.
•       The Cross-Examination. AK gave no quarter, and Rosenbaum did not ask for any. The central charge: a man whose entire book argues that AI is a spectacularly good liar then trusted it to supply his quotations, in the book, without checking. Rosenbaum’s defence is that this was a year or more ago, when the models routinely produced fake URLs and fake DOI numbers and authors had not yet learned to distrust them — and that he is now in a large and growing club of doctors, lawyers, poets and nonfiction writers who have been caught the same way. He flatly rejected the distinction between a conversation like this one, where a slip costs nothing, and a four-year book with a team and a publisher behind it: told that the two were not comparable, he replied that he thought AK was absolutely wrong, and that the obligation to tell the truth is the same in both. Asked whether there was something Cohnian in his refusal to go quietly, he turned it round — he will take not agreeing with Roy Cohn as a badge of courage, and Trump can be added to the list.
•       Whose Fault Is It? Rosenbaum’s larger argument, and the one he came to make. He has asked several developers how hard it would be for an AI company to stop placing text inside quotation marks unless it can be reliably traced to a source. All three said it would be trivially easy. So why isn’t it done? Because, as he says the systems themselves will tell you if you ask, these companies want to grow quickly, and delivering confident answers that are occasionally wrong is a risk they are prepared to take. They are not, in their own account, in the truth business. His analogy — that a car manufacturer cannot disclaim responsibility for the brakes by telling drivers to pay more attention to the road — did...

“When Dylan was booed, at the festivals or on tour, even over in England — some of that was Tom Wilson’s fault.” — Steven E. Jones
 
Five years ago, the Los Angeles based Ron Brownstein came on the show to argue that 1974 was the greatest year in American cultural history. Steven E. Jones has a rival candidate. His new book, Everything Is Everything, makes the case for 1966. In contrast with Brownstein, Jones builds his argument not around a Hollywood star but around a record producer most people have never heard of.
 
Tom Wilson was born in Waco, went to Fisk and then to Harvard, where he read economics, ran a show on the college radio station and founded the Harvard New Jazz Society. He started his own label and produced a remarkably eclectic group of musicians including Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. Then he went to Columbia and was handed a young folk singer, a complete unknown. The rest is musical history.
 
Wilson was not only the man who encouraged Bob Dylan to go electric, but the man who transformed Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence into a worldwide hit. He signed Frank Zappa thinking he was getting a white R&B band. He produced the Velvet Underground and wrote Sunday Morning for Nico. He was Black, six foot four, impeccably dressed, and drove an Aston Martin. Cooler than 007.
 
“Everything is everything” was Wilson’s mantra. He meant it as an embrace of radical eclecticism, a refusal to commit to a single genre. Steven Jones dedicates 1966, the last truly eclectic musical year, to this remarkable record producer. Where have you gone, Tom Wilson? A musical nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
 
Further Reading/Listening/Watching:
 
•       Everything Is Everything: Tom Wilson and Pop Music in 1966 by Steven E. Jones (Stanford University Press, September 29, 2026).
•       Rock Me on the Water: 1974 — The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics by Ron Brownstein, a previous guest on this show, and the rival candidate for the greatest year.
•       Irwin Chusid’s pioneering web archive on Tom Wilson, by way of WFMU — where Jones first discovered who had produced his Batman record.
•       Freak Out! (1966), The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) and Chelsea Girl (1967) — three Wilson productions worth hearing in sequence.
•       Dont Look Back (1967), in which Wilson briefly appears, and A Complete Unknown (2024), in which he appears more briefly still.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Man Who Isn’t Quite in the Movie. Jones came to Tom Wilson through the first record he ever bought, aged seven, with his own pocket money: a Batman album, bought in a supermarket in 1966, which turned out at home to be a gloriously raunchy dance record and which his mother did not much care for. Only decades later, through the musicologist Irwin Chusid’s website, did he learn who had produced it. Wilson was born in Waco, Texas, spent a short time at Fisk and then went to Harvard, where he studied economics, presented a show on the college station WHRB and founded the Harvard New Jazz Society. He started his own label, Transition Records, and recorded early work by John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. When the label folded he went into the industry proper, arriving at Columbia in time to be assigned a young folk singer. He appears briefly in A Complete Unknown, which Jones enjoyed — but the film stages him as though he were the engineer, when every account describes a commanding presence running the room.
•       Everything Is Everything. The phrase was Wilson’s own, repeated so often on his promotional radio programme — distributed to DJs on twelve-inch discs to be played straight to air — that Jones took it for a title. It was already part of Black vernacular culture by the middle sixties, turning up in the literature of the Nation of Islam and audible in the studio chatter at the beginning of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, and it travels forward through Eric Burdon and the Animals to Lauryn Hill’s 1998 song and beyond. In other mouths it means something close to it is what it is, an acceptance of how things are. In Wilson’s it meant the opposite: a celebration of radical eclecticism, an insistence that the significant music always borrows and mixes, and a conviction that rock was mutating into a kind of meta-genre. He called himself, half-jokingly, the folk-rock czar. AK’s suggestion that the hopeless term world music might simply be renamed everything got an immediate yes.
•       What He Actually Did. The list is startling even by the standards of the period. He put electric instruments behind Bob Dylan, which is why, as Jones cheerfully concedes, some of the booing at the festivals and on the English tour was Tom Wilson’s fault. He took The Sound of Silence — a track from a failed album by a duo who had already broken up — hired session musicians, overdubbed electric guitar and drums, and released it without consulting either Simon or Garfunkel; it went to number one around the world. He arrived late to the first Velvet Underground record, re-recorded several key tracks, and added Sunday Morning from scratch because he wanted a potential hit, writing the vocal for Nico while the band were busy pushing her out. He then produced her solo album Chelsea Girl. He signed the Mothers of Invention after hearing them play something that sounded like straightforward R&B, believing, in Zappa’s telling, that he had signed a white R&B band — and then backed them anyway, funding Freak Out!, one of the first double albums in rock, and giving Zappa the freedom to bring in freaks off the street to chant and make animal noises.
•       A Year of Contradictions. Jones resists the tidy narrative in which 1966 is a peak and everything afterwards is decline. What he sees instead is a set of responses to immediate pressures, some of them creative and some of them frankly commercial: radio formats were multiplying and differentiating, FM was arriving as the underground alternative, and the industry needed different kinds of music to fill them and different audiences to sell them to. The result was the most plastic and superficial moment of the decade and its most inventive, at the same time. Warhol was everywhere that year — at the Batman premiere party, photographed with Nico dressed as Batman while he played Robin, making his own film Batman Dracula, presiding over the Dom where the Velvets played. At the end of the year the Monkees arrived, an American Beatles manufactured for television. Which is precisely the atmosphere, Jones argues, in which e...

“The United States is speed running into a more authoritarian model that the Russians have been living in for quite some time now.” — Dan Storyev
 
How to survive authoritarianism in the United States? Maybe we can learn from the Russians. At least according to the Russian-American Dan Storyev, co-author (with Maria Kuznetsova) of How to Survive Authoritarianism, a phrasebook which provides a hundred Russian words for the nasty political things Americans can see but can’t yet name.
 
Storyev’s premise is that America hasn’t got the vocabulary to describe its current predicament. The country has never lived under a dictatorship, he explains, so the language simply isn’t there. Russian history, on the other hand, is defined mostly by dictatorship. Storyev experienced Putin’s post-Soviet authoritarianism, his parents Brezhnev’s stagnation, their parents Stalinist totalitarianism, their ancestors one brutal czar or another. So the Russian language shaped itself accordingly, words becoming a way to both describe and resist the authoritarian reality of their lives.
 
Storyev provides us with phrases like “power vertical,” a chilling Kremlin euphemism for a country where a single desk decides everything (ie: the aspiration of the current White House). Then there’s the Russian word “byudzhetniki,” meaning the budget people, whose salaries come from the state and who are therefore expected to loyally show up at the rally and at the ballot box (ie: everyone who benefits from Trump’s $5,000 handout). And the “siloviki,” the men of force (ie: ICE agents). Best of all, “mnogohodovochka,” the multistep stratagem — Moscow’s way of explaining a catastrophe as a plan too clever for ordinary mortals to follow. Which is an unpronounceable way to understand everything from Elon Musk’s ridiculous DOGE debacle to Trump’s absurd war in Iran.
 
Further Reading:
 
•       How to Survive Authoritarianism: A Russian’s Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America by Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev (Liveright, 2026) — a hundred Russian idioms, from apparatchik to samizdat.
•       “Here’s What’s Happening in America, in Six (Mostly) Russian Terms” — the authors’ 2025 New York Times guest essay, and the seed of the book.
•       “Protests Are Not Emotional Support Groups” — their Persuasion argument about why the No Kings demonstrations failed, raised in this conversation.
•       OVD-Info — the Russian human rights watchdog whose English newsletter Storyev writes.
•       Earlier on Keen On: Gal Beckerman on how to be a dissident, Keri Leigh Merritt on Lillian Smith and Jacob Weisberg on cowardice in the MAGA age — all raised here.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       A Phrasebook, Not a Prophecy. Storyev is careful about the claim he is making. The United States is not an authoritarian country, and he says so repeatedly. What exists is a looming threat, and a faction within the ruling class that would plainly like the country to become one. The trouble, in his account, is linguistic. Americans have never lived under a dictatorship, so they have no words for its early symptoms, while Russian is saturated with them. AK’s immediate objection was a good one: millions of Americans have lived under an authoritarianism of their own, whether under Jim Crow or during the McCarthy years, and surely they know the signs. Storyev conceded the point readily, observing that those communities developed a private vocabulary for the agents of the state which never reached the mainstream. His own formulation of the difference is the one that sticks. Russia has spent three centuries learning these models of government. America is speed running them.
•       Aesopian Language. The device at the heart of the book is an old one, invented by satirists under the czars and perfected in the Soviet Union: a way of attacking the state that everybody understands and no prosecutor can use. Storyev’s favourite example is mnogohodovochka, the multistep stratagem, which Russians now deploy sarcastically to describe the Kremlin’s habit of presenting every disaster as a master plan too subtle for ordinary minds to follow. The American equivalent arrived when the White House press secretary explained that journalists would understand the president’s thinking if only they had read more of The Art of the Deal. Among the young, Storyev argues, the same instinct now appears as irony poisoning: everything becomes a joke about itself, partly because jokes are harder to punish. AK brought in Lea Ypi on growing up in Hoxha’s Albania, where families spoke in opposites, and the artistic lineage that runs from Havel to Shostakovich to Tarkovsky. Resistance begins, Storyev says, in private language: first in your own head, then among friends, then with strangers. That is how movements start.
•       Breaking the Law. The one moment in the hour when Storyev abandoned his hedges. American liberals, he argues, are still debating whether what the administration does is legal, and have not yet absorbed the central fact about autocrats, which is that they write the laws themselves. At some point, therefore, resistance will mean breaking them. AK pushed back hard, and on two grounds: Trump was elected and can be unelected, and once lawbreaking is licensed so, eventually, is violence. Storyev clarified rather than retreated. He is not calling for a civil war; he is calling for an end to normalization. His article with Kuznetsova argued that the No Kings protests achieved nothing because protests are not emotional support groups. He points to Steve Bannon’s own formulation — we win or we go to prison — as evidence that at least one side has stopped thinking in electoral terms, and to the unitary executive theory as the blueprint for what Russians call the power vertical. He offers no solution and says so plainly. What he offers is a vocabulary.
•       The Words Themselves. Power vertical entered Russian in the late nineties, sold as a promise of order after the gangster decade, and came to mean that in the largest country on earth every decision is taken at one desk. The byudzhetniki, literally the budget people, are the teachers, doctors and students whose salaries come from the state and who are therefore expected at the rally and at the ballot box; Storyev’s American instances are the promised $5,000 payment should the Republicans hold the midterms, and Musk’s money in the Wisconsin judicial election. The siloviki are the men of force, whose ancestors are Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki, riding into towns on black horses with severed dogs’ heads at the saddle; his parallel is the recruitment of ICE, which AK was unw...

“She is absolutely a Cassandra. She is unafraid to tell the stark naked truth, no matter how ugly it is.” — Keri Leigh Merritt
 
In April, Gal Beckerman came on the show to identify the ten qualities of being a dissident. They included pessimism, humour and recklessness. But he left one out: inconvenience. Dissidents are profoundly inconvenient people — to the government, to society, sometimes even to themselves. Take, for example, Lillian Smith, author of the bestselling (and banned) 1944 Strange Fruit, a novel about interracial love. Born into a white Florida family at the turn of the century, Smith dissented against Jim Crow. She was, indeed, An Inconvenient Woman, the title of a new biography about her by today’s guest Keri Leigh Merritt.
 
So why, I asked Merritt, isn’t Lillian Smith better known? Part of the answer is bound up in Smith’s own uncomfortable critique of white supremacy. She insisted that Jim Crow damaged white people, that its shame and guilt did immense psychological injury to its supposed beneficiaries. So this inconvenient woman pushed better known white southern liberals like Ralph McGill or Hodding Carter leftwards, calling them out for refusing to support integration long after the Brown decision.
 
Smith had quite a life. She lived openly with her partner Paula Snelling in Clayton, Georgia, ran a girls’ camp for twenty-five years, wrote many books (including what Merritt calls her masterpiece, Killers of the Dream in 1949) and was the first white magazine editor in the South to publish Black writers like Pauli Murray. Her FBI file ran to 143 pages, making her a particular inconvenience to J. Edgar Hoover and his goons.
 
Most of all, she stayed in rural Georgia. She could have escaped to Greenwich Village or Berkeley like other misfits. Instead she remained a perpetual thorn in the southern conscience. Her brother, who ran the county, had kept her safe until he left office in 1955. After that, one fire burned down her library, destroying decades of correspondence, research and manuscripts with it. And still she stayed. In today’s America, Keri Leigh Merritt concludes, this inconvenient woman offers us a timely reminder of what it takes to be a dissident.
 
Further Reading:
 
•       An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America by Keri Leigh Merritt (St. Martin’s Press, September 29, 2026), with a foreword by the Rev. Dr. William Barber II.
•       Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1949) by Lillian Smith — the novel that made her famous, and the book Merritt rates highest. Both still in print from the University of Georgia Press, which also publishes A Lillian Smith Reader.
•       Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017) — Merritt’s first book, winner of the Bennett Wall Award and the President’s Book Award.
•       Pseudopodia, later The North Georgia Review and finally South Today — the magazine Smith and Paula Snelling ran, and the first white Southern magazine to publish Black writers. Every issue is online through Piedmont University Library.
•       Earlier on Keen On: Andrew Curran on how the Enlightenment invented race, and Dennis Rasmussen on Frederick Douglass — both raised in this conversation.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Bestseller Nobody Remembers. Lillian Smith may be the most successful American author of the twentieth century you have never heard of. Strange Fruit appeared in 1944, told the story of a love affair between a white man and a Black woman, ended in a lynching, sold in the millions, was translated into some thirty languages and became a Broadway play. It was also banned — in Boston, in Detroit, informally by booksellers across the country who simply declined to stock it, and formally in the US mail until Smith asked Eleanor Roosevelt to intervene and Roosevelt got the president to lift it. Merritt’s explanation for the forgetting has three parts. Smith argued that white supremacy psychologically damaged white people, which is not a comfortable thesis for anyone. She refused to spare white liberals, pushing Ralph McGill and Hodding Carter leftwards all her life and naming them for failing to back integration long after Brown. And she was a woman living openly with another woman, which did the rest.
•       How She Was Made. Two episodes from childhood, both in the book. Her father Calvin, a devout Methodist who had married into money and lost it when the First World War ruined his turpentine business, once invited an entire chain gang to Christmas dinner — not the guards, the prisoners, murderers and rapists among them — and the Smith children cooked for days. Then there was Julie. A Black family moved to Jasper, Florida, and the town’s white women noticed that one of the children looked white; the girl was removed from her home and placed with the Smiths. Lillian shared a room with her and came to love her as a sister. One day Julie was gone, returned to her own family, because Julie was Black. What that taught Lillian, Merritt says, is that race had no bearing on what a person was. And the culture she grew up in was absolute: the first time Smith ate a meal at a table with Black people she went outside and vomited — not from disgust but from terror at the scale of the taboo she had broken.
•       She Stayed. The decision that makes her remarkable. She could have left for Greenwich Village, as the South’s misfits generally did. Instead she stayed in Clayton, in the north-eastern corner of Georgia, in country that was supposed to be the most hostile place imaginable — and built, in that very rural place, something like a gay and lesbian community around her. Her brother Frank effectively ran the county and kept her and Paula safe while he held office; when he left in 1955 the retaliation began. A fire destroyed her library: decades of correspondence, research and manuscripts, gone. More followed, one set at eight separate points of her house on Old Screamer Mountain. She stayed anyway, partly because she loved it and partly because the sadness of the place was, she thought, artistically generative. And she did not believe laws alone could end racism: art — writing, music, painting — was what changed hearts.
•       The Network. Smith was not isolated, and the list of her friends is startling. W. E. B. Du Bois from the 1930s. Pauli Murray, whose first paycheck ca...

“The Enlightenment may have produced race, but it also produced what we might call anti-racism.” — Andrew Curran
 
Most of us imagine the eighteenth century Enlightenment positively. As the victory of reason, science and individual rights over superstition and intolerance. But Andrew Curran, who has spent his career interpreting the Enlightenment, has a more nuanced view. Indeed, his new book, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson, suggests that the age of reason was also what he calls the first “anthropological century.” Which meant that in sorting humankind into fixed biological categories for the first time in history, the Enlightenment invented the dangerous idea of “race.”
 
Before the eighteenth century, Curran says, Europeans spoke of nations and peoples using the botanical metaphor of varieties. Variety implies hybridization. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Race, in contrast, separates species into fixed categories. As biblical authority weakened, the European mind was freed to play new tricks. To classify people by skin samples and anatomical designs. Thus the “dangerous idea” of race embraced by every Enlightenment philosopher, from the tyrannical Catherine the Great to the slave owning Thomas Jefferson. With “enlightened” friends like these, who needs enemies?
 
Further Reading:
 
•       Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson by Andrew S. Curran (Other Press, 2026) — a group biography of thirteen figures, among them Louis XIV, Buffon, Linnaeus, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Blumenbach, Kant and Jefferson.
•       Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race, edited with Henry Louis Gates Jr. — the 1739 Bordeaux essay contest on the source of Black skin. Nominated for an NAACP Image Award.
•       Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely and The Anatomy of Blackness — his earlier books, the first a prize-winning biography, the second a traditional intellectual history.
•       Earlier this month on Keen On: Dennis Rasmussen on Frederick Douglass — Curran’s co-author on a forthcoming book, Good Beyond Belief, about the eighteenth-century atheists who argued one could be good without God.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Before Race. Curran resists the current rush to find race everywhere in the past. Xenophobia is ancient — humanity ends at the frontiers of one’s own tribe, as Lévi-Strauss put it — and the dehumanization of Jews, Muslims, Roma and West Africans was enormous. But the specifically biological version, in which your physical makeup makes you inferior, doesn’t take off until the eighteenth century, and you can watch it happen in the vocabulary. People spoke of nations, peoples and varieties; Buffon and Linnaeus both used variety, a botanical metaphor implying hybridization and continuity within a category. Race implies fixity and standalone categories; species implies no biological link at all. All three were in circulation, and the shift between them is the story. Context mattered too: in Nantes or Liverpool you would hear proto-racist talk from returning slave traders, while in central France you would hear something else entirely, in a society where literacy ran at perhaps fifteen per cent.
•       The First Anthropological Century. The Enlightenment’s great virtue, in his account, is universalism — all men are created equal, a universal human condition, inalienable rights. Its blind spot is the question mark that follows: are they? The same century that put the human at the centre of knowledge also became the first anthropological one, and the new science qualified the universalism in a dozen ways — anatomical discoveries, skin samples, treatises on physiological difference, proto-evolutionary ideas about peoples degenerating over time, and the conviction that commercial European society sat at the pinnacle. The classification schemes arrive in bursts rather than steadily: François Bernier in 1684, anecdotal and chatty; Linnaeus from Uppsala in 1735; then an explosion by 1775, when ten or fifteen appear at once. Christianity’s loosening grip is what made the room: monogenesis — Noah’s sons setting out from the Caucasus, the origin of the word Caucasian — had kept all humans related, and the pre-Adamite heresy that Native Americans were a separate creation was dangerous precisely because it broke that.
•       Writing on Paper, Writing on Skin. Catherine the Great’s line to Diderot, who had arrived in Russia with elaborate plans for democratizing it: Diderot, Diderot, Diderot — you write on paper, and I write on skin. Curran uses it to divide his cast. Buffon, Linnaeus, Kant in Königsberg and Blumenbach wrote on paper, in abstractions. Louis XIV wrote on skin: in 1685 he became the most famous monarch to sign a slave code, France’s Code Noir, which gave slavery legal status and converted enslaved Africans into property — moving the word nègre from an ethnographic term towards a political status, not yet race but close. Exactly a century later, Jefferson wrote on skin in Notes on the State of Virginia. The justification had changed completely in between: the devout Louis told himself the enslaved lost their freedom but gained eternal salvation, while the anticlerical deist Jefferson had no such illusions, and had instead absorbed the European theories of inferiority.
•       Jefferson’s Bookshelf. The chapter Curran says frightened him most to write, as a historian of Europe stepping into an American industry of ideological combat. What stunned him was the library: Jefferson owned not only the first-tier race-makers but the second, third and fourth tier — Kant, Hume, the naturalists, the classifiers, all of them. He was, Curran says, the American who synthesized European racial thought better and more thoroughly than anyone else in the eighteenth century. In Paris in the 1780s, while drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man with Lafayette in his own townhouse, he was invited to join the Société des Amis des Noirs, which existed to refute exactly the ideas being used to justify slavery. He declined. He replied courteously to the Black astronomer Benjamin Banneker — rare in itself — saying it would be wonderful if what Banneker claimed about Black people were true. Publicly cautious, privately convinced of intrinsic inferiority. And this is why the everyone-was-like-that defence fails: the Enlightenment produced race, and it produced the anti-racists who fought it.
•       Why It Exploded in the 1770s. The sharpest corrective in the hour. For most of the period these were the ideas of a tiny elite — perhaps a few hundred gentlemen writing from scientific academies and châteaux. What turned a private conversation into an ideology was the abolitionist movement. As ...