Keen On America

“My brothers always think: what would Jesus do? And they do that. I think: what would dad do? And I do the opposite.” — Jamison Firestone
 
What do you do if your dad was a multimillionaire conman, crack addict, and owner of New York’s most expensive brothel? If you’re Jamison Firestone, you transform yourself into his antithesis. You go to law school. You go to post-Soviet Russia and establish the country’s first independent foreign law firm. You employ Sergei Magnitsky and befriend Alexei Navalny. You transform yourself into one of Vladimir Putin’s most vocal foreign critics.
 
It’s quite a story. His memoir, Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin’s Russia (HarperCollins, June 4, 2026), is both a Russian and American confession. As an old friend of the show, Peter Pomerantsev, says: “This book is NUTS! — in the best possible way.”
 
Yes, Rule of Lies is nuts. But it’s also the best kind of contemporary history. Firestone arrived in Russia in 1991, at the very moment the KGB hardliners rolled tanks into the streets and kidnapped Gorbachev. He watched, within days, as the Russian people confronted the tanks. He saw Yeltsin emerge as the hero, the Soviet Union dissolve, and the promise of a free-market democracy consumed by mafia groups, corrupt officials, and the structural lawlessness of the transition. In 1993, Yeltsin shelled his own congress. In 1999, on New Year’s Eve, he got on television, wished everyone a happy new year, and resigned — handing the country to Vladimir Putin in exchange for a pardon. That, says Firestone, is how we got to Putinism’s kleptocratic rule of lies.
 
Firestone’s Russian memoir is also the Magnitsky story. He employed an accountant called Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered the largest tax theft in Russian history, was arrested on fabricated charges, and died in pre-trial detention — probably murdered by the same corrupt officials he had exposed. The Magnitsky Act, the Magnitsky sanctions, the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign — all of it connects back to Jamison Firestone. And, in a way, back to his dad, Richard, the New York City crook who schooled his rebellious son in the value of obeying the law and telling the truth.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Criminal Father Who Taught Him Everything He Needed for Russia: Firestone’s father was a brilliant, charming man who turned out, when Firestone was 15, to be a multimillionaire fraudster defrauding investors and the IRS. Indicted, his father went a little crazy: became a crack addict, bought New York’s most expensive brothel, started hanging out with loan sharks and contract killers. Firestone spent his late high school years learning to talk to contract killers — respectfully, to make them laugh, to say no and not get killed. That skill, he says, turned out to be exactly what he needed in Russia in the 1990s, when everyone was mafia. His father taught him crime doesn’t pay. He believed it.
 
•       Arriving in Russia at the Moment of the Coup: Firestone arrived in Russia in 1991, at the very end of the Gorbachev era, during the opening of the Soviet Union. Within days, KGB hardliners rolled tanks into the streets, kidnapped Gorbachev, and declared the reforms over. Then — the extraordinary thing — the Russian people stood up. The tanks backed down. Gorbachev was released. But the hero of the day was Yeltsin, not Gorbachev. The Soviet Union dissolved within months. What followed was a chaotic, disorderly transition in which democracy got lost: everyone, including Firestone and the US government, was so concentrated on the business opportunities that no one noticed the democratic backsliding until it was too late.
 
•       Yeltsin Shelling His Congress, and Putin’s New Year’s Eve Deal: Two moments stand out in Firestone’s account of Russia’s democratic failure. First: in 1993, Yeltsin resolved a standoff with his own congress by shelling it — the equivalent, Firestone says, now that January 6 has happened, of not unimaginable. Everyone — the US government, Firestone himself — saw it as a triumph for the free market. They didn’t recognise how undemocratic it was. Second: on New Year’s Eve 1999, Yeltsin got on national television, wished everyone a happy new year, and resigned — handing the country to Vladimir Putin in exchange for a pardon. “That’s how we got Putin,” Firestone says. For a pardon.
 
•       Sergei Magnitsky: The Tax Fraud, the Murder, and the Act: Firestone employed Sergei Magnitsky as a tax adviser and auditor. Magnitsky uncovered what was then the largest tax theft in Russian history — committed by the same government officials who had raided and seized a Browder-connected fund. Magnitsky reported it to the authorities. He was arrested on fabricated charges, denied medical treatment in pre-trial detention, and died — murdered, in Firestone’s view, by the officials he had exposed. The Magnitsky Act, which sanctions human rights abusers, grew from that death. The Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, which Firestone co-founded with Bill Browder, has extended it worldwide.
 
•       Russia’s Precarity and Why Ukraine Must Not Fall: Firestone’s current work is dedicated to seizing Russian state assets for the benefit of Ukraine. His strategic assessment: Russia has burnt through its $600 billion reserve fund under sanctions — it took four years, but it’s done. Russia now owes hundreds of billions of dollars. Putin cannot force a mass mobilisation without becoming deeply unpopular, and even the huge financial incentives he’s offering for enlistment are no longer working. The regime is precarious. But Firestone’s long-term hopes for Russia do not change his short-term argument: if Russia is not stopped in Ukraine, the West will be fighting it when it takes a chunk of Europe that used to be part of the Soviet Union.
 
About the Guest
 
Jamison Firestone established Russia’s first independent foreign law firm, where he worked for eighteen years. He is the author of Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin’s Russia (HarperCollins, June 4, 2026). He is co-founder (with Sir William Browder) of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, which created the Magnitsky human rights and anti-corruption sanctions regimes. He also ran the Navalny 35 campaign promoting the sanctioning of corrupt oligarchs and officials identified by Alexei Navalny. He currently works on seizing Russian state assets for the benefit of Ukraine. He lives in London.
 
References:
 
•       Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin...

“His descent is in a sense our descent.” — Peter Wehner on Trump at 80
 
Donald Trump turned 80 two weeks ago. But Peter Wehner’s timely Atlantic piece, “The Apotheosis of Donald Trump,” isn’t much of a birthday present. Wehner even suggests that for all Trump’s madness, mayhem and malevolence, the orange octogenarian eludes Shakespearean tragedy. So no historic hall of infamy for Donald. He’s too sad for that.
 
Trump is a man, Wehner says, of borderless corruption — malicious, totally corrupt, without any visible redeeming qualities. But he isn’t King Lear. Trump lacks Lear’s complexity, Wehner says. Lear was a figure with whom you could have some empathy. Trump is not. He is, as Wehner notes, “a flatter figure in that sense” — but that doesn’t make him any less dangerous.
 
For the DC-based Wehner, what makes Trump more dangerous, as an octogenarian, is his decomposition. The signs are everywhere: the disinhibition intensifying, the impulsivity more easily triggered, the volatility producing a foreign policy that no ally can track or trust. His descent, Wehner warns, might be our descent. Peak Trump. The apotheosis of a pathetically malevolent madman. Just in time for the semiquincentennial, which Wehner will “celebrate” at Monticello.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Trump at 80: The Apotheosis and the Decomposition: Wehner’s Atlantic piece, written to mark Trump’s 80th birthday, argues that what we are seeing is not just the decline of an old man but a visible decomposition in his mental and physical capacities that is making him more, not less, dangerous. The disinhibition is more intense. The impulsivity is more easily triggered. The volatility is producing a foreign policy that no ally can track or trust. Trump 2.0 is more dangerous than Trump 1.0 — and Trump 1.0 was not a walk in the park. The question is not whether this ends well. The question is how badly it ends.
 
•       Not King Lear: A Man of Borderless Corruption: Wehner uses a King Lear allusion in his Atlantic essay but hesitates to lean on it. Lear was a complicated figure — someone you could have empathy with, who saw things at the end he hadn’t seen earlier. Trump is not like that. He is, as best Wehner can tell, a man of borderless corruption, malicious from head to toe, with no visible redeeming qualities — a flatter figure in the Shakespearean sense. That flatness makes the Lear parallel partial. But it does not diminish the danger. His descent is in a sense our descent.
 
•       European Mystification: When It Happens Twice, That Breaks Trust: Andrew has just returned from Europe, where every prominent journalist and historian he met was mystified by Trump. Wehner agrees: Trump is sui generis, unlike any leader the post-war world has produced. What he says is particularly disturbing is the second election. If it had happened once, Europe could have told itself it was a parenthesis. When it happens twice, that breaks trust. Even if the next president is sane and rational, there is no guarantee the following one will be. That uncertainty, Wehner says, is a real inflection point in the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.
 
•       The Crack-Up of MAGA World: The cult-like grip Trump had on the Republican Party and the MAGA base is no longer there. His approval among Republicans has dropped from the nineties to the seventies — still high, but significant. And the fissures in MAGA world are, in Wehner’s word, extraordinary: Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens have broken from the movement or turned on its leadership. Marjorie Taylor Greene too. The crack-up has begun. Whether it is fast enough or decisive enough to matter remains to be seen. But the movement that once seemed invincible is showing its first serious cracks.
 
•       Monticello for the 250th: Welcoming New Immigrants: Wehner and his wife are considering spending July 4 at Monticello — Thomas Jefferson’s house in Charlottesville, Virginia — where a friend has invited them to an event welcoming new American citizens and immigrants. It is, he says, going to be a birthday that is not untainted by sadness even as there will also be hope of what can still happen. Six days from the 250th, Andrew asks what Jefferson would think of Trump. Wehner: probably not terribly favourable. Probably true of most of the founders.
 
About the Guest
 
Peter Wehner is a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He served as a senior policy adviser in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. His Atlantic piece “The Apotheosis of Donald Trump” was published June 14, 2026.
 
References:
 
•       Peter Wehner, “The Apotheosis of Donald Trump,” The Atlantic, June 14, 2026 — the piece that occasions this conversation.
 
•       Episode 2945: Samuel Moyn on Gerontocracy in America — referenced at the opening.
 
•       Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia — Thomas Jefferson’s home; venue for the July 4 immigrant-welcoming event Wehner mentions.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
 
Chapters:
 

(00:31) - Introduction: Trump at 80 and the apotheosis

(02:07) - Visible decomposition: more dangerous than Trump 1.0

(02:54) - Something to celebrate or be concerned about?

(03:21) - The disinhibition intensifies; impulsivity more easily triggered

(04:18) - Is there a Shakespearean arc?

(04:54) - King Lear allusion: hesitation; Trump is a flatter figure

(05:30) - Man of borderless corruption; his descent is our descent

(06:40) - European mystification: just back from Poland

(07:18) - Trump is sui generis

(08:10) - When it happens twice, that breaks trust

(10:22) - Not everyone elected Trump: the Republican question

(11:16) - The crack-up of MAGA world

(12:19) - Marjorie Taylor Gre...

“The frontier AI companies invited the government into the room. Now the government is beginning to behave as if it owns the door, the guest list, the schedule, and the product roadmap.” — Keith Teare
 
Last week, I was away in Europe. So Keith Teare ran our That Was The Week show solo — with a chillingly authentic Andrew Keen bot. So realistic, in fact, that the fake version sounds (to me, at least) more interesting than the real one.
 
The bad news is that I’m back. The good news is it’s been an interesting week in tech. That was the week in which the US Commerce Department told both OpenAI and Anthropic that they now need government approval for whom they can sell their frontier AI models. This is supposedly “voluntary” — for now, at least.
 
Keith’s TWTW editorial argues that Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have spent over a year crying wolf about the dangers of their own technology, supposedly deliberately seeking government involvement as a regulatory moat against competitors. And now the government has walked through the door that Sam and Dario left ajar. Now, Keith argues, the US government is behaving as if it owns not just the door and the guest list, but the entire product roadmap. “Payback’s a bitch,” Keith bristles in his editorial.
 
The other major news this week is the rumour (via David Sacks) that OpenAI has offered the US government a 50% stake in a sovereign wealth fund. If true, this would change everything — not just in Silicon Valley, but in the political debate about public ownership of our AI economy. It’s not just tech insiders like Sacks and Altman who are on board the sovereign wealth fund express, but also Bernie Sanders and other leftist critics of Big Tech. So maybe payback, at least when it comes to public investment in AI, isn’t always such a bitch.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Fake Andrew Keen: An Hour of Work on a Local Nvidia Card: Keith ran last week’s show solo with an AI-generated Andrew Keen: trained on a few episodes of the show, animated from a YouTube still, scripted from Keith’s newsletter. No third-party service. Just a local PC with an Nvidia GPU, about an hour of work, three attempts. Andrew, listening back, second-guessed whether he was actually there. The result was “pretty bad compared to our normal actual live shows,” Keith says. But also: really good. The question hanging over this episode and every future one: which Andrew are you listening to?
 
•       Payback’s a Bitch: How AI Companies Created Their Own Regulatory Trap: The US Commerce Department has told OpenAI and Anthropic they need government permission for who gets to use their latest models. Voluntary, for now. Keith’s diagnosis: AI leadership spent more than a year crying wolf about existential risk — not because they believed it, but because government regulation creates a moat against competitors. Now the government has taken them at their word. Dario and Sam Altman wanted to be wrapped in government clothing. They are. The government now owns the door. They asked for this. They got it.
 
•       American and Chinese State Capitalism: Converging Models: Andrew raises the macro argument: what we’re watching is the convergence of American and Chinese models of capitalism toward a more state-centric model. China has always been explicit about state control. America has prided itself on free enterprise — even when the internet, atomic technology, and now AI were all substantially government-funded or government-shaped. Keith agrees at this level: all governments seek to control things they frame as dangerous. The difference is the framing. The direction of travel is the same.
 
•       OpenAI’s Rumoured 50% Stake Offer to the Government: Keith has heard — from sources including David Sacks, who should know — that OpenAI has offered the US government a very large stake, potentially 50%, in a sovereign wealth fund that would then distribute dividends to citizens. Sacks is not only unsurprised but in favour: he thinks 50% is too small. Andrew’s question: why would OpenAI give away 50% of the company? Keith’s answer: because it’s the price of the regulatory moat. The government as partner rather than the government as regulator. A company that once aspired to “open” AI is now offering the state a controlling interest in its future.
 
•       Paul Kennedy and America’s Inevitable Decline: Keith has Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers on his shelf. His conclusion from it: it is historically impossible for America to retain its first-place status. No country ever has. Newly capitalised countries produce things more cheaply; China, India, and large parts of Asia are where most future growth will be. Does the AI boom change this? Keith’s honest answer: no. It may slow the decline. It will not reverse it. America will, like an older gentleman on a rocking chair outside the house, accept its fate. Europe won’t even be in the rocking chair.
 
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 by Keith Teare — the newsletter on which this episode is based.
 
•       Azeem Azhar, The Exponential View — his report quantifying the AI economy at roughly $175 billion, referenced in the closing section.
 
•       Alex Lazarow, 99%Tech — referenced for his piece on the emergence of an AI trust layer, the “Lloyds of AI.”
 
•       Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers — on Keith’s shelf; referenced in the America-China decline section.
 
•       David Sacks — referenced as the source for the OpenAI sovereign wealth fund rumour.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
 
Chapters:
 

(00:38) - Introduction: the fake Andrew Keen from last week

(01:14) - Keith explains how he did it: local Nvidia card, one hour, three attempts

(02:11) - The big story: Commerce Department tells OpenAI and Anthropic they need permission

...

“You cannot expect a society to open its doors if there is no way to close them. You cannot expect a society to open its gates if there is no gate to open.” — Justin Gest
 
It’s a counterintuitive and deliberately provocative argument. Rather than bolstering open societies, migration actually benefits authoritarianism. And it’s the argument that Justin Gest makes in his new book, Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy. Drawing on data from 149 countries, Gest shows that global migration has been inadvertently strengthening authoritarianism by stealing liberal democrats from the places that need them most.
 
When liberals emigrate from authoritarian countries, Gest argues, they take their democratic values with them. As a consequence, fewer people dare to vote against the autocrat, fewer people protest, fewer people cling to liberal norms. The argument turns the normal discourse about migration on its head. Immigration is usually framed as a question about the countries experiencing migration. But Gest reframes it from the perspective of the countries losing people. So, for example, when Hungary’s young liberal professionals move to Berlin or London, Orbán’s job got easier. Or when Venezuela’s middle class emigrated to Miami, Maduro’s grip tightened.
 
And, of course, when people leave America, it benefits Trump. That’s the real bite in his polemic. Be patriotic, Justin Gest is telling American liberals. Stay home. Don’t go down the democratic drain.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Democratic Drain: Migration Is Strengthening Authoritarianism: Gest’s central argument: when people emigrate from authoritarian countries, they are disproportionately people who hold liberal democratic values — people who would vote against the autocrat, protest in the streets, or organise civil society. He calls them “demmigrants.” When they leave, they leave behind a population that is, on average, more sympathetic to authoritarian governance. The result: Orbán’s Hungary is easier to govern after Hungary’s young liberals move to Berlin; Maduro’s Venezuela tightens its grip as the middle class departs for Miami. Across 149 countries, the correlation is striking.
 
•       White Working Class as Protest Voters, Not Authoritarians: Gest, whose earlier book The New Minority anticipated the Trump and Brexit era, pushes back on the characterisation of working-class voters as simply authoritarian. Many are protest voters: they want to see the system shaken, they see populists as the only candidates willing to speak truth about the system’s failures, and they are willing to tolerate short-run damage to democratic institutions in the hope of building something better from the ashes. Immigration is the sine qua non of far-right populism: when immigrants are framed as an existential threat, voters make transactional short-run compromises to democratic integrity. They are not irrational. They are strategic.
 
•       The Left Must Embrace Nationalism to Win the Immigration Argument: Gest’s most provocative political prescription: the left has ceded nationalism to the right as if there is no nationalist case for immigration, no nationalist case for climate policy, no nationalist case for progressive values. This is, he says, inexcusable. The national interest served by carefully selected immigration is plain: immigrants make countries younger, fill labour shortages, innovate, create jobs. If the left can frame the immigration debate in terms of the national interest rather than moral obligation, the debate changes. He wrote a piece for the Washington Post on this in March 2022.
 
•       Can You Be an Enlightened Anti-Immigrationist? The Internationalist Paradox: Andrew raises a sharp question: if democratic drain is real, then an internationalist who cares about democracy globally might logically oppose emigration from authoritarian countries, since it strengthens those authoritarian governments. Gest’s response: possible, but foolish. You don’t stop the drain by damming the river. You stop it by growing the democratic movement — by demonstrating the vitality and virtues of democracy and the perils of authoritarianism — so that there are more democrats to spare even after emigration.
 
•       Three Fault Lines for the 21st Century: Gest maps three overlapping fault lines that will define the 21st century’s politics. First: democrats vs authoritarians (the Wieliński argument, which Gest confirms and extends). Second: winners vs losers of globalisation (which often determines the first). Third — and Gest’s own addition: those who understand their nation in civic terms vs those who understand it in ethno-religious terms. The civic imagination: a country grounded in ideas, institutions, interdependency, and a devotion to co-evolution together. The ethno-religious imagination: a country derived from static, unchanging ancestral roots. Whichever fault line you look at, he says, you end up at the same place.
 
About the Guest
 
Justin Gest is Professor and Director of the Public Policy Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. He is the author of Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge University Press, May 2026), Majority Minority: Racialized Divisions in the New American Order (2022), The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (2016), and four other books. A founding editor of the Oxford University Press series “Oxford Studies in Migration and Citizenship,” he has published commentary in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.
 
References:
 
•       Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy by Justin Gest (Cambridge University Press, May 2026).
 
•       Justin Gest, “How the Left Can Embrace Nationalism While Maintaining Its Values,” Washington Post, March 2022 — referenced in the conversation.
 
•       Episode 2951: Bartosz Wieliński on “We No Longer Dream of the United States” — referenced at the opening.
 
•       Central European University, Budapest — where Gest is teaching this week.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America...

“Narrative remains a pretty unbeatable delivery device for information.” — Patrick Radden Keefe
 
Has London really fallen? That’s the question Patrick Radden Keefe — staff writer at The New Yorker and bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing — addressed in his new book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth.
 
One thing for sure is that Keefe himself hasn’t fallen. He’s been surprised by the book’s success. “I thought the antibodies would get up because I’m an interloper,” the American confesses about writing about Britain. Antibodies or not, the book has been a #1 bestseller in both the UK and US. And we can look forward to an A24 and Brightstar TV adaptation soon.
 
On London, the story is murkier. London Falling begins on November 29, 2019, when nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler falls to his death from a luxury apartment above the Thames. Every parent’s ultimate nightmare. As it happens, I’ve known Zac’s dad, Matthew, for many years. But what appeared to be a tragic accident or a suicide turned out to be something far more sinister — a story of double lives, dirty money, a dishonest businessman named Akbar Shamji, and a terrifyingly violent gangster known as Indian Dave.
 
Lurking behind the Brettler death is what Keefe presents as the greatest deceit of all — London’s cruel descent into what he sees as the moneyed miasma of post-Thatcherite neo-liberalism. London is, in Keefe’s compelling narrative, the most invisible of cities — where power lies with criminals like Indian Dave, where the police are at best bystanders, and where a teenage fantasist from a comfortable middle-class family can become fatally entangled in a fallen world he barely understood.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Zac Brettler: The Double Life That Led to His Death: Zac Brettler was nineteen years old. He fell — or was pushed, or was forced to jump — from a luxury apartment balcony above the Thames on November 29, 2019. He had been living a double life: to London’s criminal underworld, he was Zac Ismailov, the son of a Russian oligarch, heir to a great fortune. He had even fabricated bank statements showing a personal account holding $1 million. Under this guise, he became entangled with Akbar Shamji, a slippery businessman, and a man known as Indian Dave, a violent extortionist. Keefe’s reporting suggests Zac jumped to escape from one of these men. Scotland Yard’s passivity in investigating the case is, in Keefe’s word, bizarre.
 
•       London as a Twenty-Four-Hour Laundromat for Dirty Money: Keefe’s portrait of London is the book’s macro argument: a global city that has been hollowed out by decades of financial deregulation, whose financial sector is stacked with professional facilitators eager to help protect or conceal a dubious fortune, where posh mansions and private nightclubs serve as the visible surface of a hidden economy of criminal money. Zac Brettler was not rich. He was a boy from a comfortably off family who became fixated on the glitzy, mercenary, aspirational culture embodied by foreign billionaires who had bought mansions and football clubs in his city. London, in Keefe’s telling, did this to him.
 
•       The Brettlers’ Consent: A Long Haul With the Family: Keefe had written 15,000 words for The New Yorker when he knew there was a book. He went to Matthew and Rochelle Brettler and their surviving son Joe and told them: I will only do this with your blessing. They read the finished piece, talked amongst themselves, and came back with a yes. Keefe’s method: he is an open book; he invites sources to read his previous work. It took him an LSE graduate who became one of the most trusted journalists in the world to persuade a devastated family to trust him with their son’s story. They made the right decision.
 
•       Narrative as Delivery Device: Keefe’s Method: Keefe on why he writes the way he writes: everyone has a phone in their pocket making claims on their attention. Narrative — true stories about real people, told with enough seductive propulsive energy — remains the most powerful way to convey information, to make someone who would not otherwise read nonfiction want to keep turning pages. He is looking, always, for inherently dramatic stories. London Falling is that: a whodunit, a parental love story, a portrait of a corrupted city, and a thriller, all in one book. The New York Times described the whole book as one of the best of 2026 so far.
 
•       The Television Adaptation: A24, Brightstar, and the Lessons of Say Nothing: A24 and Brightstar are producing the television adaptation of London Falling. Five production companies had to audition for the Brettlers over Zoom. The family is involved. Keefe knows from Say Nothing — which took five years from book to screen and won awards as an FX series — that this cannot go on autopilot. The aim: something sophisticated, sensitive, and just to the family’s story. The first word on the Mill Hill School website is “integrity.” Whether that word will survive contact with a television adaptation remains to be seen.
 
About the Guest
 
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth (Doubleday, April 7, 2026; #1 New York Times bestseller), Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize), Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (National Book Critics Circle Award; named one of the twenty best books of the 21st century by the New York Times), Rogues, and Chatter. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award, and the Orwell Prize. He served as executive producer on the award-winning FX series Say Nothing and is the creator and host of the podcast Wind of Change.
 
References:
 
•       London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday, April 7, 2026).
 
•       Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe — referenced at the opening.
 
•       Say Nothing (FX series, executive produced by Keefe) — referenced in the closing section.
 
•       Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road — referenced as covering similar London territory in fiction.
 
•       A24 and Brightstar — the production companies making the London Falling television adaptatio...