Keen On America

“Someone said, oh, you look like Steve Bannon, and I love you for that… No, I just shaved my hair and lost some pounds.” — Kaya Genç on Trumpism’s global fanbase
 
The NATO circus rumbled into the Turkish capital of Ankara this week resembling more of a gun show than an alliance summit. Ringmaster Donald J. Trump promised Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the F-35s and lifted the very sanctions that Trump himself had imposed. Erdogan handed out pistols to the assembled leaders — with poor old Keir Starmer (no Winston Churchill) leaving his at the airport. And observing all these clowns from Istanbul was the Turkish novelist and essayist Kaya Genç.
 
As a contributor to the anthology How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, Genç is a keen America watcher. He first set foot in the United States in January 2017, stumbling into New York City’s protests against Trump 1.0’s Muslim-ban. What seemed temporary — Trump as a bizarre historical aberration — looked to Erdogan-literate Kaya Genç like an operating manual for 21st century populist authoritarianism.
 
Turkey, Genç argues, has spent a century Americanizing itself. First with the 20th century Marshall Plan, the highways, the Hilton hotels, and finally an American-style executive presidency operating on the politics of referendum. Now, he says, the whole world — from Turkey to France and Britain — is living with the consequences of 21st century Americanization.
 
Like a more functional NATO, right-wing populists operate like an international alliance. Erdogan, Trump, Meloni, Le Pen and Farage are like a club in which projecting strength at summits buys impunity at home. And this club has a house style. Turkish right-wing columnists, Genç reports, deploy Michael Corleone on their X banners — exactly David Thomson’s warning earlier this week about Hollywood’s glorification of on-screen violence.
 
So, in a way, America observers like Kaya Genç got a sneak preview of Trump’s America in movies like The Godfather. First as cinema, then as life. From both Turkey and Russia with love.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       NATO: The Club of the Mighty. The night before the summit, activists were rounded up in Ankara — LGBTQ rights defenders, labor unionists, journalists — as threats to NATO security. In Turkish civil society, Genç explains, NATO doesn’t represent the liberal world order; it represents the mighty, and has since the writers of the 1960s. The summit itself was a military passion show: jets overhead, revolvers gifted among the attendees, and a host country whose ruling politicians no longer hide that arms exports — including the drones Ukraine used so effectively — are now the mission of the Turkish economy.
 
•       Trump: A Star Among Right-Wing Voters Everywhere. In India, a chubbier, longer-haired Genç was once told: you look like Steve Bannon, and I love you for that. The Turkish media savaged Biden but forgives Trump everything — Netanyahu is the villain of the Turkish press, while Trump speaks the language. Not Turkish (though he tried a phrase): the language of the presidential system. The Turkish right’s America has always been selective — yes to the death penalty and gun ownership, no to labor rights, free expression, and the trans movement — an instinct as old as the poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy’s advice to copy Germany’s industriousness and leave out the decadence.
 
•       Living the Consequences of Americanization. Turkey began its republic in the 1920s on the European model — parliament, proportional voices for an ethnically diverse country. After the Marshall Plan, it re-forged itself on the American one: highways, Hilton hotels, burger joints, and eventually an American-style executive presidency, approved by referendum over the objections of people like Genç. That’s why Trump 1.0 read so differently in the two countries: in New York it looked like an exception to be fought off; in Ankara it looked like how American politics works — and something to imitate.
 
•       Populists Learn Like Large Language Models. Did Erdogan create the model, or is Trump teaching Erdogan? Neither, says Genç: it’s a dialogue — right-wing populism learning from itself the way AI learns from language models. The AKP ran a Gramscian culture war through the institutions; Meloni, Le Pen, and Farage apply the cosmetic soft brush that makes fascist-rooted politics presentable. Join the club, project strength at the summit, and whatever you do domestically stops mattering. Putin, notably, is not in the curriculum: Turkey is returning its S-400s to get the F-35s, and Russia is becoming a footnote.
 
•       The Hologram and the Pushback. Ekrem Imamoglu — the Istanbul mayor Genç profiles in The Dial as the hologram candidate — won the city with socialist municipalism, and the skeptics who warned it would alienate the pious were simply wrong. Soft liberalism, the faith Genç himself held since the nineties, is disappearing; the pushback is finding its heroes in dead poets — Rosa Luxemburg, and Sevgi Soysal, whose novel Walking is out in English from New York Review Books. From Istanbul to Middle America, Mamdani to AOC, Genç’s advice to the left is the same: don’t fragment — conquer the big parties.
 
About the Guest
 
Kaya Genç is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul. He is the author of Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey and The Lion and the Nightingale, and his writing appears in The Dial, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Index on Censorship, and Jewish Quarterly. He is a contributor to How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press, June 2026), edited by The Dial’s Madeleine Schwartz.
 
References:
 
•       How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, edited by Madeleine Schwartz (The New Press, June 2026). Publishers Weekly: “A much-needed reality check.”
 
•       Madeleine Schwartz — founder and editor-in-chief of The Dial, editor of the anthology, and a recent guest on the show.
 
•       Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey — Genç’s account of Turkey’s political generation, published just after the 2016 coup attempt.
 
•       Ece Temelkuran — the Turkish writer and recent guest whose How to Lose a Country globalized the Turkish case as a warning to democracies everywhere.
 
•       Sevgi Soysal — the Turkish novelist who died at 40, whose Walking — a portrait of Ankara slowly killing itself for profit — is out in English from New York Review Books, reviewed by Genç.
 
•       David Thomson — the film critic and recent guest whose argument that Trumpism grew from Hollywood’s lov...

“A place that doesn’t have great philosophers will not have great technologists either.” — Mehran Gul on Europe’s inexplicable underperformance
 
The digital revolution, we were promised, would mean the end of geography. From Beijing to Birmingham to Berlin to Barcelona, anyone could invent anything anywhere, and so the geography of innovation would no longer matter. But that’s not the way it has worked out. At least according to the Geneva-based innovation geographer Mehran Gul.
 
Gul’s acclaimed The New Geography of Innovation is a travelogue of innovation. But what he finds on his journey around the world in search of innovation is the end of the end of geography. Yes, Gul reports, there’s innovation in Beijing and in Birmingham (USA) — but not in Birmingham (England), Berlin or Barcelona. All the important invention is in China and the US. There simply isn’t much radical stuff going on anywhere else.
 
Gul began his journey expecting to find ten or twelve countries able to innovate competitively with the United States and China. But what he discovered is either niche players or, in the case of South Korea, Israel, and India, just an extension of the US-centric system. Europe — as renters rather than owners of American technology — comes off worst. When PayPal went public, it minted 160 millionaires who went on to help build SpaceX, Tesla, LinkedIn and Palantir; when Skype exited at about the same value, it minted 11. And if you put London aside, the rest of the UK is now poorer per capita than Mississippi.
 
And the AI boom has only compounded all this, with half of last year’s key research papers coming from China, 40% from America, and just 4% from Europe. So really the new geography of innovation is the old geography. Only with China replacing Europe as the only serious competitor to American innovation. Oh lord, oh lord. As a Mississippi bluesman might summarize Europe’s predicament.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Golden Shares: The Two Systems Are Converging. OpenAI offering Washington a 5% stake, the US government owning Intel — these are Chinese moves, and Gul argues the two models are becoming more alike than either admits. But he pushes back on the lazy version of the China story: its tech sector rose despite the state, not because of it. Jack Ma exiled to Japan, Didi hit with a billion in fines, entire sectors decapitated overnight in 2021 under the banner of common prosperity. In a country with no independent media and no opposition parties, the only rival to centralized power is the tech sector — and the party knows it.
 
•       Two Countries — and Everyone Else. Gul started writing expecting to find ten or twelve countries punching at America’s level; the honest answer turned out to be two. Only China has broad-based competence across technologies and a genuinely competitive relationship with the US. The middle powers — South Korea, Israel, India — are extensions of the American system, not rivals to it. That finding surprised the author as much as anyone: it’s not the book he set out to write.
 
•       Europe: Renters, Not Owners. After the Fable 5 and Mythos bans, Europe woke up to being a renter of American technology — foundation models, NVIDIA GPUs, all of it. Its best companies keep leaving: DeepMind to Google, Arm to a New York listing, Hugging Face from Paris to Manhattan — while Volvo, Supercell, and KUKA sold to China. Gul’s diagnosis is institutional, not cultural: European employees own half as much of their startups as American ones, so there is no European PayPal mafia. His fixes: a European Nasdaq to replace 41 competing capital markets, and pension funds unleashed into venture capital.
 
•       The Question Nobody Is Asking. Since 1990, America’s share of global GDP has held at 25% while China’s multiplied tenfold — the loser is Europe. The top ten American tech companies are worth $27 trillion, more than the GDP of every country on earth except America itself. Tech is not one industry among many; it is the foundation of all of them — the new cars came from Tesla, not GM. Gul’s message to the skeptical Spaniard enjoying long lunches: the last sixty years of American platform dominance skewed power across the Atlantic, and the next sixty will add China to the bill.
 
•       The Rest of the Map: Anti Case Studies. Japan tops the freedom indexes, has the technical schools, and still never escaped the keiretsu — disproving Matt Ridley’s claim that innovation is simply the child of freedom. Taiwan’s relevance comes down to one company and Morris Chang’s missed promotion at Texas Instruments. Singapore is an inspiration, not a model — a one-party city-state that invoices NVIDIA’s chips and banks ASEAN’s venture capital. India underperforms while Indians excel — 56 notable American foundation models last year, 35 Chinese, barely one Indian. And Switzerland reminds us innovation isn’t only venture-backed: a train network running on renewables since the 1960s.
 
About the Guest
 
Mehran Gul writes about technology and business. He is the winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize, from which The New Geography of Innovation grew. He attended Yale as a Fulbright Scholar, Fox International Fellow, and Teaching Fellow, has been a Lead for the Digital Transformation of Industries at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, and served as an expert on entrepreneurship and industrial policy at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization in Vienna. Born in Pakistan, he lives in Switzerland. The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), a Financial Times Book of the Year, is his first book, out in paperback this month in the US and UK.
 
References:
 
•       The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies by Mehran Gul (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster). The Wall Street Journal: “An ambitious tour of technological innovation.”
 
•       Sebastian Mallaby — author of The Power Law, which argues China’s tech rise owes more to American-style risk capital arriving in Shanghai and Shenzhen than to the state; recently on the show discussing his biography of Demis Hassabis.
 
•       Kai-Fu Lee — author of AI Superpowers, cited by Gul as the classic account of tech written through a Chinese lens.
 
•       Matt Ridley — author of How Innovation Works, whose thesis that innovation is “the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity” Gul tests against the anti case study of Japan.
 
•       Andrew Keen — author of How t...

“I crack the tab open, and I feel the cold metal… I hear the tink and give of the aluminum. And maybe when I’m done, I crush it into a small patty.” — Ian Bogost on the everyday enchantment of a Diet Coke can
 
Don’t sweat the small stuff is one of the most persistent (and annoying) mantras of the self-help industry. But the counter-intuitive Atlantic columnist Ian Bogost advises the opposite. In his new book, The Small Stuff, Bogost suggests that gratification lies in our appreciation of small stuff like the crinkle of empty Diet Coke cans and the foldability of plane tickets.
 
Max Weber argued that disenchantment was the defining quality of modernity, but in The Small Stuff, Bogost maps a way back to it. What we need to get away from, he says, is “optimization” — metrics, feedback loops, money as a proxy for a place in heaven. Rather than the cult of delayed gratification, pick up that empty coke can and revel in its architectural glory. Or lick a tree. That’s how to be enchanted in postmodernity.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Sweat the Small Stuff. Bogost inverts three decades of self-help orthodoxy: the small stuff is precisely what we should be sweating. The crack of a Diet Coke tab, the cold metal warming in your hand, the can crushed into a patty before the recycling bin — these sensory encounters are not where deep purpose lives, and Bogost never claims they are. But they recur every day, sometimes several times a day, and accepting them as meaningful rather than as noise to get through delivers what he calls a surprising payload of engagement and enchantment. For some it’s Diet Coke; for others, woodworking, gardening, or the gear shift of a manual transmission.
 
•       Dematerialization: How We Lost the World. The book’s central diagnosis is what Bogost calls dematerialization — the slow disconnection from the physical world driven by convenience technologies. The QR code that replaced the concert ticket you might have pinned to a bulletin board. The automatic faucet you wave at awkwardly in the public restroom — which never works, and doesn’t even save water; it just makes buildings easier to manage. The process is decades old, hardly limited to computers, and it stripped the texture from everyday life so gradually that nobody noticed what was being given up.
 
•       It’s Sensory, Not Physical — and Not Anti-Tech. This is not a go-touch-grass book. Bogost insists the small stuff is sensory rather than physical, and that smartphones are compelling precisely because they are delightful — the smooth glass that demands to be touched, the thunderstorm animation in the weather app. Everything is technology, including the clothes on your body and the language in your mouth. He gave his twelve-year-old a smartwatch rather than banning screens, because parenting means living in the same world as your kids — and kids must live a contemporary life to become the adults who invent the next one.
 
•       We Already Got Rid of God — So Meaning Had to Move. Pressed on Weber and the Protestant ethic, Bogost argues that secularization emptied out the place where meaning used to live — good works justified by an infinite time in heaven — and replaced it with happiness, purpose, and wealth as proxies. The result is a hyper-optimized, future-oriented culture in which everything worth doing is worth doing for some later payoff. Bogost admits he struggles with this himself: the health wearable he wears while writing a book against quantification. What he loves about his morning walk isn’t the step count. It’s the twigs crunching underfoot.
 
•       The Quietism Charge — and the AI Twist. Isn’t this stoicism for the age of Trump, the same charge leveled at Heidegger’s silence before the Nazis? Bogost anticipates the critique: we are and must be both political creatures and creatures who live moment to moment in our bodies — he asks no one to abandon the fight, only to stop missing the life underneath it. And the timing is no accident. As AI takes over the big stuff, Bogost suspects it may push us back into the sensory world — he consults ChatGPT about fixing his range thermostat, then goes and fixes it with his hands.
 
About the Guest
 
Ian Bogost is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of eleven books, including The Small Stuff and Play Anything. He is the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches computer science and engineering, film and media studies, and art and design. He is also an award-winning game designer whose work is held in collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He is the author of The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026).
 
References:
 
•       The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026). The New Yorker: “Bogost’s joy is infectious.”
 
•       Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (2016) — Bogost’s earlier book, the subject of his June 2020 appearance on the show.
 
•       Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (2012) — Bogost’s “straight up philosophy book” where he first explored the idea of wonder.
 
•       Max Weber — the German sociologist who identified disenchantment as the defining quality of modernity, and whose The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism frames the discussion of delayed gratification and the afterlife.
 
•       Matthew Crawford — mutual friend of host and guest, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head, earlier explorers of the same terrain.
 
•       Martin Heidegger — the philosopher whose ideas of thrownness and being-in-the-world haunt the book, though his name never appears in it, and whose Nazi-era quietism frames the political critique.
 
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

“America has a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance.” — the message Tad Devine and Ben Tulchin developed for Bernie Sanders, which tested highest in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2015
 
How the Democrats Screwed Bernie. It could have been coined by Donald Trump. That was Tad Devine’s first objection when his editor floated it. But as Devine, Bernie Sanders’ chief strategist on his 2016 Presidential campaign, worked on the book about the 2016 campaign, he realised it most accurately expressed how he felt about what actually happened. And so the new tell-all — the inside account of the historic Sanders campaign — is, indeed, entitled How the Democrats Screwed Bernie.
 
Devine was never an outsider. He worked on Al Gore’s 2000 and John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaigns. He first met Bernie Sanders in 1996, when Peter DeFazio — the Oregon congressman for whom Devine and his partner Mike Donilon had just run a near-miraculous campaign — suggested they meet. Sanders had almost lost his House seat in 1994. Devine’s campaign won it back by 26 points. Ten years later, Devine ran Sanders’ successful Senate campaign against a free-spending billionaire. They won by 30 points. Devine schooled Bernie in the insider-politics of the Democratic party. But he didn’t transform him into an insider. Bernie was and is always Bernie. The consummate outsider.
 
So how, exactly, did the Dems screw Bernie? According to Devine, it was a coordinated campaign by the Clinton Machine, the DNC, and a network of Super PACs to stop a wildly popular outsider through dark money, dirty tricks, and deliberately structured primary rules. The unHillary candidate who, Devine argues, may well have been the people’s choice — and could have beaten Donald Trump in November 2016.
 
But Bernie’s real legacy, Devine insists, is not what was done to him. It’s his campaign message. “America has a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance.” That outsider language — which Devine developed with pollster Ben Tulchin — captures how America is screwing itself. The consummate insider Trump stole Bernie’s language. And if the Democrats want to screw the MAGA crowd in 2028, they need to seize back this outsider message.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Title That Sounded Like Trump: Devine’s first reaction when his Simon & Schuster editor proposed the title: I don’t want to be anything like Trump. But as he worked through the process of writing the book, he came to see that the title most accurately expressed how he felt about what happened in 2016. The Democratic establishment — the Clinton Machine, the DNC, the network of Super PACs and media allies — used dark money, dirty tricks, opposition research, and deliberately structured primary rules to stop a wildly popular outsider candidate. A candidate who, the book argues, may well have been the people’s choice and may well have defeated Donald Trump.
 
•       How Devine Met Bernie: 1996, Peter DeFazio, and 26 Points: Devine was already a Democratic establishment figure when Peter DeFazio — a progressive Oregon congressman — introduced him to Sanders in early 1996. Sanders had almost lost his House seat in 1994; Devine’s firm came in a month before the 1996 election and reversed the trajectory. Sanders won by 26 points. Ten years later, Devine ran Sanders’ Senate campaign against a billionaire who spent the equivalent of $350 million in California, and they won by 30 points. A bond of trust formed between the establishment consultant and the independent socialist, though it was a relationship in which the label-defying aspect went both ways: Bernie, you’re a United States senator, Devine told him. That is the establishment.
 
•       The Rigged Economy Message: What Bernie Actually Contributed: The most important moment in the 2016 campaign was not a debate or a rally. It was a polling session in 2015 in which Devine and pollster Ben Tulchin combined two separate arguments — a rigged economy and a corrupt system of campaign finance — into a single sentence: “America has a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance.” It tested as the highest message in Iowa and New Hampshire. That, Devine argues, is Bernie’s real legacy: the identification of the structural problem. Until that problem is fixed — until the campaign finance system that rigs the economy is reformed — the economy will continue to crush the middle class and make it impossible for people to afford groceries, gas, and healthcare.
 
•       The Real Populist vs the Phony One: Trump saw the same diagnosis Bernie had identified and grabbed it — infusing it with his xenophobia, racism, pathological lying, and contempt for democratic norms. The populist message was the same; the bundle around it was entirely different. Bernie represents a belief that government has a role in serving people. Trump represents a belief that government should serve rich people and punish everyone else, wrapped in the language of the working class. That, Devine argues, is the distinction that matters for 2028. The fight is not between left and right. It is between the real and the phony.
 
•       AOC, Ro Khanna, and the 2028 Democratic Race: Bernie won’t run in 2028. But Devine is certain that one or more Bernie-style candidates will. AOC and Ro Khanna are the most obvious — both have toured with Bernie, both share his core principles, both are committed to Medicare for All. But Devine adds: at this point in the calendar going into 2006, Barack Obama was a state senator from Illinois. The candidate who actually wins the 2028 nomination may not yet be on the radar. What is on the radar: a Democratic base that is desperate for new leadership and a new direction. And a president, Trump, who Devine believes is capable of doing anything to hold power, including worse than January 6. The only way to stop him is to beat him in elections.
 
About the Guest
 
Tad Devine is a Democratic political strategist with over thirty years of campaign experience. He served as chief strategist for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and as a senior adviser in Al Gore’s 2000 and John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaigns. He has held academic positions at Boston University, the Harvard Kennedy School, and George Washington University. He is the author of How the Democrats Screwed Bernie (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026).
 
References:
 
•       How the Democrats Screwed Bernie by Tad Devine (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026). Publishers Weekly: “An enraging account… a keen cautionary tale.”
 
•       Mike Donilon — Devine’s former partner; later became Joe Biden’s top strategist in the White House.

“For all the paperwork of democracy — government by and for the people — we have become a citizenry of spectators who simply want to be entertained. And we are accustomed to the realization that we can’t do anything about what’s on the screen.” — David Thomson
 
Has the prolific film critic David Thomson fallen out of love with the movies? That’s the question I began my conversation with Thomson, arguably the greatest living writer on film. My question was triggered by his revisionist movie history (out today), A Sudden Flicker of Light, which, while still glorifying film, nonetheless recognizes the damage that the medium has done to us.
 
No, he hasn’t fallen out of love with the movies, Thomson responded. But he did acknowledge a new kind of wariness about his beloved medium — a suspicion of auteur worship, that tradition which concentrates on the great artistry of individual directors like Welles, Hitchcock, and Scorsese while ignoring what the motion picture medium as a whole has done to society.
 
“What has God wrought?” Samuel Morse asked about the telegraph. David Thomson is asking the same question about the consequence of movies.
 
Cinema, particularly Hollywood, Thomson argues, has spent a century disempowering audiences. Sitting in the dark, gazing at the screen, people have lost their agency. This passivity, Thomson argues, has invaded our political life, transforming us from citizens into spectators. No, Mr Smith hasn’t gone to Washington. Instead, America has become a theater of gawkers addicted to screen entertainment, unable to discriminate between a sudden flicker of light and reality.
 
Thus the degeneration of America into a violent Coppola movie. Thus The Joker who has crawled out of primeval darkness and now monopolizes all our screens. You could make a movie about it. Call it “Being There” or “Network.” Or perhaps “The Truman Show.”
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Cinema Has Trained Us to Be Spectators — and That Has Destroyed Our Agency: Thomson’s central argument: sitting in the dark watching a bright light in front of them, audiences learned that the thing on the screen is not their responsibility. People are not really hurt on screen, no matter their bodies are torn apart. They are not really happy, no matter what they say in the film. And whatever happens, the audience remains a spectator. Extrapolate that out into a broader world and you have a society in which, for all the paperwork of democracy and government by and for the people, people have become a citizenry of spectators who simply want to be entertained. America, Thomson believes, is in that state.
 
•       Every Cut Is Violent — and Every Cut Is a Marriage: Thomson’s most original observation is the smallest: the cut. A cut is where the stream of imagery you are watching goes from one shot to another. It is a separation — but it is also a marriage. Every cut says: join them up. The way we measure the effectiveness of directors from D.W. Griffith onward is that they found ways to put shots together so that film had sequence and order, like the order of sentences in writing. And every cut has an element of violence in it, because you are seeing one thing and then, bang, you are watching something quite different. We have never taught our children what a cut is — even though they have spent far more of their lives watching moving imagery than reading. That neglect, Thomson argues, is consequential.
 
•       The Culture of Manhood and the Systematic Neglect of Women: Thomson’s most politically charged observation: the culture of manhood and the serious neglect of women was going on in virtually every film he saw until at least the 1980s, and you could argue well beyond that. That is, he says, a kind of tacit advertising — a way of saying, look, this is really a very good way for how the world should be. It is something that has become harder and harder for him to endure as an idea. And he thinks that the war in Iran would not have been as likely if America had had enough women running the country — because women feel and think together in concert in different ways, with more room for compassion, sentiment, and plain rationality.
 
•       Cinema Is Deeply Educational — and We Have Ignored That: Thomson’s answer to Andrew’s challenge: what does any of this have to do with movies? Everything. You cannot have a mass medium without the mass being affected, without the ways in which they think being shaped. The movies have given us examples of how to live that have been intensely persuasive. They are deeply educational. And yet we have permitted them, and like every technology humans have ever invented, we have let the technology take control of us rather than the other way around. Children spend far more time watching moving imagery than reading — and yet we do not teach them what a cut is, what a camera angle means, how the medium constructs its reality. That neglect has been, Thomson believes, catastrophic.
 
•       Citizen Kane Is the Definitive American Film — Not The Godfather: Andrew’s final question: what is the definitive movie about America? Not The Godfather, Thomson says, because the Godfather films cannot overcome their attraction to authority. There is a reverence for dark power in the Godfather films. Whereas in Citizen Kane, there is all through the film a terrible ruefulness about what happens to people who seek power. Welles absolutely understood and was intensely critical of the personality that needed power and authority — and he was afraid of it. For that reason, it is still for Thomson the definitive American film. Thomson has been known to doze off watching it, because he knows it too well. On July 4, he plans to watch something different. Ideally, The Odyssey.
 
About the Guest
 
David Thomson is the author of more than twenty books on film, including A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026), The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (six editions, 1975–2014), Orson Welles, The Big Screen, Have You Seen…?, and biographies of David O. Selznick, Marlon Brando, and Nicole Kidman. Michael Ondaatje has called him “the best writer on film in our time.” He lives in San Francisco, where he is Andrew Keen’s neighbour.
 
References:
 
•       A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies by David Thomson (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026).
 
•       Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) — Thomson’s definitive American film; discussed extensively in the conversation.
 
•       The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) — referenced as ...