As founding director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute and author of the new ALIEN EARTHS: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos, Lisa Kaltenegger is one of the world’s most respected cosmologists. She believes that, with our revolutionary new cosmological technologies, we are likely to “discover” non-human life somewhere in the cosmos. What’s particularly astonishing about these kinds of conversations is how they no longer astonish us. Fifty years ago, the idea of discovering non-human life somewhere in the Universe was science fiction; today, it’s become the mainstream scientific assumptio ..read more

In a “post-truth” world, who should we trust? According to Alex Edmans, one of the UK’s hottest business school professors, you should trust him enough to read his new book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics and Studies Exploit Our Biases - And What We Can Do About It. You should also trust me enough to listen to and/or watch this conversation with Edmans, but not enough to believe everything that I say. For example, describing Alex as one of the UK’s “hottest” business school professors could be an exaggeration. It might even be a lie. Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Bus ..read more

Museums, the distinguished anthropologist Adam Kuper argues in his new book Museums of Other People, are actually mirrors of ourselves. Rather than revealing curiosities about cultures of antiquity, they are actually living documents of power - particularly western, colonial power. Does this mean we affluent westerners should all feel horribly guilty ever time we go to the British Museum or the Peabody? Perhaps. But Kuper brings these old museums back to life by reminding us of their contemporary political significance. So maybe guilt isn’t such a bad thing, if it makes us think a little more ..read more

There are few people more adept at navigating America’s labyrinthine medical system than Robert Pearl. Yale medical degree, Stanford University professor, best-selling author, former CEO of the Californian insurance network Kaiser Permanente, Pearl has explored this byzantine confusion of private enterprise monopoly and government supported bureaucracy from almost every angle. And now Dr Pearl has a way of curing its profound dysfunctionality and shoving the archaic system into the 21st century. As Robbie argues in his new book, ChatGPT, MD (which he claims he “co-authored” with ChatGPT), Robb ..read more

Dr Judy Ho has a new book entitled The New Rules of Attachment: How to Heal Your Relationships, Reparent Your Inner Child, and Secure Your Life Vision. It’s one of those books which explain to us, in our therapeutic age of intense anxiety, how to stop f*****g ourselves up. Yeah, I know. These kinds of books, by “clinical and forensic neuropsychologists” like the telegenic Judy Ho, can be intensely annoying. But, as an proven expert in f*****g up one’s life, I rather liked Dr Judy’s arguments about “reparenting our inner child” and securing our “life vision”. And I was particularly intrigued by ..read more

The suburbs haven’t got a great press recently on KEEN ON. First there was Benjamin Herold, author of Disillusioned, who found the dead body of the American Dream in the American suburb. And then David Masciotra, author of Exurbia Now, discovered political lethargy and reaction in the outer suburbs of American “exurbia”. Matt Hern, however, disagrees, finding in the suburbs the very political energy and engagement that he believes have been lost from the gentrified inner cities of London, Vancouver and San Francisco. Indeed, Hern, a Canadian urban activist and author of the new Outside the Out ..read more

In his early opposition to the Iraq war and other overseas misadventures in Bosnia, Haiti and El Salvador, Mark Danner is one of the most respected observers of American foreign policy. So it was a real honor to sit down with him and talk about his life both as an American and as a critic of America’s increasingly frayed relations with the rest of the world. Given his peripatetic life as a correspondent of overseas conflict, there’s a Homeric quality to Mark Danner, both as a man and as a writer. And so it wasn’t surprising that we began our conversation with Danner’s memories of how the Illia ..read more

Harper’s has a great cover story this month entitled “The Life and Death of Hollywood” by the intellectual historian, podcast and general muckraker Daniel Bessner. Film & tv writers face an existential threat, Bessner told me, from a Hollywood now controlled by four financialized mega-companies operated by MBA touting execs. But is this really new, I asked him, or is today’s dismal story just another rerun of the standard anti-capitalist narrative of creatives getting screwed by the money men? Yes, it is new, Bessner insists, because today’s existential crisis of Hollywood’s film & tv ..read more

Elliot Ackerman has an intriguing essay in this issue of Liberties Quarterly on the use and abuse of mercenaries throughout history. Linking the history of the British in India, the US in Afghanistan and Russia in contemporary Ukraine, he ask what it means when mercenaries replace regular soldiers to fight supposedly “national” wars? It’s not usually good news, he suggests, arguing that for America to remain both a militarily and morally great power in the 21st century, it should consider reestablishing national service for all citizens, irrespective of gender, class or race. ELLIOT ACKERMAN i ..read more

I have to admit I absolutely HATED Alex Garland’s new movie Civil War. I found it annoyingly trite, self-evidently packaged for an ahistorical cinematic audience addicted to the amnesia of mindless violence. That’s fine, of course, for most Hollywood productions, but not for a supposedly serious movie about the American future by a highly talented filmmaker. However, my Canadian friend, Stephen Marche, author of the much acclaimed The Next Civil War, clearly disagrees with my own (elitist) critique of Garland’s movie and I tried to keep my own views out of our conversation. As Marche also note ..read more