In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he wrote in 1948,George Orwell imagined the “Ministry of Truth” to be the central institution that Big Brother used to reinvent reality and make war on the recent past. Three quarters of a century later, Steve Benen, the Emmy award winning producer of the Rachel Maddow Show, revisits Nineteen Eighty-Four and sees the Republican party as a reincarnation of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. In his eponymous new book, Benen argues that the raison d’etre of today’s GOP is to wage war on both reality and the recent past. Ontologically and historically, then, today’s Republican party has literally become Orwellian - a particularly chilling reality given that almost half of the American electorate will vote for Republican candidates in November.

Steve Benen is a producer on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show and the author of The MaddowBlog. Benen's articles and op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, Salon.com, and other publications. He's also been a guest on several radio and television programs, including NPR's Talk of the Nation and MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann. For his work on TRMS, Benen has received two Emmy Awards, and he's been nominated for three more.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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As author of the authoritative three volume Third Reich Trilogy, Richard J. Evans is probably the most respected scholar of Hitler’s Third Reich in the world today. And his latest book, Hitler’s People, is an attempt to make all-too-human sense of Nazi lieutenants like Goebbels, Himmler, Eichmann and Streicher. It goes without saying of course, that these men were all monsters. But Evans is also interested in the human qualities of these Nazis. What he discovers, he told me, are ordinary middle class German faces lurking behind the masks of mass murderers. Any of us could have been on of Hitler’s people, he seems to be warning us. And in a contemporary age in which the murderous Nazi cult of racism and violence is creeping back into mainstream politics, Evans observations about the ordinariness of evil are particularly jarring.

Richard J. Evans is one of the world’s leading historians of modern Germany. He has served as Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge; president of Wolfson College, Cambridge; and provost of Gresham College in the City of London. He has received the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and the British Academy’s Leverhulme Medal and Prize, awarded for a significant contribution to the humanities or social sciences. In 2000, he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War, and The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination. In 2012, he was knighted for services to scholarship.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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In her new book, Freeman’s Challenge, the Harvard historian Robin Bernstein reveals the early 19th century origins of America’s for profit prisons. Telling the tragic story of William Freeman, an Afro-Native teenager guilty of what she calls the “terrorist” act of killing a white family, Bernstein simultaneously explores the origins of America’s first for profit prison in Auburn, NY. As she explains, there was and there still is an intimate connection between American incarceration and American capitalism - a chilling nexus which, for Bernstein, represents the import of slave “economics” into the for profit prison system.

Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and professor of African and African American studies and studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In an America riven with both civic discord and ignorance, how can we nurture a next generation of responsibly informed citizens? That’s the all important question Lindsey Cormack addresses in her new book, How to Raise a Citizen. There are no magical tricks to learning how to be a good citizen, Cormack says, no clever shortcuts or miraculous new technologies. Instead, it’s up to all of us to take responsibility for giving our kids the necessary knowledge to understand the workings of our democratic system. And that all begins at the local level, she insists, where the real business of American democracy gets done on a daily basis.

Lindsey Cormack is an associate professor of Political Science and Director of the Diplomacy Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her first book, Congress and U.S. Veterans: From the GI Bill to the VA Crisis investigates the differences between legislative efforts and lip service paid to veterans by members of the US Congress. Her second book, How to Raise a Citizen & Why it’s Up to You to Do It, aims to reinvigorate multigenerational political discussion and governmental know-how after examining the somewhat dire state of civic education in the United States. She earned her PhD in Government from New York University and is raising a daughter on the Upper East Side. She currently serves as the Secretary for Community Board 8 in Manhattan. Her research has been published in Political Behavior, Congress & the Presidency, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Science Research and Methods, American Politics Research, Politics & Policy, Politics Groups & Identities, Politics & Gender, The Journal of Gender Studies, Energy Economics, The Legislative Scholar as well as in popular outlets including the New York Times, The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, ProPublica, Roll Call, The New York Post, NBC News, the LSE USCentre, and The Hill, and more. She created and maintains the digital database of all official Congress-to-constituent e-newsletters in the DCinbox Project.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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There are two core critiques of AI. The first is that it is an existential threat because it replaces humans with algorithms. The second is that AI is a mirror that only compounds preexisting injustices. James Muldoon, an associate professor of management at Essex Business School and co-author of Feeding the Machine, fits into the second category. Reminding us that “AI is people”, he travelled around the world in search of the hidden human labor that is the powering the AI revolution. What he found was a huge precariat (estimated by the World Bank to be over 100 million people) who are doing the dirty human work that powers “artificial” intelligence. The AI revolution, then, for Muldoon, is only compounding the exploitative nature of labor in today’s increasingly inegalitarian global economy. It is the core problem with, rather than the solution to 21st century networked capitalism.

James Muldoon is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Management at the Essex Business School, a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and Head of Digital Research at the Autonomy think tank. His research examines how modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and digital platforms can create public value and serve the common good. It explores how notions of freedom, power and democracy need to be rethought in a digital age and what we can do to harness the positive potential of new technology. His recent work has focussed on the hidden human labour of artificial intelligence and the global production networks that power AI. He also analyses how digital labour is changing across multiple sectors including ride hail, food delivery, domestic work, childcare and microwork.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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How democratic is American “democracy”. Dramatically less so that it was. That’s at least the rather worrying conclusion of David Daley, the author of ANTIDEMOCRATIC, a new book which exposes what he says is “the far right’s 50-year plot to control American elections”. This half century plot was successfully realized in 2013, Daley told me, with the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now, he argues, individual states have the right to tamper with their electoral laws and hijack voting rights in America for their own political ends. It’s not quite a return to Jim Crow, Daley says, but it does reveal the worryingly antidemocratic foundations of the American political system.

David Daley is the author of the national best-seller "Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count" (Norton/Liveright) and one of the nation's leading experts on partisan gerrymandering. He is a senior fellow at FairVote, a nonpartisan champion of election reforms. His journalism on redistricting and gerrymandering has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, New York magazine and many other leading publications. He is the former editor in chief of Salon.com.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Shad White has an uncanny resemblance to J.D. Vance. Born in a tiny town in Mississippi, White went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then Harvard Law School and is now the State Auditor of Mississippi. Like Vance, the lifelong Republican White is a converted Catholic whose faith informs his conservative, family centric politics. And, like JD Vance, White is an author. His new book, Mississippi Swindle, which he jokes might be called “Red Neck Elegy”, is the story of Brett Favre and the Mississippi welfare scandal that shocked America. One thing is for sure. This isn’t the last you will hear of Shadrack Tucker White. As he told me, he’s thinking of running for Mississippi Governor and he’s exactly the kind of articulate, smart and youthful conservative who, I imagine, will one day caste his ambitious eyes on the US Presidency.

Shad White is the State Auditor of Mississippi. During his tenure, the auditor’s office has uncovered more waste, fraud, and abuse than any other time in state history. Shad is also a prolific writer on fraud, and his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Hill, and other publications. He is a certified fraud examiner and holds degrees from Harvard Law, the University of Oxford where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Mississippi. He lives with his wife and three children in Flowood, Mississippi.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If it’s lunchtime, it must be KEEN ON time. At least that’s what it seems, given the long menu of food guests recently on the show. First there was the lunatic regenerative farmer, Joel Salatin, fixing America one bite at a time. Then Nicola Twilley, the food blogger and historian of refrigeration. And don’t forget Andrea Freeman, who reminded us that even free school lunches aren’t really free. But our latest food guest, Lola Milholland, a Portland based Ramen noodle entrepreneur and food writer, might be the most entertaining of all. Milholland is the author of GROUP LIVING and Other Recipes, a rich stew of a memoir about her collectivist foodie parents and her passion for noisily slurping Japanese noodles. And my conversation with Lola covered everything from the non-sexual polyamory of group living to the deliciousness of the classic 1985 Japanese movie Tampopo. Eat, Lola, Eat. Recommended.

Lola Milholland is a food-business owner, social-practice artist, and writer. Her work has been published by The Guardian, Gastronomica, Oregon Humanities, Meatpaper, Compound Butter, and others. A former editor for Edible Portland magazine, she currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and runs Umi Organic, a noodle company with a commitment to providing nutritious public school lunch. Her debut book, Group Living and Other Recipes, will be released by Spiegel & Grau on August 6, 2024.

Lola was born in Portland, Oregon in 1985, the child of two counterculture parents involved in food and agriculture activism and cultural history. In college she became enthralled by studying the history of beef in Japan—forbidden by Buddhist and Shinto doctrine for more than a millennium, then widely propagandized, and now the focus of a couture-esque industry producing some of the most expensive beef in the world. From that time on, she’s had an intense fascination with the way that shifts in food culture reflect and influence larger cultural moments. The intersection of food justice, cultural history, and ecology is her favorite place to linger.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.