Keen On America

“We need to develop better theories of why the other side believes what they do. Having an accurate theory includes recognizing if somebody is a psychopath — but also recognizing that psychopaths are rarer than we think.” — Audun Dahl
 
If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no head. While this sounds like an annoying cliché (especially to people under forty), it does recognize that our moral views change. But, as the Cornell psychologist Audun Dahl argues in his new book Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing, the most interesting question is why our moral principles always seem in flux. Why people who say cheating is wrong cheat. Why people who say violence is wrong turn a blind moral eye to their own insurrections.
 
Dahl is a psychologist, not a moralist. He is not interested in what we should believe, but in what we think we believe. His central finding is that human morality is neither fixed nor fickle. People change their moral views when they believe they have good reasons to — reasons they can, indeed, articulate. The problem isn’t hypocrisy per se. It’s that we struggle to understand why the other side believes what it does. In morally polarised societies like contemporary America, we over-attribute psychopathy to political opponents. Most Republicans and most Democrats do have genuine moral commitments. But they are just different principles, applied to parallel moral hierarchies. Rather than morality perhaps, we need more empathy. Don’t judge. Understand.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Two Kinds of Moral Change: Dahl identifies two forms of moral change that should trouble us. Situational moral change: people espouse one principle and act against it in a specific situation — the person who says cheating is wrong and cheats on an exam, the January 6th rioter who says violence is wrong. Historical moral change: the same principles coexisting with practices that contradict them — Thomas Jefferson proclaiming inalienable rights while enslaving hundreds. Both are not simply hypocrisy: they reflect the genuine messiness of moral life, where competing principles create constant conflict.
 
•       Morality Emerges in the First Three Years of Life: Dahl’s most striking empirical finding: by around age three, virtually all children develop an intrinsic concern with how we ought to treat other sentient beings. It is not taught as an external rule. It emerges. A three-year-old will say: it’s wrong to harm others, you shouldn’t steal. No other animal acquires this. It is a uniquely human characteristic. The question is not whether people have moral commitments — almost everyone does. The question is how those commitments interact with other concerns, pressures, and competing principles.
 
•       We Over-Attribute Psychopathy to the Other Side: One of the most robustly documented findings in political psychology: Republicans and Democrats don’t merely think the other side is wrong. They think the other side is evil — likely to condone things they would never condone. Research shows both sides significantly over-estimate the other’s extremism and moral depravity. Dahl’s prescription: develop better theories of why the other side believes what it does. An accurate theory includes recognising genuine psychopaths and bad actors when they exist. It also includes recognising that they are rarer than we think.
 
•       Jefferson, Epstein, and the Exceptions: Two historical anchors. Jefferson: the author of the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights, who enslaved hundreds. The question is not whether he was a hypocrite — he clearly was — but how someone could hold both positions simultaneously. The answer Dahl finds most compelling: conflicting moral principles applied with different weights in different contexts, not the absence of moral concern. Epstein: the opposite case, a man who concealed an absence of moral concern behind a veneer of respectability. The lesson: some people genuinely lack it, but they are exceptions.
 
•       Elbow Room: The Hilary Mantel Closer: Dahl’s two wishes for a more moral world. First: that we understand why the other side disagrees. Second: that we have more “elbow room” — the phrase from Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy — to make decisions based on what we actually think is right rather than what we need to do to survive. Machiavelli and Cromwell operated in a world where survival left almost no room for principled action. If that is becoming our world again, the prospects for moral progress are bleak. Dahl is cautiously hopeful. The creative, restless energy of each new generation — willing to say this is unjust, this is unfair — is what abolished slavery. It is what drives moral change still.
 
About the Guest
 
Audun Dahl is Associate Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He is the author of Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing (Harvard University Press, April 2026). He grew up in Norway and is based in Ithaca, New York.
 
References:
 
•       Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing by Audun Dahl (Harvard University Press, April 2026).
 
•       Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall trilogy — cited by Dahl as capturing the “elbow room” problem of moral action under survival pressure.
 
•       Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning — referenced in the same context as Mantel.
 
•       Episode 2906: Dylan Gottlieb on Yuppies — the companion episode on how professional class morality was shaped by competing incentives.
 
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 2,900 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
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Apple Podcasts
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Chapters:
 

(00:31) - The Churchill/Adams quote: liberal at 20, conservative at 40

(02:08) - Dahl’s Norwegian grandpa and the disputed attribution

(02:30) - Two kinds of troubling moral change: situational and historical

(03:10) - Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and his enslaved peopl...

“Being a father is probably one of the toughest and most rewarding jobs I’ve ever had. A lot of the principles I used to teach snipers apply to kids: dealing with negativity, replacing negative self-talk, learning that well-meaning adults can say terrible things — and you don’t have to take that on as baggage.” — Brandon Webb
 
Brandon Webb defines himself as an author, entrepreneur, Navy SEAL sniper, and father. But not in that order. The first three he leveraged into a series of bestselling books about the art of sniping. The fourth — the art of being a loving father — he dodged and ducked for years.
 
But fatherhood might be Webb’s real calling. People regularly pulled him aside after meeting his grown children to ask him about his “secret” for being an effective dad. His kids were making eye contact, they were asking good questions rather than staring at their phones. Most astonishingly, they seemed happy.
 
Webb’s new book, Puddle Jumpers: Simple and Proven Ways to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids, reveals his secret of parenting. It applies the positive performance psychology Webb learned as a Navy SEAL sniper instructor — how to redirect negative self-talk, how to deal with well-meaning adults who say damaging things, how to build mental toughness without destroying connection — to the work of raising children. It outlines his parenting philosophy of both high expectations and high support. Think of Puddle Jumpers as simultaneously the manual for tiger and the bunny parenting.
 
Brandon Webb’s ultimate calling in life is as a parent. Father, author, entrepreneur and Navy SEAL sniper. In that order.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Sniper Instructor as Parenting Coach: Webb was running the Navy SEAL sniper program at 27 years old. The psychology they taught there — positive self-talk, replacing negative internal narratives, dealing with adversity without being broken by it — is what he applied to parenting. The connection is not as strange as it sounds: both sniping and parenting require performing under pressure, dealing with failure without catastrophising, and building confidence that is genuine rather than brittle. The difference is that the stakes in parenting last a lifetime.
 
•       High Expectations, High Support: Webb’s alternative to the false choice between permissive parenting and authoritarian discipline. Permissive parenting replaces preparation with protection. Authoritarian discipline breaks connection. Puddle Jumper Parenting holds both simultaneously: clear expectations and emotional safety. Kids need to know what’s required of them. They also need to know they won’t be abandoned when they fail. Webb’s word for children raised this way: puddle jumpers — kids who leap into life’s messy moments with full-hearted abandon, not because they’re fearless but because they trust themselves to recover.
 
•       The Credit Card Lesson: Don’t Bail Them Out: Webb’s son Jackson managed a self-storage facility through college and ended up with a $25,000 ownership payout as a sophomore at St Andrews. He spent it like a drunken sailor on shore leave, got a credit card, ran up $12,000 in debt at predatory interest rates, and called his father for help. Webb’s response: you remember that conversation we had? Figure it out. He let his son suffer. Jackson’s girlfriend hated Webb for two years. At the end, Jackson paid off the debt with a new business and told his father it was one of the best lessons he’d ever been taught. It would have been easy to bail him out. The suffering was the lesson.
 
•       Purpose and the War Veteran: Viktor Frankl’s Lesson: How does a combat veteran come home intact? Webb’s answer: purpose. His Afghanistan deployment had clear moral logic — the propaganda posters in the caves, the training camps, the towers. That clarity carried him through. Iraq was different. Soldiers who went to Iraq with no understanding of why they were there — and whose friends in 2010 were saying we have no idea what we’re doing here — came home broken. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: purpose is the thing that makes endurance possible. Without it, violence that cannot be assigned rational meaning produces serious mental illness.
 
•       Teach Kids About Money: The American Economy Preys on Them: Webb has strong opinions: America’s economy is largely fuelled by consumer debt. Credit card companies prey on college students because they know the parents will bail them out. Kids need to understand the system before the system takes advantage of them. His prescription: teach them age-appropriate financial literacy early. The Acorns Early app gamifies financial learning for children. The deal he struck with all his kids in college: I pay for school, you have a roof and food, but if you want to socialise, get a job. The lesson is not just about money. It’s about agency.
 
About the Guest
 
Brandon Webb is a combat-decorated Navy SEAL sniper, multiple New York Times bestselling author, Harvard Business School alumnus, and father of three. He is the author of Puddle Jumpers: Simple and Proven Ways to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids (Authors Equity/Simon & Schuster, May 12, 2026), The Red Circle, The Killing School, and The Making of a Navy SEAL. He divides his time between Portugal and New York City.
 
References:
 
•       Puddle Jumpers: Simple and Proven Ways to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids by Brandon Webb (Authors Equity/Simon & Schuster, May 12, 2026).
 
•       Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning — Webb cites it as one of his favourite books, and the source of his thinking on purpose and combat trauma.
 
•       Episode 2888: Helen Benedict on The Soldier’s House — directly referenced in the interview; Webb’s purpose-in-war argument is the complement to Benedict’s moral injury argument.
 
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 2,900 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

“As recently as the mid-seventies, under 5% of Ivy Leaguers are headed to Wall Street. It’s actually not that attractive. But as Wall Street’s deregulated, it changes the incentive structure — it makes it much more profitable and demands this huge labor force.” — Dylan Gottlieb
 
They stalked the sidewalks of Manhattan in button-down shirts embroidered with the names of investment banks. They jogged. They drank Beaujolais Nouveau. They gentrified neighborhoods. They were the Yuppies — and with the Boston-based Dylan Gottlieb, they’ve found their young urban professional biographer.
 
In Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York, Gottlieb offers both a social history of financialization and a collective biography of the professional class that came of age in the Reagan years. Rather than a passing 1980s stereotype, Gottlieb argues that the Yuppie is a phenomenon that remade the American economy, city, and political class. As recently as the mid-1970s, under 5 percent of Ivy League graduates went to Wall Street. A decade of deregulation later, banks were recruiting a third of graduating classes from top universities. The sweatshop of the meritocracy was born. Most of us are still sweating.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       From Yippie to Yuppie: The Word’s Origins: Yuppie resonates with Yippie — the iconographic late-sixties radicals of the New Left, for whom Jerry Rubin was the signifier. The word first appeared in a Chicago alt-weekly in the late 1970s to describe highly educated young people trickling into gentrifying North Side neighbourhoods. It didn’t achieve full cultural dominance until 1984, when it became the frame for supporters of Gary Hart’s presidential campaign — a prototypical Yuppie candidate who stormed the Democratic primary and represented a new professional vanguard within the party. The word named something that was already happening. It didn’t create it.
 
•       The Incentive Structure Changed: Under 5% to One Third: As recently as the mid-1970s, under 5 percent of Ivy League graduates went to Wall Street. It was seen as the preserve of WASPy children who used family connections to get a bank job. By the mid-1980s, banks were recruiting roughly a third of graduating classes at top universities. What happened: deregulation made finance enormously more profitable; finance demanded a large educated labour force to do the work of putting finance at the centre of the American economy; and the most talented students — those who might have become poets or public servants — followed the money. At mid-century, the most prestigious option for a Princeton graduate was middle management at a Fortune 500 company. By 1985, it was Wall Street.
 
•       Democratization and Distinction: The Double Movement: Gottlieb’s central thesis is a double movement. The Yuppie era brought genuine diversification to America’s elite: Jewish lawyers could now make partner at firms previously closed to them; women entered investment banks in numbers that would have been inconceivable in 1965; Black and Asian Americans got at least a foot in the door. This was new, and it mattered. Simultaneously, that newly diversified elite pulled further away from the rest of America, extracting profits from companies being financialized and rents from communities being gentrified. Democratization and distinction in constant tension. The elite became more diverse and more remote at the same time.
 
•       The Pyramid to Cylinder Shift: AI is about to do to the Yuppie what the Yuppie did to everybody else. Gottlieb spoke recently to an HR representative at an investment bank — name and bank withheld — who said the firm was moving from a pyramid structure to a cylinder structure for employment. The wide base of entry-level workers that finance has depended on since the 1980s will shrink dramatically. Only the best and brightest will be selected; the rest will be automated. Gottlieb wrote about the era of the large pyramid — the exploited many at the bottom who hoped to reach the top. What happens to the professional class when that pyramid disappears?
 
•       Are the Yuppies Becoming Socialists? A long-running trend: the pressures of the sweatshop of the meritocracy have embittered many members of the professional class. Academics work in conditions demonstrably worse than they were forty years ago. Doctors are evaluated on metrics that resemble those of factory workers. Journalists are precarious. The housing market in the cities where professionals cluster has made the cost of replicating their social status for their children prohibitive. And into this comes AI, threatening the entry-level pipeline. Gottlieb’s question: will the investment bankers see their plight as similar to the Amazon warehouse worker’s? Or will the edifice of meritocratic myth-making — the deep conviction that you’re special — hold them back from that solidarity?
 
About the Guest
 
Dylan Gottlieb is Assistant Professor of History at Bentley University and co-host of the Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism podcast. He is the author of Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York (Harvard University Press, May 12, 2026), winner of the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. He has written for the Washington Post, Gotham, the Journal of American History, and Public Seminar.
 
References:
 
•       Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York by Dylan Gottlieb (Harvard University Press, May 12, 2026).
 
•       Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of a College-Educated Working Class — the companion book, referenced in the interview as directly relevant to Gottlieb’s thesis.
 
•       Barbara Ehrenreich — referenced by Gottlieb as the first to identify the downwardly mobile tranche of the professional class.
 
•       Episode 2895: Glyn Morgan on the rise and fall of American Europe — the companion episode on how the professional class shaped American foreign policy.
 
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 2,900 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
Ap...

“All the warnings were there. It was almost a carbon copy — the same warnings that were ignored before Paradise, ignored again before the Palisades. And nobody was held accountable.” — Jonathan Vigliotti
 
On January 7, 2025, the Palisades Fire ignited in Los Angeles. Over the first few hours of the fire, the second-largest city in America had no firefighters on the front lines and no coordinated evacuation. Residents fought the flames with garden hoses.
 
“Where are the firefighters?” somebody, running from the fire, screamed into a live television shot.
 
Where, indeed, were Los Angeles firefighters? Jonathan Vigliotti — CBS national correspondent, Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award winner — was there from the beginning. His new book, Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles, is the searing firsthand account of the tragic failure of the Los Angeles authorities to respond to the fire.
 
The story Vigliotti tells is not new. In some ways, it is a carbon copy of the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise in Northern California. First as tragedy then as farce: inadequate evacuation routes, uncleared fuel loads, officials who failed to act were repeated almost exactly in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. More than eighty people died in Paradise and more than thirty in the LA fires. The economic damage in LA will likely make it the costliest natural disaster in US history. And when the LA mayor and the Californian governor appeared in the first press conference after the fires broke out, Vigliotti reports, all Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom were talking about was the 2028 Olympics.
 
The political reckoning has not happened, Vigliotti warns. Bass is still mayor and Newsom is a Presidential frontrunner for 2028. California’s current governor’s race is dominated by homelessness and crime. Wildfire — the existential threat to the state, the one where more than $2 billion in taxpayer money was pumped into agencies over several years with more than half a billion unaccounted for — is barely mentioned.
 
The fires will be back, Vigliotti warns. Maybe this year for the World Cup, maybe in 2028 for the Olympics. So where are the firefighters?
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Where Are the Firefighters? The Central Question: Vigliotti was on scene from the first moments of the Palisades Fire. What struck him was not the scale of the flames — he’d seen wildfires before — but the absence of any official response. No firefighters at ground zero. No coordinated evacuation. The traffic gridlock that formed within an hour of ignition blocked fire trucks from getting through. Residents fought embers with garden hoses. A man running from the hillside screamed into Vigliotti’s live shot: “Where are the firefighters?” That question became the question of the disaster — and the book.
 
•       A Carbon Copy of Paradise: The 2018 Camp Fire destroyed the Northern California town of Paradise. More than eighty people died. Before it happened: weeks and months of warnings about inadequate evacuation routes, uncleared fuel loads, and officials who failed to act. The same warnings, in almost identical form, were issued for Pacific Palisades and Altadena before January 7, 2025. They were ignored in the same way. The LA fires killed more than thirty people and will likely be the costliest natural disaster in US history. Nobody has been held accountable. Nobody has been fired.
 
•       The Olympics Come First: Vigliotti’s most damning reporting: in the first press conference after the Palisades Fire broke out, Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom were already talking about the 2028 Olympic Games and Los Angeles’s ability to rebuild in time. The fires were still burning. The framing was already: how do we make this a story of resilience and recovery? Vigliotti’s counter: the story is not resilience. It is accountability. The question is not whether Los Angeles can rebuild. It is whether it can avoid the same disaster happening again.
 
•       $2 Billion, Half a Billion Unaccounted For: California’s taxes are already among the highest in the country. More than $2 billion in taxpayer money was pumped into homeless-related agencies over several years. More than half a billion was unaccounted for. And the agencies responsible for wildfire prevention and emergency management are chronically underfunded. Vigliotti’s argument: it is not that Californians need to pay more taxes. It is that the taxes they pay need to go to the right agencies. The budget for fighting climate change and protecting communities from fire is dwarfed by the budget for crime. Fire kills more people.
 
•       The Political Reckoning That Hasn’t Happened: California’s governor’s race, in the wake of the deadliest and costliest fire season in recent memory, is dominated by homelessness and crime. Wildfire — the existential threat to the state — is barely mentioned. Nobody in the political class, Vigliotti reports, has come to him asking for advice or analysis. He is not holding his breath. His warning: this summer, and every summer, the fire will come back. The conditions that created the Palisades disaster have not been remedied. Los Angeles is not ready.
 
About the Guest
 
Jonathan Vigliotti is a CBS News national correspondent and Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award winner. He is the author of Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles (Atria/One Signal, May 12, 2026) and Before It's Gone: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America. He is based in Los Angeles.
 
References:
 
•       Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles by Jonathan Vigliotti (Atria/One Signal, May 12, 2026).
 
•       Lizzie Johnson, Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire — the companion book on the 2018 Camp Fire, referenced in the interview.
 
•       Watch Duty — the wildfire monitoring app Vigliotti mentions as standard equipment for California residents.
 
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 2,900 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

“They’re all me. Every single one. I see them almost as if they’re inoculated on various petri dishes, and the petri dishes are all put into this pressure-cooker situation — that of a missile alert.” — Vincent Yu
 
So what would you do with the last 19 minutes of your life? That’s the question Vincent Yu plays with in Seek Immediate Shelter. Triggered (so to speak) by a 2018 Hawaii missile alert of an apocalypse that fizzled, Yu’s novel is about a false alarm that sent Asian-American residents of a small Massachusetts town into 19 minutes of existential panic. Seek Immediate Shelter really starts after the fictional all-clear. Because now everyone has revealed their cards. The real games begin.
 
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. Seek Immediate Shelter is really a novel about third acts, not second. The first act is normal life. The second is the nineteen minutes of terror. The third — the one that really matters — is the reckoning: the mother who used the alert as an excuse to cruelly insult her daughter; the man who hit the gas and sped away from his family; the woman who confessed her unrequited love. So all clear does not mean all right. The missile alert strips away all the lies of daily life. What’s left is a truth as explosive as any missile.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Third Act, Not the Second: F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives — and Yu’s novel is a direct argument against that claim. But the book’s real focus is the third act: not the nineteen minutes of terror (the second), but the aftermath. The mother who used the alert as permission to say something cruel. The man who sped away from his wife and child. The woman who confessed her love. These are the decisions people made when they thought it was the end. Now they have to live with them. All clear does not mean all right.
 
•       The Petri Dish Method: Yu has a background in biology and no formal training in fiction. He approaches writing scientifically: characters as specimens on petri dishes, a missile alert as the experimental conditions. The pressure-cooker situation strips away the social armour and reveals the character beneath. His goal was not cruelty but pressure — there’s a difference. He feels profound empathy for every character. When asked if any are based on real people: they’re all me. Every single one.
 
•       Asian American Silence and the Langston Hughes Principle: Yu originally wrote the characters without race. But honesty required him to make them Asian American — citing Langston Hughes’s argument that a Black poet cannot write outside of race even if he wants to. Asian American fiction has long focused on immigrant trauma and the difficult parent-child relationship. Yu wants to push beyond that: third- and fourth-generation stories, people who are simply American. The missile alert forces the silence of striving and quiet excellence to break. What’s underneath is the novel’s real subject.
 
•       Can AI Write This Kind of Novel? Yu has never used AI for his writing and — he admits — hasn’t been curious enough to try. His verdict: AI is nowhere close to writing a novel like this. Some genres, with more uniform rubrics, are more vulnerable. But the distinctive cadences of AI writing are currently easy to detect. He is, however, optimistic: the proliferation of AI-generated plots may make readers more discerning, better at recognizing tropes, more hungry for genuinely fresh storytelling. AI might, paradoxically, sharpen the audience for literary fiction.
 
•       The Cuban Missile Crisis, Trump, and COVID as Crucibles: Andrew’s provocation: was the Cuban Missile Crisis actually good for America? Did it force a national reckoning? And might Trump and COVID do the same? Yu is reluctant to apply this logic to countries — he deals in characters. But at the individual level: yes. A crucible that forces you to confront what you most cannot bear to part with, what truly matters, can be clarifying. The novel’s premise is that the missile alert was such a crucible. The broader lesson may be that we are all living through one.
 
About the Guest
 
Vincent Yu is a fiction writer and sales manager at W. W. Norton/Liveright. He is the winner of the 2021 Ashley Bourne Prize for fiction from Ploughshares and the author of Seek Immediate Shelter (Flatiron Books, May 5, 2026). His short fiction has been published in Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Able Muse, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
 
References:
 
•       Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu (Flatiron Books, May 5, 2026).
 
•       The 2018 Hawaii missile alert — the real-life false alarm that inspired the novel.
 
•       Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) — the essay Yu cites on writing within race.
 
•       Episode 2898: James Lasdun on The Family Man — the companion episode on fiction’s capacity to go where journalism cannot.
 
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 2,900 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: