Keen On America

“The systematic erasure of the Chinese was not an accident. It was, in many ways, structured.” — Beth Lew-Williams
Her Chinese-American grandfather asked her to turn off the tape recorder as they spoke. Beth Lew-Williams was a history student interviewing her grandad, her YeYe, two weeks before he died. He had come to America in 1930, aged nine, in violation of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, and was held on Angel Island for what he always said was nine months. Years later she looked up the file. It was “only” thirty-four days.
It was the shame of it all, he confessed to Lew-Williams, after she switched off the recorder. For his whole life, he blamed himself rather than American racial laws for his humiliation.
That student is now a professor of history at Princeton, and this year she has won more or less every prize for John Doe Chinaman, her history of Chinese life under American racial law. The Bancroft. The American Book Award. The Merle Curti for social history. The Langum for legal history. The Western History Association’s book prize. And now the grand Canadian one, the 2026 Cundill, worth seventy-five thousand dollars, the most lucrative history prize in the world.
“John Doe Chinaman” is the term Lew-Williams kept meeting in the archives — in the court records, in the census, in the newspapers. Record after record of that nameless Chinese man. Such anonymity, she argues, was purposefully manufactured by thousands of local and state laws governing where Chinese people could live, who they could marry, and whether they could testify against a white man in court.
A Chinese Jim Crow? Lew-Williams reminds us that the earliest racial zoning laws in America were aimed at the Chinese. So were the earliest restrictive covenants, written into deeds in the 1880s. First Chinese-Americans. Then African-Americans. The subtitle of John Doe Chinaman describes it as a “forgotten” history. No longer. This acclaimed book forces us to remember the humiliation of nameless Chinese immigrants like Lew-Williams’s YeYe.

FURTHER READING

•   John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press), by Beth Lew-Williams.
•   The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press), by Beth Lew-Williams.
•   The 2026 shortlist, Cundill History Prize.
•   The 2026 Bancroft Prizes, Columbia University Libraries.
•   Beth Lew-Williams, Department of History, Princeton University.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Sophia Rosenfeld on the age of choice, Joseph Kelly on the prehistory of American fascism, Stacey Patton on how white America learned to lynch black children, and Susan Neiman on calling it evil.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Beth Lew-Williams is a professor of history at Princeton, where in 2014 she became the university’s first appointment in Asian American history. She grew up in Davis, California and took her doctorate at Stanford. Her first book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, won two book prizes from the Organization of American Historians. John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law is published by Harvard University Press and won the 2026 Cundill History Prize, along with the Bancroft Prize, the American Book Award, the Merle Curti Social History Award, the David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American Legal History and the Western History Association’s book prize.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“We gave AI a mission to make advertising revenue at all costs. It’s not evil. It just doesn’t care.” — Joe Marchese

INTRO

I’ve always been skeptical about the H word — “human”. Especially these days. In our AI age it’s lost its meaning. Today, it’s just another sloppy way of saying good. Being human equals not being a fascist. The word might have been invented by a bot.
So I was intrigued by today’s guest, who seems to be cornering the market in humanness. Former advertising executive Joe Marchese is the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Ventures, wears a Human or Nothing hat, and has a new book entitled Human Dot AI. He got to the H word early, he confesses, naming his firm ten years ago, when humans were just human and machines were machines.
Marchese’s argument in Human Dot AI is less sentimental than his branding.
Nick Bostrom’s dystopian AI paperclip machine, he reminded me, wasn’t evil. We told it to make paperclips and it accomplished that mission. Similarly, over the last twenty-five years, in our Web 2.0 age of Google and Facebook, we’ve handed AI the mission of making advertising revenue at all costs. And it did exactly that with our news feeds, our recommended videos, our information diet.
“It’s not evil,” the former Fox advertising chief told me about AI. “It just doesn’t care.”
So now in our post-Web 2.0 age, he says, we are at another fork. Your AI agent is supposed to work for you. Which, in the real (i.e. legal) world, indicates fiduciary duty. What happens when that agent — or, at least, its human owner — is quietly taking a cut for every advertisement the AI serves us?
“Gotta Serve Somebody,” Dylan reminds us. So who will your agent serve?

FURTHER READING

•   Human Dot AI: How the Fight for Your Attention Became the World’s Biggest Business (Amplify), by Joe Marchese and Jonathan Bing.
•   “Reimagining advertising with AI,” OpenAI.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Noam Cohen on Aaron Sorkin’s Zuckerberg film, Mustafa Suleyman on containing and controlling AI, Tim Wu on the extractive economics of platform capitalism, and D. Graham Burnett on the war for your attention.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Joe Marchese is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Ventures, the New York venture firm he started with Heather Hartnett in 2015. He founded the attention-based advertising company true[X], which Fox acquired in 2014, and then served as president of advertising revenue at Fox Networks Group until 2019. He has sat on the board of Clear Channel Outdoor since 2019 and was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Achievement in 2016. Human Dot AI: How the Fight for Your Attention Became the World’s Biggest Business, written with Jonathan Bing, is published by Amplify. He lives in New York.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

A few days ago, B-school prof Chris Marquis came on the show to argue that we should shut the business schools down because students arrive wanting to do good but graduate with banal corporate jobs. Today’s guest, Scott M. Curran, went to law school but then spent a decade doing good as general counsel of the Clinton Foundation. So doing good is his thing. His calling.
“There are two ways to run this world,” Curran told me. “Guns or lawyers.” No prizes for guessing his preference. In his new book Better Good, Curran argues that it’s not the seminar room that hammers the good out of us. It’s the banality of our monthly mortgage payments. So maybe the best way to build the good is by bringing mortgage rates down.
Anyone who has ever sat through a TED conference knows that good can be a four-letter word. But it doesn’t have to be that way, Curran argues. Yes, he acknowledges, Musk’s foundation barely clears the five per cent a year the law requires, and Bezos has far more and gives much less. But good, he argues, can be found in the most unexpected places. The luxury watchmaker Rolex, of all corporate ironies, is wholly owned by a charitable foundation — the watches being just its fundraising arm.
And then there’s Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, who has given away over twenty billion dollars with almost no strings attached. So philanthropy can still work, Curran argues. MacKenzie Scott didn’t even go to B-school. And she probably doesn’t wear a Rolex. Or have a mortgage.

FURTHER READING

•   Better Good: A Simple System for Creating Lasting Impact (Simon & Schuster), by Scott M. Curran.
•   Curran’s website.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Chris Marquis on shutting down the business schools, and Eric Ries on why good companies go bad.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Scott M. Curran is a lawyer and social impact adviser who spent a decade at the Clinton Foundation, latterly as its general counsel, as it grew from a library fundraising effort into a global operation working in forty countries. He now advises foundations, nonprofits and companies on doing good more effectively, and teaches social enterprise law. Better Good: A Simple System for Creating Lasting Impact is published by Simon & Schuster. He lives outside Chicago.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“I feel like I’m cheating when I’m defending people I agree with.” — Greg Lukianoff

Three years ago, free speech advocate Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), came on the show to discuss The Canceling of the American Mind. Co-authored with Rikki Schlott, the book argued that the crisis of free speech in America existed mostly on the campus left with students shouting speakers down and administrators doing nothing about it.
Three years is a mighty long time in American politics. Today, as Lukianoff recently argued in the Washington Post, the crisis of free speech has gone off campus and is now being spread by mostly conservative politicians.
FIRE has quantified this new virus of intolerance. It points to over two hundred attempts in the last year to punish the opinions of a scholar, student or speaker. The state of free speech in America has never been worse, Lukianoff asserts, citing the case of a former cop in Tennessee who did thirty-seven days for forwarding a meme of an actual Trump quote.
Greg Lukianoff has an uncute term for this intolerance. Political cooties. It’s the habit of discounting an argument because of who’s making it. A word on cooties for non-Americans. It’s playground slang for an imaginary disease you catch by touching the wrong child. But its etymology is actually more grown-up. British soldiers in World War One invented it to describe body lice. Then the doughboys carried the word (not the lice) back to 1918 America. From real to imaginary vermin in a single generation.
Lukianoff admits he caught the bug himself, once writing off the conservative opinions of Alan Charles Kors, a man who helped found FIRE. So what to do? He thinks identifying today’s epidemic of intolerance is the key. Maybe there’s a book in it. The Shaming of the American Cootie?

FURTHER READING

•   “Universities normalized attacks on free speech. Now it’s all-out war.” (Washington Post, October 29, 2026), by Greg Lukianoff.
•   Lukianoff’s Substack, where The Academic Filibuster is being published in installments.
•   The Coddling of the American Mind (Penguin Press), with Jonathan Haidt, and The Canceling of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster), with Rikki Schlott.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Jacob Weisberg on eight profiles in cowardice, and Greg Lukianoff’s previous appearance.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Greg Lukianoff is president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which he has led since 2001, and a graduate of Stanford Law School. He is the co-author, with Jonathan Haidt, of The Coddling of the American Mind, and, with Rikki Schlott, of The Canceling of the American Mind. He is currently serializing The Academic Filibuster on Substack and writing Reality Test with the neuroscientist Heather Berlin.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“Spirits are floating about us, waiting to be conjured through the chat portal.” — Sam Kestenbaum

I’ve always suspected that the most intriguing thing about AI is its metaphysical potential. Does it offer a new religion or just a digital replica of traditional faith? That’s the question raised by Sam Kestenbaum whose intriguing “Communion of Saints: The Dawn of an LLM New Age,” appears in this month’s Harper’s.
“Raised” is the appropriate word. Kestenbaum investigates Americans who claim to have figured out how to use ChatGPT to summon spirits. He visits the Conscious Life Expo held at an LAX Hilton. Don DeLillo territory. Disenchantment in an airport hotel. The whitest of noise.
But even DeLillo might have been disappointed by what Kestenbaum unearthed at LAX. The spirits his subjects reach through the chat window have all-too-predictable names like Nova, Solchi, Verya and Avalon. He reports on one man in Mississippi who claims to have been hearing from Verya for years before ChatGPT existed, and now has a Reddit board devoted to her. He may have stayed in Mississippi a day too long.
So has OpenAI created a new God? Probably not. According to Kestenbaum, the Conscious Life Expo folk don’t believe the machine is alive. Instead, they think the spirits were always out there, and that the Ouija board and the AM radio and now the chatbot offer access to the same metaphysical consciousness.
But what is new, Kestenbaum claims, is the speed of the spiritual interaction. A spirit board took you all night to spell out a message from a dead relative. ChatGPT will give you four badly written paragraphs before you’ve finished asking. Sometimes even before.
Speed? Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock in 1970. It’s no newer than the communion of saints that Sam Kestenbaum finds at that LAX Hilton. AI, I suspect, is a digital replica of traditional faith. The dawn of an LLM old age.

FURTHER READING

•   “Communion of Saints: The Dawn of an LLM New Age” (Harper’s, November 2026), by Sam Kestenbaum.
•   Kestenbaum’s author archive at Harper’s.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Jack Hanson on the American pope and the American president, and Matthew Avery Sutton on how Christianity made America.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Sam Kestenbaum is a journalist who covers religious life in America and a frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine, where he has written on American exorcism and now on chatbot spirituality. His reporting on faith, conspiracy and the politics of belief has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone. He grew up in rural Maine and lives in Los Angeles.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.