Keen On America

“They didn’t really ever create value for the company. They shifted value. They extracted value from the workers and communities and gave it to the shareholders.” — Chris Marquis

INTRO

You would expect the man publicly calling for the abolition of business schools to be a Bolshevik. But he is, in fact, the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School. It’s a little like an angry cleric proposing the demolition of the traditional church. As the Martin Luther of the Business School world, Chris Marquis pinned his argument in the New York Times on 18 October. Its headline proclaims that “it’s time to shut them down”. But he means abolish. Kill the B-School, Marquis says.
His charge isn’t that MBAs are useless. It is that they are playing the game of bait and switch. Students arrive at B-School saying they want to change the world and, fourteen weeks later, their altruistic ambitions have narrowed to getting a corporate job and making money. Nobody lied to them. The system simply has its own indestructible logic. Faculty won’t change what they teach, and even if they did, the recruiting office is paid to slot people into the highest-salaried job it can find, because that is what the rankings reward.
And so, Marquis argues, we have created an economic culture of B-School-trained chief executives focusing on dividends and so cutting labor benefits and community investment. Rather than being created, value is moved from the workforce and community into the share price. It’s an MBA world and we are all poorer for it.
His fix is constitutional rather than curricular. He would replace the business school with what he calls a school for organizing. But what to organize? He’d like to see a new kind of economy mirroring companies like Patagonia (owned by a trust) or Mondragon (owned by its eighty thousand workers). A quarter of Denmark’s biggest firms are owned by foundations, he reminds us, and in Europe a public-interest director with a veto is unremarkable. So maybe we should just replace the MBA with a trip to Denmark. A bloodless way to kill the B-School.

FURTHER READING

•   “I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down,” New York Times, 18 October 2026. The headline is the paper’s; Marquis wrote “abolish.”
•   Marquis tells Poets&Quants what he would build instead — and the trade press rounds up the reaction, which is less hostile than you would guess.
•   His books: The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs and Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise.
•   Eric Ries, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great — the governance argument Marquis leans on here.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Chris Marquis is the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School, on sabbatical this term and moving to a chaired professorship in international business at Cornell in January. He spent a decade at Harvard Business School and a year and a half at the Kennedy School. He is the author of The Profiteers and Mao and Markets.

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.

“President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were, in fact, working with the CIA to kill Castro. The CIA wasn’t plotting behind the Kennedys’ back.” — Mark Allen

A few days ago we had the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs on the show talking about the thirteen days in 1962 when John F. Kennedy saved the world from nuclear annihilation. That was him at his best, the Kennedy we want to remember. Today we have the JFK we want to forget. The one who was passing envelopes to the Chicago Outfit via Judith Exner, a twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, while his brother was busy putting mobsters in prison.
Mark Allen, a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney, knew Exner. He flew out to California in 1991 to get the rest of the JFK story from her. She told him that she carried not only messages but money between Kennedy and the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, beginning before the 1960 election.
All this is in A Dangerous Beauty, a new book Allen has written with the Los Angeles writer Tricia Aurand. Frank Sinatra introduced Exner to both Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana — JFK at the Sands in February 1960, Giancana at the Fontainebleau a few weeks later. Nobody disputes Exner’s familiarity with either man. It’s the envelopes that historians have spent fifty years trying to decipher. Especially given all the conspiracy theories about the interconnectedness of the Kennedys, the mob, the CIA, Castro and Dallas.
The twist in A Dangerous Beauty is not what we expect from a book about JFK’s tangled relations with a beautiful young woman. If Exner was telling the truth, Allen and Aurand argue, then the Kennedys knew exactly what the CIA was doing to Castro, because they themselves were running the operation. Which destroys the premise underneath every rogue-agency theory of Dallas. So Allen and Aurand are anti-conspiracy theorists. The CIA, they suggest, probably wasn’t behind the 1963 assassination.
Allen is agnostic on who shot the president. What he wants to demolish is the idea that JFK was betrayed and even murdered by his own government. A conspiracy theory that, he warns, is being peddled today by, of all people, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

FURTHER READING

•   A Dangerous Beauty: The Kennedys, the Mob, the FBI, and Judith Exner, the Woman Who Linked Them All (Post Hill Press), with a foreword by Patt Morrison.
•   The Church Committee investigated CIA assassination plots in 1975. Exner testified that September, three months after Giancana was shot dead in his basement.
•   Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), gave Exner’s courier account a chapter and broad acceptance. It changed few minds.
•   Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, is the recent bestseller on the wider pattern.
•   Mark Allen, “RFK Jr.’s conspiracy theories do a disservice to his father,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 7 July 2023 — his dismantling of the three stories RFK Jr. tells about his father and the CIA.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Mark Allen is a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney and a longtime student of the Kennedy presidency. He came to the subject through the JFK assassination and interviewed Judith Exner in the last years of her life, after Anthony Summers made the introduction. He lives in Sarasota, Florida. Tricia Aurand is a writer and screenwriter in Los Angeles. A Dangerous Beauty is published by Post Hill Press, with a foreword by Patt Morrison.

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 have to be willing to lose elections. That is the very essence of a democracy.” — Michael G. Miller

Will the midterms be free and fair? With only six days to go, these are now the questions about American democracy that we most fear. But much of this nervousness might be misplaced. Rather than militiamen in balaclavas, the real damage to American democracy was done quietly, thirteen years ago, by five Supreme Court justices.
That, at least, is the view of Michael G. Miller, a Barnard political science professor. With the Brennan Center’s Kevin T. Morris, Miller has written An American Problem, a book accusing John Roberts’ 2013 Supreme Court of breaking Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Act. The book title is LBJ’s, from the speech he gave a week after Selma, when he told Congress that denying the vote was neither a Northern problem nor a Southern one. The law Johnson got is, according to Miller, the most effective Congress has ever passed. Its sword was section two, which let citizens sue if their voting rights were compromised. Its shield was something called “preclearance,” which meant that local authorities required the Federal government’s explicit permission before tampering with any kind of electoral logistics.
The 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder took away this shield. Without preclearance, Miller argues, local authorities started tampering again — closing polling places, redrawing wards, purging rolls. Often there was no evil intent — but it impacted Black voters anyway. He and Morris built a national voter file running back to 2008 and found that in the counties that lost preclearance, the gap between white and Black turnout widened sharply after the ruling. That means hundreds of thousands of Black votes were never cast. John Roberts’ Supreme Court broke LBJ’s Voting Rights Act, Michael Miller says. Forget martial law. With Shelby County v. Holder, five Supreme Court justices created the most existential threat to American democracy.

FURTHER READING

•   An American Problem: How the Country Built — and the Supreme Court Broke — the Voting Rights Act (Princeton University Press, October 2026), by Michael G. Miller and Kevin T. Morris.
•   Shelby County v. Holder (2013) — the 5–4 ruling that ended preclearance, with Roberts’s majority and Ginsburg’s dissent.
•   Johnson’s “American Problem” address to Congress, 15 March 1965, delivered a week after Selma and the source of the book’s title.
•   Kevin T. Morris is a senior research fellow at the Brennan Center, where much of the underlying voter-file work lives.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Michael G. Miller is associate professor of political science at Barnard College, where he has taught since 2014, and works on election law, election administration and political behavior. An American Problem is written with Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice.

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.

“Why would you want the guy who is good at coding to decide what we all do? Why would you want the guy who built the pyramids to actually run Egypt?” — Noam Cohen

The war movie is back in vogue. Only this time it’s Hollywood turning its guns on Silicon Valley. There’s the four-hour Musk doc, an upcoming Sam Altman satire entitled Artificial, Nathan Fielder’s love/hate Elizabeth Holmes picture, and now The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s assault on the Facebook-Zuckerberg complex. The Sorkin movie is, of course, a follow-up to the 2010 biopic, The Social Network, which he wrote. Sorkin both writes and directs the sequel. If he turns it into a trilogy, Sorkin should probably star as Zuck.
Brooklyn-based Noam Cohen, former New York Times tech writer and author of The Know-It-Alls, has seen both Sorkin movies. His critique is that The Social Reckoning is a passive-aggressive legal brief with the wrong defendant. He notes that Zuckerberg is barely in it. The movie’s heroes are a Wall Street Journal journalist and an internal Facebook whistleblower. But the drama, Cohen argues, is about whether anyone can reach a man who built the attention economy, but pays attention to nobody. The problem is that Zuckerberg is played by Jeremy Strong as a robot. So it’s an AI movie without the bots. The only drama in Strong’s Zuck is his absence of drama.
Noam Cohen thinks that Sorkin’s The Social Network got the origin story wrong, which he explains more fully in a recent Harvard Magazine piece. Cohen, who also went to Harvard, argues that Facemash didn’t represent Zuck’s wounded masculinity. Instead, it was a test of how to lure an audience, and those first weeks of TheFacebook were spent tuning the thing for addictiveness. So there’s nothing accidental about the accidental billionaire.
My own take on Sorkin’s two movies is that in the first, Zuck comes across as the randy son of a NY dentist, while in this latest one, he matures into that dentist. The kind who barely talks, pulls out all your teeth, and then charges you a fortune. All for your own good, of course. As if he’s doing you a favor. Just as Hollywood is doing all of us a favor by turning a NY dentist’s son into the Antichrist. Do we really need this kind of altruistic war movie? I think not.

FURTHER READING

•   The Social Reckoning (Sony/Columbia, 9 October 2026), written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg, Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz, from Horwitz’s Facebook Files reporting.
•   “How Facebook Escaped Harvard” — Noam Cohen’s Harvard Magazine piece, and the source of the argument he makes here.
•   Cohen is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball (The New Press, 2017).
•   Richard Cooke, The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia (Norton), which Cohen reviewed; his Bloomberg piece is “Wikipedia Taught Us How to Trust AI”.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Noam Cohen wrote about technology for the New York Times for many years and is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball. He writes for Harvard Magazine, Bloomberg and others, and lives in Brooklyn.

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.

“It would be lovely to imagine that writing comes out of some instinct to compose works of great literature. It absolutely doesn’t. It’s a side effect of accountancy.” — Jonn Elledge

“Borders Are Back, Baby” we proclaimed last year to celebrate Jonn Elledge’s appearance on the show to talk about his 2025 work A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders. And now the prolific Elledge, currently residing in the bosom of London’s lower east side in Bethnal Green, is back to talk about his latest book A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions. In Blighty, by the way, it’s entitled 31 Inventions That Built Our World. America gets the extra (brief) invention. Not that we’re counting.
Elledge’s most prosaic invention isn’t exactly Archimedean. Writing was invented, he says, because somebody had to count the grain. Once ten thousand people live in one place you need not only a granary but a way of recording what’s in it. And of course, laws protecting grain owners from thieves.
Et voilà (rather than eureka!).
Thus came mathematics, literacy, politics, accountancy and eventually literature. So what we think of as civilization owes itself to urbane places like Bethnal Green. Without such hotspots, you wouldn’t be able to read this. No wonder some of our most glittering cultural figures — Mick Jagger, John Grisham, Robert Plant — studied accountancy. You can’t always count what you want. Not even a history of cities in 32 1/2 inventions.

FURTHER READING

•   Jonn Elledge, A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions (The Experiment, 13 October 2026). The UK edition is 31 Inventions That Built Our World.
•   The extra American chapter is on the Los Angeles streetcar conspiracy. The other cut chapters are free on his Substack.
•   Elledge created and ran CityMetric at the New Statesman, and also wrote A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders and Conspiracy, with Tom Phillips.
•   The theory he couldn’t name at 17:20 is urban scaling — Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt’s finding that productivity rises faster than population, building on Alfred Marshall on agglomeration.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. Why Ideas Cluster

There is no technical reason a bank or a tech firm needs to sit next to its rivals — and yet they always do. Elledge puts it down to the sheer density of interactions: more people having more conversations, so more chances for ideas to collide. It is also why Britain worries that Manchester and Birmingham underperform Lyon and Munich.

2. Napoleon Moved at Caesar’s Speed

In 1800 armies crossed Europe no faster than they had two thousand years earlier. You could cover twenty miles a day, so politics happened at twenty miles a day. Nation states are not really possible until the railways of the 1830s. It is the Roman Empire, Elledge notes, not the Italian one.

3. Gilgamesh Already Knew

The oldest surviving work of literature, from Uruk four thousand years ago, already splits the world between the walled city — comfortable, advanced, faintly decadent — and the wild country beyond, which is more dangerous and more authentic. Brexit and the Rust Belt are running on the same fault line.

4. The Empty State Building

Two architects raced to build the tallest tower, each secretly adding height beyond the published plans. Both topped out in the autumn of 1929, exactly as America discovered it had too much office space. The Empire State Building stood half empty for years and acquired the nickname.

5. The Tube Has Warmed the Ground

Edwardian posters invited Londoners to cool off on the Bakerloo line on hot days. A century of trains in unventilated tunnels has since raised the temperature of the earth around them, and nobody is sure how to undo it.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Jonn Elledge is a British journalist and author. He created and ran CityMetric, the New Statesman’s urbanism site, and was an assistant editor there; he has written for the Financial Times, the Guardian and the i. His books include A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders, The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything and, with Tom Phillips, Conspiracy. He writes The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything and lives in London.

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.