Keen On America

“The United States and America are not the same thing. The United States is a government, an administration. America is an idea — and that idea is still there, even when the government is not.” — Konstanty Gebert
 
What is the best thing about America? At least when viewed from Warsaw. For Konstanty Gebert — Polish-Jewish journalist, Solidarity activist, co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza, and one of his country’s most celebrated public intellectuals — the answer is the interlibrary loan system. The ability to order any book from any library in the United States and have it delivered to your local branch within days, for free. To Gebert, it represents something irreducibly American: access to knowledge as a public good. What the internet once was. What America once represented to freedom-loving Poles like Gebert.
 
And the worst? Yalta. Gebert’s narrative is damning. In February 1945, FDR and Churchill caved into Stalin’s demands and agreed to Soviet colonisation of Eastern Europe in exchange for Russia’s entry into the Pacific War. Poland was once again bartered by the great powers. “We were sold,” Gebert describes a perfidy that resulted in a forty-year Soviet occupation of Poland.
 
Between the interlibrary loan and Yalta lies a more complex Polish-American history: Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points enabling an independent Poland; Herbert Hoover feeding a starving Europe after WW1; Reagan’s support for Solidarity. Now, however, Konstanty Gebert warns, Trump’s America isn’t just failing Poland, but all of Europe in its disdain for freedom, especially in Ukraine. That’s the view from Warsaw. And it’s closer to Yalta than the interlibrary loan system.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Interlibrary Loan System: The Peak of American Civilisation: Gebert’s opening answer to Andrew’s question about what the United States means to him: the interlibrary loan system. The ability to order any book from any library in the country and have it delivered to your local branch within days, for free. It represents something specific about the American idea: that access to knowledge is a public good, that no individual library can hold everything, and that the solution is to share rather than compete. It is, he says, the most civilised thing any country has ever done. He is not entirely joking.
 
•       The United States and America Are Not the Same Thing: Gebert’s structural distinction: the United States is a government, a foreign policy, a set of institutions that can be well or badly run. America is an idea — a myth of liberty, opportunity, and democratic self-governance — that has shaped the world’s imagination since 1776. When the United States fails, as it has under Trump, that is serious and damaging. But it does not destroy America. The idea persists independently of what any administration does to it. Poland’s relationship is with America, not just the United States. That is what survived Yalta. That is what survived Trump’s first term. He is less sure it will survive the second.
 
•       Wilson Square, Hoover, and Yalta: America’s Polish History: The arc of American-Polish relations is extraordinary. Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points gave Poland its independence after 123 years of partition — which is why Wilson Square in Warsaw exists. Herbert Hoover fed Europe after the First World War — a gesture of generosity that Poles still remember. But at Yalta in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt traded Eastern Europe to Stalin in exchange for Soviet entry into the Pacific War — or so the Polish reading goes. “We were sold,” Gebert says flatly. Reagan’s support for Solidarity rehabilitated the American image. Trump’s presidency has damaged it again. The cycle is long but the memory is longer.
 
•       Solidarity and America: Personal History: Gebert was a Solidarity activist and underground journalist — writing under the pseudonym Dawid Warszawski — during the 1980s. The movement was sustained, in part, by American moral and material support: the Reagan administration, the CIA, Western unions, the Catholic Church in America. For Gebert’s generation, America meant: someone in the world cares about us. Someone knows what is happening in Warsaw. We are not alone. That is the emotional core of the Poland-America relationship. Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine — not just Ukraine but the principle that democracies defend each other — tears at that core.
 
•       Gaza, Genocide, and the Precision of Language: The conversation’s most unexpected and bravest section. Gebert — as a prominent Polish Jew, Solidarity activist, and scholar of comparative genocide — refuses the word “genocide” for Gaza, and explains why. The legal and historical definition, established at Srebrenica and Nuremberg, requires evidence of systematic intent to destroy a people as such. What is happening in Gaza is, he says, horrifying, criminal, and a moral catastrophe for Israel. But the precision of the word “genocide” is what gives it its power to prevent future atrocities. Diluting it into a synonym for mass killing weakens the concept at the moment we most need it. The Nazis’ General Plan Ost would have turned to Slavs next. That is the context in which the word was forged.
 
About the Guest
 
Konstanty Gebert (also known as Dawid Warszawski) is a journalist, author, and Jewish activist, and one of Poland’s most celebrated public intellectuals. He was a democratic opposition activist in the 1970s, an underground journalist during martial law in the 1980s, a co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza in 1989, a war correspondent in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and co-founder of Midrasz, Poland’s leading Jewish intellectual monthly. He is an Associate Fellow of the European Council on Foreign Relations and has taught at Hebrew University, UC Berkeley, and Grinnell College. He is the author of more than a dozen books in Polish, covering Poland’s Round Table negotiations of 1989, the Yugoslav wars, Israeli history, comparative genocide, and commentaries on the Torah.
 
References:
 
•       Wilson Square, Warsaw — named for President Woodrow Wilson, whose 14 Points included Polish independence; renamed Paris Commune Square under communism, restored in 1989.
 
•       Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points (1918) — Point 13 called for an independent Poland with access to the sea.
 
•       Herbert Hoover’s post-WWI European relief programme — referenced as an act of American generosity Poles still remember.
 
•       The Yalta Conference (1945) — where Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to Soviet influence over Eastern Europe, which Poles describe as a betrayal.
 
•       Srebrenica — referenced as the legal touchstone for the definition of genocide in international law.
 
•       Andrew Keen’s forthcoming book: Where Have You Gone, Bobby Kennedy? My Search for a Lost America — the conversation is part of Andrew’s European research trip for the book.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer a...

“People in my generation worshipped the United States during communism. Everybody wanted to flee to the US. It was the land of the dream. And now we confront a different type of country, different type of politics — and we don’t dream of the US anymore.” — Bartosz Wieliński
 
I’m just back from Warsaw where I spent an afternoon at the offices of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s liberal newspaper of record. I talked with Bartosz Wieliński, the newspaper’s Deputy Editor and one of the country’s most respected journalists.
 
The message from Warsaw is dire — at least for America. Wieliński told me that his generation grew up worshipping the United States. But they no longer do. The Americans, he says, have lost not only their credibility and their values, but their minds.
 
Invoking Timothy Snyder, Wieliński describes this as the “suicide of a superpower.” Trump didn’t have to start a trade war. He didn’t have to bomb Iran without strategic objectives. He didn’t have to destroy US aid programmes that were the most cost-effective democracy-promotion tool in the world. He didn’t have to cripple NATO or sacrifice Ukraine. He chose to do all of it.
 
Wake up, America! That’s Bartosz Wieliński’s stark message from Warsaw. Don’t lose Europe. Trump will be gone sooner or later. Make sure he hasn’t burned every bridge with Europe before he exits.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       We No Longer Dream of the United States: Wieliński’s generation grew up under communism worshipping America — the land of the dream, the place everyone wanted to reach. Now they confront a different country with a different politics. The Americans, he says, didn’t lose anything. The Poles didn’t lose their innocence. The Americans lost their credibility, their values, and their minds by electing Donald Trump. If anyone lost anything, it was Americans. Not Poles.
 
•       The Suicide of a Superpower: Wieliński invokes Timothy Snyder’s phrase to describe what Trump is doing. The US started a war with Iran without having any strategic objectives. Nobody heard Trump say what his objective was. America had friends, influence, and soft power — US aid was the most cost-effective democracy-promotion tool in the world. It is being deliberately destroyed. NATO was the best investment America ever made: the only time Article Five was invoked was by Europeans, to defend America, after September 11. Crippling NATO means losing Europe, and there is no way back.
 
•       The Dark Enlightenment and Silicon Valley: Wieliński identifies a specific group behind Trump’s project: very rich and powerful people connected to big tech who believe they can reshape politics through platforms, influence behaviour through technology, and create a new technological order — reversing political development back to before the Enlightenment. They call it the dark enlightenment. Europe, he says, rejects it. Europe will defend its societies against that influence.
 
•       The New Division: Democrats vs Anti-Democrats: The key political division everywhere Wieliński looks is no longer between left and right. It is between supporters of democracy and its enemies. In Germany: the AfD at 30%, while the mainstream parties have collapsed from a combined 70% to a combined 35%. In France: the horseshoe theory — far left and far right meeting at the ends of the arc, both willing to work together to dismantle democracy. In Poland: a colourful coalition from right to left defending democracy against PiS. The same coalition will be needed everywhere.
 
•       Wake Up: Don’t Lose Europe: Wieliński’s message to Americans: wake up. You still have friends in Europe. Europeans still want to believe in America as the land of promise and freedom. But don’t destroy what you spent so many decades building. Trump will be gone sooner or later. Make sure he hasn’t burned every bridge with Europe before he exits. If those bridges are destroyed, they will be very hard to rebuild.
 
About the Guest
 
Bartosz Wieliński is Deputy Editor in Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s leading liberal daily newspaper. He was formerly the paper’s Berlin correspondent. Gazeta Wyborcza was founded in 1989, the year of Poland’s first free elections.
 
References:
 
•       Gazeta Wyborcza — Poland’s liberal newspaper of record, founded 1989.
 
•       Timothy Snyder — referenced for “suicide of a superpower.” Previously appeared on KOA.
 
•       The horseshoe theory — the idea that the extreme left and extreme right, at the ends of the political horseshoe, are closer to each other than either is to the centre.
 
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 3,000 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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Spotify
 
Chapters:
 

(00:30) - Introduction: Warsaw, Gazeta Wyborcza, and lost illusions

(01:25) - We no longer dream of the United States

(02:17) - The Americans lost their credibility, not the Poles

(02:41) - Message to Trump voters: you did it wrong

(03:51) - Timothy Snyder: the suicide of a superpower

(05:00) - The Iran war: no strategic objectives

(06:00) - US aid: the most cost-effective democracy tool ever destroyed

(07:00) - NATO: Article Five was invoked by Europeans, for America

(08:10) - Silicon Valley and the dark enlightenment

(09:14) - Trump’s policy as an opportunity for Europe

(27:26) - The new division: democrats vs anti-democrats

(27:52) - Germany: the AfD at 30%

(31:15) - The horseshoe theory

(33:45) - Wake up, America: don’t lose Europe

“If your opening position is: your views are beyond the pale, you are deplorable, there is no space for you in democracy — then how on earth do we expect anything other than revolutionary conservatism as a response?” — Maciej Kisilowski
 
For Americans concerned about the fragility of their democracy, Poland offers some reassuring news. Having experienced its own illiberal blip, democracy in Poland now seems amongst the healthiest in Eastern Europe. So what does a democracy only created in 1989 teach America as the old republic braces for its surreal semiquincentennial celebration?
 
The Vienna-based constitutional scholar Maciej Kisilowski is the author of Let’s Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design. In this bestselling 2025 book, Kisilowski argues that Poland is a map of where other Western democracies could go. If they choose to.
 
Poland elected its first illiberal conservative government in 2005. Hungary followed in 2010. Both explicitly served as models for Donald Trump — relatively tamed in his first term, unshackled in his second. Like the United States, Poland is a relatively rich country with per capita GDP growing an astonishing 650% in a single generation. So, Kisilowski argues, the conventional argument that Poland embraced illiberalism in response to economic hardship is mostly wrong. Instead, what triggered illiberalism in Poland was culture, particularly the compressed, accelerated challenge to traditional identity — national, male, religious — that EU accession triggered in Central Europe.
 
Kisilowski, who teaches at Central European University, might have entitled his book Let’s Agree to Disagree. Poland’s solution to this cultural crisis of identity is what Kisilowski calls “subsidiarity” — genuine decentralisation that allows both conservative communities to remain traditional and liberal cities to become progressive, all within a common democratic framework. He warns both the left and the right that if you tell people their views are somehow foreign, it’s entirely rational for them to want to smash their “foreign” democracy.
 
This is the Polish model of a viable 21st century democracy. Ironically, it’s a Madisonian warning about the dangers of faction. The “deplorable” gambit always backfires. Péter Magyar’s remarkable victory in Hungary — a staunch conservative ending Orbán’s 16-year mafia-style illiberal chapter — offers the Hungarian model of Kisilowski’s argument. So this July 4, worried Americans might read Let’s Agree on Poland. Or reread James Madison.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Central Europe as the Leading Indicator: Poland and Hungary Before Trump: Poland elected its first revolutionary conservative government in 2005 — sixteen years before the January 6 insurrection. Hungary followed in 2010. Both were explicitly cited as models by the architects of Trump’s political project. Kisilowski’s argument: what happened in Central Europe is not a regional anomaly but a leading indicator of what happens when open society’s challenge to traditional identity is concentrated and rapid rather than gradual. The walls of liberal democratic institutions were weaker in Warsaw and Budapest. They will not hold indefinitely in Washington or London either.
 
•       It’s Not the Economy, Stupid: The Case Against Materialist Explanations: Poland and Hungary are economic opposites. Hungary was the “happiest barrack” of the Soviet bloc but fared poorly after 1989. Poland was among the poorer countries of the bloc and grew 650% in per capita GDP in one generation, with a Gini coefficient below France’s. Same revolutionary conservative politics. Opposite economic trajectories. Kisilowski’s conclusion: the materialist explanation — people turn right because of economic hardship — is flatly wrong. The driver is identity: the compressed, accelerated challenge to national, male, and religious identity imposed by EU accession conditionality in a decade.
 
•       The Deplorable Problem: Why Exclusion Rationally Produces Authoritarianism: Kisilowski’s most politically pointed argument: if your opening position to conservatives is that their views are beyond the pale, they are deplorable, there is no space for them in democracy — then it is entirely rational for them to break democracy. Not irrational. Not manipulated. Rational. If there is no space for me inside the system, I must break the system. That is what revolutionary conservatism is: a rational response to liberal exclusion. The solution is not to validate the views. The solution is to demonstrate that there is a place for those people and their communities within a democratic framework. That is the Madisonian insight.
 
•       Subsidiarity as the Solution: Conservative Communities, Liberal Cities, Common Framework: Kisilowski’s constitutional proposal, worked out with co-authors from the full ideological spectrum, is subsidiarity: genuine decentralization that allows conservative rural communities to be conservative and liberal cities to be liberal, within a common democratic framework. Budapest, in Magyar’s Hungary, should get strong autonomy to pursue the more liberal policies its electorate wants. Warsaw and Kraków should be able to differ. The European Union is, in this reading, the model: different countries, different cultures, one framework. The alternative is winner-takes-all, which always produces a revolutionary reaction from the losers.
 
•       Peter Magyar and Hungary: Proof of Concept for the Compromise Strategy: Magyar’s extraordinary victory in Hungary — winning a constitutional majority against a 16-year right-wing regime rightly called a mafia state, in elections skewed heavily toward the government — is, in Kisilowski’s reading, direct evidence that the compromise strategy works. Magyar is a staunch conservative and former member of the Orbán government. He won because he demonstrated to far-right voters that there was a place for them and their views within democratic Europe. The 2 million liberal Budapest voters who voted for him did so not because they like his conservatism but because he was unquestionably preferable to Orbán. Kisilowski made sure Magyar got the book.
 
About the Guest
 
Maciej Kisilowski is Associate Professor of Law and Strategy at Central European University (CEU) in Vienna. He is co-editor (with Anna Wojciuk) of Let’s Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design (Oxford University Press, 2025). He is a Europe’s Futures Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School. He writes frequently for Project Syndicate, Politico, and The EU Observer.
 
References:
 
•       Let’s Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design by Maciej Kisilowski and Anna Wojciuk (Oxford University Press, 202...

“The Gross National Product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” — Robert F. Kennedy, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968
 
It is June 5, 1968. An eleven-year-old English boy is watching the assassination of Bobby Kennedy on his black and white television. That little boy is Tim Jackson — now one of Britain’s most influential critics of capitalism. He had no idea then that RFK would change his life. It happened years later, when Jackson discovered a speech Kennedy gave in Kansas in the spring of 1968. It was a speech that changed the way Tim Jackson thought about economics.
 
The March 1968 speech, one of the first of RFK’s presidential campaign, was delivered at Phog Allen Fieldhouse, University of Kansas. It opened with a joke at the expense of rival Kansas State University. Then Bobby turned deadly serious. For the first time (at least for a Presidential candidate), he attacked the very idea of the Gross National Product itself. RFK argued that GDP quantifies all the worst stuff including air pollution, cigarette advertising and jails. But it doesn’t measure the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It quantifies everything except that which makes life worthwhile. Then fetishizes the data. Worse than wrong, Bobby Kennedy suggested, GDP makes data evil.
 
For Jackson, who has spent his career mulling over the idea of economic growth, RFK’s Phog Allen Fieldhouse speech came as a revelation. Indeed much of his later thinking, including his 2021 award-winning book Post Growth: Life After Capitalism, is indebted to this March 1968 speech. Almost sixty years later, in our ever-more-quantifiable age of data-centres, it’s a speech that appears uncannily prescient. Both Tim Jackson and Bobby Kennedy are right to remind us that there is an alternative to quantifying progress. There is, indeed, life after GDP. And it can’t be measured.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       An 11-Year-Old Watching the Assassination on His Birthday: Tim Jackson was born on June 4. On the night of June 4–5, 1968, after the California primary, RFK was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Jackson — watching on a black and white television in the UK — remembers thinking: oh no, not again. His aunt had just sailed for America from Southampton. Is this the country she is going to? Two high-profile assassinations. Violence as a condition of American political life. He had no idea then that RFK would become important to him professionally two or three decades later.
 
•       The Kansas Speech: GDP Measures Everything Except What Makes Life Worthwhile: The speech RFK gave at Phog Allen Fieldhouse, University of Kansas, March 1968 — one of the first of his presidential campaign — opened with a joke at the expense of rival Kansas State University and became one of the most prescient political speeches of the 20th century. Kennedy attacked GDP directly: it counts air pollution, cigarette advertising, and the jails for the people who break the law. It does not count the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
 
•       The Two Wrong Turns of Post-War Capitalism: Jackson’s account: fossil fuels made mass production possible; the Great Depression revealed the danger of overproduction; the post-war solution was to persuade people that having more stuff is what matters. Two big mistakes were embedded in that solution. First: material consumption is not all we are — we have social, relational, spiritual needs that GDP ignores. Second: more production does more environmental damage. Both wrong turns are what Kennedy was already diagnosing in Kansas in 1968. Both are what we are now living with in extremis.
 
•       The Trillionaire and the 2 Billion: The interview is recorded the day after the world’s first trillionaire arrived on the scene. Jackson’s response: this is an obscene amount of money for one person to have, while 2 billion people lack access to clean water and electricity. The same structural observation could be made about the 1850s: monarchs parading luxury while the people around them starved. The trillionaire is not a new phenomenon. He is the latest expression of an economic system that was always building toward this endpoint.
 
•       They Created a Desert and Called It Peace: In the Kansas speech, RFK quoted Tacitus on Rome: “they created a desert and called it peace.” Jackson applies it directly to today’s America: what is it to be a citizen of the affluent West only on the back of a flattened Gaza, a distant war, the creation of violence to preserve a failing hegemonic empire? Bobby was saying: we have values around social justice. We have a fragile planet. These are what matter. Bernie Sanders said the same things. AOC picked up the mantle. The message is unchanged. It is still Kansas, 1968.
 
About the Guest
 
Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). He is the author of Post Growth: Life After Capitalism (Polity Press, 2021; winner of the 2022 Eric Zencey Prize for Economics) and Prosperity Without Growth (2009/2017; Financial Times book of the year). He is also an award-winning BBC radio dramatist. He lives in Guildford, Surrey.
 
References:
 
•       Post Growth: Life After Capitalism by Tim Jackson (Polity Press, 2021).
 
•       RFK’s University of Kansas speech, March 18, 1968 — delivered at Phog Allen Fieldhouse, Lawrence, Kansas.
 
•       Tacitus, Agricola — “they created a desert and called it peace,” quoted by RFK in the Kansas speech.
 
•       Kerry Kennedy, Ripples of Hope — referenced in the conversation.
 
•       Andrew Keen’s forthcoming book: Where Have You Gone, Bobby Kennedy? My Search for a Lost America — the RFK book this conversation feeds directly into.
 
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 3,000 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<...

“Just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. The agent is the unacknowledged legislator of the literary field.” — Laura McGrath
 
We think of publishers and editors as the ultimate tastemakers. As those godlike gatekeepers controlling what we read. But if you’re looking for literary gods, Laura McGrath argues, then you need to look at literary agents rather than publishers or editors. Her ten-year project, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, is the first serious scholarly account of the literary agent’s astonishingly powerful role in shaping what America reads. Except, of course, the Middlemen are actually Middlewomen — since 80% of literary agents are women.
 
The numbers are striking. Just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. McGrath interviewed 75 of them over ten years. Shelley called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world. McGrath’s agents are the unacknowledged legislators of the literary field. They shaped postmodernism (Candida Donadio and Pynchon, Heller, Gaddis). They launched the debut novel as a literary form. They made the short story collection viable. And 25 of them control more than half of the prizes.
 
So will AI replace the agent? In operations, perhaps, McGrath acknowledges — the slush pile is overwhelming and smart machine assistance is welcome. But in creative work — in the business of writing, editing, translation, cover design, and above all taste — she thinks not. No algorithm will ever learn the Catch-22 of publishing — separating the Thomas Pynchon or Joseph Heller from all the dross. And no bot (male or female) is ever going to host a three-martini lunch in Manhattan.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Literary Agent as the New Gatekeeper: Replacing the Publisher: In the early 20th century, publishing was shaped by the taste of individual publishers: Bennett Cerf at Random House, Alfred and Blanche Knopf at their imprint, Max Perkins at Scribner’s. Those days are over. Publishers are now conglomerates where individual editors may have excellent taste but no single figure shapes the house. Into that vacuum has come the literary agent — who now operates, McGrath argues, exactly as the great publishers once did: as the primary tastemaker, the person whose aesthetic and commercial judgment shapes what America reads.
 
•       25 Agents, Half the Prizes, 80% Women: The Numbers: McGrath’s most striking statistical finding: just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. Twenty-five people. The field is 80% women — hence the tongue-in-cheek title — and 73% white. Agents tend, McGrath found, to represent authors who resemble themselves. One answer to the question “why is contemporary literary fiction so white?” is: because agents are. And agents, because they work on contingency fees rather than salaries, face severe financial pressures that concentrate power at the top of the profession.
 
•       The Unacknowledged Legislators: Agents Shaped American Literary History: McGrath’s book is full of literary history rewritten from the agent’s perspective. Sterling Lord persisted past dozens of rejections to place On the Road for Kerouac. Candida Donadio — Pynchon’s, Heller’s, Gaddis’s, and early Philip Roth’s agent — championed maximalist, experimental writers whom no one was interested in, and built the social network of editor relationships that made postmodernism possible. The debut novel as a cultural form, the persistence of the short story collection despite poor sales, the rise of the New York novel — all are, in McGrath’s account, partly agent-made.
 
•       Can White Male Writers Not Get Published? No: Andrew raises the complaint he hears from white male writers: that they can no longer get published because of diversity initiatives. McGrath’s answer is flat. No. She thinks it’s silly. The number of books published each week is staggering. Being able to see some success on the part of writers of colour does not diminish the work white men are doing. The complaint, she notes, circulates every ten years, typically after a boom in support for writers of colour. We are in another round of this cycle. There will be another one in a decade.
 
•       Will AI Replace the Literary Agent? In Operations, Maybe. In Taste, No: Andrew’s closing question: will AI replace the middlemen? McGrath draws the distinction she heard at the US Book Show: AI in operations (slush pile management, contract tracking), yes, possibly. AI in creative work — writing, editing, translation, cover design, and above all taste — she hopes not. An algorithm is built on priors. It narrows the window of possibility endlessly, replicating itself. That is not what a good literary agent does. A good literary agent is looking for books that surprise, frustrate, and thrill. No algorithm has learned to take an author out for a three-martini lunch.
 
About the Guest
 
Laura McGrath is an assistant professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. She was formerly the associate director of the Literary Lab at Stanford University. She is the author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Princeton University Press, April 28, 2026). She writes the textCrunch Substack on literary and publishing culture.
 
References:
 
•       Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction by Laura McGrath (Princeton University Press, April 28, 2026).
 
•       Earlier on KOA: Gayle Feldman on Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built — the companion episode referenced at the opening.
 
•       Sterling Lord (agent for Kerouac), Candida Donadio (Pynchon, Heller, Gaddis, Roth), Andrew Wylie — agents profiled in the book.
 
•       Andrew Keen, Cult of the Amateur (2007) — referenced as Andrew’s own defence of gatekeepers.
 
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 3,000 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