Sam Kahn, Persuasion Journalist Profile

Articles

Gavin Newsom, Tim Walz, and the Democrats’ Future

6 days ago | compactmag.com | Sam Kahn

Gavin Newsom’s new podcast might have been the last place I would have looked for wisdom about the future of the Democratic Party. I’ve always thought of the California governor as the prince of smarm. His go-to gesture seems to always be the hearty two-handed handshake, which even his podcast’s title and intro sequence—the booming “This is Gavin Newsom,” followed by the diminuendo subheading, “And this is [insert name of guest]”—evokes.
Don’t Assume Trump Is Joking About a Third Term

3 weeks ago | persuasion.community | Sam Kahn

There’s a certain zen art to dealing with the Trump era. The trick—usually—is to not spend too much time on social media, to not be too sucked in by the latest tweet or the “daily outrage,” to really only respond to something when Trump actually does it. Speaking personally, I very much try to master this art, but, even so, my heart stopped when I saw the repeated assertions by Trump and various of his acolytes that he was interested in a third term.
Why I'm boycotting AI

4 weeks ago | unherd.com | Sam Kahn

aiArtificial intelligenceBig techchatgptCulturediverseFutureGoogleSam AltmanUS I went cheerfully through college listening to music on old file-sharing programmes while everybody around me had switched to iTunes. While the rest of the student body scrolled the web on WiFi, I dorkily plugged in an ethernet cable anytime I wanted to go online.
Trump Is Privatizing America

1 month ago | persuasion.community | Sam Kahn

Recently, like some sort of half-drunk, half-mad amnesiac historian, I’ve taken to asking any interlocutor I can find—family, colleagues, whomever—if they can think of any historical parallels to what the two-man wrecking crew of Trump and Musk is doing. The usual answer is that nobody can come up with anything. A great deal of what’s going on is brand new.
Trump Is Actually Warren Harding

2 months ago | persuasion.community | Sam Kahn

I’m confused. There was to be a major trade war with Mexico and Canada. Then the next day there wasn’t. The United States was to put “America First” and stay out of the world—except for maybe conquering Greenland... or the Canal Zone... or turning Gaza into the Riviera. There’s not much point in looking for logic here because there is none. Trump is doing whatever seems politically opportune at the moment, or maybe just amusing himself, and ideological consistency is a long way from his world view.
The Case Against Drinking

2 months ago | persuasion.community | Sam Kahn

From as far back as I can remember, my plan had been to be a kind of low-intensity alcoholic. I hoped that it wouldn’t make me beat my family or wet myself at work, and that it wouldn’t lead to organ failure in the end—always the question, isn’t it?—but it seemed a gamble worth taking. The social life of the West is built almost entirely around the copious consumption of alcohol, with its professional life closely adjacent to that.
How psychedelics blew my mind

2 months ago | unherd.com | Sam Kahn

diverseDrugspsychedelicsself-helpSociety I was a good kid. I barely touched drugs when I was a teenager. Nor when I was at university. But then, when I was 28, I discovered LSD. It blew my head off. But not in the way I thought it might. There were no hallucinations, there was no Day-Glo assortment of colours. It was something much more profound. Basically, it was paradise, and it was paradise all the more so for being so adjacent to everyday reality.
The Perils of Doomerism

2 months ago | compactmag.com | Sam Kahn

Waste Land: A World in Permanent CrisisBy Robert D. KaplanRandom House, 224 pages, $31In college, I attended a talk by the writer Robert Kaplan. As I recall, I was less interested in hearing what he had to say than seeing how he dressed, how he carried himself. At the time, my almost unconscious assumption was that the kind of career I wanted would be just like Kaplan’s. He was, as I saw him then, the thinking man’s Paul Theroux.
Our Heterodox Moment

Jan 13, 2025 | persuasion.community | Sam Kahn

There are very many ways to parse the 2024 election, but one of its features is that it was the first election in which “heterodoxy” played a prominent role. Actually, it could be argued that it was the heterodox election.
Walt Whitman: the original Substacker

Dec 30, 2024 | unherd.com | Sam Kahn

American poetryChristmas Reads 2024CultureUSWalt Whitman I can remember exactly where I was when I first read Walt Whitman. Lying on the bed in my girlfriend’s dorm room in college, I started reading “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass out loud and, much to my girlfriend’s annoyance, sort of couldn’t stop myself. This kind of compulsive reading had never happened to me before and never would again.