America at 250: From the American dream to book bans and AI

Home Shows arts24 To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Cover image: arts24 © FRANCE 24 13:00 Issued on: 25/09/2026 - 17:17 From the show As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, its founding promises, identity and place in the world are being fiercely debated. As the Festival America in Vincennes gets underway, we're putting that question to two acclaimed novelists: New Yorker Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of "Long Island Compromise", and Lebanese-American writer Rabih Alameddine, whose novel "The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)" won the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction. Is the American dream still alive? How does America look to someone who arrived there from elsewhere? Has Donald Trump's second presidency changed the American story, or exposed divisions that were already there? We also discuss the growing battle over books in American schools, with thousands of titles challenged or banned in recent years and ask why literature has becom...