A Nation of Strangers: Ece Temelkuran on Rebuilding Home in a Homeless World
Keen On America
The Acropolis onion story and democratic duty
Ece recounts the onion anecdote to stress democracy's grassroots nature and the need to get hands dirty to defend it.
“We’re losing home on so many different levels. Physically. Politically. Morally. And after AI, spiritually — because language, our spiritual home, is taken away from us. We now have to share it with an unhuman entity.” — Ece Temelkuran
Do you feel homeless — physically, politically, morally or spiritually? That’s the question posed by Ece Temelkuran’s new book Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century. Shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction, the narrative is structured as a series of letters from one homeless stranger to another. Temelkuran left Turkey in 2016, after threats to her life made staying untenable. After seven years of exile — in Beirut, Tunis, Oxford, Paris, Zagreb, and now Berlin — she has written both her own and our story in today’s globalized, populist age.
She’s been called everything from a 21st century Hannah Arendt to a “ruthless Cassandra.” And yet she retains faith in the future — as a defiant stance, a can-do-no-other attitude against rootlessness and loneliness. The wisdom of survival, Ece Temelkuran argues, lies with refugees, exiles and migrants like herself. This nation of strangers are rebuilding home in our homeless world.
Five Takeaways
• Four Kinds of Homelessness: Temelkuran identifies four simultaneous crises of home. Physical homelessness: refugees, migrants, the displaced. Political homelessness: people who no longer recognize their countries, who feel unrepresented by any party, who cannot feel that they belong where they are. Moral homelessness: people who see the cruelty of our times and find no institution — state, court, international organization — capable of stopping it. And spiritual homelessness: the loss of language as our innermost home, now shared with AI. Four levels of being unhoused at once. That is the human condition of 2026.
• Minneapolis as a Nation of Strangers: The week the book was published in the US, Minneapolis happened — ordinary people forming human chains to resist ICE agents. Temelkuran’s reading: that was a Nation of Strangers in action. People who had never met, people from different communities who owed each other nothing in the old sense, holding on to each other because they recognized a shared condition. Not an ideology, not a party, not a leader — just strangers building a home together in real time. That, she says, is what the book is about.
• Digital Refugees: When Elon Musk bought Twitter, millions of people fled to Mastodon, Bluesky, and other platforms — behaving, Temelkuran observes, exactly like refugees. Looking back at the old home while building a new one. Checking both simultaneously. She asks: why did no one think to occupy Twitter? To say: this is ours, not yours? Her conclusion: our political imagination has become extraordinarily limited. We accept displacement, digital or physical, as inevitable. We do not think to resist it by occupying the space rather than fleeing.
• Gaza and the Move-On Ideology: Gaza was the ultimate test of how much humanity can swallow. Temelkuran draws an arc from Colin Powell’s tube in the UN Security Council in 2003 — when a global anti-war movement was brushed aside — to today. Each time people mobilize and are ignored, they lose a little more faith in themselves, in politics, in institutions. What devastated Temelkuran most was not the bombing but Jared Kushner at Davos presenting his PowerPoint for a seaside resort in Gaza. That, she says, is what neoliberal morality looks like. Move on. That is the lowest of the low.
• The Pioneers of History: Refugees as the Advance Guard: Temelkuran resisted writing her own story for years — she came from a leftist family where talking about yourself was suspect, and she feared being seen as a victim. What changed: she realized her story intersected with the story of the masses. The wisdom of survival — how to remake home from scratch, how to survive with dignity, how to rebuild identity after losing everything — belongs to refugees, exiles, and migrants. These are the pioneers of history. Soon everyone will need what they know. That is why their stories matter now.
About the Guest
Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish writer, political thinker, and public speaker. She is the author of Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century (Simon & Schuster, May 2026), shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction; How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism; and Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World. She was born in Turkey and is based in Berlin.
References:
• Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century by Ece Temelkuran (Simon & Schuster, May 2026).
• How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism by Ece Temelkuran — the book that made her reputation in the West.
• Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World by Ece Temelkuran — the second book, between How to Lose a Country and Nation of Strangers.
• Episode 2894: Marc Loustau on why Orbán lost and how to defeat Trump — the companion episode on defeating fascism from within the system.
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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Chapters:
- (00:31) - Is Ece still retaining faith in the future?
- (01:47) - Faith as a stance: like Martin Luther, here I stand
- (02:30) - How to Lose a Country and what comes next
- (02:57) - Minneapolis as a Nation of Strangers
- (04:00) - Four kinds of homelessness: physical, political, moral, spiritual
- (04:35) - AI and the loss of language as spiritual home
- (05:10) - Why this book now — and why it’s the most personal <...
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