Roughly six weeks ago, the two Middle East powers, whom everyone feared might someday go to war, actually went to war. After 12 days of fighting, mostly deadly exchanges of missiles, drones and air power, Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire on June 24th. But peace is an elusive concept in the Middle East, even more so these days. Will the ceasefire continue to hold? If it does, what are the likely consequences? If it doesn't, who would break it? More importantly, was this the first Iranian-Isr...
Aug 21, 2025•21 min
Francesca Borri, Hossein Mousavian, and Abraham Silver join host Alan Stoga in Part One of a two-part series exploring the fragile ceasefire six weeks after Iran and Israel’s 12-day war. Roughly six weeks ago, the two Middle East powers, whom everyone feared might someday go to war, actually went to war. After 12 days of fighting, mostly deadly exchanges of missiles, drones and air power, Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire on June 24th. But peace is an elusive concept in the Middle East, even...
Aug 21, 2025•43 min
Jaap van der Waarde shares insights on balancing development and conservation in the Congo River Basin. The Congo River Basin includes six countries and covers approximately 3.7 million square kilometers, making it the world's second-largest rainforest basin behind the Amazon . Like the Amazon, in practical terms, it is vital to the health of the planet. Also like the Amazon, scientists and conservationists worry that the Basin's ecology could tip if its rainforests are seriously degraded. Unlik...
Jul 17, 2025•32 min
Tânia Trindade on balancing sustainability and profit in one of the world’s most vital ecosystems. Global meetings on climate change almost always turn on two factors: political will and money. Even when the will is present, the money is not---and the result for decades has been the seemingly endless, accelerating slide toward a hotter, more volatile, climate. Each year the big international climate meetings like the 2025 COP to be held in Belém, Brazil in November produce ever larger estimates ...
Jul 03, 2025•25 min
Chandran Nair explores the global stakes of U.S.-China rivalry and argues that China may have a clearer vision for the future world order. We live at a moment when everything we thought we could rely on to understand our world seems to be becoming unglued . Whether it's “uncharted waters” or the “break up of global order” or “the end of the American century,” at the least we are entering a period of change and chaos unlike anything that most of us have experienced in our lifetimes. Whatever emer...
Jun 05, 2025•42 min
Marco Annunziata unpacks the risks and rewards of President Trump’s bold attempt to reshape the U.S. and global economies. President Trump has launched an unprecedented trade war, a radical overhaul of regulation, and a significant reshaping of U.S. fiscal policy. His purpose? To rewire global trade patterns and supply chains, recreate American manufacturing capacity, and change the essential structure of the U.S. and world economies. Can he succeed? How would success be measured? What are the r...
May 30, 2025•55 min
Bryan Doerries uses ancient texts to confront today’s challenges, showing how timeless art can heal, provoke, and connect us across time. Great art is timeless because it provides insights into our souls, into how we think and why we do what we do . That's as true of Shakespeare's sonnets as it is of Michelangelo's frescoes, as it is of the Greek tragedies. But what if those classics could be repurposed to shed light on the specific challenges facing us today? Would it be possible to understand ...
May 22, 2025•44 min
Francisco “Pacho” von Hildebrand of Gaia Amazonas believes the Amazon can still be saved—if Indigenous communities are empowered to protect it In 2019, Carlos Nobre, a leading Brazilian scientist, published an open letter entitled "Amazon tipping point: Last chance for action.” If that article were published today, it might have to be titled, “No more chances” because the past five years have seen record-breaking drought throughout the region as well as record-breaking forest fires. Indeed, from...
May 08, 2025•33 min
Tom O’Donnell, former key player in Democratic Party, explores the growing confrontation between the President and the Congress. Normally, that's a simple question with a simple answer: of course, the Congress matters; after all, its powers are enthroned in the American Constitution. However, as the Trump presidency unfolds, nothing is simple anymore. President Trump obviously has an expansive view of presidential power and is clearly intent on exercising it at the expense of the Congress and of...
May 01, 2025•54 min
Dr. Kris Olson discusses how innovative, human-centered design is transforming global healthcare. Healthcare is intensely personal. Even when national statistics show improvement—which has been the case for most countries over recent decades—what matters is whether my baby in rural Uganda is having trouble breathing or whether my aging father in New York who went into the hospital with a broken hip will now die from the MERS he contracted there or whether why my wife in Buenos Aries can access t...
Apr 10, 2025•34 min
Filmmakers Charlotte Eagar and William Stirling explore how theater heals and transforms. Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet , “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” when the troubled Prince stages a play to catch a murderer. The underlying point of the play-in-the-play is that drama is an incredibly powerful force for storytelling and much else. Fast forward to the 21st century for an amazing example of that Shakespearean wisdom. Two incredibly creative British filmmake...
Apr 03, 2025•40 min
Journalist and author Michela Wrong unpacks the stakes of Congo’s latest crisis—and why it matters beyond the region. With its unlimited natural resources and huge agricultural potential capacity, the Democratic Republic of Congo should be a paradise—but unfortunately, it’s not. Instead, it’s been wracked by war, bad government, corruption, tribal and ethnic enmities, neighbors who are serially tempted to intervene, and Great Powers who seem to think that it's time for a second age of colonialis...
Mar 27, 2025•38 min
Journalist Francesca Borri and activist Gershon Baskin examine the human reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the possibility of peace. The brutal Hamas attacks on October 7th, 2023 kickstarted a new cycle of widespread death and destruction that continues today. Countless lives lost, shattered, or irrevocably altered. Of course, mostly Palestinian, but also Israeli. Even Donald Trump is right about some things, as when he says, "It's impossible to imagine how life can go on under suc...
Mar 20, 2025•31 min
Ana Palacio and Vygaudas Usackas discuss what needs to be done to put Europe on a better track. Donald Trump doesn’t like the European Union and he’s not afraid to tell people . “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States.” “The EU treats us very, very unfairly, very badly,” "They put tariffs on things that we want to do … We have some very big complaints with the EU.” His answer, of course, is tariffs, “taking back” American companies, and ignoring Europe as he reaches ou...
Mar 13, 2025•37 min
2024 Prize winner María Teresa Ronderos advocates for honest, smart journalism to fight misinformation and uphold democracy in the digital age. Winston Churchill is alleged to have written that " A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize ; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.” Thus, it should be no surprise that at a time when clear majorities of people in most democracies don’t trust their governments or their politicians, they also don’t trust their m...
Mar 06, 2025•41 min
Aziz Huq and Scott Miller discuss the unprecedented pace and impact of Trump’s first five weeks in office Donald Trump has been president for five weeks now. In light of the blizzard of executive orders, funding and hiring cuts, endless nominations and appointments, and above all the nonstop controversial policy declarations on every imaginable topic (and some of which literally are unimaginable), it seems like months or even years. It's already clear that President Trump intends to change, not ...
Feb 27, 2025•58 min
Andreas Schleicher, OECD Education and Skills Director, shares insights from the Survey of Adult Skills, revealing its good, bad, and ugly. We live in an increasingly complex technology-driven world. How we learn, how we create, how we make and grow things, how we interact with each other is being transformed by new technologies that themselves are rapidly evolving. In a perfect world, this technological transformation would lift all boats, make people smarter, healthier, more prosperous, maybe ...
Feb 20, 2025•35 min
Fernando Trujillo discusses his work to protect the Amazon’s freshwater basin during unprecedented drought and dangerously low river levels. What happens in the Amazon is of planetary consequence. Its rainforests influence weather and rainfall around the world. Its rivers account for 1/4 of the available fresh water on earth. Its drainage basin is more than twice as large as that of the Congo River in Africa, which is the world's second-biggest. It harbors an estimated 10% of the planet's known ...
Feb 13, 2025•32 min
Photojournalist Fabio Bucciarelli shares what compels him to keep documenting the world’s most dangerous conflicts. We live in a violent and complicated world. Wars, big and small, on every continent; mass migrations, often targeted for abuse by criminals as well as by governments who don't want the migrants; spreading cartel violence; increasingly disastrous consequences of climate change; pandemics and epidemics. So much for the Age of Aquarius and the End of History! If there is any good news...
Feb 06, 2025•32 min
Listen as the 2024 prize winners discuss their leadership journeys, lessons from failure, and future challenges. When leaders fail, democracy fails—and too many leaders in too many places are failing. That’s exactly why the Tällberg Foundation has sought out and honored great global leaders over the past decade. Leaders who are innovative, courageous, dynamic, with global worldviews, and whose leadership is rooted in universal values. The three winners of the 2024 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Le...
Jan 30, 2025•41 min
Dr. Rohan Gunaratna, a leading expert on global terrorism, warns of a rising terrorist threat and the urgent need for a coordinated global response. The start of 2025 is burdened with no shortage of things to worry about. The war in Ukraine; conflicts throughout the Middle East; tensions around Taiwan; the Los Angeles inferno; the possibility of Chinese and Russian financial or economic collapse. And, of course, the biggest known unknown that preoccupies the whole world: what will Donald Trump a...
Jan 16, 2025•33 min
Scott Miller on Trump’s return: decoding the voters and the power behind the presidency When Donald Trump becomes the 49th President of the United States, the whole world will be watching , with people holding their breath in expectation of almost Biblical levels of chaos and confusion. Ironically, it seems that his return to power may be seen as less dramatic by many Americans: after all, he made his way back to the White House by somewhat unexpectedly (at least at the time) winning the Republi...
Jan 09, 2025•38 min
Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, shares how his team uses open-source investigations to uncover the truth. We live in a world where facts are everywhere, recorded and shared ubiquitously. That ought to make this an era where arguments, journalism, and politics are routinely rooted in fact; unfortunately, it is more a world where too many people insist not only their own opinions, but on their own “facts.” The problem is technology running amok, a bit like the broom in Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Ap...
Jan 02, 2025•32 min
The Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the planet, and Tero Mustonen shares his firsthand insights. That the Arctic is warming is not exactly breaking news on a planet where almost everywhere is warming. But it is critical news that the Arctic is warming almost four times faster than the rest of the globe since the polar regions are essentially the planet’s air conditioners. Last year's Arctic Report Card documented that 2023 was the Arctic's hottest summer in centuries, with all th...
Dec 26, 2024•36 min
Chris Dalby explains what the Mexican cartels want and how they are getting it. Politics in Mexico has long been a blood sport: not only “winner takes all,” but also incredibly violent. Last month’s national elections—when the country's first female president won with a record number of votes and by a record margin of victory—demonstrated both trends. President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena party (founded and still controlled by outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador) won huge nationa...
Dec 19, 2024•33 min
Fernando Trujillo discusses his work to protect the Amazon’s freshwater basin during unprecedented drought and dangerously low river levels. What happens in the Amazon is of planetary consequence. Its rainforests influence weather and rainfall around the world. Its rivers account for 1/4 of the available fresh water on earth. Its drainage basin is more than twice as large as that of the Congo River in Africa, which is the world's second-biggest. It harbors an estimated 10% of the planet's known ...
Dec 11, 2024•32 min
María Teresa Ronderos champions honest, smart journalism as essential to combating misinformation and strengthening democracy in the digital age. Winston Churchill is alleged to have written that " A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize ; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.” Thus, it should be no surprise that at a time when clear majorities of people in most democracies don’t trust their governments or their politicians, they also don’t trust their...
Dec 05, 2024•41 min
Join Dr. Kristian Olson as he discusses how innovative, human-centered design is transforming global healthcare. Healthcare is intensely personal. Even when national statistics show improvement—which has been the case for most countries over recent decades—what matters is whether my baby in rural Uganda is having trouble breathing or whether my aging father in New York who went into the hospital with a broken hip will now die from the MERS he contracted there or whether why my wife in Buenos Ari...
Nov 27, 2024•34 min
Zubaida Bai discusses how bold systemic change can make gender equality achievable In 2015 the nations of the world—with much fanfare—agreed to achieve gender equality by 2030 as one of the U.N.’s “Sustainable Development Goals.” With the approach of the 10-year anniversary of that declaration, it’s obvious to even the UN statisticians that there is no possibility the goal will be realized. Indeed, if you want to be depressed (or, perhaps, angered) Google “gender inequality” and you will learn t...
Nov 21, 2024•28 min
Dr. Olayinka Omigbodun addresses Africa’s urgent youth mental health crisis amid economic and social challenges. It is trite, but true that youth are our future. Unfortunately, what is also true is that in most countries the mental health of young people has been declining over the past two decades, a decline that seems to have accelerated during and after COVID. Globally, one in seven 10 to 19-year-olds reportedly experience mental disorders. In turn, depression, anxiety, and behavioral issues ...
Nov 07, 2024•37 min
