Episodes

William A. Galston writes the weekly Politics & Ideas column in the Wall Street Journal. He holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a senior fellow. A former policy advisor to President Clinton and presidential candidates, Galston is an expert on domestic policy, political campaigns, and elections. His current research focuses on designing a new social contract and the implications of political polarization. Galston is the aut...

Julia Hobsbawm is an entrepreneur and writer who address the problems and solutions of humans in the machine age. She was described by James Harding, former editor of The Times and of BBC News and founder of Tortoise Media, as 'one of the most important public intellectuals in the UK'. She is Honorary Visiting Professor of Workplace Social Health at London's Cass Business School.

Soli Özel is a senior lecturer at Kadir Has University in Istanbul and a columnist at Habertürk daily newspaper. Currently, he is a Tom and Andi Bernstein Fellow at the Schell Center, Yale Law School. Previously, he has guest lectured at Georgetown University, Harvard University, Tufts University and other American universities. Özel also taught at UC Santa Cruz, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), University of Washington, Hebrew University and held fellows...

Trevor Jackson works on early modern European economic history, with an emphasis on inequality and financial crisis. His dissertation, “Markets of Exception: An Economic History of Impunity in Britain and France, 1720-1830” examines how changes in the scope for prosecutorial discretion, technical complexity, and the international mobility of capital diffused the capacity to act with impunity in the economy across the very long eighteenth century. The project argues that impunity has shifted from...

Rana el Kaliouby is a pioneer in artificial emotional intelligence (Emotion AI), as well as the cofounder and CEO of Affectiva, the acclaimed AI startup spun off from the MIT Media Lab. She grew up in Kuwait and in Cairo, Egypt, among a family of technologists and educators. After earning an undergraduate and a master's degree in computer science at the American University in Cairo, she attended Cambridge University, where she earned her PhD. Afterward, she joined the MIT Media Lab as a research...

Paul Morland is associate research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and an authority on demography. A French speaker with dual British and German citizenship, Paul was educated at Oxford University and was awarded his Ph.D from the University of London.

Sarah Frier reports on social media companies for Bloomberg News out of San Francisco. Her award-winning features and breaking stories have earned her a reputation as an expert on how Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter make business decisions that affect their future and our society. Frier is a frequent contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Television. She attended the University of North Carolina, where she earned a degree in journalism and edited the school paper before j...

Kishore Mahbubani is a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS. From 1984-1989 and 1998-2004, he was Singapore's Permanent Representative to the UN, and served twice as President of the UN Security Council during the second term. Mahbubani is best known in the West as the author of Can Asians Think?, The Great Con...

Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy. She has been at Cambridge since 1994 and is at present Deputy Head of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a regular panelist on Talking Politics.

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of seventeen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Glass Cage, and Utopia is Creepy. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, and Wired. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife.

Award-winning media critic William Powers has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and McSweeney's, among other publications. He lives on Cape Cod with his wife, the author Martha Sherrill, and their son.

Amity Shlaes is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man: Graphic, a full length illustrated version of the same book drawn by Paul Rivoche, Coolidge, a full-length biography of the thirtieth president and The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americas Crazy. National Review called the Forgotten Man "the finest history of the Great Depression ever written."

Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish novelist and political commentator whose journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and Der Spiegel. She won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book award for her novel Women Who Blow on Knots, and the Ambassador of New Europe Award. She has been twice recognized as Turkey's most-read political columnist, and twice rated as one of the ten most influential people in social media (with three million Twitt...

Gabriel Zucman is professor of economics and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His research analyzes the accumulation and distribution of wealth through global and historical perspectives. He received his PhD in economics from the Paris School of Economics in 2013. He was awarded the Bernácer Prize in 2018 and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2019. He is the author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, which has been translated into eighteen languages.

Christopher Schroeder is a leading tech media entrepreneur and venture investor. He ran the digital assets for the Washington Post Company and co-founded Silicon Valley backed HealthCentral.com which connected millions of health seekers who had gone through similar experiences. He has invested and advised some of the leading venture capital firms globally, and co-founded Next Billion Ventures to back startups in rising markets. He has written for leading news companies around the globe, a freque...

Liesl Schillinger is a New York–based critic, translator, and moderator. She grew up in Midwestern college towns, studied comparative literature at Yale, worked at The New Yorker for more than a decade and became a regular critic for The New York Times Book Review in 2004. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, The New Republic, The Washington Post, Vogue, Foreign Policy, The London Independent on Sunday, and many other publications. Her recent tra...

John Ralston Saul is an award-winning essayist and novelist. His works of ideas, history and philosophy are constantly being reissued and translated for a broad readership, as well as taught around the world. A long-time champion of freedom of expression, he was the elected President of PEN International from 2009 to 2015. He is a leading voice in the international movement supporting immigrants and refugees. Saul is perhaps best known for his philosophical trilogy – Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dic...

Sarah Kendzior is best known for her reporting on St. Louis and the 2016 election, her academic research on authoritarian states, and her New York Times bestselling debut The View from Flyover Country. She is a co-host of the podcast Gaslit Nation and was named one of Foreign Policy's “100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events.” Her reporting has been featured in Politico, The Atlantic, Fast Company, The New York Times, Globe and Mail, and more. She lives in St...

Parag Khanna is a leading global strategy advisor, world traveler, and best-selling author. He is Founder & Managing Partner of FutureMap, a data and scenario based strategic advisory firm. Parag's newest book is The Future is Asian: Commerce, Conflict & Culture in the 21st Century (2019). He is author of a trilogy of books on the future of world order beginning with The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (2008), followed by How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the...

Jessica Rosenworcel is a member of the US Federal Communications Commission. Nominated by President Obama, she was confirmed by the US Senate and sworn into office in May 2012. She currently chairs the Federal-State Joint Conference on Advanced Telecommunications Services. Rosenworcel previously served as senior communications counsel to the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Prior to that, she worked in the Wireline Competition Bureau of the FCC and for then-FCC commi...

John Borthwick has been a leader and early-stage investor in New York technology for over two decades. As founder and CEO of betaworks, John has led the company building and investment process since 2008. Companies built by betaworks include Giphy, Dots, bitly, and Chartbeat. Previously, he was SVP of Alliances and Technology Strategy for Time Warner Inc.; CEO of Fotolog, one of the first social photo sharing sites; and head of AOL’s product development studio after they acquired his first compa...

Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Team Human, based on his podcast, as well as the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Ma...

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow of International Affairs and Agora Fellow in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she co-directs LSE Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda. A Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and a former member of the editorial board, she has also worked as the Foreign and Deputy Editor of the Spectator magazine in Lo...