Open Transcripts

Three Advices for Clinton

presented by Derek Shearer

I think the interesting and most difficult challenge for Mrs. Clinton if she becomes President is how to bring America together.

Roger Berkowitz on Refiguring American Government

presented by Roger Berkowitz

The great danger and fear that I have is that in the last fifty to seventy years, power has increasingly concentrated not only in the federal government but in the presidency.

President Trump: The End of American Democracy?

presented by Roger Berkowitz

One thing I can say is that I don’t think we know very much about Donald Trump, which is one of the things that’s scary about him but also one of the things that’s exciting about him.

A Network of Sorrows: Small Adversaries and Small Allies

presented by Quinn Norton

In an environment where everybody can pick up everybody’s tools, we’re all weirdly empowered now. And I mean kind of weird in an almost fey sense like, our powers are weird, they make us weird, and they make our our conflicts weird. It’s again that idea that our tools are interacting with our human flaws in really really interesting ways.

Elif Şafak Makes a Case for Women’s Rights in the Middle East

presented by Elif Şafak

One of the primary questions, or problems as I see it, is this “illusion” that sameness will bring safety. People start to thinking that if we are surrounded by similar people, like-minded people, if we have communities based on sameness, that will bring us safety. That’s an illusion. That’s not the case at all.

Elif Şafak on Memory and Learning from the Past

presented by Elif Şafak

When I look at the signs today, I see a very strong trend back to what I call tribalism, back to nation-states, nationalism, religiosity, all those divisive forces that many intellectuals in the 1940s, ’50s, thought were going to disappear gradually. That did not happen.

Roger Berkowitz on Hannah Arendt

presented by Roger Berkowitz

Hannah Arendt loved it when unexpected things happened in politics. She thinks and thought that spontaneity, newness… She used the word “natality,” which is often misused and abused in her work by others, but it means birth, birthliness. And she thought that what made human beings different from other animals is not that we were rational, but that we could start things new.

Using Cryptography to Redefine Legal Contracts and Public Records

presented by Rabee Tourky

Can we have agreements or the mechanisms for enforcing agreements between governments without having to appeal to the ambiguity of international law?

Language as a Signature of the Flexible Human Mind

presented by Mahesh Srinivasan

To understand human nature, I focus on human language and what it can reveal about how we think. Unlike other animals, humans can communicate an infinite number of thoughts through language. And one reason that language is powerful is because we can use each of our words flexibly, with several different meanings.

Applying Algorithms to Minimize Risk

presented by Joshua Woodard

The United States plants more than 170 million acres of corn and soybeans a year, more than any country in the world. And the primary mechanism in the US that we use to subsidize agriculture is actually called the Federal Crop Insurance Program. So, the crop insurance program in the US is also the largest such program globally, with over $100 billion in liabilities annually. So it’s a very big program.