How can journalism make people care about crises & create solutions? - Highlights - NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Interviewed by Mia Funk

How can journalism make people care and bring about solutions? What role does storytelling play in shining a light on injustice and crises and creating a catalyst for change?

Nicholas D. Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist and Op-ed columnist for The New York Times, where he was previously bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. Kristof is a regular CNN contributor and has covered, among many other events and crises, the Tiananmen Square protests, the Darfur genocide, the Yemeni civil war, and the U.S. opioid crisis. He is the author of the memoir Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life, and coauthor, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of five previous books: Tightrope, A Path Appears, Half the Sky, Thunder from the East, and China Wakes.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You've been to 170 countries, and in your book Chasing Hope, you've written on the value of witnessing the world's atrocities, neglected conflicts, human rights abuses, and how you then turn these into stories that will call on people to act. How do you find your way into a story?

NICHOLAS KRISTOF

So the backdrop of Chasing Hope came when I was trying to cover the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s. I was making these trips and reporting on the horrific massacres, and it just felt as if these columns were just disappearing without a ripple. At the same time in New York City, all of Manhattan was up in arms about these two hawks that had been pushed out of an apartment building where they had a nest because the building didn't like their bird droppings. And I thought, “how is it that I can't generate the same outrage people feel for these two homeless hawks for hundreds of thousands of people? What's wrong with my writing? Why can't I connect with people on these issues?” So that led me to the work of what makes us care. And one of those lessons is that it's an emotional process—an emotional connection not a rational one—you have to tell stories about individuals. I'm always going out to find not just an individual story, but the most compelling story—somebody that people can relate to.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

And I wonder what role growing up in a small town (Yamhill, Oregon) played in the kind of journalist you’ve become? You get to know almost everyone in the town, I imagine, and you can see behind their stories in a way and all sectors of society that we might not get in big cities where we have this tunnel vision and stick with our groups?

KRISTOF

Growing up in a tiny town very much affected my journalism and how I see the world, in the sense that it always felt to me that national media establishments neglect small towns like mine, people like those around me, and the issues that concern us. An example is addiction—we've got more than 100,000 people a year dying from overdoses, including many of my old friends, and I don't think that America has come to terms with that adequately. When we try to cover what is happening in other countries, we go to the capital, talk to officials, and typically talk to university educated men who speak English, but that's a pretty tiny slice. That has encouraged me to talk to other people to understand what is happening more broadly.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

And you talk about the personal emotional stories, and I wonder how do you protect yourself emotionally—how do you keep your empathy in check, skepticism, critical thinking or neutrality, in these emotionally charged situations when you might be meeting warlords or covering human trafficking and witnessing these terrors? You begin Chasing Hope going down in a small plane in the heart of the Congo Civil War. With so much going on, how do you remain clear minded in those situations and also, journalistically, how do you develop that courage and strength?

KRISTOF

In writing Chasing Hope, I self diagnosed myself with a mild case of PTSD. It's probably parallel to an emergency room physician who is surrounded by trauma victims, but you have to create some distance from that pain just to get through the day. Where my armor breaks down is in particular where children are involved or where somebody that I am close to, such as my interpreter, has been in jeopardy and I fear that I’ll put somebody at risk. Every now and then unexpectedly, I’ll interview somebody and find myself completely tearing up.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

And I'm just wondering about all the places that you've been. What are some of those things that still haunt you?

KRISTOF

June 4th, 1989 Tiananmen Square in China is certainly high on that list. I was the Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times and had covered the Tiananmen democracy movement. It had seemed so full of hope, but that terrible night, I heard that the troops were busting through student lines and headed toward Tiananmen. I rode my bike and got to Tiananmen Square a little bit before the troops did. And then they arrived and opened fire on the crowd that I was in. I was terrified. To watch a modern army turn weapons of war on unarmed protesters—that changes you. Frankly, at first, I was a little bit disdainful of some of the less educated protesters at Tiananmen, and I wrote periodically that although they say they're for democracy, they can't define the kind of democracy they're in favor of. That night, though, it was those uneducated workers and peasants who were driving their rickshaws out whenever there was a pause in the firing to pick up bodies of kids who'd been killed or injured, who blocked the troops. One bus driver saw troops coming in trucks, so he parked his bus across the road to keep the trucks away and turned off the engine. Then when the officer pointed his firearm at him and demanded he move the bus, he just hurled the keys into the high grass. People like that might not have been able to define democracy, but they were willing to risk their lives for it. And I think there's a lot we can learn from the courage and commitment of people like that whom I witnessed in June 1989.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes, that coverage was so moving, and so were those other books that you've co-authored with your wife, Sheryl WuDunn, China Wakes, Thunder from the East, Half the Sky, among others. And you were the first married couple to jointly receive a Pulitzer for journalism. How do you work together to jointly tell a story?

KRISTOF

It's funny because people always ask that question, and there's a little bit of a hint of how do you guys write books together and stay married? We also have three kids, and the truth is that if you can raise kids together and stay married, a book is a piece of cake. It really is. And you know, you put a manuscript down at night. It stays down. A manuscript can't play you off each other. At the end of the day, if you screw up on a manuscript, it's only a manuscript. It's not like screwing up on a kid. More seriously, it helped to have Sheryl and me working on these things together.

China, after Tiananmen, was a somewhat dispiriting time. We were tailed a lot. We dealt with really tough ethical decisions, and it really helped to have somebody who was engaged in this business who understood the risks. We could talk through some of these questions about what our moral responsibilities were to our sources and to our readers.

When we wrote Half the Sky about empowering women around the world, if it had been just a woman writing that book, it would have been marginalized as just a woman's issue. And it would have been weird if it had been just a man writing it, but I think a man and a woman addressing gender inequity together underscores that this is an issue that affects all of us, whatever our sex. And that we all have to get to work to try to address it. So, it's been a wonderful partnership.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You also describe your early posting as New York Times bureau chief in Hong Kong during a kind of golden age of print journalism where you had more time to explore, whereas now, with the attention economy and clickbait, so much has changed. What are your reflections on the future of journalism?

KRISTOF

Traditionally, newspapers were often monopolies or oligopolies, and so they were making money and perfectly fine being committed to covering important things that readers weren't terribly interested in. That business model has collapsed for local journalism around the country. We're losing an average of two and a half newspapers each week around the country, and we've lost more newspaper journalists than we have coal miners over the last decade. In terms of national,international coverage, The New York Times still has a good business model. The Washington Post has a business model in the sense that Jeff Bezos has a large checkbook. The Wall Street Journal is doing okay, but the news weeklies are collapsing, and television is struggling. There are still reporters covering the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, but you don't have many reporters covering what's probably the world's biggest humanitarian crisis right now—the famine in Sudan. It's just like how Yemen wasn't getting much coverage when it was the biggest crisis. I think that's fundamentally because it's expensive and dangerous to cover those kinds of international stories, and there's not much of an audience for it. Once, I did back-to-back columns about the Yemen humanitarian crisis and Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated for the Supreme Court. The Kavanaugh piece—I could whip off in a few hours, while the Yemen piece resulted from an expensive, dangerous trip to Yemen. But the Kavanaugh piece got seven times as many page views, so you can understand why an executive producer wouldn't want to send a camera crew to Yemen when they can just put a Democrat and a Republican in a studio together and have them yell at each other.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Your writing has inspired Bill and Melinda Gates to focus their philanthropy on global health. Robert DeVecchi, the former president of the International Rescue Committee, said your coverage of the genocide in Darfur saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Considering the changing face of journalism, how can we continue to be a catalyst for positive change?

KRISTOF

I hope that we come up with a solid business model for journalism. I'm actually planning a trip to Sudan right now and it will probably lose money for The Times, but they're willing to send me to cover pieces that maybe only my mother and wife will read. We need a better business model for journalism as a whole. I think that there may be ways for journalists to partner with aid groups and think tanks around the world to cover crises.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Your parents were educators, and you've also created mentorship programs where you've taken young journalists on the road with you to help bring them along that pathway toward journalism. You've been an outspoken advocate for education reform. What are your reflections on education, and how can we improve our education models to prepare people not just for the jobs of the 21st but to be more engaged global citizens?

KRISTOF

If you look over the last 500 years or so, the best metric to predict where society will be in 30 or 50 years, the best metric is simply education today. One reason I think the U.S. is the world's largest and most successful economy today is that, beginning in the 19th century and through about 1970, the U.S. led the world in mass education. And what matters is not so much elite education. Britain had Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge, and it had better elite education, but it wasn't great at mass education. And the U.S. really was. We were the first country to have almost universal literacy, male and female. We were the first country to have widespread high school attendance and the first country to have significant college attendance. And then, beginning in about the 1970s, we lost that lead. And now, there are many countries that are way ahead of us. I think back to my old classmates who are now dead, and I think: What were adults thinking in the 1970s that they let them drop out? And yet, I think today: What are adults thinking in 2024 when they let one in seven American kids today drop out of high school and let so many emerge from the school system not literate, not numerate, completely unprepared for the 21st century?

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes. And for somebody who's always gone out into the world, who's derived their knowledge from one-on-one to understanding what it is in the world, what are your reflections on how AI is changing the way we communicate with ourselves, our imagination, and journalism itself? How can we prepare everyone, especially young people, for these uncertain futures?

KRISTOF

There have been some alarming experiments that show AI arguments are better at persuading people than humans are at persuading people. I think that's partly because humans tend to make the arguments that we ourselves find most persuasive. For example, a liberal will make the arguments that will appeal to liberals, but the person you're probably trying to persuade is somebody in the center. We're just not good at putting ourselves in other people's shoes. That's something I try very hard to do in the column, but I often fall short. And with AI, I think people are going to become more vulnerable to being manipulated. I think we're at risk of being manipulated by our own cognitive biases and the tendency to reach out for information sources that will confirm our prejudices. Years ago, the theorist Nicholas Negroponte wrote that the internet was going to bring a product he called the Daily Me—basically information perfectly targeted to our own brains—and that's kind of what we've gotten now. A conservative will get conservative sources that show how awful Democrats are and will have information that buttresses that point of view, while liberals will get the liberal version of that. So, I think we have to try to understand those cognitive biases and understand the degree to which we are all vulnerable to being fooled by selection bias. I'd like to see high schools, in particular, have more information training and media literacy programs so that younger people can learn that there are some news sources that are a little better than others and that just because you see something on Facebook doesn't make it true.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Exactly. There's checks and balances, so it is important to understand fake news, misinformation, and disinformation. You said your experience in China helped you have a certain respect for the mechanisms of capitalism, even though it doesn't work perfectly, and it hasn't worked perfectly in terms of how we are stewards of the planet. This you've seen from your travels around the world, these decisions that cause ecological degradation because we're not seeing further down the line to the future. I know that maintaining ecological balance is important for you. You have practical working knowledge since you were raised on a farm and to this day you and your family run a 25-acre farm in Yamhill, Oregon. What, in your view, is holding us back from moving forward on environmental issues?

KRISTOF

I think that the problem is a classic economic problem of tragedy of the commons—the fact that any one country is going to benefit if other countries reduce carbon emissions but is going to suffer when it itself does means there's always a tendency to want other countries to lead the way. Since the industrial revolution began, the US point of view is that we can't get anywhere unless India and China reduce carbon emissions, while India and China say if you look over the last one hundred years, the US is the one who put out all the carbon, and we're just finally getting a little bit richer and you want to cut us off at the knees.

There are arguments to be made on both sides, but the fundamental impediment is that 10 years ago, it just seemed really hard to see how we were going to get out of climate change and disastrous consequences, but right now, if you squint a little bit, you can maybe see a path through this period where we reduce carbon emissions enough to figure out how to navigate our way to a future in which things work and we pay a price, but one that is manageable. Green energy is becoming much cheaper because of a revolution in battery technology, and now there are possibilities for a field-like energy generated by waves or fusion nuclear power to remove carbon from the air with direct air capture. We're not sure that these will work, but they may, and they would really be revolutionary. China is an interesting example of a country that has made remarkable progress on electrification and battery technology. It is still pushing out a ton of carbon, but it has done this for practical reasons—it understands that those are key technologies for the future and whoever figures out how to get electric vehicles done right, whoever figures out how to get battery technology right, the world is going to benefit from their progress in battery technology, just as the world has benefited by having solar panels made in China go up all over the world.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You know, we're so glad that Chasing Hope allows us to understand some of these backstories that make or don't make the cut when you're writing an article, but how do you narrow that down when there's so many fascinating details to what would be the most poignant to bring across the essence of the story?

KRISTOF

That's the perpetual challenge of storytelling. It's what Homer was wrestling with 800 years ago and what we wrestle with today. But I think one of the lessons of storytelling is that you pick the elements that will move a reader. In my case, I'm trying to get people to care about a crisis in ways that may bring solutions to it. And that's also how I deal with the terror and the fear to find a sense of purpose in what I do. It's incredibly heartbreaking to see some of the things and hear some of the stories, but at the end of the day, it feels like–inconsistently here and there–you can shine a light on problems, and by shining that light, you actually make a difference.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

And as you think about the future, those teachers who have been important to you, and the importance of storytelling, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

KRISTOF

I think a lot of young people today are focused on what might be called résumé qualities. I was proud to be the youngest foreign correspondent at the Times and then youngest national correspondent, winning a Pulitzer, these kinds of things, but overtime, I came to see more importance and reward in finding a purpose, finding meaning, paying it forward, and giving back—the eulogy qualities, the kind of things people say when they remember you, not the résumé qualities. It's the importance of finding friends, emphasizing family, and doing things that give you that sense of fulfillment and meaning, keep you going, and give you a cause larger than yourself to hold on to. I, too, am not sure I got it at the beginning of my career, so I think it's maybe hard for young people to grasp, but that is the advice I would offer.

Photo credit: David Hume Kennerly

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Katie Foster and Henie Zhang. The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast is produced by Mia Funk. Associate Text Editor was Nadia Lam. Additional production support by Sophie Garnier.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Interviews - FEATURED

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Conversation with Showrunner · Creator · Head Writer
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I feel very fortunate that the medium I’m in is television, which is a very long form of storytelling. You're not telling a single story; you're telling a world. You're inviting people into a world and asking them to live there with you and these characters for a period of time. The best I can do is build a world where people grapple with these important questions and try their best. All I can expect from people and from myself is that we're trying to do something larger than ourselves.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist · NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist
Author of Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life · Coauthor of Half the Sky · Tightrope · A Path Appears

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Psychologist
Author of Emotional Intelligence · Optimal · Ecological Intelligence

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1 0 0 1 · Silfur · Transparent · Lion

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President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
Author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America

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Founder of The White Feather Foundation
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JULIA CHRISTENSEN

Neuroscientist · Fmr. Dancer
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Artists, Writers, Visionaries & Educators Share their Stories

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ARASH ABIZADEH

Professor of Political Science · McGill University
Author of Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics · Assoc. Editor · Free & Equal

There is a tremendous tension between healthy democracy and deep economic inequalities. I don't think that, in the long run, democracies can survive in a healthy way unless we address the problem of economic inequalities. If we have individuals who are living day to day, on the one hand, and we have other individuals who are billionaires in our societies, on the other hand, it will be very difficult for us to have a genuine democracy.

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Doubt starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams
Moonstruck · Wild Mountain Thyme · Danny and the Deep Blue Sea · Joe Versus the Volcano

I knew Philip Seymour Hoffman for several years. We went on vacation together. He produced a play of mine. Before we did Doubt, we worked in the same theater company together, and he was, you know, very committed to excellence. And so he could become impatient with anybody who was not committed to excellence, and that could make him a volatile person to deal with. Phil cared. He cared a great deal. And he worked really hard. They're very committed. Like with Viola Davis. Viola had done a decent amount of big work before Doubt, but she was not recognized yet. And she was careful. You know, she certainly wasn't throwing weight around. She was, I'm the new kid on the block, and I'm just here to work and be serious and do my job, keep my head down, and get out. And pretty much that's what I was doing too, you know, because I've got Meryl Streep, I've got Philip Hoffman, who I was friends with, but Phil's not an easy guy to be friends with or was not easy to be friends with. He's a very prickly person prone to getting pissed off about things that you might not expect. And then Amy Adams was somebody who, you know, tried to get along with everybody and Phil would say like, 'You just want everybody to like you.' So, you know, you're in the middle of that group, and you just, you don't want to put yourself in a position where you're trying to prove something. You have to let them...they're very, very smart people, and they're going to figure out whatever it is that you're doing. They're going to figure out whether you are in any way trying to handle that. And that's not going to go well. And so I didn't do that.

DAVID RUBIN

President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences 2019-2022
Casting Director & Producer

What an academy was meant to be, going back to their founding, really is a group of people with a certain degree of passion and expertise and knowledge that want to get together and share. That's what I think academies are all about. So the fact that I've been helpful in spurring the Academy onto becoming a more international and global enterprise is a source of great satisfaction to me

ALAIN ROBERT

Famous Rock & Urban Climber
"The French Spider-Man”
Known for Free Solo Climbing 150+ of the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers using no Climbing Equipment

First of all, yes, I need to know what I will be climbing, whether it's on rocks or whether it's on buildings. And then there is physical preparation. And regarding the mindset, it's more something that became a bit automatic over the years because I have been free soloing for almost 50 years. So it is pretty much my whole life. So that means that for me, being mentally ready, it's kind of simple. It's almost always the same mental process, meaning, I can be afraid before an ascent, but I know myself actually very well. And I know that once I am starting to climb, I feel fine. I put my fear aside, and I'm just climbing.

BEN SHOFTY

Functional Neurosurgeon · Professor · University of Utah

When you think about the evolution of the human brain–just like other animals that have specialized in speed or keeping warm or gathering food–I feel our brain sort of specialized being creative and flexible and being able to generate different solutions to a given problem. To me, this is probably the most fascinating thought process that happens in the human brain. And what I do in neurosurgery–and my subspecialty is called functional neurosurgery–we don't deal with disorders in which there's an anatomical abnormality inside the brain. We deal with disorders in which there is an abnormal connection or abnormal circuitry inside the brain when there's an issue with the way the brain functions. There's no tumor. There are no abnormal blood vessels or anything like that. And that gives us an amazing opportunity to really investigate how different circuits and different areas inside the brain work.

SCOTT DOORLEY · CARISSA CARTER

Creative & Academic Director · Stanford d.school
Co-authors of Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future

Today, someone is putting the finishing touches on a machine- learning algorithm that will change the way you relate to your family. Someone is trying to design a way to communicate with animals in their own language. Someone is cleaning up the mess someone else left behind seventy years ago yesterday. Today, someone just had an idea that will end up saving one thing while it harms another.

To be a maker in this moment— to be a human today— is to collaborate with the world. It is to create and be created, to work and be worked on, to make and be made. To be human is to tinker, create, fix, care, and bring new things into the world. It is to design. You— yes, you!— might design products or policy, services or sermons, production lines or preschool programs. You might run a business, make art, or participate in passing out meals to the poor. You may write code or pour concrete, lobby for endangered species legislation or craft cocktails. Wherever you fit in, you are part of shaping the world. This is design work.

– Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future

STEPHEN REILY

Founding Director · Remuseum
Fmr. Director · Speed Museum · Attorney · Co-Founder & CEO · IMC Licensing
The opportunity is that we have never had a public that is more passionate and obsessed with visual imagery. If the owners of the best original imagery in the world can't figure out how to take advantage of the fact that the world has now become obsessed with these treasures that we have to offer as museums, then shame on us. This is the opportunity to say, if you're spending all day scrolling on Instagram looking for amazing imagery, come and see the original source. Come and see the real work. Let us figure out how to make that connection.

Was Stanford Firing 23 Lecturers in Creative Writing Really Necessary?

A Conversation with Lecturers & Students

Recently, twenty-three lecturers in the highly successful Creative Writing program at Stanford were summoned to a Zoom meeting where they were first praised, and then summarily fired. One of the most surprising aspects of this purge is the fact that it was carried out not by top-tier university administrators, but by tenure-track faculty in the program. It was they who decided to brutally terminate their colleagues. On this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with two of the lecturers who have been told they will leave Stanford in nine months, and one of their students, a published novelist. They explain the devastating nature of this act and share statistics and histories that show this was not at all necessary. Expediency for senior faculty trumped the survival of a carefully developed and nurtured community of creative writers.

JACQUELINE GOTTLIEB

Professor of Neuroscience & Principal Investigator at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute

I came to neuroscience from a humanistic perspective. I was very interested to find out who we are. What do we know? What do we think we know? Why do we think we know certain things? How do we see things? How do we perceive them? Ultimately, the question behind curiosity is what things we find interesting in our environment. The way I think about eye movements is that they really are trained in some largely subconscious process.

MEAGHAN OPPENHEIMER

Screenwriter · Exec. Producer · Showrunner
Creator of Hulu's Tell Me Lies · Queen America

Often when people write or make movies about romances with young adults, I think they are very flippant about it and don't take it seriously. But I think that those friendships and romantic relationships are some of the most important ones because they really set the stage for the rest of our lives. If your first relationship is incredibly toxic and damaging, it can take you years to figure out that that's not normal, and that that's not actually how relationships are meant to be.

EUAN NISBET

Earth Systems Scientist · Royal Holloway University of London

I am a Christian and I have strong Muslim and Jewish friends as well as great respect for Hindu beliefs. I grew up in Southern Africa and I am well aware of the depth of some Indigenous beliefs. I think that having belief systems does give you a very different perspective sometimes. Now, in Christianity, the concept of the shepherd, human beings are here and this is our garden, our garden of Eden, but we have a responsibility. And if we choose to kick ourselves out of the garden, there are consequences. And that's precisely what we are doing. The garden is there, it's lovely, and we can manage it, and it's our job to manage it. We can manage it properly. We can respect it. It's for all creation, and it's very explicit that it involves all Creation. And that's a very fundamental biblical law that you have to respect all Creation. And if you don't do that, then the consequences—you’re basically throwing yourself out of the garden of Eden.

RENÉE BERGLAND

Literary Critic · Historian of Science · Educator
Author of Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science

There is a stronger connection between Dickinson and Darwin than the proximity of history. Or the universality of literature. They both understood natural science and the natural world in ways that seem strange and somewhat surprising in the 21st century. Their 19th century attitudes to nature and the study of it are so different from ours that when we trace their stories, a vanished world begins to emerge. The more I consider these figures together, the more I feel their world and my world. come alive. Darwin and Dickinson illuminate each other. By reading them together, we can start to understand the interconnected relationships that animated 19th century poetry and science.

FRANK TRENTMANN

Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London · Author of Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942 to 2022

The environmental crisis, Gaza, the war in Ukraine—all of those don't make sense if you don't have a sense of history. History and the humanities have come under huge pressure. We've seen falling student numbers, and that's a real shame because history continues to be a source of intellectual inspiration and curiosity that not only makes us wiser and more reflective but also creates the dynamism and creativity we need to confront our present and future challenges. I hope that among the young generations, there will be people inspired by history, people that have the ambition to research and write about the past.

LISA EDELSTEIN

Actress · Artist · Director · Producer · Writer
House M.D. · Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce · Little Bird · The West Wing · The Kominsky Method

I have always thrown myself into everything, and that includes terrible things, because I want to have the whole experience. Even if I know it's going to hurt for better or for worse, that has been how I've lived my life. And so it's given me a lot of information and allowed me to play a lot of different roles and understand a lot of different points of view. I think part of the beauty of being in a long-running television show is that, in season one, you're playing the role they wrote. By season two, they're writing the person you're playing. You start to build your voice, and they start to merge, and so by the time you get to season three, you're much more like full human beings having this dialogue.

APRIL GORNIK

Artist · Environmentalist
Co-founder of The Church · Arts & Creativity Center
Co-director of Sag Harbor Cinema Board

I've chosen my work because I've loved the outside world. I love the things outside of myself. I love what isn't immediate to me. And I love projecting onto that as a way of kind of trying to reach the distance between my inner self and the vastness. To try to do that in a way that makes other people feel inspired by it, not be chided for not taking care of it. It's not something that I intend to be a message per se. I'd rather people look at the natural world and see the heartbreaking beauty of it and sense its fragility and its impermanence and their own impermanence and fragility and then have a response to that rather than say, you know, you have to act, you have to do something. I would hope that would inspire action rather than to cudgel them with a directive.

Featured

The Architecture of Oppression

Jake Ferguson · Anthony Joseph · Jermain Jackman

I think as humans, we forget. We are often limited by our own stereotypes, and we don't see that in everyone there's the potential for beauty and love and all these things. And I think The Architecture of Oppression, both parts one and two, are really a reflection of all the community and civil rights work that I've been doing for the same amount of time, really - 25 years. And I wanted to try and mix my day job and my music side, so bringing those two sides of my life together. I wanted to create a platform for black artists, black singers, and poets who I really admire. And it was a no-brainer to give Anthony a call for this second album because I know of his pedigree, and he's much more able to put ideas and thoughts on paper than I would be able to.

PRIYAMVADA GOPAL · FRANÇOISE VERGÈS

on the Recent Elections in Britain and France

I would say what we can celebrate is the incredible mobilization of the young people. They went everywhere, they knocked on the door, they mobilized. This was an incredible, incredible mobilization. So that was extraordinary because it showed real mobilization and an understanding that the National Rally was a real threat. We knew that if they came to power, the first people who would be targeted would be people of color, and that was absolutely clear.

S. D. CHROSTOWSKA

Author · Historian · Curator
Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics · The Eyelid · Marvellous Utopia

I like to think of utopianism as “effective social daydreaming” because utopia is associated with consciously imagining societies. Our imagination is always involved in creating reality. The opposition between the two, reality and the imaginary, is not a stark one; they're porous.

RICHARD BLACK

Author of The Future of Energy · Fmr. BBC Environment Correspondent · Director of Policy & Strategy · Global Clean Energy Thinktank · Ember

The fact is you've got a lot of industrial and political muscle now coming behind clean energy, especially from China, which is the leading country deploying wind energy, solar, and the leading manufacturer and user of electric vehicles. "We have petrostates in the world. China is the first electrostate." And China is on its way to becoming the world's most powerful country. So, where China leads, the rest of the world is almost certain to follow. Yes, there are massive air pollution problems in China, of course, but I think it's more than that. It's also about seeing that this is the future that the world is going to have. And if these goods are going to be made anywhere, well, the Chinese government clearly would like them to be made in China. And they've set out, you know, industrial policies and all kinds of other policies for, well, at least a decade now, in pursuit of that aim. It's interesting now to see other countries, India, for example, and the United States now sort of deploying muscle to try and carve out a slice of the pie themselves as well.

CHRIS CARLSSON

Writer · Organizer · Activist
When Shells Crumble · Shaping San Francisco · Critical Mass

The novel When Shells Crumble begins in December 2024, when the US Supreme Court nullifies the popular vote in the Presidential election and awards the presidency to an authoritarian Republican, who proceeds to demolish democracy and install a fascistic state that hastens ecological havoc. The novel is much more than your usual dystopian tale—it focuses on how to resist political cynicism and defeatism, and rebuild on planetary wreckage. It is a world-building project filled with wisdom, sadness, and joy. We specifically put this fictional text in conservation with his brilliant non-fiction work, Nowtopia, which offers a radical redefinition of “work” that restores dignity and value to their proper places.

On the War & Famine in Sudan

with Dr. Osman Hamdan & Umniya Najaer

The ongoing conflict in Sudan has pushed millions to the brink of famine, threatening to devastate an entire generation. Despite the severe humanitarian crisis, global awareness remains limited. Today learn about the long history behind these events, the people and groups involved, and the roles that foreign governments and international organizations like the IMF have played. Importantly, we learn how civil society groups are bringing a form of mutual aid and support to the people of Sudan where the national government, warring factions, and international humanitarian organizations have utterly failed.

HENRY AJDER

AI/Deepfakes/Synthetic Media Advisor · BBC Presenter
Adobe · Meta · European Commission · Partnership on AI · House of Lords

I would like to preserve a real sense of empathy and humility, which comes with understanding that the world is messy, that people are messy, that defects and imperfections exist, that things don't always necessarily kind of go the way you want, even as much as you wish they could. Imperfection is part of life and I guess my concern is that AI-generated content, which smooths and perfects a version of reality to precisely what you want and forces you or makes you feel pressured to represent yourself in this absolutely perfect way, fundamentally gives you no room for error and kind of detaches you from the reality of growth and life and and how people work. Empathize with other people. Everyone has their challenges. Things don't always have to be exactly perfect to how you want them to be or how other people want them to be. And that involves having some humility about yourself as a messy creature, as we all are. I hope that's retained, but I do see this kind of move towards this sort of smoothed and shaped reality that AI is enabling, potentially creating more of a disconnect between that imperfect, messy, but also quite beautiful world. This sort of polished but ultimately plastic version of reality increasingly is becoming the default for some people over the kind of fleshy, messy human side of things.

PAUL AUSTER

Writer · Filmmaker 1947-2024

What happens is a space is created. And maybe it’s the only space of its kind in the world in which two absolute strangers can meet each other on terms of absolute intimacy. I think this is what is at the heart of the experience and why once you become a reader that you want to repeat that experience, that very deep total communication with that invisible stranger who has written the book that you’re holding in your hands. And that’s why I think, in spite of everything, novels are not going to stop being written, no matter what the circumstances. We need stories. We’re all human beings, and it’s stories from the moment we’re able to talk.

JEFF OLSON

Co-founder of the Largest Bike Share System in North America · NYC’s CitiBike
Co-founder of re:Charge-e: Wireless Bike & Scooter Docking Stations
Author of The 3rd Mode: Towards a Green Society

The key number for people to remember is one to 150 for the cost and energy that it takes to charge a single electric car, our system could charge 150 bikes or scooters in public space that then people have access to. So the question from an equity standpoint, from really achieving our climate goals standpoint is, do you invest in getting one person mobile and maintaining maybe the current lifestyle that goes along with those cars? Or do we make some changes and invest in 150 to 200 people being mobile with the same energy? Clearly, we think the answer is more people moving more often, more sustainably. And we have to make that shift or we're never going to hit the 2030 goals. They are probably not even in reach, you heard the Secretary-General say just last week. And even 2050 seems a long way to go if we're still investing in technologies that only essentially help the 1 percent that already have the resources. It's the larger population that we really need to reach.

LEE McINTYRE

Philosopher · Author of On Disinformation: How To Fight For Truth and Protect Democracy · How to Talk to a Science Denier

One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.

STEPHEN WOLFRAM

Computer Scientist · Mathematician · Theoretical Physicist
Founder/CEO of Wolfram Research · Creator of Mathematica · Wolfram|Alpha

I think as there is more automation, there is more kind of emphasis on this question of our choice. The story of the development of things tends to be what do humans decide that they care about? In what direction do they want to go? What kind of art do they want to make? What kinds of things do they want to think about? There is in the computational universe of all possibilities, there is sort of infinite creativity.

KEITH FRANKISH

Editor of Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness · Cambridge University Press’ Elements in Philosophy of Mind
Author of Mind and Supermind · Consciousness

What I like about the sort of view I have is that it represents us as fully part of the world, fully part of the same world. We're not sealed off into little private mental bubbles, Cartesian theaters, where all the real action is happening in here, not out there. No, I think we're much more engaged with the world. It's not all happening in some private mental world. It's happening in our engagement with the shared world, and that seems to me a vision that I find much more uplifting, comforting, and rewarding.

PAUL HAWKEN

Founder of Project Regeneration & Project Drawdown
Author of Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation

We and all living beings thrive by being actors in the planet’s regeneration, a civilizational goal that should commence and never cease. We practiced degeneration as a species and it brought us to the threshold of an unimaginable crisis. To reverse global warming, we need to reverse global degeneration.

ROBIN PHILLIPS

Retired US Army Officer with a Career in Current and Crisis Intelligence and Strategic Plans and Policy at the Pentagon

We need to work together to handle the migrations that will inevitably come because of climate change and loss of human habitat and loss of agricultural lands. The wisest nation going forward will be the one that can maintain its population through allowing immigration and thinking about where you can draw folks that are coming from stressed environments and they need a place to land and you're losing population. Why should you not accept those people and encourage them to fill the roles that you need them to fill and settle in the areas where you are being depopulated because of falling fertility by choice?

ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

Senior Reporter at ProPublica · Filmmaker · Author
On The Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America

Living in California, I've just come to accept the unsettledness of this era we're moving into. And I think that's really how I see the future. You know, we're living in an era of disruption, and there are others I talk to and write about in the book who also muse about the possibility of a more nomadic future. That maybe home isn't a permanent place with deep roots but is a transient place with shallow roots or two places that you alternate between. In addition to a lot of other dramatic changes that the book is about, a change in our sense of home and our sense of place is a part of this story.

MATTIA MAURÉE

Interdisciplinary Composer · AuDHD Coach
Host of the AuDHD Flourishing Podcast

So for me, just removing a lot of the shame and then a lot of the energy that I was wasting trying to fit myself into a neurotypical process or framework or way of thinking or being. So, you know, some people call that unmasking, just kind of removing. I was wasting a lot of energy, basically trying to be someone else and function in a different way. And then just beating myself up internally for not being able to do that. And throughout my healing journey, as I really realized, Oh, that's actually what's happening. Like there's not actually anything wrong with me being able to...That's why it's called Love Your Brain. It's not just, you know, tolerate your brain. Or, fine, you can work with this brain that you have. It's like, no, I genuinely love the weird experiences that my brain can give me and the incredibly rich, deep experience I have of the world. Like I experience nature so deeply and so intensely. I have really strong connections with animals. I have really great intuition, which I think is just from picking up all this sensory data and putting it together. All these experiences that I get to have, but I don't get to have those experiences if I'm just trying to make myself be something else, which I think is most people who are late diagnosed, I feel like that's their experience. It's just like I've been trying to be someone else for so long. It's exhausting. And then you don't have the energy then to be creative, the carving out the time, making the time to actually create.

DANA FISHER

Director · Center for Environment, Community, & Equity
Author of Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action

I call myself an apocalyptic optimist. In other words, I do believe there is hope to save ourselves from the climate crisis that we have caused. However, I also believe that saving ourselves will only be possible with a mass mobilization that is driven by the pain and suffering of climate shocks around the world. A generalized sense of extreme risk can lead to peaceful and less-peaceful mass mobilizations at the levels needed to stimulate an AnthroShift. Only a global risk event (or numerous smaller events that are seen as threatening social and economic centers of power) will motivate the kind of massive social change that is needed. In other words, without a risk pivot—be it driven by social or environmental change—an AnthroShift that is large enough to respond adequately to the climate crisis and open a large enough window of opportunity postshock is improbable.

ESHA CHHABRA

Author of Working to Restore: Harnessing the Power of Business to Heal the Earth

The term regenerative business started coming into the lexicon in 2017, 2018. And regenerative means to regenerate, means to bring life into something. To sustain means to keep the status quo. And regenerative looks at things from a very holistic lens. You know, it's like if you're going to run a regenerative farm, it's all the different components of the farm and the ecosystem ideally come within the ecosystem.

RAPHAËL MILLIÈRE

Asst. Professor in Philosophy of AI · Macquarie University
I'd like to focus more on the immediate harms that the kinds of AI technologies we have today might pose. With language models, the kind of technology that powers ChatGPT and other chatbots, there are harms that might result from regular use of these systems, and then there are harms that might result from malicious use. Regular use would be how you and I might use ChatGPT and other chatbots to do ordinary things. There is a concern that these systems might reproduce and amplify, for example, racist or sexist biases, or spread misinformation. These systems are known to, as researchers put it, “hallucinate” in some cases, making up facts or false citations. And then there are the harms from malicious use, which might result from some bad actors using the systems for nefarious purposes. That would include disinformation on a mass scale. You could imagine a bad actor using language models to automate the creation of fake news and propaganda to try to manipulate voters, for example. And this takes us into the medium term future, because we're not quite there, but another concern would be language models providing dangerous, potentially illegal information that is not readily available on the internet for anyone to access. As they get better over time, there is a concern that in the wrong hands, these systems might become quite powerful weapons, at least indirectly, and so people have been trying to mitigate these potential harm

DANNY CAINE

Bookseller · Poet · Author of How to Protect Bookstores and Why · How to Resist Amazon and Why · Picture Window

The thing that unites my poetry and the nonfiction writing is my main obsession as a writer. It's the question of, how do you live meaningfully in late capitalism? As corporations and global capitalist forces take over the world, what does it mean to try to have a meaningful human life? Bookselling captured my imagination and my heart as soon as I started working at the bookstore because I could see the potential for this great, amazing community-oriented work.

NEIL JOHNSON

Professor of Physics · GWU · Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab

It gets back to this core question: Why AI comes out with what it does. That's the burning question. It's like it's bigger than the origin of the universe to me as a scientist, and here's the reason why. The origin of the universe, it happened. That's why we're here. It's almost like a historical question asking why it happened. The AI future is not a historical question. It's a now and future question.

BEN GOLDFARB

PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award-winning Author

The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. We're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads. Roads aren't just symbols of movement and mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.

ROBERT PIPPIN

Author of The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy
Modernism as a Philosophical Problem · Hegel’s Idealism

Philosophy is both an academic discipline and also something that everybody does. Everybody has to have reflective views about what's significant. They also have to justify to themselves why it's significant or important. The nature of justice itself, and the various opinions that have been written about in philosophy about justice, can get to a very high level. So there's this unusual connection between philosophy and human life. We've inherited from the middle ages, this incredible tradition that's now developed into a chance for young people to spend four or five years, in a way, released from the pressures of life. The idea to pursue your ideas a little further in these four years you have, exempt from the pressures of social life, allows philosophy to have a kind of position unique in the academy. In confronting what the best minds in the history of the world have had to say about these issues, the hope is that they provide for the people who are privileged enough to confront philosophy a better and more thoughtful approach to these fundamental questions that everybody has to confront.

BERTRAND PICCARD

Psychiatrist, Explorer, Aviator of First Round-the-World Solar-powered Flight
Founder & Chairman · Solar Impulse Foundation: 1000+ Profitable Climate Solutions
UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment

So this is why I prefer to speak with a really down to earth language. So maybe the people who love nature are going to say, “Oh, Bertrand Piccard, now he is too down to earth. He's speaking about profitable solutions. He's speaking to the industries that are polluting,” but we have to speak to the industries that are polluting and bring them profitable solutions, otherwise the world will never change, or humankind will never change. And don't forget one thing, what we are damaging is not the beauty of nature. What is being damaged is the quality of life of human beings on Earth because we can still have beautiful things to see, but if we have climate change, if we have tropical disease in Europe, if we have heat waves, floods, droughts, millions of climate refugees, life will be miserable, even if nature is still beautiful.

NINA LUZZATTO GARDNER

Adjunct Lecturer in International Law, Johns Hopkins SAIS
Director of Strategy International, Corporate Sustainability Advisory Firm

My father made me think very much in terms of what kind of planet we are leaving to our children? And what should we be doing in terms of being custodians of this planet? And that we should not be using up all the resources, but actually trying to conserve them and make the world a better for the next generation.

JOSEPH LEDOUX

Neuroscientist · Musician · Author
The Emotional Brain · Anxious · The Deep History of Ourselves
The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human

We've got four billion years of biological accidents that created all of the intricate aspects of everything about life, including consciousness. And it's about what's going on in each of those cells at the time that allows it to be connected to everything else and for the information to be understood as it's being exchanged between those things with their multifaceted, deep, complex processing.

INTAN PARAMADITHA

Author of The Wandering · Apple and Knife
Editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets · Co-ed. The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas

The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find home—that's the curse of the shoes. The title in Indonesian is Gentayanga, which is a word used to describe ghosts who exist in a liminal state.

MAX COOPER

Electronic Musician · Fmr. Computational Biologist

As technology becomes more dominant, the arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch the things that the sciences can't tackle. What it's actually like to be a person? What's actually important? We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness, according to some metric. Or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. So, I think what's important really is just exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, being open-minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other as well. And the arts is an essential part of that.

CLAYTON PAGE ALDERN

Neuroscientist turned Environmental Journalist
Author of The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains, and Bodies

I want to be wowed by the world. I want to gaze at it in awe and wonder. And I think when we take a step back and begin to appreciate the complexity of the interactions around us. We're taking note of a very porous between the self and the rest of the world. We are literally observing our enmeshment in our environment. And it's that kind of a reference frameshift that I think is going to help us move out of some of the darkness. My mother is an artist, and I think growing up surrounded by her practice exposed me to the creative process and is probably that which afforded me a certain sympathy for those tools and those modes of exploring the world later in life.

AYÇA ÇUBUKÇU & ADOM GETACHEW

On Imagining a New Left Internationalism Outside the Legacies of the Settler State

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji have a conversation with critical political theorists Adom Getachew and Ayça Çubukçu on the colonial construction of the international system and its organization around the institution of the nation state. The conversation covers and uncovers so many aspects of the hidden colonial history behind the constitution of this system, but also the resistance and creative appropriations by Black, Indigenous, and colonized peoples, allowing us to imagine possible liberatory futures beyond the forms and strictures of the colonial present.

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The Creative Process

The Creative Process

SOCIAL JUSTICE & ACTIVISM

The Creative Process

How can journalism make people care about crises & create solutions? - Highlights - NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Interviewed by Mia Funk

Photo credit: David Hume Kennerly

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Creative Process

PODCAST INTERVIEWS

The Creative Process

The Creative Process

The Creative Process

SOCIAL JUSTICE & ACTIVISM

The Creative Process

How can journalism make people care about crises & create solutions? - Highlights - NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Interviewed by Mia Funk

Photo credit: David Hume Kennerly

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions). Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Creative Process

PODCAST INTERVIEWS

The Creative Process

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.