Aspen Ideas to Go

President Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin Monday during a time when international relations are being tested. On the heels of a tension-filled NATO summit, Russia experts wonder whether Trump’s meeting with Putin will address the Russian government’s rising belligerence. Putin’s government is increasingly acting as an outlaw state across the international stage — undermining...

Hours before President Trump attends a NATO Summit in Brussels, we examine the role of the alliance and how it fits into Europe’s recent struggles. Brexit, terrorism, a new anti-establishment government in Italy, and rising nationalism fueled in part by a flood of immigrants from the Syrian war are testing the grand European experiment. How should the continent move forward? And how will the regio...

Former FBI Director James Comey says transparency and a desire to maintain his agency’s credibility prompted him to reopen the Hillary Clinton email investigation in 2016. He sent a letter to Congress days before the presidential election saying he had new evidence in the case. To this day, some people blame him for Clinton’s defeat. In this episode, he speaks with journalist Katie Couric about th...

As the nation’s top doctor, US Surgeon General Jerome Adams has pledged to lead with science and collaborate with local entities to tackle national health crises. In this episode, he speaks with NPR’s Alison Kodjak about children being separated from their parents at the southern US border, the opioid crisis, gun violence, and mental health. Adams is the 20th person to serve as Surgeon General. In...

What makes two people click? What does it really mean to say, “we have chemistry”? The Atlantic 's Olga Khazan talks to biological anthropologist Helen Fisher about the four styles of thought and behavior that Fisher has identified through brain scans that help explain the biological underpinnings of romantic love, love addiction, adultery, and divorce. Based on data collected from 35,000 single A...

In a recent Alabama Senate election, 96 percent of African American voters supported one candidate, and according to a Pew Research Center survey, 66 percent of Latino voters chose just one candidate during the most recent Presidential election. Do Democrats take the "people of color" vote for granted? How can Republicans appeal more to people of color? What are the ways in which people are viewin...

A hip-hop musical about America’s founding fathers with a virtually all minority cast. A reimagining of La bohème as a rock musical uncovering the AIDS crisis in New York City. A coming-of-age musical about the anxieties of entering adulthood told through cartoons. These are just a few of the radically relevant and compelling concepts that Tony Award-winning producer Jeffrey Seller has turned into...

Bill Gates portends doomsday is coming. The late Stephen Hawking said we should prepare for our robot overlords to take their thrones. But is the future as glaring as HAL’s red eye? Or is it more complicated than that? What does a future powered by algorithms and big intelligence mean for our lives? What are the game-changing developments made possible by AI? How will AI transform industry and dis...

News from around the globe is dominating US headlines. President Trump plans to meet with North Korea's Kim Jong-un in June, Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller is continuing his probe into Russian meddling. Former members of the US intelligence community and the White House weigh in on these global moving parts. Lisa Monaco , former advisor to the preside...

By trying to provide the perfectly happy childhood, a generation of parents may be making it harder for their kids to actually grow up. Hear from psychologists Polly Young-Eisendrath and Madeline Levine , as well as psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb on how our preoccupation with choice, self-esteem, and happiness may be yielding a generation marked by entitlement, materialism, narcissism, and an inabi...

The #MeToo Movement has exposed sexual harassment in the workplace, but what about the problem of gender inequality? Journalist Joanne Lipman says every woman knows how it feels to be marginalized, not taken seriously, overlooked, and underpaid at work. Lipman, editor-in-chief at USA Today , wrote the book “That’s What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) About Working Tog...

Former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter insists that serving in city council is the best job in politics. He served two terms as mayor and managed to lower the city’s homicide rate and increase the high school graduation rate. Still, he says, it wasn’t enough. Though it may not be as glamorous as working in national politics, Nutter says you can more easily see progress when serving at the local...

As our lives become increasingly tech driven, we’re more vulnerable to cyberattacks, and our workplaces and government are too. William Evanina , director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), says it takes a whole-of-nation counterintelligence and security effort to keep our data safe. His organization is helping lead the charge. In this episode, he talks with NPR counte...

Big philanthropy can contribute to a democratic society by addressing problems that neither government nor the private sector will take on. Yet philanthropic institutions and foundations are institutional oddities within a democracy: exercises of power by the wealthy with little accountability, donor-directed preferences in perpetuity, and generous tax subsidies. What, if anything, confers democra...

Author Luis Alberto Urrea 's latest novel, The House of Broken Angels , is inspired by his own Mexican-American family. Set in a San Diego neighborhood, the book's characters celebrate a final birthday for a beloved brother dying of cancer, and a funeral for his elderly mother. The farewell doubleheader may sound depressing, but the book buzzes with joy. And so does this talk from Urrea, held on s...

In rallies from coast to coast, students across the United States are calling for tighter gun control. The deadly Parkland, Florida shooting resurfaced the conversation but the issue of gun violence is all too familiar for people in Chicago. For residents in certain neighborhoods, shootings are frustratingly frequent. In 2016, a particularly deadly year, there were nearly 800 murders, and about ha...

A young, courageous African American woman risked it all to gain freedom from America’s First Family in the late 18th century. Ona, or “Oney,” Judge escaped George Washington’s Philadelphia mansion after years of serving as a seamstress for the famous founding father. There’s little written about Judge. Historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar stumbled on Judge’s story by chance when she discovered a runa...

For centuries the human race has been grappling with how to live a moral life. In this conversation we hear from scholars who think deeply about moral philosophy and helping others. David Brooks suggests that, “We have words and emotional instincts about what feels right and wrong,” yet questions the criteria we use to “help us think, argue, and decide.” New Yorker author Larissa MacFarquhar profi...

Throughout history, young people have been at the center of activism: the Civil Rights movement, Black Lives Matter, the labor movement, and now gun violence. What barriers do young people have to overcome to get adults to listen? What tactics must they employ to get people in power to take them seriously? We hear from young student activists working on issues of racism, inequity, and transgender...

Why do people do evil things? We hear from Yale psychologist Paul Bloom and journalist Graeme Wood about the nature of evil. Bloom studies morality in babies, children, and adults. Wood immersed himself in ISIS, readings the terror group’s propaganda and conversing with its members, in order to write the book The Way of Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State . Graeme explains that ISIS membe...

The debate around gun laws is resurfacing in the wake of the deadly high school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Can America’s shared sorrow inspire a consensus that gun violence should be tackled as a public health issue? For years former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has labeled gun deaths this way. “Whenever you have large numbers of people who are dying for preventable reasons,” he says, “that...

Historian Jon Meacham has written extensively about the presidency, with acclaimed books on Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and most recently, George H. W. Bush. What does his research into these presidents suggest about the nature of the office? What might we learn from the past about the current state of politics, the White House, and perhaps more broadly, democracy in Amer...

US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith says her true self comes out in her work. Poetry, she says, helps her wrestle with dark, sometimes unresolvable questions. In this episode she reads new and old work that examines subjects like death, the afterlife, nature, and African American history. Smith is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light , and three books of poetry, including the P...

If you’re white and middle class, you were probably raised thinking that discussing race was impolite. Color blindness was seen as a virtue. But in truth, color blindness is an insidious form of racial oppression, says Ford Foundation President Darren Walker . In this episode, Walker and Jeff Raikes , former CEO of the Gates Foundation, speak with Michele Norris , director of The Bridge at the Asp...

Norman Lear is the prolific television writer and producer of stories about diverse American life—among them “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son,” “The Jeffersons,” “Good Times,” and “Maude”—as well as a lifelong political and social activist. Khizr Khan is a Pakistani American lawyer, speaker at the 2016 Democratic Convention, and parent of US Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in 2004 d...