Policy 360

Dr. Jim Young Kim is a physician and anthropologist who previously served as the President of the World Bank. As a student at Harvard he co-founded the influential non-profit Partners in Health with Dr. Paul Farmer. Kim has received the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship and was named one of TIME magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World." Dr. Kim sat for a wide-ranging conversation with the...

Scholars, practitioners, advocates and students gathered recently at Duke University to examine the topic of redistricting, the process of drawing congressional boundaries. The conference included judges and mathematicians, investigative reporters, and more. Each contributed insights to try and untangle the complex web that redistricting had become. This episode includes comments from: James Andre...

There's been tremendous political wrangling in the US recently about raising the debt ceiling (how much money we allow ourselves to borrow). The U.S. is not the first country in history borrow money and we won't be the last.  In the late imperial period until the early 1920s, Russia needed cash, and they got it from Britain and France. Owing so much money gave Russia a kind of power; if Russia def...

If you've ever opened the New York Times, it's likely that you've read something by Frank Bruni. He worked at the paper for 25 years as metro reporter, White House correspondent, Rome bureau chief, and even the chief restaurant critic for a time. He was also the first openly gay op-ed columnist at the Times. Bruni is now a faculty member at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University an...

Duke University's Cyber Policy program has a new report that shows data brokers are openly and explicitly advertising sensitive information about US individuals for sale including demographic information, political preferences, even real-time GPS locations on current and former U.S. military personnel. The authors say such data brokerage is a virtually unregulated practice in the United States. Gu...

Most Americans have no idea that there are elaborate pretend Iraqi and Afghan villages scattered around the United States – on US military bases. The villages are designed to look real. There are people in them - many of the people were born in the Middle East and immigrated to the U.S. They now play pretend versions of themselves, in pretend Middle Eastern villages, in the very real forests and d...

COVID-19 has ripped through nursing homes and long-term care facilities in the US, painfully unveiling and amplifying the problems that have been inherent in long-term care delivery for decades. Guest: Nathan Boucher is an assistant research professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

What does it take to build a business from the ground up? Are there special challenges that women face? Are there lessons that can be learned from those who have, as they say, been there and done that when it comes to building organizations that matter? Our guest today is Maya Ajmera, who started her first organization, the Global Fund for Children, shortly after she graduated from Duke University...

What role do corporations play in a functioning democracy? Is there a way to encourage companies to be more socially responsible? Guest: Stan Litow is the author of The Challenge for Business and Society: From Risk to Reward. At IBM he led the global corporate social responsibility program. Litow now teaches graduate courses at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He has held hi...

Our guest this episode is part of a team of researchers that used data from real people's social media accounts to build bots that expose people to news they don't agree with – then they measured how users reacted. What they found is that when people are exposed to views that oppose their own, they actually become MORE not LESS polarized. Guest: Chris Bail,  Professor of Sociology, Public Policy,...

Sometimes we know exactly what the consequences of a policy will be, and sometimes we don't. In this episode, we'll explore a surprising consequence related to stepped-up enforcement of immigration policy in one county in North Carolina: Mecklenburg County. Guest: Professor Christina Gibson-Davis is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke and co-author of t...

In this episode, we look at ways to demystify artificial intelligence (AI) for military commanders and arm military personnel with the right questions to ask to distinguish AI with real, enduring capabilities from so called "drive-by AI." Guest: Marc Losito is a Master of Public Policy student at the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy, where he is a Carlucci Fellow in Security Studies. He is als...

As Elizabeth Warren memorably wrote, "It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street." That quotation is an apt introduction to Mallory SoRelle's book, Democracy Declined – the Failed Poli...

In this episode, we explore new research into providing healthcare recommendations by algorithm. Professor Kate Bundorf recently published a study examining the impact of algorithmic information and recommendations on consumer choice in health insurance plans.

On January 27, 2021, the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security issued a first-ever National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin due to a heightened threat environment across the U.S., which DHS believes will persist in the weeks following the Jan. 6 Presidential Inauguration. In a recent guest column in the Tampa Bay Times, Duke Professor David Schanzer wrote "Jan. 6 demonstrated to all Amer...

Duke Professor Anne-Maria Makhulu joins Dean Judith Kelley to compare the current racial and socioeconomic disparities of South Africa with the disparities that have been made increasingly apparent over the past decade in the United States. The scholars discuss the countries' similarities and differences with regards to the coronavirus response, responses to police violence, movements for racial e...

The end of the Cold War is often considered a bit of a geopolitical anomaly. In 1980 the increasing antagonistic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union caused many to fear that the conflict was once again on the path to nuclear fallout. President Regan famously characterized the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" and while Soviet media described U.S. foreign policy as "nuclear insanity." T...

In a special episode, Policy 360 joins a panel of Duke University experts for a debrief the day after election day 2020. Sanford professors Mac McCorkle, Director of POLIS: Center for Politics, and Deondra Rose, director of Research at POLIS: Center for Politics, moderate a discussion with four other professors here at Duke. John Aldrich is a professor of Political Science and an expert on politic...

This episode takes a look behind the curtain to see what actually happens during elections and just how your vote counts and is counted. Judith Kelley is joined by Damon Circosta, the Chair of the North Carolina State Board of Elections.  

Since graduating from Sanford in 2015, Emily Feng has travelled all over China as a foreign correspondent covering topics ranging from human rights, to technology, to the environment. As foreign correspondent for the Financial Times , Feng uncovered key information surrounding the Chinese oppression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, China. Her coverage of the human rights abuses in Xinjiang won sever...

North Carolina has been at the center of discussions around race-based voter suppression, most recently focused on stringent voter ID requirements. With election day only two months away, there is growing concern among many in this pivotal swing state about whether their voice will be heard. James Leloudis, professor of history at UNC Chapel Hill, and Robert Korstad, professor of public policy at...

Thomas J. Tierney is an expert in smart philanthropy and co-founder of the Bridgespan Group which provides management consulting to nonprofits and philanthropists.  He is the co-author of Give Smart: Philanthropy That Gets Results , which is intended for philanthropists and nonprofits with the resources to do big things to make big changes in the world. Our guest host is Alex S. Jones, a Pulitzer...

Billy Shore is a founder of the organization Share Our Strength, the umbrella organization of No Kid Hungry. Over the past 35 years, the organization has made huge strides in ending childhood hunger in the United States. How have they done it? Listen: This episode is hosted by Alex S. Jones - Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and former director of the Shorenstein Center on Med...

Since the first confirmed case of coronavirus in Durham county back in March, the Durham city and county governments have had the tall task to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus while also responding to the struggles of local residents. Sanford alumni Ryan Smith and Mariel Beasley and current MPP candidate Mary Grace Stoneking join Dean Judith Kelley to talk about the local response to the p...

In late March President Trump said he considers himself a wartime president. The fight against COVID-19 has since intensified; the number of cases in the US doubled in that time. How does Trump compare to wartime leaders of the past? Bruce Jentleson is the William Preston Few Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy. He has held pos...