Video & Audio

The rise of ethnonationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-system parties in rich OECD countries has economic roots in rising income inequality and relatively slow economic growth, and social roots in increasing geographic inequality of income and employment opportunities. What explains these politically salient problems? In this talk, Herman Mark Schwartz argues that the focus on rising income inequality…

Literary historian Martin Puchner confronts his family history through a nearly forgotten medieval language.

In recent decades, the European Union and United States have worked together to combat common strategic threats—from terrorists and proliferators of weapons of mass destruction to violent and despotic regimes in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and conflict regions in Africa. Economic sanctions—an alternative between words and war—have served as key tools of choice. Recent transatlantic sanctions-cooperation…

Jared Farmer combines the history of trees and the science of longevity to address the ethics of long-term thinking.

If colonial writing robbed Africa of its “spirit”—as the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’O suggested—what do we make of that other Western, technological intervention: the sound recorder? Around 1900, a series of German travelers undertook their own kind of “language” invasion consistent with Africa’s broader, colonial occupation. Armed with phonographs, they sought to capture what was commonly…

Sir David Chipperfield talks with Berlin architect Jason Danziger about sustainable building, planning, and social architecture.

Sir David Chipperfield discusses his nonprofit Fundación RIA, in Galicia, northwestern Spain.

The president of The Met, Daniel Weiss, talks about the public role of the museum.

Literary theorist Emily Apter unravels the untranslatability of norms and prohibitions across cultural lines.

Writer Anne Finger on the Nazi uses of disability.