Fellow Spotlight: Jennifer Allen
Jennifer Allen discusses East and West German plans for surviving possible catastrophe.
Beyond the Lecture: Wang Lu
Composer and pianist Wang Lu was born in the Xi’an, China, the country’s ancient capital. Brought up in a musical family with strong Chinese opera and folk music traditions, her compositions are inspired by both of these forms, and fused…
The Written World: Storytelling from Mesopotamia to the Moon
Stories are much more than entertainment—they shape our world. They have inspired the rise and fall of empires and nations, sparked our understandings of basic political and philosophical concepts, and given rise to religious beliefs. In this talk, Martin Puchner, author…
Populism, Fascism, and the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s
The American Ku Klux Klan is familiar to many: after the Civil War, it formed in the southern states as a masked terrorist group devoted to maintaining white supremacy and ensuring cheap sharecropper labor. But few know about the “second…
Intellectual Property and Inequality in the Information Economy
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…
Beyond the Lecture: Martin Puchner
Literary historian Martin Puchner confronts his family history through a nearly forgotten medieval language.
Iran, Russia, and the Future of EU-US Sanctions Cooperation
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…
Fellow Spotlight: Jared Farmer
Jared Farmer combines the history of trees and the science of longevity to address the ethics of long-term thinking.
Black Music’s Recorded Afterlives
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…
Beyond the Lecture: Sir David Chipperfield
Sir David Chipperfield talks with Berlin architect Jason Danziger about sustainable building, planning, and social architecture.