Carnegie Council Video Podcast

Northwestern's Garry Wills says that he was surprised to learn that Islam is a much more "inclusive" religion than Judaism or Christianity.

Republican politician Bob Inglis used to think that climate change was nonsense; but his son--and science--changed his mind. Today he advocates letting market forces do their work. "The thing to do is to make it apparent in the marketplace what the costs of energy are, and eliminate all the subsidies, and have a level playing field and a strong competition. If you do that, we can fix climate change. That is what needs to be done."

To mark Carnegie Council's Centennial, Michael Ignatieff and team set out to discover what moral values people hold in common across nations. What he found was that while universal human rights may be the language of states and liberal elites, what resonate with most people are "ordinary virtues" practiced on a person-to-person basis, such as tolerance and forgiveness. He concludes that liberals most focus on strengthening these ordinary virtues.

"Democrats/liberals need to understand how we lost our grip on the American imagination. Why is it that we are unable to project an image of the kind of country that we want to build together, a vision that would draw people together?" Mark Lilla blames identity politics and argues that the U.S. case offers a window on the crisis of democratic citizenship worldwide.

Jonathan Sanders, former Moscow correspondent for CBS News, describes a surprising picture of Russian media, saying that alternate voices to Putin are there if people want them.

As big data and artificial intelligence become commonplace, Microsoft Research’s danah boyd knows that we must ask tough questions about the ethics of these new technologies. In this clip, boyd compares the proliferation of algorithms and machine learning to the emergence of nuclear energy decades ago, which gives her hope that we will find viable governance structures for nation-states and corporations as they use these new tools. But she also knows that we are only seeing the beginning of how this technology will scale and how humans will be able to manipulate it.

"We need to face the fact that Turkey under Erdoğan has become a rogue regime," declares Columbia's David L. Phillips. It's a corrupt, repressive, Islamist dictatorship. The U.S. should no longer regard it as an ally, but as a strategic adversary.

Entrepreneur Sam Kass talks about his experiences as chef and senior policy nutrition advisor in the Obama White House, including initiatives to improve schoolchildren's health. He also discusses the links between climate change and food.

How do we analyze vast swaths of data and who decides what to collect? For example, big data may help us cure cancer, but the choice of data collected for police work or hiring may have built-in biases, explains danah boyd. "All the technology is trying to do is say, 'What can we find of good qualities in the past and try to amplify them in the future?' It's always trying to amplify the past. So when the past is flawed, it will amplify that."

Major changes must be made if U.S. nuclear war plans are to conform to the principles of just war doctrine and the law of armed conflict, declares Stanford University's Scott Sagan. He proposes a new doctrine: "the nuclear necessity principle." In sum, the U.S. will not use nuclear weapons against any target that could be reliably destroyed by conventional means.