The war in Ukraine and the global response to Russia's invasion are dominating the news. But missing in much of the coverage is a sense of the country and its people. In this historic moment, we hear a riveting account of the country's recent political awakening and why Ukrainians are prepared to resist and fight.

In the past century, Ukraine suffered massively during two world wars, Nazi occupation, famine, and the Chernobyl disaster. Eight years ago, during the "Revolution of Dignity", Ukranians stood up against corruption, brutality, and Russian dominance. A new democracy and civic bond were formed. The country profoundly changed.

"Ukranians are fighting for all of us," says our guest, Yale University historian Marci Shore, the author of “The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.” She is a scholar of Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet era. 

"I'm terrified for my friends," Marci tells us. "The Ukrainians will not give up... I'm desperately hopeful that as difficult as the odds are, they are going to prevail."

Recommendations for further reading about the war and today's Ukraine: Yarolav Trofimo, the Wall Street Journal’s Chief foreign correspondent, now in Kiev. Phil Stewart of Reuters and his newsfeed on Twitter, coverage from CNN's Clarissa Ward, Anderson Cooper, and Alex Marquardt in Ukraine. Background and perspective in The Economist.

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The invasion of Ukraine is a shocking reminder of what's at stake for democracies around the world. This moment is a stunning reminder of the vital importance of what we so often take for granted— personal freedoms and the rule of law. Despite well-advertised flaws, our constitutional system of governance is infinitely preferable to dictatorships or thuggish autocracies. 

In this episode, we share a conversation that touches on the relationship between voters and those who represent them, and what is meant by "representative democracy". The interview is shared with us by our friends at the "Democracy Paradox" podcast.

Lisa Disch, author of the book, “Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy” is this week’s guest. She is a professor of political science at the University of Michigan and an elected member of the Ann Arbor City Council. She is a committed member of the Democratic Party, but her views and research should be of interest to listeners from across the political spectrum.

Lisa makes a spirited defense of multi-party representative democracy as an engine for change and progress. Justin Kempf asks the questions in this interview. His podcast, “Democracy Paradox” and ours are members of the Democracy Group network, where you can hear challenging, fascinating, and sometimes difficult ideas about democracy and governance.

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Partisan gerrymandering— where one party gains an unfair advantage by redrawing political maps to favor its candidates— is unpopular with voters, but widespread in many states. We examine why this process devalues democracy, and how data science is being used across the country to expose many of the most egregious examples, and help voters advocate for fair and transparent redistricting. 

Every decade, legislators across the country come up with maps for state and congressional districts. The latest round of changes, due to be finished well before primaries are held before the 2022 midterm elections in November, is facing widespread criticism. Redistricting reformers also see strong ties between partisan and racial bias.

Our guest in this episode shows citizens how they can fight back against local examples of gerrymandering by both Democrats and Republicans. Professor Sam Wang oversees the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which runs an informative website that helps voters in every state decide if they live in an unfairly drawn legislative or Congressional District.

"A sense of fairness is a fundamental principle of our democracy," Professor Wang tells us. But "these fundamental principles are hard to keep sight of when a lot of the ways we talk about democracy have started to break down a bit." 

Additional listener resources on political reform: Dave's Redistricting App, and RepresentUs. Daily news coverage of democracy reform at The Fulcrum.

Richard's recommendation this week: Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The book, first published in 1605, is often called the first modern novel.

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Best-selling author Daniel Pink admits he's pedaling against the wind. His new book, "The Power of Regret" takes on the longstanding and deeply ingrained doctrine that paying attention to our regrets is foolish. In this episode, we ask him why this notion is wrong.

"No regrets" is the name or theme of countless books and popular songs. Bob Dylan, Angelina Jolie, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg all advised us to live without regrets. 

"We think that it's courageous to say I have no regrets, but it's not," Pink tells us. "What's courageous is staring your regrets in the eye, confronting them, and doing something about them".

Almost everybody has regrets. And if we acknowledge them in fresh and imaginative ways, we can enlist our regrets to make smarter decisions, perform better at work and school, and deepen our sense of meaning and purpose. In our solutions podcast, we hear that examining what we regret the most helps us understand what we value the most.

Pink draws on research in psychology, neuroscience, economics, and biology to challenge widely-held assumptions about emotions and behavior. He also questioned people about their regrets and conducted his own World Regret Survey, which has collected regrets from more than 16,000 people in 105 countries.

Recommendation: Jim often listens to the podcast, "Blocked and Reported", hosted by journalists Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal.

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Two years of coronavirus have made the growing loneliness crisis even worse— with greater social isolation causing personal pain and mental and physical illnesses.

"Even before the global pandemic introduced us to terms like social distancing, loneliness was becoming the defining condition of the twenty-first century. But it's also one we have the power to reverse," says our podcast guest, economist Noreena Hertz. 

Numerous surveys have found that reported cases of loneliness have jumped in recent decades. More than three-in-five Americans told a 2020 poll, conducted before the pandemic, that they felt left out, poorly understood, and lacking in companionship. 

Noreena Hertz is the author of "The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World Pulling Apart." Her book is a personal and deeply-researched investigation into the roots of the loneliness epidemic and what we can do to come together. 

In our interview, we discuss the importance of the workplace in enhancing community, the need to reinvigorate our neighborhoods, and how governments and private enterprises can react to the increase in loneliness and alienation. We also learn more about the link between loneliness and the rise of right-wing populism.

In many different ways, the social fabric of our community is being pulled apart, causing an increase in polarization and a loss of confidence in democracy and civil institutions. Technology, including social media, migration, a radical reorganization of many workplaces, and the transactional nature of commerce have also led to a broader sense of isolation. We discuss solutions in this episode.

Recommendation: Richard and Jim use Wikipedia, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Wiki co-founder, Jimmy Wales, is the guest on a recent episode of "the Economist Asks" podcast, hosted by Anne McElvoy.

Note: This episode was first published in January 2021.

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Across the board— from voter access to questions of race and gender, and views of the economy— the gap between Republicans and Democrats has grown wider in recent years. According to recent polling, a rising share of Americans say that having political conversations with those they disagree with is “stressful and frustrating”.

Political polarization and the recent actions of party leaders have prevented compromise and resolution of critical problems.

We discuss five personal ways to reduce polarization with our guest, Kamy Akhavan, Director of the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California, and former CEO of the well-known non-partisan site procon.org 

"In today's political climate we don't respect the other side: We don't care what they have to say," says Kamy. "Our immediate reaction goes to defense. It is 'stop that side'".

5 personal tips to depolarize:

1. Listen to understand not to judge.

2. Commit to speak with and learn from others you disagree with.

3. Seek Opposing Views. Is your sense of what the other side is saying a mere characterization of what they say?

4. Interpret Generously. Don't assume that those with different ideological and cultural views are bad people. 

5. Superordinate. Instead of pursuing common ground, recognize our underlying shared values. Seek out what you have in common with your workers, colleagues, and—yes— political opponents.

In this episode, Kamy also shares his personal experience as an immigrant and a bridge builder.

Recommendation: Jim is reading the science fiction novel, "Far From the Light of Heaven", by Tade Thompson.

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What is the point of an education? Is it to learn skills that will help you get ahead in the workplace, or is it to acquire knowledge and to think more deeply about your place in the world?

In this episode we hear from an educator who thinks that the great books— Plato, Aquinas, Shakespeare for example— aren’t just for a few well-off students at elite colleges, but for everybody. And he says encountering these thinkers when he was a poor immigrant teenager from the Dominican Republic literally changed his life.

Roosevelt Montás is senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. He is director of the Center for American Studies Freedom and Citizenship Program, which introduces low-income high school students to primary texts in moral and political thought, as well as seminars in American Studies including “Freedom and Citizenship in the United States.” From 2008 to 2018, he was director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum. 

"There is a prevailing cultural attitude that liberal education— the study of literature and philosophy — is appropriate only to the elite," Roosevelt tells us. "That is a really pernicious idea." He argues that the students who benefit the most from the foundational wisdom in the "great books" come from poor and marginalized backgrounds.

But liberal education is under assault today in academia. We find out why.

Recommendation: Richard is watching the Anglo-Japanese Netflix TV series, "Giri / Haji", — duty/shame in Japanese— a thriller about a Tokyo detective scouring the London underworld to find his allegedly deceased brother. The series was filmed in Tokyo and London.

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Earth's global average temperature in 2021 was the sixth warmest on record, according to two new reports issued this week by U.S. Government agencies. Scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies report that collectively the past eight years were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880. The research adds to overwhelming evidence of climate change.

This episode looks at the role played by carbon-free nuclear power in providing one solution to the growing climate crisis. Our guest, British environmental activist and science communicator, Zion Lights, tells us whyt she changed her mind about nuclear safety and reliability. After playing a leading role with Extinction Rebellion UK, Zion left the group and founded Emergency Reactor, which calls on fellow activists to "stop spreading misinformation and fear. Follow the science about nuclear energy." 

"People are already worried and scared about climate change. Let's look at solutions," she tells us.

This show is the latest in a series of "How Do We Fix It?" episodes about the need to come up with pragmatic, workable solutions that limit the damage to our warming planet. 

Recommendation: Richard has spent part of the past year reading literary classics, including the three books of Dante's "Divine Comedy", Virgil's "The Aeneid", and The Iliad and Odyssey by Homer. "My recommendation is to challenge yourself. This may lead you to change your mind about something that's important to how you see the world," says Richard.

Note: Zion Lights is an amateur astronomer. Her Tedx talk, "Don't Forget to Look Up" is full of curiosity and wonder about stargazing and the universe. 

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Our first episode of 2022 is all about a constructive response to the calamitous events of one year ago: The January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol.

On January 5th, a coalition of organizations, led by Ideos Institute, will host the first annual National Day of Dialogue. We discuss this invitation to all Americans to push back against deep divides. We also explore the need for hard talk and getting into our discomfort zones. 

“As a nation, we have largely lost our ability to have hard conversations without judgment, animus, or fear,” says our guest, Ideos President & CEO, Christy Vines. "Deep down we all want to have these kinds of moments with somebody we would disagree with and who we often see as the enemy... Not enough people are getting those opportunities to see the human behind the positions they hold." 

The National Day of Dialogue is a series of virtual and live events across the country, and the premiere of a documentary movie "Dialogue Lab: America", which includes a series of deep, and sometimes very emotional conversations among individuals from different political and religious beliefs. 

The event is part of a broader bridging movement that we’re part of on "How Do We Fix It?", as we respond to the deep divides that hold us back and threaten our democracy.

Recommendation: "Beginner's Mind", 90-minutes of music and audio narration by acclaimed cellist Yo Yo Ma. He speaks of his career and personal story as an immigrant, and invites us “to strip away preconceptions and reclaim a beginner's mind...one open to new questions, explorations, and unexpected answers.” Available free on Audible.

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The Forever Pandemic, Omicron, Build Back Better, Biden, Putin, China, What's Trump got up his sleeve? The media gave these stories ad nauseum coverage in 2021, often marching in lockstep and suffering from a painful lack of imagination about what should be the big news of the day.

But what about underreported stories: The important news that most of us missed?

Richard and Jim share their gripes, observations, hopes and insights about the media, science, the environment and global affairs. Our co-hosts are not only solutions journalists with decades of reporting experience, they're also voracious readers and observers of current events.

In this episode, we learn how COVID has super-charged the development of promising new mRNA vaccines against malaria, lyme disease and other challenging illnesses, the hidden social upsides of remote working on family life, the broad benefits of the private space flight boom, and the hard truths of global energy production. We also examine why curiosity, intellectual humility and overcoming our negativity bias are all needed to gain a better understanding of the world.

We explore why people have such a hard time accepting progress that is being made in many fields."A lot of times I think it is because the media is afraid that if they mention good news then people will stop the fight for further change," says Jim. "But if you can emphasize the good sometimes that shows these problems can be solved."

Jim and Richard's recommended news sources: Apart from reading The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other mainstream newspapers, Richard recommends The Economist, GZero Newsletter on global affairs, and the Migration Policy Institute. Jim urges listeners to check out City Journal and eco-modernist reports from The Breakthrough Institute. His other sources include a range of journalists on Substack and Twitter. 

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