Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” when the troubled Prince stages a play to catch a murderer. The underlying point of the play-in-the-play is that drama is an incredibly powerful force for storytelling and much else.

With its unlimited natural resources and huge agricultural potential capacity, the Democratic Republic of Congo should be a paradise—but unfortunately, it’s not. Instead, it’s been wracked by war, bad government, corruption, tribal and ethnic enmities, neighbors who are serially tempted to intervene, and Great Powers who seem to think that it's time for a second age of colonialism.  

The brutal Hamas attacks on October 7th, 2023 kickstarted a new cycle of widespread death and destruction that continues today. Countless lives lost, shattered, or irrevocably altered. Of course, mostly Palestinian, but also Israeli. Even Donald Trump is right about some things, as when he says, "It's impossible to imagine how life can go on under such circumstances."

Donald Trump doesn’t like the European Union and he’s not afraid to tell people. “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States.” “The EU treats us very, very unfairly, very badly,” "They put tariffs on things that we want to do … We have some very big complaints with the EU.” His answer, of course, is tariffs, “taking back” American companies, and ignoring Europe as he reaches out directly to Moscow without bothering to consult America’s allies.

Winston Churchill is alleged to have written that "A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.” Thus, it should be no surprise that at a time when clear majorities of people in most democracies don’t trust their governments or their politicians, they also don’t trust their media or the journalists that produce it. Literally, you can’t have one without the other—and today most of us have too little of both.

This episode was originally published on December 5, 2024.

Donald Trump has been president for five weeks now. In light of the blizzard of executive orders, funding and hiring cuts, endless nominations and appointments, and above all the nonstop controversial policy declarations on every imaginable topic (and some of which literally are unimaginable), it seems like months or even years.

We live in an increasingly complex technology-driven world. How we learn, how we create, how we make and grow things, how we interact with each other is being transformed by new technologies that themselves are rapidly evolving. In a perfect world, this technological transformation would lift all boats, make people smarter, healthier, more prosperous, maybe even wiser and more human. 

What happens in the Amazon is of planetary consequence. Its rainforests influence weather and rainfall around the world. Its rivers account for 1/4 of the available fresh water on earth. Its drainage basin is more than twice as large as that of the Congo River in Africa, which is the world's second-biggest. It harbors an estimated 10% of the planet's known lifeforms.

This episode was originally published on December 11, 2024.

We live in a violent and complicated world. Wars, big and small, on every continent; mass migrations, often targeted for abuse by criminals as well as by governments who don't want the migrants; spreading cartel violence; increasingly disastrous consequences of climate change; pandemics and epidemics.  

So much for the Age of Aquarius and the End of History!

If there is any good news in this litany of man's inhumanity to man, it's that most of us have not yet been inured to the brutality to which we are constantly exposed. We can still be appalled, angered, outraged—and we should be.

In large part, that's a tribute to the journalists who report the stories. The good ones don’t aim to shock, but to compel their audiences to reflect on the complexities, of the world as it actually exists.

Fabio Bucciarelli is that kind of journalist. He is an amazing freelance photographer and an even better storyteller, whose beat is some of the most dangerous places on Earth. Listen as he discusses what drives a world-class photojournalist to keep returning to the front lines in a conflicted world.

When leaders fail, democracy fails—and too many leaders in too many places are failing. That’s exactly why the Tällberg Foundation has sought out and honored great global leaders over the past decade. Leaders who are innovative, courageous, dynamic, with global worldviews, and whose leadership is rooted in universal values.

The three winners of the 2024 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize recently came together at a seminar on leadership at the Collegio Cairoli, University of Pavia in Italy. Kristian Olson (medical innovator and educator developing global healthcare solutions), María Teresa Ronderos (champion of press freedom and collaborative journalism across the Americas), and Fernando Trujillo (marine biologist and conservationist working to protect Amazonian ecosystems) discussed how they evolved as leaders, learned from failure, and imagine their future challenges.

Listen to how successful leaders cope with some of the great issues confronting our societies today. Then tell us what you think.

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