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The 2020 election is finally over in the United States, but the polarization of the country continues to grow. We used to be a nation that read the same papers and watched the same evening news programs; now many of us have completely separate sources of information, and news outlets have strayed far from the mass media that existed decades ago. To help us understand the radically remade world of news, we’re joined by Meg Heckman, who worked in local news for over a decade as a reporter and digital editor, and who is now an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern and the author of Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party.

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We have long been told that this will be the Chinese century, as the most populous nation in the world achieves economic dominance and as it extends its political influence across the globe. But that still emerging future will also be an extension of China’s complex past, when other nations arrived on its shores with colonialism, capitalism, and once-distant cultures. On this episode, Jonathan Kaufman discusses his new book, The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China. Professor Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, and Director of the Northeastern University School of Journalism.

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This year, as the global pandemic rapidly spread, President Trump took the extraordinary step of withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. There was a fierce backlash to this development in medical and policy circles, both within the U.S. and internationally. But beyond doctors and healthcare advocates, few know exactly what the World Health Organization does, and what its role is during crises like the coronavirus. Summer Marion, a research fellow at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and a PhD candidate in political science at Northeastern University, helps us understand the role of the World Health Organization in relation to global health.

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