Thomas Friedman on Thriving in the Age of Acceleration

What’s all this nonsense about sending the Parthenon Marbles back to Greece? If Lord Elgin hadn’t rescued them from the Parthenon in Athens and presented them to the British Museum almost 200 years ago, these exquisite sculptures – the finest embodiment of the classical ideal of beauty and harmony – would have been lost to the ravages of pollution and time. So we have every right to keep them: indeed, returning them would set a dangerous precedent, setting off a clamour for every Egyptian mummy and Grecian urn to be wrenched from the world’s museums and sent back to its country of origin. It is great institutions like the British Museum that have established such artefacts as items of world significance: more people see the Marbles in the BM than visit Athens every year. Why send them back to relative obscurity? But aren’t such arguments a little too imperialistic? All this talk of visitor numbers and dangerous precedents – doesn’t it just sound like an excuse for Britain to hold on to dubiously acquired... — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

16 Joulu 201348min

To say “The West has failed Syria” tempts us into the dangerous belief that had we only got stuck into this conflict from the off, things would now be better. It’s a belief, as recent history shows, we badly need to resist. So speaks the voice of caution. But are we really saying that the best the big powers can do is just sit on the sidelines and watch Syria destroy itself? In this debate from October 2013, former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown and City University's Professor of Middle East Policy Studies Rosemary Hollis, take on NYT columnist Roger Cohen and former British Ambassador to the US Nigel Sheinwald. — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

16 Joulu 20131h 30min

Can anything good really be said of an institution that has such a warped attitude to sex that it tries to stop the world from wearing a condom, is bitterly opposed to gays leading a fulfilled life and regards women as unworthy of officiating in its rituals? But who you gonna call when it comes to finding a good school for your children, when it comes to standing up for the oppressed, when it comes to giving material and spiritual succour to the wretched of the earth? In 2009 Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens locked horns with Anne Widdecombe and John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, over whether or not the Catholic Church was a force for good. Today the debate has been watched more times online than any other Intelligence Squared event. We're thrilled to make the audio available to all as part of our Advent podcast. — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

13 Joulu 201348min

Daniel Dennett is one of the world’s most original and provocative thinkers. A philosopher and cognitive scientist, he is known as one of the ‘Four Horseman of New Atheism’ along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens. On May 22nd he came to Intelligence Squared to share the insights he has acquired over his 40-year career into the nature of how we think, decide and act. Dennett revealed his favourite thinking tools, or ‘intuition pumps’, that he and others have developed for addressing life’s most fundamental questions. As well as taking a fresh look at familiar moves – Occam’s Razor, reductio ad absurdum – he discussed new cognitive solutions designed for the most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, consciousness and free will. By acquiring these tools and learning to use them wisely, we can all aspire to better understand the world around us and our place in it. — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

12 Joulu 20131h 25min

Thomas Friedman: A manifesto for rescuing America Thomas L. Friedman is an internationally renowned author, reporter, and columnist – the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes and the author of six bestselling books, and writes a twice-weekly column for The New York Times. He's also one of the most brilliant orators to have graced the Intelligence Squared stage. In this talk from June 2012 he discusses his latest book 'That Used to be Us: What Went Wrong with America and How it Can Come Back' where he and co-author Michael Mandelbaum present an urgent manifesto for the America's renewal and address the major challenges it faces today. — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

11 Joulu 20131h 2min

Which side were you on? The Jets or the Sharks? The Capulets or the Montagues? The Greeks or the Trojans? Antony or Caesar? William or Harold? And so the list goes on ... Indeed, maybe the whole of human history is the story of group-making and group-breaking. The passions of loyalty and love for the in-group are matched by the de-humanising indignation and hatred for the out-group. But what's actually going on in the chemical soup of the brain when Agamemnon gathers his heros-to-be and sets sail after Helen? Will peering into that soup - as neuroscientist David Eagleman is now doing - actually give peace a chance? Maybe utopia can come out of the lab. Will a scientific understanding of love and hate deliver social programmes that undermine the nastiness without sacrificing the good? — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

11 Joulu 20131h 19min

American author Naomi Wolf made her name with The Beauty Myth, a book that exposed the tyranny of the ideal of female beauty. Now she’s back with a no less dramatic or controversial new work. In Vagina: A New Biography Wolf makes the case that the vagina is much more than a sex organ – it is integral to female well-being, and a catalyst to female creativity, confidence and identity. In this talk for Intelligence Squared she explained how the latest neuroscience reveals fascinating new discoveries about the vagina and female wellbeing, and discussed sexual relationships, pornography, history and literature. She showed how men can learn more about ‘what women really need’, and how women can experience themselves in a new way. — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

10 Joulu 20131h 36min

In an age of custom-fabricated, do-it-yourself product design and creation, the collective potential of a million garage tinkerers and enthusiasts is about to be unleashed... Check out today's Advent podcast where Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson takes you to the front lines of a new industrial revolution as today’s entrepreneurs, using open source design and 3-D printing, bring manufacturing to the desktop. — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

10 Joulu 20131h 24min