The Gray Area with Sean Illing20 Huhti 2018

Special episode: The Syrian conflict, explained by a UN diplomat who saw it start

Many of you will remember the interview I did with Grant Gordon, who works on humanitarian policy innovation at the International Rescue Committee. That conversation received a huge response — some of you even wrote in to say it had changed your career path and you were now reorienting towards humanitarian work and crisis response. Now, Vox Media, in partnership with the IRC, is launching Displaced, a podcast about the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises and the people whose lives they upend. Each week, Grant, alongside his co-host, IRC chief innovation officer Ravi Gurumurthy, bring on a guest to dig into the world’s toughest problems — both to understand them and to think through how to solve them. Today, the world’s most destabilizing crisis is the civil war in Syria — it’s led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of millions more, a refugee crisis that has undermined the European Union and brought America and Russia perilously close to armed conflict. In this episode, Grant and Ravi interview Stephen Hickey, who served as UK deputy ambassador to Damascus in 2010, and was ejected by the Assad regime as its response to the protests became more vicious. So he was in Syria as this began, and his perspective is crucial to understanding where it’s gone and why it’s been so hard to solve. If you like this episode, you can subscribe to Displaced wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(765)

Fareed Zakaria on our revolutionary moment

Is it possible that we are living through one of the most revolutionary periods in human history? CNN’s Fareed Zakaria believes that we are and argues that the convergence of AI and the global backlas...

15 Huhti 202445min

Life is hard. Can philosophy help?

Philosophy may seem like a theoretical or abstract discipline in which unanswerable questions are debated to the point of tedium. But MIT professor Kieran Setiya believes that philosophical inquiry ha...

8 Huhti 202451min

The American dream is a pyramid scheme

Jane Marie is an expert in American bullshit. Her podcast The Dream explores life coaching, wellness, marketing, and other fraudulent industries and exposes their exploitative practices. Her book, Sel...

1 Huhti 202446min

The chaplain who doesn't believe in God

As a non-believer, Devin Moss never thought he would become a chaplain or a spiritual adviser, much less one who counsels hospital patients with terminal illnesses and inmates on death row. Devin join...

25 Maalis 202448min

Can a friend be our most significant other?

Journalist Rhaina Cohen believes that modern culture undervalues friendships and discusses the ways in which deep friendships are distinct from but no less meaningful than romantic partnerships. Gue...

18 Maalis 202450min

The power of climate fiction

Stephen Markley’s novel, “The Deluge,” is an ambitious and terrifyingly realistic look at our collective future on a warming planet. He joins Sean to talk about the 10-year process of writing the book...

11 Maalis 202447min

The denial of death

It’s been 50 years since Ernest Becker’s breakthrough book The Denial of Death was first published, and its thesis has become more relevant than ever. Filmmaker Jef Sewell is the co-creator of a new d...

4 Maalis 202445min

A brief history of extinction panics

Silicon Valley is in the middle of an AI frenzy, and many of its leaders believe this technology could eventually result in human extinction. Tyler Austin Harper breaks down the most outlandish predic...

26 Helmi 202450min