Alain Bertaud on Cities, Markets, and People
Markets, Alain Bertaud likes to say, are like gravity: they exist everywhere. But while urban planners are quite good at taking gravity into account, they tend to ignore market forces entirely in thei...
25 Sep 20191h 20min
Samantha Power on Learning How to Make a Difference
A former war correspondent and UN ambassador, Samantha Power has had her share of tough assignments. But writing a memoir about it all is also a daunting prospect. The format itself is a challenge: ho...
11 Sep 20191h 6min
Hollis Robbins on 19th Century Life and Literature
As a graduate student, Hollis Robbins helped Henry Louis Gates, Jr. unravel a mystery about the provenance of a mid-19th century book. Robbins helped date the book by discovering allusions to popular ...
28 Aug 201950min
M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia
What sort of country would compel you to flee it, draw you back ten years later, then force you away yet again after two decades? M. Gessen knows the answer all too well, having dedicated their career...
14 Aug 20191h 8min
Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World
Born to a Ghanaian father and British mother, Kwame Anthony Appiah grew up splitting time between both countries — and lecturing in many more — before eventually settling in America, where he now teac...
31 Jul 20191h 1min
Neal Stephenson on Depictions of Reality
If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he's created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technol...
17 Jul 201954min
Eric Kaufmann on Immigration, Identity, and the Limits of Individualism
Going back and forth between Canada and Japan during his childhood sparked Eric Kaufmann's interest in the question of identity. As a foreigner in an international school, he encountered young individ...
3 Jul 201956min
Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business
Before he became the Adam Smith of Googlenomics, Hal Varian spent decades as an academic economist, writing influential papers, a popular book about the information economy, and several textbooks tha...
19 Jun 201956min
