What student debt says about democratic institutions
Americans owe more than $1.5 trillion in student debt and some members of the Millennial and Gen Z wonder whether they'll ever pay off their loans. Student loans began as a well-intended government pr...
25 Apr 202241min
Combating disinformation at home and abroad
Peter Pomerantsev visited Penn State at the end of March, when he was just back from a trip to Ukraine. We discuss what he saw there, as well as how American media is covering the war. We also talk ab...
18 Apr 202243min
Jon Meacham on creating a more perfect union
Jon Meacham is one of America's leading thinkers on how the country's political history can inform the present. He recently visited Penn State to present a lecture on his 2018 book The Soul of America...
11 Apr 202237min
The roots of radical partisanship
Political violence is rising in the United States, with Republicans and Democrats divided along racial and ethnic lines that spurred massive bloodshed and democratic collapse earlier in the nation’s h...
4 Apr 202246min
How democracies can win the war on reality [rebroadcast]
Peter Pomerantsev will visit Penn State March 31 and April 1 to discus Ukraine, Russian misinformation, and more. To get ready for his visit, we're rebroadcasting our conversation with him from May 20...
28 Mar 202240min
Ro Khanna on dignity and democracy
The concept of dignity comes up a lot when we think about the condition of American democracy. Francis Fukuyama wrote about the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment and Chris Bail talked ...
21 Mar 202241min
Russia and Ukraine: How we got here
Was the war in Ukraine inevitable? What is Vladimir Putin trying to achieve? What does the conflict say about Ukraine as a democracy? Those are just a few of the questions Michael Berkman explores thi...
14 Mar 202234min
Defending democracy at home and abroad
Robert Kagan is a foreign policy expert who turned his focus to the United States last fall in a Washington Post column titled "Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here" that became one of the Post's...
7 Mar 202242min
