In our Epicenter podcast, we bring together scholars and experienced practitioners from different disciplines to guide us through pressing global topics, to boil down the issues, to explain the research and give valuable context. The goal is to give listeners a deeper understanding of a topic to expand their everyday thinking about the world inside and outside their own borders.
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Sven Beckert, a history professor at Harvard, has written an epic book about the history of capitalism over roughly a millenium: it’s called Capitalism: A Global History. Beckert believes the only way to understand one’s place in the world is through...
When a war ends, the work of mending a society begins. Groups who were sworn enemies for decades, even generations, must find ways to live together in peace. The process of reconciliation takes a long time, and involves all levels of society: civilians...
We don’t think about commodities very much. They’re all around us: cotton, sugar, oil, gas, chickens, cattle, and so many other things we take for granted. But a closer look at the history of commodities tells a revealing story about the expansion of...
One room. One locked-down camera. One roll of film. A group of famous directors from the 1960s took the challenge: they would make a short film with these parameters plus one more—their dialogue must include the sentence “I Miss Sonia Henie.” The result...
Massachusetts has long been a welcoming state to immigrants and migrant families. In the summer of 2023, its one-of-a-kind “right to shelter” law was put to the test when emergency shelters reached capacity. It was called a humanitarian crisis, and images...
People aged sixty-five and older make up the fastest growing population around the world, posing unique challenges to societies. A Harvard initiative called Social Technology for Global Aging Research is founded on the belief that there’s a great...
When the Wagner mercenary group staged a near coup in Moscow in June, it was seen as the greatest challenge to Vladimir Putin’s regime in decades. Though it didn’t come to fruition, it nevertheless exposed some of the fissures in Putin’s ironclad control...
The presidential election in Turkey this spring is shaping up to be the most consequential in decades. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has led the country for twenty years, is facing the staunchest opposition in his career in the form of an unprecedented...
Green technology has come a long way, to the extent that it can, in theory, be scaled up to solve the world’s energy problems. If this is true, then why does the US lag so far behind in transitioning away from fossil fuels? This episode addresses the...
There’s a shadow over World Cup Soccer this year, and it’s become impossible to separate the sports from the politics. Host country Qatar gained notoriety for bribes, exploitation of workers, and antigay laws. In this episode, a group of athletes and...
Lebanon has been called many different things: a gem of the Middle East, a failed state, a geopolitical Gordian knot (or nightmare). Its financial system has recently collapsed, people cannot find basic services, and residents are still recovering from...
Pulling out of Afghanistan was the top foreign policy event of 2021. Perhaps overlooked in the collective relief to be done with this twenty-year war is the fact that the US had to negotiate with terrorists to get there. In fact, it ceded an entire...
