USA
Justice
Antisemitic incidents are on the rise in the United States, leaving Jewish communities feeling vulnerable — a sentiment both new and sadly familiar. Among the responses is the first ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, released by the White House, advocating a whole-of-society approach because all of us are affected by hate and it takes all of us to fight i...
Over a century ago, Andrew Carnegie wrote the “Gospel of Wealth,” challenging his wealthy peers to be generous with their largesse. Today, in his new book, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker writes that inequality far surpasses that which Carnegie witnessed, and argues that the widening chasm between haves and have-nots demands a new approach to philanthropy.
Hate takes many insidious forms: as a mass shooting targeting a Black community, as an antisemitic remark, as a wave of anti-Asian violence. Intolerance and hate crimes have spiked in recent years, and experts, activists, and community members themselves are working hard not only to quantify the problem but to find actionable solutions. What does it take to stop hate in co...
The Afternoon of Conversation is the Aspen Ideas Festival's pinnacle programming moment. Over 2,000 people gather in the Benedict Music Tent, an open-air venue with acoustics that mimic an amphitheater, to hear from global leaders, community change-makers, journalists, politicians, and more.
In the last decade, the people of democratic societies across the globe have elected autocratic leaders. These populist strongmen have undermined democratic institutions with a disregard for the rule of law, expertise, and the truth. Is their election the symptom of already advanced societal illnesses, or is it the disease itself? In countries where the damage to democracy...
Yuliya Tychtivska is the dynamic executive director of Aspen Institute Kyiv, an Aspen Institute partner organization in Ukraine, founded in 2015. Less a conversation about the war and of strategies and global actions to support a Ukrainian victory, this will be an opportunity to probe the human dimensions of the tragedy. Tychtivska will talk about her experiences, emotion...
As the rest of human activity has been globalized, so has corruption — and to such a degree that it has fueled global inequality, created extremist groups, and converted democratic institutions into autocratic regimes stripping wealth from entire nations. These organized criminals are supported by technology that can anonymize money, by a global criminal-services industry,...
Before signing the $1.2 trillion dollar Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, President Biden put Mitch Landrieu in charge of executing its vision. In this role, the former New Orleans mayor oversees the biggest investment in American infrastructure in generations. With promises of generating millions of high-paying jobs, fixing supply chains, and repairing America’s roa...
Benjamin Franklin famously warned that our government is a republic, if we can keep it. Most Americans don’t follow the highly pitched partisan battles that are waged over the redrawing of electoral districts after each decennial census. Yet, as we head into the 2022 midterm elections, a flurry of court rulings have upended the maps put in place by state legislators, findi...
In its landmark 2002 study, Unequal Treatment, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) stated bluntly that racial and ethnic minorities receive lower-quality health services than white Americans. Two decades after the IOM called out structural racism, the devastating toll remains apparent in the uneven risks associated with COVID, diabetes, asthma, cancer, stroke, and pregnancy. P...
Sometimes the underdog prevails. Acting on principle, with sparse resources and limited support from regulators and legislators, a few determined individuals took on the industry behind the opioid epidemic and found a semblance of justice for those it had harmed. Although Purdue Pharma gained particular notoriety for its deceptive marketing strategies, it did not act alone...
If we just do enough yoga, cleanse with the optimal juice fast, and buy products designed to help us meditate or foster positive thinking, we’ll feel better. That, at least, is what the $650 billion wellness industry wants us to believe. But what’s making us ill, argues Kerri Kelly, author of American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal, can’t be cured by...
Charles Adams, a 20-year Minneapolis police officer, built a powerhouse football program at North High, in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. With a group of cop-coaches, they forged a bond with the community on the way to the state championship. But winning didn’t resolve the conflict of being black and blue, magnified when Adams was called to the front lines in th...
The emotionally charged trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd was a milestone case in a country whose legal system has historically been resistant to convict officers for alleged abuses. What did it take to break the blue wall of silence, the informal code among police officers protecting their own? Is it possible to get a fair trial and an impartial jury w...
Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass learned to read against the odds, succeeded in a harrowing escape from bondage, and went on to bear witness to its evils across the country. By the outbreak of the Civil War, he had become perhaps the most famous orator in the nation — charismatic, eloquent, and a unique combination of fierce critic of his country and radical patriot....
“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner so famously. “It's not even past.” Indeed, the stories we tell ourselves about the past, always seen through one looking glass or another, are as much about the present and the future as they are about eras long gone. But what happens when those stories get things terribly wrong? What are the most dangerous historical inaccu...
If you assume things have quieted down on the US-Mexico border, think again. The chaos and questions that have plagued the region for decades are reaching fever pitch while tens of thousands of lives remain in flux. How did we get here? Where — and how — are the children who were separated from their families? Are the administration’s latest crackdowns making any progress...
How can we overcome our own biases and stop seeing the worst in others? Psychologists and bestselling authors Jennifer Eberhardt and Adam Grant, along with CBS News’ John Dickerson, use cutting-edge research and examples from their own lives to discuss whether there’s hope for our schools and workplaces to bring out the better angels of our nature.
Our culture and policies have revolved around the myth of the "dead-beat dad,” but in many cases, low-income fathers face serious legal, economic, and other systemic obstacles in engaging with their kids as the dads they would like to be. Yet research shows that children with fathers actively engaged in their lives are more likely to perform better in school and meet key d...