New Thinking for a New World - a Tallberg Foundation Podcast

Tom O’Donnell, former key player in Democratic Party, explores the growing confrontation between the President and the Congress.

Normally, that's a simple question with a simple answer: of course, the Congress matters; after all, its powers are enthroned in the American Constitution. However, as the Trump presidency unfolds, nothing is simple anymore. President Trump obviously has an expansive view of presidential power and is clearly intent on exercising it at the expense of the Congress and of the courts. 

So does Congress matter, is becoming a huge question, potentially the stuff of constitutional crisis.

Tom...

Dr. Kris Olson discusses how innovative, human-centered design is transforming global healthcare.

Healthcare is intensely personal. Even when national statistics show improvement—which has been the case for most countries over recent decades—what matters is whether my baby in rural Uganda is having trouble breathing or whether my aging father in New York who went into the hospital with a broken hip will now die from the MERS he contracted there or whether why my wife in Buenos Aries can access the drugs she needs to survive cancer. 

In our hi-tech age, it seems like much of wh...

Filmmakers Charlotte Eagar and William Stirling explore how theater heals and transforms.

Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” when the troubled Prince stages a play to catch a murderer. The underlying point of the play-in-the-play is that drama is an incredibly powerful force for storytelling and much else.

Fast forward to the 21st century for an amazing example of that Shakespearean wisdom. Two incredibly creative British filmmakers created something called The Trojan Women Project to use drama to help refugees from wars in the Middle East and...

Journalist and author Michela Wrong unpacks the stakes of Congo’s latest crisis—and why it matters beyond the region.

With its unlimited natural resources and huge agricultural potential capacity, the Democratic Republic of Congo should be a paradise—but unfortunately, it’s not. Instead, it’s been wracked by war, bad government, corruption, tribal and ethnic enmities, neighbors who are serially tempted to intervene, and Great Powers who seem to think that it's time for a second age of colonialism.  

Recently, well-armed militias, accompanied by the Rwandan military, have seized key provinces in the country's mineral-rich east. They'r...

Journalist Francesca Borri and activist Gershon Baskin examine the human reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the possibility of peace.

The brutal Hamas attacks on October 7th, 2023 kickstarted a new cycle of widespread death and destruction that continues today. Countless lives lost, shattered, or irrevocably altered. Of course, mostly Palestinian, but also Israeli. Even Donald Trump is right about some things, as when he says, "It's impossible to imagine how life can go on under such circumstances."

Indeed, it's easier to imagine how roads or houses or markets can be rebuilt than how people, Palestinians as well...

Ana Palacio and Vygaudas Usackas discuss what needs to be done to put Europe on a better track.

Donald Trump doesn’t like the European Union and he’s not afraid to tell people. “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States.” “The EU treats us very, very unfairly, very badly,” "They put tariffs on things that we want to do … We have some very big complaints with the EU.” His answer, of course, is tariffs, “taking back” American companies, and ignoring Europe as he reaches out directly to Moscow without bothering to consult America’s allies.

...

2024 Prize winner María Teresa Ronderos advocates for honest, smart journalism to fight misinformation and uphold democracy in the digital age.

Winston Churchill is alleged to have written that "A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.” Thus, it should be no surprise that at a time when clear majorities of people in most democracies don’t trust their governments or their politicians, they also don’t trust their media or the journalists that produce it. Literally, you can’t have one without the other—and...

Aziz Huq and Scott Miller discuss the unprecedented pace and impact of Trump’s first five weeks in office

Donald Trump has been president for five weeks now. In light of the blizzard of executive orders, funding and hiring cuts, endless nominations and appointments, and above all the nonstop controversial policy declarations on every imaginable topic (and some of which literally are unimaginable), it seems like months or even years.

It's already clear that President Trump intends to change, not only how Washington and the United States work, but how the whole world works.

No pr...

Andreas Schleicher, OECD Education and Skills Director, shares insights from the Survey of Adult Skills, revealing its good, bad, and ugly.

We live in an increasingly complex technology-driven world. How we learn, how we create, how we make and grow things, how we interact with each other is being transformed by new technologies that themselves are rapidly evolving. In a perfect world, this technological transformation would lift all boats, make people smarter, healthier, more prosperous, maybe even wiser and more human. 

This, obviously, is not that perfect world—in part because the unpleasant fact is that too man...

Fernando Trujillo discusses his work to protect the Amazon’s freshwater basin during unprecedented drought and dangerously low river levels.

What happens in the Amazon is of planetary consequence. Its rainforests influence weather and rainfall around the world. Its rivers account for 1/4 of the available fresh water on earth. Its drainage basin is more than twice as large as that of the Congo River in Africa, which is the world's second-biggest. It harbors an estimated 10% of the planet's known lifeforms.

Our guest this week on New Thinking for a New World is Fernando Trujillo, Colombian marine biologist, 2024 Tä...