We spend the hour looking at the environmental impact of the US military. How much does the US military pollute the environment? What is their role in climate change causing green house emissions? The military has taken some measures to reduce its impact on the environment and green gas emissions, but our guests say these measures do little to assuage the military’s bigger effects on climate change. What are these effects and what can be done about them?[ dur: 58mins. ]

For a transcript of this interview, please visit: TheBigQ

• Benjamin Neimark is Senior Lecturer at the University of Lancaster, United Kingdom. He is the author of Speaking Power to ‘Post-Truth’: Critical Political Ecology and the New Authoritarianism and co-author of Hidden carbon costs of the “everywhere war” Logistics, geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot‐print of the US military.
• Oliver Belcher is an Assistant Professor in Human Geography at Durham University, United Kingdom. He is the author of Anatomy of a village razing: Counterinsurgency, violence, and securing the intimate in Afghanistan, and co-author of Hidden carbon costs of the “everywhere war” Logistics, geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot‐print of the US military.
• Neta C. Crawford is Professor of Political Science and Department Chair at Boston University. She is the author of the book Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars and the research paper Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change,and the Costs of War

Produced by the Scholars’ Circle team: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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Is the age of privacy over? We spend the hour on technology, spying and privacy, exploring how privacy, and the lack of it, affects security, democracy and society. What exactly is at stake when we lose our privacy? [ dur: 58 mins. ]

For a transcript of this interview, please visit: TheBigQ

• Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech. She is the author of Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, and co-author of Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest and Values at Play in Digital Games.
• Michael Patrick Lynch is Professor of Philosophy & Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data, True to LIfe: Why Truth Matters and In Praise of Reason.
• Bruce Schneier is Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He is the author of 14 books including the New York Times best-seller Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World, and The Electronic Privacy Papers: Documents on the Battle for Privacy in the Age of Surveillance. His blog is “Schneier on Security.”
• Joshua A.T. Fairfield is William Donald Bain Family Professor of Law at Washington and Lee School of Law. He is the author of Owned: Property, Privacy and the New Digital Serfdom, Privacy as a Public Good , and Smart Contracts, Bitcoin Bots, and Consumer Protection.

Produced by the Scholars’ Circle team: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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First, how is international law changing for human rights and for war? Our guest says we are moving from protecting state security to increasingly protecting individual security. The shifts are influenced by the human rights frame and are reshaping what she calls “humanity’s law.” [dur: 15mins. ]

• Ruti Teitel is Professor of Comparative Law at the New York Law School and Visiting Professor at London School of Economics. She is Chair of Global Law and Justice Colloquium and Founding Co-Director of the Institute for Global Law, Justice and Policy at New York Law School. She is the author of numerous publications including:
  • Humanity’s Law
  • Globalizing Transitional Justice.

Then, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is the most broad sweeping attempt to ban nuclear weapons. Guest host Doug Becker looks at the motivations behind the treaty, its relative importance on nuclear states decisions, and its prospect for eventual adoption.[ dur: 42mins. ]

For a transcript of this interview, please visit: TheBigQ

• Ira Helfand, MD is co-chair of the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR)’s Nuclear Abolition Committee. He is also a member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)’s International Steering Committee. He has co-authored PSR’s “Nuclear Famine: 2 billion at Risk?“
• Wayne Glass is Professor Emeritus in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. He is the former Senior Defense Policy Advisor to Senator Jeff Bingaman on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Produced by the Scholars’ Circle team: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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First, from broken heart to suicide bomber we explore the various drives that fuel deadly terror. [dur: 17mins. ]

• Ken Ballen, author of Terrorist in Love.

Then, is the transmission of trauma multi-generational? Do the children of survivors of mass atrocities have higher risk of developing psychological disorders? What are the social and behavioral factors that result in the trauma of successive generations? We look at the impact of survivors’ post-trauma adaptational style in their children’s eyes. [ dur: 40mins. ]

For a transcript of this interview, please visit: TheBigQ

• Andrei Novac is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine, School of Medicine, and Founding Director of the Traumatic Stress Program. He is the author of the research papers Traumatic Stress and Human Behavior, Special Treatment Issues in Children of Holocaust Survivors and Free Artistic Expression: A Clinical Exploration of Resiliency and Healing After Trauma.
• Yael Danieli is Director of the Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and their Children. She is the Founding Co-President of the International Network of Holocaust and Genocide Survivors and their Friends, and a Founding Director of The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. She is the author of the pubications International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, International Responses to Traumatic Stress and the research papers Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma: Modeling the What and How of Transmission, and Differing Adaptational Styles in Families of Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust.

Produced by the Scholars’ Circle team: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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Global alarm over COVID-19 also known as Coronavirus . How did it began? How dangerous is it? What needs to be done now to protect public health.[ dur: 22mins. ]

• Paul R. Hunter is Professor of Health Protection at The Norwich School of Medicine at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of Can economic indicators predict infectious disease spread? A cross-country panel analysis of 13 European countries, and Misinformation making a disease outbreak worse: Outcomes compared for influenza, monkeypox and norovirus.

Guest host Sam Smith examines the flourishing of conspiracy theories. What are they? How dangerous are they? [ dur: 35 mins. ]
For a transcript of this interview, please visit: TheBigQ

• Matthew R. X. Dentith has a PhD from the University of Auckland and is an expert in the epistemology of conspiracy theories. He is the author of The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories.
• Patrick Stokes is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University. He is an expert in the ethics of conspiracy theories. He is the author of the book chapters Conspiracy Theory and Perils of Particularism, On some moral costs of conspiracy theory, and his blog article, Why Conspiracy Theories Aren’t Harmless Fun.

Produced by the Scholars’ Circle team: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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We spent the hour looking at the science of tippings and what they mean for our climate and our ecosystems on land and in water today. What causes these types of sudden changes? And how can society be better prepared for such events? We spoke with three scientists whose studies involve tipping points, how they happen and their effects.[ dur: 58mins. ]

• Peter Ward is a Professor of Paleontology and Biology at the Earth and Space Sciences Department of the University of Washington, Seattle.He is the co-author of the best-selling Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, the author of many books including, Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth’s Ancient Atmosphere, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future, and The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? which was listed by the New York Times as one of the “100 most important ideas of 2009.”
• Simon Thrush is Professor of Marine Science and Head of the Institute of Marine Science at the University of Auckalnd in New Zealand, He is the co-author of many publications including, Real world biodiversity-ecosystem functioning: A seafloor perspective, The up-scaling of ecosystem functions in a heterogeneous world, and Altered Sea Ice Thickness and Permanence Affects Benthic Ecosystem Functioning in Coastal Antarctica.
• George Perry is a Professor at the School of Environment at the University of Auckland. He studies the effects of humans on forest ecosystems. He is the co-author of many publications including, Positive Feedbacks to Fire-Driven Deforestation Following Human Colonization of the South Island of New Zealand, Feedbacks and landscape-level vegetation dynamics, and Pyrodiversity is the coupling of biodiversity and fire regimes in food webs.

Produced by the Scholars’ Circle team: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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What’s the role of the US in promoting peace between Israel and Palestinians? What’s the likelihood of its success? Doug Becker hosts. [ dur: 36mins. ]

• Brent Sasley is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas, Arlington. He is the author of the book Politics in Israel: Governing a Complex Society and the Washington Post article The White House Peace Plan Puts Israel’s Concerns First – and Shortchanges Palestinians.
• Fayez Hammad is Lecturer in International Relations and Middle East Studies at The University of Southern California. He is a frequent commentator on Middle East politics.

Sanitation and antibiotics have saved the lives of many, but are they also the culprits behind some of modern diseases? We might have gone overboard in killing our microbes and that may be causing some of today’s epidemics. [ dur 22mins. ]

• Martin I. Blaser is Director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM) at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS). Blaser is also the Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome and Professor of Medicine and Microbiology at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He is the author of Missing Microbes : How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues.

Produced by the Scholars’ Circle team: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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First, the historical roots of the present day political turmoil, divisions, and partisanship in the United States. The fault lines that fractured the United States. [ dur: 38mins. ]

For a transcript of this interview, please visit: TheBigQ

• Julian Zelizer is Professor of History and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of many publications including the books Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism, On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and its Consequences, 1948-2000, and his latest Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.

Then, how does the design of a city and its architecture affect democracy, community, our psychology and public health? [ dur: 20 mins. ]

• Jan Gehl is an Architect and is former Professor and Researcher at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture. His books include Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space, Cities for People and How to Study Public Life.

Produced by the Scholars’ Circle team: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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First, why do states choose to use third parties to intervene in other nation’s civil wars and political conflicts? On today’s show we interview Andrew Mumford on the legality, efficacy, and implications of the waging of proxy warfare. Hosted by Doug Becker. [ dur: 21 mins. ]

• Andrew Mumford is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at The University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author about Proxy Warfare Counterinsurgency Wars and the Anglo-American Alliance.

In December unexpected volcanic eruption in White Island, NZ. killed 21 people, recent Taal volcano erupts in Philippines caused thousands of people to flee the area, from Ecuador warning of pending eruptions. With Climate Change will volcanic eruptions become more frequent? By looking at ice cores, chemistry, size of eruptions, volcanoes buried in glaciers we get insight into this question. Hosted by Maria Armoudian. [ dur: 35 mins. ]

• Jihong Cole-Dai is Professor of Analytical Chemistry at South Dakota State University. He is the co-author of Evidence of Influence of Human Activities and Volcanic Eruptions on Environmental Perchlorate from a 300-Year Greenland Ice Core and Synchronous volcanic eruptions and abrupt climate change ∼17.7 ka plausibly linked by stratospheric ozone depletion
• Charles B Connor is Professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of South Florida. He is the co-author of Climatic control on Icelandic volcanic activity during the mid-Holocene.
• Ivan Savov is Lecturer in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, UK. He is co-author of Evaluating the relationship between climate change and volcanism.

Produced by the Scholars’ Circle team: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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First, how emigration could lead to greater democratization in the world. [dur: 11 mins. ]

For a transcript of this interview, please visit: TheBigQ

• Margaret Peters is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. She is the author of Trading Barriers: Immigration and the Remaking of Globalization, and the co-author of the research paper Restraining the Huddled Masses: Migration Policy and Autocratic Survival.

Then, today’s panel hosted by Professor Doug Becker, International Studies at University of Southern California (USC), lays the foundations of public diplomacy, its techniques, and its effectiveness. It then examines the role of new technologies in the digital age and how it poses new challenges and opportunities. [ dur: 45 mins. ]

For a transcript of this interview, please visit: TheBigQ

• Daniel Aguirre Azócar is Assistant Professor at Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, Chile. He is the author of the book chapters Propaganda and Populist Communication in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela (forthcoming in the SAGE Handbook of Propaganda) and Public Diplomacy in Latin America: An Emerging Field of Practice? (forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, 2nd Edition).
• Nicholas J. Cull is Professor of Public Diplomacy and is the founding director of the Master of Public Diplomacy program at USC. He is the author of many books including The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989, The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency: American Public Diplomacy, 1989-2001, and his latest Public Diplomacy: Foundations for the Global Engagement in the Digital Age.

Produced by the Scholars’ Circle team: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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