On June 4, results came in from the largest democratic election in history. Over 640 million people voted in India’s election, which took place at over one million polling places across the country over the course of six weeks. Many predicted that India’s prime minister Nerandra Modi and his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would dominate th…

For this week’s show, we’re sharing an episode of “Humans in Public Health,” a podcast from The Brown School of Public Health. It makes a great follow-up to our episode earlier this month about Rhode Island’s first-in-the-nation legally approved proposal for a safe injection site (also known as an overdose prevention center) and how such programs w…

At the Watson Institute, the beginning of summer means commencement festivities, moving trucks, and bittersweet goodbyes. In American politics, the beginning of summer means something very different: the approach of the Supreme Court's summer recess and, with it, the handing down of the Court’s final decisions from this term. This year’s cases will…

Mexico, like the United States, has a gun violence problem. It has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and most of those murders come from firearms. In 2019, for example, almost 70% of the country's 35,000 murders involved firearms. But unlike the U.S., Mexico doesn’t have tens of thousands of licensed firearms dealers. It has two. So how…

In February of this year, Providence became the first city in America to approve opening a state-sanctioned overdose prevention center. Sometimes known as safe injection sites, these are facilities where people can bring illegal drugs and consume them under the supervision of trained volunteers and health professionals. It’s one of the boldest expe…

In the 1970s in Nicaragua, left-wing rebels, calling themselves the Sandinista National Liberation Front, fought to overthrow their country’s dictator. It worked. The Sandinistas led a coalition that took over the government in July 1979, in what became known as the Sandinista Revolution. However, within a few years, the Sandinistas faced a violent…

Here’s a depressing fact: it takes longer to travel from Boston to Los Angeles today than it did 50 years ago. Getting to the airport, getting through the airport, the flight itself — just about every part of the process takes longer than it once did. According to New York Times senior writer David Leonhardt, this is just one example of the stagnat…

The last decade has seen the growth of two political movements that appear diametrically opposed: the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise of Donald Trump. But as our guest on this episode explains, these two movements are linked, and can only be understood together. On this episode, Dan Richards talks with political scientist Juliet Hooker abo…

We’ve got a lot of exciting new Trending Globally episodes coming up in the next few weeks and months, but this week we’re sharing an episode of another podcast from the Watson Institute: Mark and Carrie. The show is hosted by political economist Mark Blyth and political scientist Carrie Nordlund. On each episode, they discuss, debate and, occasion…

February 24, 2024, marks two years since the beginning of the War in Ukraine. In the war’s first year, Russia’s assault on Ukraine shook the West, while Ukraine's defense of the territory captivated the world. While no less deadly or consequential, the war's second year has looked very different. The war has become a stalemate on the battlefield, a…

In the United States, inequality along the lines of race in education is such a persistent issue that it often fails to make headlines. COVID-19 brought it back to the front of the nation’s consciousness as evidence mounted that nonwhite students were experiencing roughly twice as much learning loss as their white counterparts. Yet, as our guest on…

Backlash is hardly a new political force — since America’s founding, change has often been driven by citizens mobilizing in opposition to policies, programs, or social movements. But recently, as our guest on this episode explains, backlash movements have come to dominate our politics in unprecedented ways. He argues that to build a more stable and…

Trending Globally will be back with all new episodes soon, but in the meantime we’re rereleasing some of our favorite episodes from 2023. We hope you enjoy – and have a great start to 2024! *** The beginning of 2023 saw a disturbing milestone: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the ‘Doomsday Clock’ forward to 90 seconds to midnight – the c…

“Trending Globally” will be back with all new episodes soon, but in the meantime, we’re rereleasing a few of our favorite episodes from 2023. We hope you enjoy — and have a great start to 2024! *** In 2007, Watson Professor John Eason moved with his family from Chicago to Forest City, Arkansas. At the time Eason was getting his Ph.D. at the Univers…

This December marks four years since the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. On this episode of Trending Globally, Dan Richards speaks with two experts from the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health about the ways our society’s approach to public health has changed since 2019. They discuss how we should be thin…

On this episode, political economist and Watson professor Mark Blyth talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir Angus Deaton about his new book, “Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality.” You may not know Angus Deaton by name, but you probably know a phrase he helped to make famous: “deaths of despair.” In 201…

How do our individual experiences shape our political views? What role do our own stories and memories play in how we think about the world around us? How can we use our memories — even our most painful ones — to help build a more peaceful politics? These are complicated questions, and not of the variety we often ask on this show. But historian Ome…

Last year, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Considered by many to be the biggest climate and energy bill ever passed, the IRA included roughly $370 billion to help shift the U.S. to cleaner forms of power. And it was just one of three laws passed by the administration that will play into the United States’ move away from…

In 1982, Mumia Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer. An ex-Black Panther, he had no prior criminal record. Amnesty International investigated his case and found in many ways that it "failed to meet minimum international standards.” He’s been incarcerated for more than 40 years. Over those decades, Abu-Jam…

One day in the year 2000, in the midst of the Second Congo War, Honoria* fled her home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and never returned. After 16 years in a refugee camp in Uganda, she relocated to Philadelphia, where she became one of the roughly 80,000 refugees who entered the U.S. that year. Honoria’s family was one of the dozens that …

Imagine if, when you were in middle school, an Ivy League professor came to your school and told you that you were going to be part of an experiment. You were going to get to decide how the money in your school was spent. What would you want to spend it on? How would you convince your classmates that your idea was best? Furthermore, would you even …

This summer, military forces in the West African country of Niger pushed the country’s president, Mohamed Bazoum, out of power. This was not the first coup in Niger’s history, or in the recent history of the Sahel region of Africa. In the last few years there have been coups in multiple countries in the region, including Burkina Faso and Mali. But …

On August 23, at least 5 GOP hopefuls for the party’s presidential nomination will take to the stage in Milwaukee for their first primary debate. In other words, the 2024 election is about to get real. In this episode, Dan Richards talks with Wendy Schiller, professor of political science at Brown University and director of the Watson Institute’s T…

In the last year, programs like ChatGPT, Dall-E and Bard have shown the world just how powerful artificial intelligence can be. AI programs can write hit pop songs, pass the bar exam and even appear to develop meaningful relationships with humans. This apparent revolution in AI tech has provoked widespread awe, amazement — and for some, terror. But…

In May, Nigerian political veteran Bola Tinubu was sworn in as president of the country. The outcome was predictable, but that doesn’t mean there were no surprises in this year’s election. The biggest, perhaps, was the national rise of progressive politician Peter Obi. Obi galvanized young people around issues of government accountability, transpar…