3 ways to upgrade democracy for the 21st century | Max Rashbrooke

3 ways to upgrade democracy for the 21st cent...

Up next

I taught rats to drive. They taught me to enjoy the ride | Kelly Lambert

What can happy rats teach us about human joy? Behavioral neuroscientist Kelly Lambert describes how her team trained rats to drive tiny cars to earn treats — and noticed something surprising about how effort and anticipation affect the brain. The experiment opens new questions ab ...  Show more

Is luck random — or can you cultivate it? | Christian Busch

When the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires destroyed his home and neighborhood, scientist Christian Busch encountered the opposite of serendipity: "zemblanity," or bad luck by design. Drawing on more than a decade of scientific research, he explores how people can navigate unpredictabil ...  Show more

Recommended Episodes

Lisa Herzog, "Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
New Books in Philosophy

For better or worse, democracy and epistemology are intertwined. For one thing, politics is partly a matter of gathering, assessing, and applying information. And this can be done responsibly or incompetently. At least since Plato, a leading critique of democracy has focused on t ...  Show more

Democracy works — we just need better leaders | Lindiwe Mazibuko
TED Business

South Africa transitioned to democracy in the 1990s with a visionary constitution, but the promises of that constitution are largely unfulfilled to this day. Public leader Lindiwe Mazibuko explores how poor leadership failed to deliver a better life for the country's citizens — a ...  Show more

Year-End Review of Global Democracy with Larry Diamond
Democracy IRL

Larry Diamond once again joins Francis Fukuyama for a year-end review to discuss the state of global democracy as 2023 draws to a close. Diamond also recounts his Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture, the 20th iteration of the annual lecture series named in honor of the famed political ...  Show more

The Tech We Need for 21st Century Democracy with Divya Siddarth
Your Undivided Attention

Democracy in action has looked the same for generations. Constituents might go to a library or school every one or two years and cast their vote for people who don't actually represent everything that they care about. Our technology is rapidly increasing in sophistication, yet ou ...  Show more