Events Calendar

Beth Gardiner is a London-based environmental journalist. Her book, Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution, made the Guardian’s Best of 2019 list, and was a finalist for the (U.S.) National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society book award. Beth wrote the cover story for National Geographic’s April 2021 issue, and her work has also appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Scientific American, Yale Environment 360, HuffPost and Smithsonian. She’s a two-time fellow of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a winner of the CUNY journalism school’s McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, a former longtime Associate Press reporter, and a member of the Yale Class of 1993. 

This eight-week course will serve as a sequel to my two-part course on the Beatles offered in Fall 2018 and Fall 2019, although taking these prior classes is not a prerequisite for this new course. This semester we will focus on the legacy of the Beatles—that is, the extraordinary influence this group has had and continues to have in shaping not only the landscape of recorded popular music, but our postmodern world itself.

A conversation with Prof. Thomas Homer-Dixon, Executive Director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University, Victoria Canada. Frightening pandemics, terrible inequality, racism and poverty, rising political authoritarianism, the inescapable climate crisis, and the resuscitated danger of nuclear war. We know the story. Some choose not to see it. Each of these crises seems so much larger than any one of us can understand or handle. Yet today, they all seem to be going critical simultaneously.

For Canadian Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon, in addition to these crises, Canada’s big neighbor to the south is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war. In an article in the Globe and Mail in December 2021 that went viral, he asks, “How should Canada prepare?” for the case that American democracy does indeed collapse.

In "Commanding Hope", Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon shows why and how we got where we are today; and most importantly, he shows the powers we possess to renew our imperiled world. Join us to hear a Canadian perspective on the U.S. midterm elections, about practical tools we can use to understand our own and others’ worldviews better, to be strategically smart in our actions, together, to take the world to a healthier, more just place.