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Higher education is in crisis, in large part because - as Kevin Carey points out in his new book, The End of College - students (and their parents) are paying more and getting less. The announcement that Sweet Briar College will close at the end of this year illustrates how untenable the current system is. On this episode, Carey, director of New America's education policy program, talks with ProPublica's Marian Wang about his book and how information technology will facilitate the creation of institutions that serve what Carey calls the "big middle" in education, who are currently left behind or saddled with debt. 

If you use a smartphone or your kid has a tablet, you should already be wondering how we can educate, engage, and retain diverse talent in tech. But experts say you should also be curious to know why Ida B. Wells is Aliya Rahman's favorite data scientist. On this episode, Anne-Marie Slaughter talks with Rahman, program director of Code for Progress, as well as Megan Smith, Chief Technology Officer at the White House, and Jessica Rosenworcel of the FCC, about how leadership can make an impact in tech.

We can make planet-wide, always-on, high-speed(ish) Internet communications a reality for everyone. In other words, a universal Internet is possible, say Alan Davidson, New America's Vice President for Technology Policy and Strategy and Director of the Open Technology Institute (OTI), and Danielle Kehl, a policy analyst with OTI, in this conversation with Anne-Marie Slaughter (and in New America's Big Ideas series on CNN). According to Davidson and Kehl, now that the goal of internet everywhere for everyone is on the horizon, global and local participation and investment are the keys to getting to that finish line.

Borders are perhaps the biggest and most contentious issue when it comes to trade, immigration, diplomacy, and innovation. Twenty years after NAFTA and with the Trans-Pacific Partnership on the horizon, it's time to update the United States' border-sharing relationships with its neighbors. One provocative way to start the conversation: Let's create a North American passport, say Andres Martinez and Daniel Kurtz-Phelan in this conversation with Anne-Marie Slaughter (and in New America's Big Ideas series on CNN). Martinez and Kurtz-Phelan point out that the privileges of movement and access shared among the United States, Canada, and Mexico should reflect just how interwoven our respective economies--including education, manufacturing, and research, in addition to trade itself--have become.

In the story of the American Dream, the moral is that with hard work, making a comeback or reinventing yourself is possible. Inherent in that moral is the viability of second chances. Real life for the long-term unemployed in America tells a different story, say Rachel Black and Aleta Sprague in this conversation with Anne-Marie Slaughter (and in New America’s Big Ideas series on CNN). Black and Sprague report that for America to have a real second-chance economy, we must make policy changes that will remove barriers for dreamers of the American Dream to re-enter our economy.

Instead of working harder to be more productive, we need to work smarter by taking time out to relax and connect with friends and family. In study after study, the research shows that by taking breaks in between periods of focused attention, we will get more done and could even make strides toward greater gender and class equality, says Brigid Schulte in this conversation with Anne-Marie Slaughter. According to Schulte, author of the best-selling book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, it's when we hit the pause button that our brains unlock their most powerful creativity and innovation.

How do we prevent atrocities like those in Bosnia and Rwanda from happening again? Over the course of her career, Samantha Power - U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem From Hell, has approached this question from diplomatic, military, and historical angles. The subject of a 12,000-word profile in this week'sNew Yorker, Power spoke recently with Anne-Marie Slaughter as part of New America's Leadership, Innovation, and Ideas series. In this excerpt from their conversation, Power and Slaughter discuss how the U.S. government, civil society, and the United Nations can innovate to pursue a peaceful and secure global future.

We all know that increasingly, Hispanic Americans are at the forefront of national conversations about politics, and not just in the context of the electoral landscape or immigration debates. Anne-Marie Slaughter talks with Heritage senior fellow Mike Gonzalez about his book, A Race for the Future, and why conservatives need to embrace demographic change and craft a message to Hispanic voters that prioritizes community and opportunity above the polarization of the status quo.

What can the history of investigative journalism – or global muckraking, as Columbia professor Anya Schiffrin calls it – teach us about the future of human rights? More than anyone might think, as Schiffrin tells Anne-Marie Slaughter in their discussion of Schiffrin’s new book, Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World.

How do we win a war that can’t be seen? Anne-Marie Slaughter goes behind the cyber curtain to find out by speaking with ASU Future of War Fellow Shane Harris about his new book, @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex. Harris, who has been reporting on intelligence as a journalist for 15 years, talks on this episode about his unprecedented access to how the NSA works and why our response to the threat of cyber war – rather than the risks of harm - will have a bigger impact on cyberspace in the 21st century.

  The tech industry now admits it has a woman problem. On this week’s episode, fresh ideas for how to address that issue across the tech sector – and other male-dominated industries, too. Liza Mundy, Director of New America’s Breadwinning and Caregiving Program, sits in for Anne-Marie Slaughter and speaks with Joan C. Williams, Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at University of California Hastings, about her cutting-edge research.

How should we fill the information gap on Ebola and the Syrian Civil War, which the mainstream media addresses only when there's a new patient or attack? According to News Deeply founder and CEO Lara Setrakian, it's by providing accurate, accessible, and focused content – day in, day out. And that's where News Deeply comes in. On this episode, Anne-Marie Slaughter talks to  Setrakian about her single-subject news platforms, Syria Deeply and Ebola Deeply, and why we need them to tell some of today's most important stories. 

It’s possible, says Perry Bacon, Jr., who believes that only local journalism can sustain democracy where it is most active these days—at the state and municipal levels. On this week’s episode, Bacon talks with Anne-Marie Slaughter about why we need a New York Times in every state and how—in this moment when global digital storytelling is thriving and local papers are shedding thousands of jobs—we might begin to get there.

In this episode, Slaughter talks with historian Khalil Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, about why the story of police violence against people of color seems to be repeating itself from Rodney King to Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown.

One week of presidential politics in the spring of 1987 changed political journalism forever and not for the better. So says noted political writer (and alumnus of three presidential campaign trails) Matt Bai in his new book, All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid. On this episode, Bai speaks with Schmidt Family Fellow Christopher Leonard to tell us how Gary Hart’s failed presidential bid fundamentally shaped this modern age of political tabloid journalism and what he thinks that means for the future of democracy.

“The poor” aren’t other people – they’re us. According to recent scholarship, by the time we’re 75 years old, 59 percent of us will fall below the poverty line at some point in our lives. Factoring in related experiences like near-poverty, unemployment, or use of public assistance, that number climbs to a staggering 80 percent. In this episode, Ford Academic Fellow and SUNY-Albany professor Virginia Eubanks talks with New America Managing Editor Fuzz Hogan about the biggest thing we can do to address inequality in this country: recognizing that poverty is a majority issue and something that impacts us all.

Promoting diversity in education was one the biggest and most widely practiced ideas of the 20th century. But as Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Daniel P.S. Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at Harvard, argued in last week’s edition of The Weekly Wonk, diversity isn’t getting us where we need to go to help students who are truly disadvantaged. She has another big idea to make higher education a real pathway to social mobility: directing resources to students who are the first in their families to attend college. In this episode, Slaughter and Brown-Nagin outline the stakes for how reaching out to first-generation students can make college, in the words of Horace Mann, a “great equalizer.”

Conventional wisdom and media narratives suggest that visible populist movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street emerged in response to the financial crisis of 2008. New America Fellow Yascha Mounk disagrees. In a recent article for Foreign Affairs (“Pitchfork Politics”), he argues that this surge in populism is part of a more complex trend, dating back to the 1990s and a steadily growing disenchantment with government. On this episode, Mounk and Slaughter discuss the impact of reading this rise in populism as part of a longer-term story and explore ways—in Mounk’s words—to “channel populist passions for good.”

Why do veterans miss war? That's the question that has animated the latest work of Sebastian Junger, the best-selling author and filmmaker whose recent film, Korengal, picks up where his Academy Award-nominated war documentary Restrepo left off. The answer, he says, could have broad social implications. On this episode, Junger and Slaughter discuss those implications, and explore how both evolution and gender shape the experience of war – and peace - for men and women.

Why are some Americans choosing to fight malaria in Malawi over meth in Minnesota? In other words: why do we tend to romanticize development work abroad while neglecting problems down the street? On this episode,  Anand Giridharadas, New York Times columnist and author most recently of The True American, tells us how this disconnect illuminates a fundamental misunderstanding of the biggest problems that plague our society.