Getting to zero: Rotary’s stubborn campaign to rid the world of polio

For today's final Humanosphere podcast, we're going to talk about ourselves - why we do what we do, what are some of our favorite stories and where we go from here. Due to lack of funding, we must now take a break.

For today’s Humanosphere podcast, we are talking with Rebecca J. Wolfe of Mercy Corps about how we talk about terrorism. No, that's not a grammatical error. We wanted to ask Wolfe, an expert on violence prevention, about the standard narrative around terrorism and if it over-simplifies or disguises some of the less-appreciated root causes of violent extremism.

For today's Humanosphere podcast, we talk with Chuck Collins at Inequality.org, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C. Collins is the author of several books warning against rising wealth concentration and inequality, most recently Born on Third Base.

The 70th World Health Assembly in Geneva just elected a new director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday. But underfunded and over strapped, what does the road ahead look like for the WHO? To answer that question for us in today's Humanosphere podcast, we caught up with Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

How close are we to ridding the world of polio, why has it taken so long, and why does this one disease campaign matter so much? For this Humanosphere podcast, Tom Murphy talks with Carol Pandak, director of Rotary’s PolioPlus program. Folks have probably heard Bill and Melinda Gates speak over the years about how [...]

For today’s Humanosphere podcast, we’re talking with Peter Buffett, musician, author, activist and youngest son of legendary investor Warren Buffett. Peter Buffett may be more low-profile than his father. But he is a lot more outspoken when it comes to politics, equity and what he thinks humanity needs.

For this Humanosphere podcast, we’re talking with Elizabeth Hausler, CEO and founder of Build Change – a non-profit organization that works around the world to prevent deaths from earthquakes or other disasters that lead to homes or other buildings collapsing. As engineers like to say, or well, as they say even if they may not like to say it: “Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings kill people."

American philanthropy has been undergoing a major resurgence in the last few decades, leading some to dub this a 'golden age' for giving. At the same time, wealth concentration and inequality, the gap between rich and poor, has been on the increase. Author of a new book called The Givers, David Callahan, explains why these two trends are fueling each other and what needs to change to avoid oligarchy.

For today’s Humanosphere podcast, we're talking with a leader in the battle to end human trafficking. Bradley Myles and his colleagues at Polaris has for the past 15 years concentrated his efforts on reducing, and ideally eliminating, a practice that unfortunately may be as old as human history: slavery and trade in human beings.

For today’s Humanosphere podcast, we are talking with Halldóra Mogensen, an MP with Iceland’s Pirate Party. For those who may not be aware of the Pirate Party as a serious political movement - it’s not about dressing up with an eye patch - let's just say at the outset that this political party exists by name in some 40 countries worldwide and was started more than a decade ago largely to protect personal freedom and promote institutional transparency in this new digital age.