It used to be so easy. You left university, came to London and got yourself a flatshare in one of the cheaper areas: Notting Hill, Maida Vale or Highgate. Living was cheap and if it took you a while to find out what you really wanted to do with your life you could drift about a bit and get by. Ma...

Have historians misunderstood everything? Have they missed the single greatest idea that best explains the past?

Niall Ferguson is the preeminent historian of the ideas that define our time. He has challenged how we think about money, power, civilisation and empires. Now he wants to reimagine hi...

Let’s be honest. It’s the political Left that has society’s best interests at heart, that works for the good of all. It has always been the Left that has struggled to protect the weak from the strong, that has fought for workers’ rights, for sexual and racial equality, for the welfare state. It i...

Anne-Marie Slaughter is the Washington power player who upset the feminist applecart. At the peak of her career — as first female Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department — she turned her back on her dream job with Hillary Clinton in order to spend more time with her teenage sons. H...

Almost all of us want to make a difference in our lives. So we give to charity, recycle, volunteer, or cut down our carbon emissions. But are we getting it right? In a world where ever more data is available, shouldn’t we be paying closer attention to the measurable effects of our altruistic acti...

In Britain, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign hit the headlines when it demanded the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oxford’s Oriel College, of which he was a leading benefactor, because of his colonialism. In the US, violent protests in Charlottesville were sparked by a decision to remove...

A year ago, you could have been forgiven for thinking that gender equality was on an unstoppable trajectory. America stood poised to elect its first female president. On this side of the Atlantic, members of the political and cultural establishment proudly sported ‘This Is What a Feminist Looks L...

Myths. We tend to think they’re a thing of the past, fabrications that early humans needed to believe in because their understanding of the world was so meagre. But what if modern civilisation were itself based on a set of myths? This is the big question posed by Professor Yuval Noah Harari, auth...

There are lies, damn lies, and then there’s fake news. Manipulating the facts for political gain is as old as politics itself, but due to the rise of social media and search engine algorithms false stories can now spread like wildfire. In the run-up to the US presidential election, more people on...

Lock them up. That’s the way we’ve always dealt with offenders. Criminals deserve to be put away for their crimes. Prison works because it keeps those criminals out of circulation, and acts as society’s most effective deterrent. Our prisons may be more crowded than ever – the prison population of...

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means.”

When Theresa May uttered these words at the Tory party conference in 2016, there was uproar. May was targeting the liberal establishment, who flit business class from Mayfa...

In this Intelligence Times conversation, chaired by Carrie Gracie stage Two of Weinstein's former assistants are joined on stage by the two New York Times reporters, Jodi Kantour and Megan Twohey, who broke the Harvey Weinstein sexual misconduct allegations and triggered the #MeToo movement.

In...

Has society gone ‘woke’? Is antiracism being hijacked by the culture wars? And how do we make sense of the racial reckoning of 2020 and the backlash against it? In this live London event filmed in July 2022 award winning journalist, podcaster and author Reni Eddo-Lodge came to Intelligence Square...

Ibram X. Kendi shot to fame with his book How To Be an Antiracist, which reshaped the conversation about racial justice when it was published in 2019, selling over 1 million copies in the US and 100,000 copies in the UK. In July 2022 he came to the Intelligence Squared stage for an exclusive even...

Twenty minutes a day, five days a week, “The Daily,” The New York Times’s flagship audio show, explores the world’s biggest stories, with the world’s best journalists. For the first time outside the United States, The New York Times — in collaboration with Intelligence Squared — presented a live ...

In the wake of the 2021 Olympics we have seen a resurgence of misunderstanding around testosterone, its role in gender transition and its effect on athletic performance. In July 2021 Harvard evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven was in conversation with Tom Whipple, science editor of The Times, on...

In 2016, on stage at Wembley Arena in front of thousands of fans, Dr Ruja Ignatova promised her followers a financial revolution. The future, she said, belonged to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. And the Oxford-educated, self-styled cryptoqueen promised that the cryptocurrency she had created –...

Forget the old battles between the left and the right. Welcome to the era of ‘identity politics,’ where loyalties are owed not to class or political party, but to groups defined by gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

To some people, this is a dangerous trend. True, many minorities have suff...

This event was livestreamed from St Martin in the Fields, Trafalgar Square via Intelligence Squared+.

We cannot put a price on the value of the biosphere – it is an asset upon which we are all wholly dependent. Yet poor communities in the global south are bearing the brunt of biodiversity loss,...

Intelligence Squared presents a climate change debate, looking at the facts Extinction Rebellion activist Farhana Yamin and writer George Monbiot argue for the motion "To avoid climate collapse, we must overthrow capitalism." On the other hand, their opponents, Tony Juniper and Adair Turner argue...

In the very first event in The Futureverse series, in partnership with Y TREE, we were joined by Sir Antony Gormley, futurist and entrepreneur Mo Gawdat and climate activist Clover Hogan to debate the motion: the world will be a better place in 5, 50, 500 years. We explored the future of art and ...

Yuval Noah Harari is the star historian who shot to fame with his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. In that book Harari explained how human values have been continually shifting since our earliest beginnings: once we placed gods at the centre of the universe; then ca...

On March 29 2021, Kehinde Andrews, academic and self-described Black radical, and Jeremy Black, eminent historian, came to Intelligence Squared to debate the question 'Is the West fundamentally racist?'

The West, Andrews will contend, prides itself on being founded on the three great revolutions...