Policy 360 Duke University

Dr. Jim Young Kim is a physician and anthropologist who previously served as the President of the World Bank. As a student at Harvard he co-founded the influential non-profit Partners in Health with Dr. Paul Farmer.

Dr. Kim sat for a wide-ranging conversation with the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy Dean Judith Kelley.  The two discuss China, the challenge and the need to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, and how anyone can use their own skills to make real change.

Scholars, practitioners, advocates and students gathered recently at Duke University to examine the topic of redistricting, the process of drawing congressional boundaries.

The conference included judges and mathematicians, investigative reporters, and more. Each contributed insights to try and untangle the complex web that redistricting had become.

Guest: Professor Deondra Rose, Director of Polis, the Center for Politics at Duke University and audio highlights from conference speakers.

The U.S. is not the first country in history borrow money and we won’t be the last.  In the late imperial period until the early 1920s, Russia needed cash, and they got it from Britain and France. Owing so much money gave Russia a kind of power; if Russia defaulted, it would have been catastrophic for the countries that lent them money.

Guest: Duke professor Jennifer Siegel. Her book is For Peace and Money: French and British Finance in the Service of Tsars and Commissars.

If you’ve ever opened the New York Times, it’s likely that you’ve read something by Frank Bruni. He worked at the paper for 25 years as metro reporter, White House correspondent, Rome bureau chief, and even the chief restaurant critic for a time. He was also the first openly gay op-ed columnist at the Times. Bruni is now a faculty member at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and he joins Dean Judith Kelley to talk about polarization, ambivalence and ambiguity in the media.

Duke University’s Cyber Policy program has a new report that shows data brokers are openly and explicitly advertising sensitive information about US individuals for sale including demographic information, political preferences, even real-time GPS locations on current and former U.S. military personnel. Such data brokerage is a virtually unregulated practice in the United States.

Most Americans have no idea that there are elaborate pretend Iraqi and Afghan villages scattered around the United States – on US military bases. The villages are designed to look real, and even include real people.

Christopher Sims has been photographing the villages. Sims is a new faculty member at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke. He also serves as the Undergraduate Education Director at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies.