Intelligence Squared Archives

My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route

The Western world has turned its back on migrants, leaving them to cope with one of the most devastating humanitarian crises in history.

Reporter Sally Hayden was at home in London when she received a message on Facebook: “Hi sister Sally, we need your help.” The sender identified himself as an Eritrean refugee who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with hundreds of others. […Learn More]

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers

Much economic advice is bogus quantification, warn two leading experts in this essential book, now with a preface on COVID-19. Invented numbers offer a false sense of security; we need instead robust narratives that give us the confidence to manage uncertainty. […Learn More]

Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century

A timely defense of liberalism that draws vital lessons from its greatest midcentury proponents

Today, liberalism faces threats from across the political spectrum. While right-wing populists and leftist purists righteously violate liberal norms, theorists of liberalism seem to have little to say. In Liberalism in Dark Times, Joshua Cherniss issues a rousing defense of the liberal tradition, drawing on a neglected strand of liberal thought. […Learn More]

Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Plane

For the first time in millennia, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world.

Farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction—and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticize urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have plowed, fenced, and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry and the price of food is rising faster than ever. […Learn More]

Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology

An epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world’s most critical resource—microchip technology—with the United States and China increasingly in conflict. […Learn More]

Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent

An exuberant, opinionated, stereotype-busting portrait of contemporary Africa in all its splendid diversity, by one of its leading new writers.

So often, Africa has been depicted simplistically as a uniform land of famines and safaris, poverty and strife, stripped of all nuance. In this bold and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective, weaving a vibrant tapestry of stories that bring to life Africa’s rich diversity, communities, and histories. […Learn More]

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World

The remarkable story of how nomads have fostered and refreshed civilization throughout our history.

Moving across millennia, Nomads explores the transformative and often bloody relationship between settled and mobile societies. Often overlooked in history, the story of the umbilical connections between these two very different ways of living presents a radical new view of human civilization. […Learn More]

The Gene: An Intimate History

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick” (Elle).
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The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

Award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist Jonathan Freedland tells the incredible story of Rudolf Vrba—the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz, a man determined to warn the world and pass on a truth too few were willing to hear—elevating him to his rightful place in the annals of World War II alongside Anne Frank, Primo Levi, and Oskar Schindler and casting a new light on the Holocaust and its aftermath. […Learn More]

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. […Learn More]