‘We rebuilt the same barracks, we rebuilt the new dictatorship, we rebuilt the same regime that we used to live in and now we have another regime, and the question is the same: How to preserve our human dignity, if everything is humiliating?’ – Mikhail Shishkin

Mikhail Shishkin is one of the mo...

Bernie Sanders joins Intelligence Squared to answer questions on U.S support for Ukraine, capitalism and whether the Left is too divided to win power.

Senator Sander is the longest serving Independent member of Congress in American history. He has run in the Democratic presidential primary elec...

‘In my opinion this idea of Anaximander’s [that the Earth is suspended in space] is one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thinking.’ – Karl Popper

Carlo Rovelli is one of the world’s best known scientists. A theoretical physicist, his boo...

Mehdi Hasan is one of the most formidable debaters and interviewers of our times, famous on both sides of the Atlantic for the hard-hitting exchanges he conducts with politicians on his MSNBC television show. And on March 13 he comes to the Intelligence Squared stage in London to reveal his tips ...

The sexual revolution of the 1960s liberated women to enjoy sexual freedom and personal autonomy. That’s the conventional view but is it right? On March 14 writers Louise Perry and Mary Harrington come to Intelligence Squared to argue that the social changes generally seen as progressive over the...

More than fifty years on, the scars of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution still run through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shap...

We tend to imagine Western Civilisation as a golden thread connecting ancient Greece to modern Europe, from Plato to NATO. The idea of the West is deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness and we often refer to it without much consideration. But what if the idea itself is deeply flawed?

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The Rohingya people of Myanmar have been persecuted for decades. The worst period of violence flared up in August 2017, when almost 700,000 Rohingya were forced to leave Myanmar after a large-scale military operation. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was in power at the time. Today ver...

Hercules, Prometheus, Pandora. The compelling characters of Greek mythology continue to fascinate readers thousands of years after their stories were first told. In February 2023 leading classicist Sarah Iles Johnston came to Intelligence Squared to discuss their enduring popularity and also to p...

China's quest for social control is now playing out in ways that should worry us all. That's the argument of award-winning journalist Josh Chin who comes to Intelligence Squared on February 14 to tell the unsettling stories of the millions of people who live under the constant gaze of the Chinese...

Martin Wolf is widely admired as one of the most influential economic commentators in the world. While he sees the flaws in the capitalist system he believes it is worth saving. Yanis Varoufakis is a globally renowned economist and a bestselling author. He rejects economic orthodoxies and advocat...