Intelligence Squared

Independent, free now from the constraints of office, with a wealth of experience and the ability to open doors at the highest level, The Elders are helping tackle some of the world’s most intractable problems.On 2nd July 2012, we brought together three members of the organisation – President Jimmy Carter, Mary Robinson and Archbishop Desmond Tutu – for a special discussion with Channel 4′s Jon Snow at the Barbican Centre. Listen to it now.

Some people just can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that a relationship is over. Finished. Unsalvageable. David Cameron, for instance. His long awaited speech on Europe has been one big exercise in denial. Yes, we should stay married to Europe, he says, because we can now renegotiate our wedding vows and get the EU to do things our way. Who is he kidding If it were so easy to pick ‘n mix what we want from Brussels, wolfing down all the soft-centred goodies and rejecting the nutty ones, wouldn’t every member state do the same That would be a certain recipe for a 27-speed Europe and why on earth would Brussels agree to that After the euro crisis, Brussels is hell-bent on tightening the rules not loosening them. So once you discard the new wrapper Cameron is trying to put around a thorny old problem, the reality re-emerges in all its starkness: we can’t live under the old rules – Cameron himself is clear about that – and the new rules will entail an even greater loss of sovereignty. So time for divorce.But do we really want to throw away all we have achieved in the post-war decades – years of painstaking negotiations which have led to a peaceful and prosperous Europe Not only has the EU enhanced trade between its members – to Britain’s benefit as much as the others – it has also provided Europe with a real voice in the world. Of course it’s far from perfect. That’s why it needs to be reformed not rejected. And of course it involves some loss of sovereignty: in a globalised world that’s inevitable. But only political juveniles hanker after a lost world of unfettered sovereignty. Time to be grown up and accept that the EU is our future, warts and all.So which side of the argument should we heed This is the biggest national issue of our time: Britain’s destiny is at stake.

Hooray for porn! What would we be without it Bored, repressed, frustrated. Porn allows the timid to indulge fantasies they’d never live out in real life and the adventurous to experiment with new forms of pleasure. Now that it has stepped down from the top shelf and waltzed across the internet we can all enjoy it. All we need to do is stop pretending it’s something dirty and come straight out and salute it.Or maybe not. Porn after all is selling a lie: that women are always eager to engage in extreme practices, that bodies are always tanned and buffed, orgasms explosive. Isn’t this a recipe for frustration and disappointment And to attract the restless voyeur, porn is always having to up the ante – cyber-sex is getting ever more degrading and extreme. Men are finding it harder to be satisfied with their real world partners, women are feeling inadequate and pressured to live up to the cyber-competition – this is the reality of pornland.So which is it – the great liberator of the libido or a blight on human intimacy Listen to pornographic film maker Anna Arrowsmith and erotica expert Dr Clarissa Smith, square up to renowned feminist Germaine Greer and addiction specialist Dr Robert Lefever.

People everywhere are better off living in liberal democracy: that has been the reigning assumption of the western world. But could it be we’ve got it wrong If you were one of the world’s billions of poor peasants might you not be better off under a system dedicated to political stability and economic growth – one that has lifted 400 million out of poverty – rather than one preoccupied with human rights, the rule of law, and the chance to vote out unpopular rulers Thanks to the Chinese model of government life expectancy in Shanghai is now higher than in New York.So is China better off without democracy Or is that just the age-old mantra of the tyrant

How do the landscapes we love shape the people we are Why do we walk For several years and more than a thousand miles, celebrated travel writer Robert Macfarlane has been following the vast network of old paths and routes that criss-cross Britain and its waters, and connect them to countries and continents beyond.Listen to his enthralling account from June 2012 of the ghosts and voices that haunt old tracks, of songlines and their singers, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of rights of way and rites of way.

Should we pay children to get good grades Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to payMichael Sandel is one of the world's most acclaimed and popular political philosophers. He has given the BBC Reith lectures and his online lectures for Harvard University attract millions of views. In this talk from May 2012 he looked at the role of markets in a democratic society, and asked how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy

It happens to all of us every day. You get rejected. Your customer doesn’t buy. Your boss doesn’t agree. Your crush doesn’t say yes. In this provocative and entertaining talk, Daniel Pink, author of the New York Times best seller Drive, harvests a rich trove of social science to explain the theory and practice of bouncing back.

How can leadership lessons from the past be applied to intractable international problems todayIn this talk from July 2013, shortly before the 50th anniversary of President John F Kennedy's assignation, the world renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs analysed JFK’s rhetoric of peace and explains how it began a process that led to détente and eventually to the end of the Cold War. How was it that only 8 months after the Cuban missile crisis had brought the world to the brink of self-destruction Kennedy could reach out to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and persuade him that they shared the same aims and interests How at such a time of external peril could he dare to ask the American people to look inward and examine their own attitudes towards the Soviet Union And where, when we need him, is the John Kennedy of the 21st centuryListen to this masterful lecture: part history lesson, part road map for the future.

American author Naomi Wolf made her name with The Beauty Myth, a book that exposed the tyranny of the ideal of female beauty. Now she’s back with a no less dramatic or controversial new work. In Vagina: A New Biography Wolf makes the case that the vagina is much more than a sex organ – it is integral to female well-being, and a catalyst to female creativity, confidence and identity.In this talk for Intelligence Squared she explained how the latest neuroscience reveals fascinating new discoveries about the vagina and female wellbeing, and discussed sexual relationships, pornography, history and literature. She showed how men can learn more about ‘what women really need’, and how women can experience themselves in a new way.

In an age of custom-fabricated, do-it-yourself product design and creation, the collective potential of a million garage tinkerers and enthusiasts is about to be unleashed...Check out today's Advent podcast where Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson takes you to the front lines of a new industrial revolution as today’s entrepreneurs, using open source design and 3-D printing, bring manufacturing to the desktop.

Which side were you on The Jets or the Sharks The Capulets or the Montagues The Greeks or the Trojans Antony or Caesar William or Harold And so the list goes on ... Indeed, maybe the whole of human history is the story of group-making and group-breaking. The passions of loyalty and love for the in-group are matched by the de-humanising indignation and hatred for the out-group. But what's actually going on in the chemical soup of the brain when Agamemnon gathers his heros-to-be and sets sail after Helen Will peering into that soup - as neuroscientist David Eagleman is now doing - actually give peace a chance Maybe utopia can come out of the lab. Will a scientific understanding of love and hate deliver social programmes that undermine the nastiness without sacrificing the good

14. Thomas Friedman: A manifesto for rescuing AmericaThomas L. Friedman is an internationally renowned author, reporter, and columnist – the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes and the author of six bestselling books, and writes a twice-weekly column for The New York Times. He's also one of the most brilliant orators to have graced the Intelligence Squared stage.In this talk from June 2012 he discusses his latest book 'That Used to be Us: What Went Wrong with America and How it Can Come Back' where he and co-author Michael Mandelbaum present an urgent manifesto for the America's renewal and address the major challenges it faces today.

Daniel Dennett is one of the world’s most original and provocative thinkers. A philosopher and cognitive scientist, he is known as one of the ‘Four Horseman of New Atheism’ along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens.On May 22nd he came to Intelligence Squared to share the insights he has acquired over his 40-year career into the nature of how we think, decide and act. Dennett revealed his favourite thinking tools, or ‘intuition pumps’, that he and others have developed for addressing life’s most fundamental questions. As well as taking a fresh look at familiar moves – Occam’s Razor, reductio ad absurdum – he discussed new cognitive solutions designed for the most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, consciousness and free will.By acquiring these tools and learning to use them wisely, we can all aspire to better understand the world around us and our place in it.

Can anything good really be said of an institution that has such a warped attitude to sex that it tries to stop the world from wearing a condom, is bitterly opposed to gays leading a fulfilled life and regards women as unworthy of officiating in its rituals But who you gonna call when it comes to finding a good school for your children, when it comes to standing up for the oppressed, when it comes to giving material and spiritual succour to the wretched of the earthIn 2009 Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens locked horns with Anne Widdecombe and John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, over whether or not the Catholic Church was a force for good. Today the debate has been watched more times online than any other Intelligence Squared event. We're thrilled to make the audio available to all as part of our Advent podcast.

What’s all this nonsense about sending the Parthenon Marbles back to Greece If Lord Elgin hadn’t rescued them from the Parthenon in Athens and presented them to the British Museum almost 200 years ago, these exquisite sculptures – the finest embodiment of the classical ideal of beauty and harmony – would have been lost to the ravages of pollution and time. So we have every right to keep them: indeed, returning them would set a dangerous precedent, setting off a clamour for every Egyptian mummy and Grecian urn to be wrenched from the world’s museums and sent back to its country of origin. It is great institutions like the British Museum that have established such artefacts as items of world significance: more people see the Marbles in the BM than visit Athens every year. Why send them back to relative obscurityBut aren’t such arguments a little too imperialistic All this talk of visitor numbers and dangerous precedents – doesn’t it just sound like an excuse for Britain to hold on to dubiously acquired treasures that were removed without the consent of the Greek people to whom they culturally and historically belong That’s what Lord Byron thought, and in June 2012 Stephen Fry took up the cause. In this debate Fry argues we should return the Marbles as a gesture of solidarity with Greece in its financial distress, and as a mark of respect for the cradle of democracy and the birthplace of rational thought.

To say 'The West has failed Syria' tempts us into the dangerous belief that had we only got stuck into this conflict from the off, things would now be better. It’s a belief, as recent history shows, we badly need to resist.So speaks the voice of caution. But are we really saying that the best the big powers can do is just sit on the sidelines and watch Syria destroy itselfIn this debate from October 2013, former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown and City University's Professor of Middle East Policy Studies Rosemary Hollis, take on NYT columnist Roger Cohen and former British Ambassador to the US Nigel Sheinwald.

President Jimmy Carter is a Nobel Prize winner, author, humanitarian, professor, farmer, naval officer and carpenter. In this special Intelligence Squared interview with Channel 4 News's Jon Snow, which took place in October 2011, President Carter talks about his career as president, and the past three decades as a senior statesman and ambassador for the Carter Center. He shares his stories from a truly remarkable and well-lived life and his views of global politics today.

They're calling her the devil. Inflammatory words, but Europe has every reason to be livid with the German Chancellor. Angela Merkel’s austerity measures are strangling the economies of the southern nations of Europe, creating huge unemployment and preventing them from paying off their debts – the very reason for introducing these measures in the first place. Worse still, she refuses to give Europe a desperately needed boost by opening up Germany’s economy, and now plans to run a budget surplus in Germany. No wonder her recent electoral victory was greeted with gloom in Greece and other struggling eurozone countries.But is this a fair take on the crisis in Europe Isn’t this just another case of scapegoating Germany for being Europe’s largest and best run economy Those other eurozone nations recklessly disregarded the rules on fiscal discipline to which they’d signed up on joining the euro and now they blame Germany for the woes they brought upon themselves. Angela Merkel isn’t destroying Europe: she’s one of the few elements that is keeping it together.The New Statesman's Mehdi Hasan and Greek MP Euclid Tsakalotos take on historian Anthony Beevor and Belgian-born veteran journalist Christine Ockrent in our debate from November 2013.

Nate Silver is the 35-year-old data engineer and forecaster with superstar status. He shot to fame in 2008 for correctly predicting the outcome in 49 out of 50 states in the US presidential election. In 2012, when most media pundits and political analysts claimed the US election was 'too close to call', Silver trumped them all again, giving Obama a 92 percent chance of winning. Barack Obama has called him 'my rock, my foundation', and Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times described him as 'our age’s Brunel'.In this event from April 2013, he came to Intelligence Squared to discuss the themes of his latest book, 'The Signal and the Noise' with Tim Harford, the FT's 'Undercover Economist'. We hear endlessly about Big Data, but when the quantity of data in our world is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day how can we find the signal in all the noise, the nugget of information that will help us make sense of it all, or maybe even predict the future Silver explains how expert forecasters think, and describes what lies behind their success, covering the stock market, the poker table, politics, sports, earthquakes, the weather and disease control. With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our forecasts, never has it been more vital to know how to distinguish true insights from the noise of useless data.

There’s not a lot to like about Vladimir Putin: he’s autocratic, vain and runs a corrupt government. And he doesn’t give a fig for human rights. The repression in Chechnya, the jailing of the (now pardoned) businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the Pussy Riot protesters, the murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and of Alexander Litvinenko, the former spy – all this happened on Putin’s watch. Who would not be on the side of the 100,000 people who turned out on Moscow’s streets last winter to protest against Putin’s election to a third term as president and to demand fair elections and an honest government Russia would be better off without Putin – who would argue otherwiseAs a matter of fact, millions would. Talk to many Russians and they’ll tell you that life under Putin is vastly better than under Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin let a handful of oligarchs hoover up Russia’s wealth while ordinary Russians were reduced to selling their possessions on the street. Putin, by contrast, has quelled the economic mayhem – inflation is down, pensions have increased. Even more importantly he has restored Russia’s sense of self-worth – crushing the Chechen revolt, refusing to play along with the West over Syria. Living in Notting Hill you might not find Putin to your taste, but for those facing the realities of contemporary Russia he is a godsend, the strong leader that the country needs at this crucial time of transition and uncertainty.An apology for tyranny Or a realistic appraisal of modern Russian realities Christopher Granville and Boris Jordan take on Masha Gessen and Luke Harding in our debate from May 2013.

Not everyone tells the truth. ‘Read my lips: no new taxes.’ ‘This isn’t going to hurt.’ ‘I see no ships, my lord.’ ‘Of course I love you.’ When can we know what to believe Four out of five of us don’t think politicians tell the truth, according to a recent MORI poll. But is telling the truth always the right or best thing to do If it isn’t, what happens to trust If it is, are there different kinds of truth Do we always want to hear the truth Do different professions need to have systemically different attitudes to truth-telling Is there a moral difference between outright lies, falsehoods, deceits, dissimulation and just plain old ‘economy with the actualité’In October 1013, Intelligence Squared headed to London's Westminster Abbey to discuss truth with a politician (Jack Straw), a journalist (Max Hastings), a scientist (Professor Robert Winston) and a poet (Wendy Cope).

Eric Schmidt is one of the leading visionaries of our time. He has taken Google from a small start-up to one of the world’s most influential companies. In this conversation with Bryan Appleyard from May 2013, he sets out the themes of his new book 'The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business', which he has co-authored with Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas. These include:- new technologies that will change lives: information systems that increase productivity, thought-controlled motion technology that will revolutionise medical procedures, and near-perfect translation systems that will allow us to communicate with anyone on the planet.- the threat to privacy and security: how much of these will we have to sacrifice to be part of the new digital age- the politics of the hyperconnected world: who will be more powerful, the citizen or the state- the threat of cyberterrorism: will technology increase or undermine our security

Think opera and you think Verdi. Verdi created some of the most beloved operas of all time, from the romantic tragedy of La traviata and Rigoletto to the Shakespearian dramas of Macbeth, Otello and FalstaffVerdi’s music transcends the barriers between high and low culture. Many of his arias count among the greatest songs ever written, streaming out of opera houses and into football stadiums and even the charts. Verdi was also the outstanding cultural figure at the heart of the unification of Italy, the musical father of the Risorgimento. Who needs Wagner when Verdi offers such richnessPeople who truly appreciate great music, say the Wagnerians. Wagner’s music is on an altogether more intellectual sphere. You hum Verdi; you think Wagner. Here is opera, and music, at its epic, definitive height.To know The Ring is to be fully immersed in opera at its greatest technical brilliance and compositional originality. To appreciate Wagner’s music is not to forgive his political views, but to cast them aside in the face of irresistible, unassailable genius.In September 2013, Stephen Fry chaired Intelligence Squared's first ever musical event live from the Royal Opera House. Two advocates made the case for their chosen composer - the irrepressible musicologist Norman Lebrecht championed Verdi and the award-winning novelist and critic Philip Hensher who cheered on Wagner - illustrating their points with the help of a live 63-piece symphony orchestra and the internationally renowned bassist Sir John Tomlinson.