Jan Eliasson is one of the most experienced diplomats in the world, having served as Chairman of the UN General Assembly and the UN Deputy Secretary-General. He published his memoirs earlier this year and it is fascinating to take part of his learnings from a career marked by war and conflict but also with a never-ending hope for peace.
IntellectInterviews Posts
Sweden was one of the European countries who accepted the most immigrants during the refugee crisis in 2015. Mustafa Panshiri who then worked as a police officer, used his cultural knowledge and language skills from Afghanistan to help many of the young refugees to better understand the written and unwritten rules in Sweden. He now works full time with integration and is a highly regarded public speaker and author.
Would you be open to have a conversation with anyone, no matter how much you detest their opinions? Navid Modiri is a “conversational extremist” who invites a wide range of guests to his podcast, especially those he tends to disagree with. He speaks in this interview about genuine curiosity, the complexity in people and what he has learned from more than 200 podcast episodes.
Sarah Haider went from being a devout Muslim girl in Pakistan to being one of the most well-known atheists in the world, as the co-founder of Ex-Muslims of North America. She has seen with her own eyes how horrible many dissenters and apostates are treated by their religious community and she has devoted her career to make a change. She talks about the reality facing Ex-Muslims, the security threats against her personally, the problem with the word Islamophobia and what she hopes to achieve with her organization.
He is one of Sweden’s strongest voices when it comes to humanism, secularism and rational thinking. Christer Sturmark is the founder of the publishing house Fri Tanke, which operates in the spirit of the Enlightenment. He has for many years debated pseudoscientists and advocates of religious influence in politics. His new book is called To Light the Flame of Reason.
Eörs Szathmáry is an Hungarian theoretical evolutionary biologist who had his breakthrough with the book The Major Transitions of Evolution (1995), which he co-authored with the late John Maynard Smith. Szathmáry shares his thoughts on evolution, the origin of life, how to define life and living systems, the uniqueness of humans and the future of life on Earth and beyond.
After having received death threats for writing a philosophical paper on after-birth abortion, Francesca Minverva started thinking about creating a journal focusing only on controversial papers. Her thoughts have now become reality, since she co-founded the Journal of Controversial Ideas together with Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan. She is fighting for academic freedom and against the cancel culture in today’s society.
Kwame Anthony Appiah is a British-Ghanaian philosopher who spent many years thinking and writing about identities, such as race, ethnicity, class and gender. These are highly discussed topics in today’s society and Appiah shares his views on how to think about these matters.
Dr. Sara Seager is an astronomer at the MIT and one of the world’s leading experts when it comes to the search of exoplanets and analysis of their atmospheres. In this interview she talks about space, phosphine on Venus, rouge planets, exoplanet research and what would constitute sufficient evidence for extraterrestrial life.