Citing President Obama's intent to strengthen community colleges, "second lady" Jill Biden told the 2009 graduates of Kingsborough Community College the two-year schools are "one of America's best-kept secrets," and "the education gained on cam

Bad Test Taker? Good News

Sep 13th, 2016 51m 2s

Since 1963, U.S. students have been “very bad at tests and very good at life,” Fareed Zakaria says, noting that during the same period of time the United States has “dominated the world of science, technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, econ

Why You Wanted Your MTV

Sep 12th, 2016 58m 4s

In this message-oversatuartion era, marketers have to “pick an audience and superserve them,” says branding guru Alan Goodman, who teaches a marketing master class at Macaulay Honors College. At MTV, where he developed the logo and the iconic a

#ThePeople Raise Their Voice

Sep 9th, 2016 46m 50s

Hashtag politics gives people who don’t have big money to donate to candidates a way to compete with big donors, or so says social media guru Alan Rosenblatt in a talk at Baruch. Hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter aggregate conversation and opinio

What’s a Bitcoin?

Sep 8th, 2016 30m 53s

The cyber currency created in 2009 as “a plaything for hackers,” will be used by governments by 2023 and consumers by 2027 by some estimates, Nathaniel Popper, author of Digital Gold: Bitcoin and theInside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires

U.N. Chief to Youth: “Rise Up”

Apr 11th, 2016 32m 11s

Young people can agitate against injustice better than the leader of the United Nations can, or so he says. “I as secretary-general have constraints sometimes, political constraints,” Ban Ki-moon tells his audience at Lehman College, which was

Hello Young Writers

Mar 21st, 2016 24m 12s

Colum McCann’s advice to aspiring writers? Write. The Hunter College creative writing MFA professor reads “A Letter to a Young Writer” and his short story “What Time Is It Where You Are” at the Writing Center. Going against the common advice t

Novelizing Naples

Mar 21st, 2016 52m 24s

Who is the Neapolitan novelist writing as Elena Ferrante? The world doesn’t know, yet the world has taken notice of such books as The Days of Abandonment and The Story of the Lost Child, the final story of her (or his?) Neapolitan quartet, whi

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up (But He Can)

Mar 16th, 2016 58m 10s

Donald Trump is the only pol “who screws up and his poll numbers go up,” says Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, and he seems willing to say anything. “It’s funny how when you’re president of the United States,” says Politico chief politica

The Sugar Wasn’t Sweet

Mar 14th, 2016 52m 24s

They could starve in India or work like slaves on the sugarcane plantations of British Guiana; that was the choice for thousands of Indians who left home from 1838-1917. One was journalist Gaiutra Bahadur’s great-grandmother Sajuria, who, pregn

Women Rock Writers in a Man’s World

Jan 12th, 2016 25m 45s

Award-winning music writer and cultural critic Jessica Hopper gives a raw backstage look into the marginalization of women and people of color in the music industry. In her lecture at Macaulay Honors College, Hopper, the author of “The First Co

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