Each autumn, tens of thousands of young people get ready to take part in We Day, a series of rock concerts and speaking events designed to inspire social change. Targeted at youth, We Day takes students out of their school environment with a goal to mobilize the audience as “change-makers.” In the We Day philosophy, we all want to create change in the world – we just need a kickstart and to be taken out of our everyday lives, to be energized by 20,000 other people in a large stadium full of inspiring people and celebrities.

Several times, the concepts analyzed in theory and the ‘how should it be’ don’t really happen in reality, for social scientists like me it’s a constant struggle to analyze reality and society and try to come up with proposals to improve the situation and the life quality of people, and sometimes they don’t happen to be quite as real as we would want.

Aside from reunification of the Korean peninsula, if denuclearization in North Korea is to be the central goal, how can one possibly achieve it? What could bring the North Korean regime to its knees and to the negotiating table? [...] for the ears of one pivotal or sitting on the panel of speakers if things continue as they are. That audience, of course, is the 24 million North Korean citizens still in the country.

David Rothkopf talks with Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, Inc., who accepted this year’s Diplomat of the Year award on behalf of Google. The conversation at the awards dinner was centered on how the massive gains in connectivity are changing the landscape of diplomacy. Within just a few years, everyone on this planet may be connected to the internet. 

Ordinary people are joining forces to create a global grassroots movement, geared towards taking on some of the biggest organizations and encouraging them to divest: take their money out of the fossil fuels, and [...] invest it in climate solutions. In the past three years, more than 400 institutions worth $2.6 trillion have pledged to divest, including the Rockefeller Foundation, an institution that made its fortunes from oil.