What has become of the America that has for so long been held up as a shining example of ideals? In conversation at the 2026 Aspen Ideas Festival, documentary maker Ken Burns and American scholar and author Eddie Glaude unpack the vexed contradictions at the heart of American democracy, from the founding of the Republic in 1776 until today.

When Rohingya poet Mayyu Ali saw his name in print for the first time, he thought: "I exist." "Even though my government doesn't recognize [me] I exist in my writing," he told IDEAS. The Myanmar government has targeted the Rohingyas for decades, and Ali grew up with no birth certificate, no citizenship, and no human rights. He fled genocide in 2017 to live in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, until he resettled to Canada in 2021. Ali speaks with Nahlah Ayed about survival, the power of poetry, and his long journey to become a citizen for the first time in his life.

Behind every great chatbot are many human workers making decisions on how those chatbots behave and evolve. Recent PhD graduate Noah Khan has been observing these workers and shares his findings on their emotions and motivations as they design and build AI entities that communicate with users — influencing our own emotions and outlooks.

Fascism has been called “the aestheti-cization of politics.” Nazis and Italian Fascists both made visual culture, art, even fashion part of their destructive programs. Now the far-right in the U.S. is taking lessons from history, selling its ideas through memes, and hate-filled videos.

In 1922, Benito Mussolini took power in Italy. Sustained by a cult of personality and iron-fisted suppression of dissent, Mussolini transformed the nation into a single-party state. Nahlah Ayed and panelists discuss the legacy of Italian fascism and its relevance today.

Acclaimed author Gabor Maté joins the conversation in part two of our series exploring Wilhelm von Humboldt’s public education system. Maté is a former English teacher. In this episode we ask: Is Humboldt's 200-year-old system equipped to meet the challenging demands of the 21st century? And does it still reflect his ideals, especially at the university level? *This episode concludes our two-part series. It originally aired on April 16, 2024.

Two hundred years ago, Wilhelm von Humboldt created the education system as we know it today. At the heart of his philosophy of education was the concept of Bildung — reaching one's inner potential. Yet over the years, as his public education system was adopted, Bildung may well have been the critical piece left out. *This episode is part one of two-part series. It originally aired on April 15, 2024.

They were known as School Cars and Schools on Wheels. Trains that chugged along the railroads and brought schooling to children living in the isolated communities of Northern Ontario. It was a novel six-month experiment that lasted from 1926 to 1967. IDEAS explores the early project in remote education, homeschooling, and nation-building. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 9, 2023.