A Relational Journey: You and We with Jim Ferrell

In this episode, Heidi Brooks talks with Jim Ferrell, who invites us to notice the invisible default of individualism that fragments our organizations and our lives. He describes a process for groups to map, measure, and manage the relational space—the “space between us”—for collective impact. Jim challenges us to see relationships fundamentally as the primary unit of analysis in work and life rather than the individual, arguing that everything we…

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Greater Transparency Brought Change to Police Departments—And Then a Reversal

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, a Black teenager, was stopped by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Within minutes, Brown had been shot and killed. In the wake of the killing—and as more deaths of Black men and women at the hands of police officers made headlines—the Black Lives Matter movement, which had begun as a social media campaign the previous year, grew into a nationwide protest movement.The…

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How Communities Can Get a Better Deal from Data Centers

This commentary was originally published in Time. The views expressed are the authors’ own.Data center companies “dug their own grave,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Sunday, and “that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.” Nine months ago, Abbott crowned Texas the epicenter of AI development, alongside Google executives announcing a $40 billion investment in the state. Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who actively recruited Amazon’s $20 billion commitment to…

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How the Right Business Model Can Fuel Creativity

Would you each introduce your company and your role?Snow Rui: I’m president, CFO, and general counsel of Hooded Horse, a video game publisher that I co-founded in 2019 with my husband, Tim Bender, who is CEO. Our first release was in 2022. Today, we have about 40 people distributed globally. We’ve released 30 games with several of them selling over a million copies. I wear a lot of hats because…

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Putting a Price on Climate Risk

Your recent work has focused on unpriced risk. Would you explain what that is?It’s a risk that’s apparent—it’s not hidden or unrealistic, it doesn’t require a black-swan event to be relevant—but for some reason, there’s a lag in pricing it. Maybe the data needed to price it is difficult. There might be significant cost to quantifying the risk. Or the complexity of the issue might be daunting.There is often unpriced…

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How Cooling the Planet with Geoengineering Would Upend Climate Economics

Climate scientists and policymakers have long warned of a dangerous threshold: If global temperatures rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages, we risk devastating consequences, including severe flooding, heat waves, and drought. Yet surpassing that grim marker now seems almost inevitable.One potential way to keep the harms of climate change at bay is geoengineering—deliberate intervention in the Earth’s climate system. The most widely studied form of geoengineering, called…

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Who Trains Junior Employees in the Age of AI?

This commentary originally appeared in K. Sudhir’s Substack newsletter The Slow Part. The views expressed are the author’s own.Many senior people are noticing the same thing lately: their junior staff are doing better work than ever—cleaner drafts, faster models, fewer mistakes—because AI now handles the grinding first pass, the rough draft that used to eat a junior’s week. And then, often in the same breath, comes the hesitation: they’re not…

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The Problems with the Paramount–Warner Merger

This commentary was originally published in Fortune. The views expressed are the authors' own.David Ellison finally got the “yes” he wanted. After eight rejections, a hostile tender offer, a Delaware lawsuit, and a bidding war that Netflix declined to escalate, Paramount Skydance signed its $110 billion agreement to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in February. In Hollywood romance terms, the boy got the girl. But every must-watch franchise gets a sequel.…

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Can Investors Make a Profit by Saving Bats?

In a 2022 agreement, an international coalition of countries set a daunting goal: to come up with an additional $700 billion per year to address biodiversity loss. These funds are needed to stave off extinctions of about one million species and preserve nature’s benefits to humanity, including food, medicine, clean water, and protection from floods and other hazards. “Biodiversity is fundamental to human well-being, a healthy planet, and economic prosperity…

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Fads, Outbreaks, and Health Policy

Howie and Harlan discuss health headlines including the ongoing cyclosporiasis outbreak; a recent FDA decision allowing pharmacies to compound certain peptides; and a concerning report from Medicare trustees on the program’s financial future. They also dive into the health habits they’re changing this year and a new feature from ChatGPT allowing users to connect medical records and health data to the platform. Show Notes: Healthy Habits Health & Veritas: Ezekiel…

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The Possibility of ‘Both/And’: Talking Paradox with Dr. Wendy K. Smith

Organizational leaders are often under constant pressure to deliver simple solutions in the face of deeply complex challenges, with confidence and speed. You may experience this as a kind of “either/or” decision-making, a tension between doing things this way or that way. A leader pressured to decide quickly may miss insights that emerge from sitting with the tension within the paradox they face. Amidst these dynamics, can leaders hold the…

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How Much Is Crawling Your Content Worth to an AI Bot?

“Best recipe for banana bread.” “How to fix running toilet.” “Is Harry Styles engaged?”For decades, a well-established business model allowed internet users to answer big life questions like these. Search engines directed readers to content on other websites—and those visits helped support content through advertisements, subscriptions, and product sales.AI-assisted search is already threatening the once-symbiotic relationship between search engines and content producers. On Google, for example, many queries now result…

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Melanie Matheu: Turning Science into Impact

Transcript Harlan Krumholz: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz.Howard Forman: And I’m Howie Forman. We’re physicians and professors at Yale University, and we’re trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare. Our guest today is Dr. Melanie Matheu. But first, we’re always checking in on whatever the current or hot topics in health and healthcare are. So, Harlan, where do you start?Harlan Krumholz: Well, there’s…

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To Reduce Emissions, the Carbon Offsets Market Needs One Crucial Fix

Over the past decade, thousands of companies have taken public positions on climate change. Airlines, banks, tech giants, and consumer brands have pledged to reach “net zero,” promising to bring their greenhouse gas emissions down to nothing—or close to it—by some future date.But few companies can actually eliminate all of their emissions. Some activities—flying planes, making cement, running global supply chains—are difficult or impossible to fully decarbonize with today's technology.…

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A Prescription for Rebuilding Trust in the FDA

This commentary was originally published in Fortune. The views expressed are the authors’ own.The FDA occupies a unique position at the intersection of science, medicine, public health, and innovation. Patients depend on the agency to evaluate therapies rigorously and fairly; innovators depend on predictable regulatory pathways; and investors depend on confidence that scientific evidence will guide decision-making.That’s why it’s so disappointing and disheartening to see that only about half of…

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Shivan Mehta: Designing Better Healthcare Decisions

Howie and Harlan are joined by Shivan Mehta, associate chief innovation officer at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, to discuss how healthcare organizations can use behavioral science to remove barriers that keep patients from getting recommended care. Harlan warns that ill-defined rules governing scientific collaboration with China could chill medical research; Howie revisits the discovery of Legionnaires’ disease 50 years ago as New York confronts a new outbreak. Show…

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When Essential Infrastructure Projects Involve Exceptional Risk, No Sector Can Go It Alone

The M10 industrial park looks much like the warehouses and fulfillment centers lining highways across America. A sprawling complex studded with loading bays, it offers local businesses space to conduct manufacturing, logistics, and technological operations.But unlike most industrial parks, M10—which opened in 2024 in Lviv, Ukraine—was built as an economic lifeline for a country in crisis. For Ukraine, a major exporter of agricultural products long known as “the breadbasket of…

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What Keeps Women Artists Out of the Art World’s Top Echelon?

A painting by Joan Mitchell recently set a record for the highest sale price for a single work by a woman artist in Asia. Can you put that news in the context of the market for women’s art more generally?Joan Mitchell’s $17.6 million sale is an important moment, but it doesn’t change the overall structure of the market. The gap at the very top remains enormous: the highest prices for…

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What Critics Get Wrong About Dual-Class Shares

This commentary was originally published in Fortune. The views expressed are the author’s own.The recent high-profile IPO of SpaceX, which famously utilizes dual-class shares to give Elon Musk nearly 85% control, has reignited debate over dual-class shares themselves, and whether they hurt or help shareholders.Some of the most revered and successful business builders have dual-class share structures at their companies, from Michael Dell at Dell to Warren Buffett at Berkshire…

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Kate Heilpern: Redefining the Hospital’s Role

Howie and Harlan are joined by Kate Heilpern, president of Yale New Haven Hospital, to discuss the hospital’s 200-year history, the financial pressures facing health systems, and how Yale New Haven is balancing innovation with its mission to serve the local community. Harlan examines the growing burden of U.S. healthcare costs; Howie highlights encouraging trends in infant mortality, life expectancy, overdose deaths, and cancer survival. Show notes: Healthcare Costs “National…

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Selwyn Rogers: Bearing Witness to Violence (Encore)

Transcript Harlan Krumholz: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz. I’m here with Howard Forman. We’ve got a special episode today. It actually reprises something that we did before because we talked a lot with Selwyn Rogers about his book and now it’s coming out. But I’m going to hand it over to Howie who’s going to tee this up for us.Howard Forman: Yeah, we’re really excited about this.…

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Too Many Pro-Democracy Groups Are Weakening the Cause

This commentary was originally published in Time. The views expressed are the author’s own.The movement to strengthen democracy in America is not struggling because its enemies are too strong. It is hobbling because its friends are too many.I have spent decades inside the machinery of social action movements. I have convened rival cancer organizations under a single coalition, mobilized over a thousand corporations to withdraw from Russia after the invasion…

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Bhramar Mukherjee: What Can the Data Tell Us?

Transcript Harlan Krumholz: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz.Howard Forman: And I’m Howie Forman. We’re physicians and professors at Yale University, and we’re trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare. Our guest today is Professor Bhramar Mukherjee, but first, we like to check in on current or hot topics in health and healthcare. What do you have today, Harlan?Harlan Krumholz: Yeah, a new study…

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How Trump Rewrites Defeat as Victory

This commentary was originally published in Time. The views expressed are the author’s own.The golden chariot of fate has often carried President Donald Trump to safer shores when financial, business, political, or legal failures trapped him in a corner. But he has hit a wall with his war against Iran, stymied by his inability to secure the “unconditional Iranian surrender” he promised at the outset of the campaign.Was the war…

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Ingrid Katz: What Would It Take to Eradicate HIV?

Howie and Harlan are joined by Ingrid Katz, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, to discuss why HIV continues to spread despite the existence of cheap and effective treatment, what AIDS activism can teach us about tackling chronic diseases like hypertension, and what outbreaks like Ebola reveal about the consequences of fragile health systems. Harlan reports on a breach of UK Biobank data and what it means for…

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Philosophy as a Practice of Self-Cultivation with Robin Dembroff

In this episode, Heidi Brooks talks with Robin Dembroff who invites us to notice the confining, prescriptive categories we get boxed into and the opportunity to maybe name or nudge our way to a more enlivened self. Robin challenges us to see gender fundamentally as a verb rather than a noun–an active, ongoing process of “gendering” rather than an immutable, biological trait. By looking at the “windshield of consciousness” that…

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Science, Policy, and Power

Transcript Harlan Krumholz: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz.Howard Forman: And I’m Howie Forman. We’re physicians and professors at Yale University. We’re trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare. Ordinarily, we have a guest, but at least once a month we like to do a deeper dive on health and healthcare. There’s a lot going on in the world right now, Harlan. So what…

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Wisdom of the Few? Prediction Markets Are Driven by a Small Number of Skilled Traders

Characters in fairy tales rely on crystal balls to see into the future. In 2026, the world has prediction markets, in which traders bet on the likelihood of real-world events such as election outcomes or the winner of the Eurovision song contest—often with surprising accuracy.The founders of these markets, which have grown by orders of magnitude in just the past two years, attribute their accuracy to the wisdom of crowds,…

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Will Banning Personalized Pricing Work?

Setting prices differently for different customers has been a practice for a long time. Are AI tools making personalized pricing more common or more effective?Yes. Firms have often tried to charge different customers different prices, but AI makes this practice easier, cheaper, and more precise. In the past, price discrimination often relied on fairly broad categories: business versus leisure travelers, coupon users versus non-coupon users, students versus non-students. Today, firms…

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Over the (Very) Long Run, Stock Bubbles Are Rare

Professor William Goetzmann has a longstanding interest in long-term financial returns. “Financial history helps you estimate and plan,” he says. “Five years doesn’t help you with the trend. If you’ve got 150 years or more, that’s a good foundation for understanding where you may end up.”Last year, Goetzmann began preparing a volume of articles for the 50th anniversary of his colleague Roger Ibbotson’s book Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation (SBBI),…

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Live at the Yale Innovation Summit 2026

Howie is joined by guest host Megan Ranney, dean of the the Yale School of Public Health, for a live episode recorded at the Yale Innovation Summit, featuring conversations with five innovators at the intersection of healthcare, public health, and entrepreneurship. Jaya Dadwal, a recent graduate of the School of Public Health and founder of forEVA Health, focused on raising healthcare standards for the female body Monique Rainford, a Yale…

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Nicholas Christakis: The Science of Human Connection

Howie and Harlan are joined by Nicholas Christakis, director of Yale’s Human Nature Lab, to discuss his research on social networks, human connection, and the forces that help societies cooperate and endure. Harlan discusses promising phase 3 results for retatrutide, Eli Lilly’s experimental “triple G” obesity drug; Howie provides an update on the fast-growing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Show notes: Obesity Drugs “Lilly’s triple agonist, retatrutide,…

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The New Fed Chair Wants Less Transparency. That’s a Mistake.

This commentary was originally published in Forbes. The views expressed are the author’s own.The new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, has made it clear that he would like to make significant changes to the Fed’s monetary policy communication. He has argued that excessive communication isn’t helpful to the public and may constrain monetary policy decisions. He has been particularly critical of the Fed’s projections of the policy interest rate (the “dot…

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Trump Has a Path Out of the Trade War. Will He Take It?

This commentary was originally published in Fortune. The views expressed are the author’s own.In Greek theater, a deus ex machina arrives when a protagonist is hopelessly trapped — and a golden chariot descends from the heavens to rescue them from a conflict they cannot escape on their own. That is precisely what the Supreme Court has delivered to Donald Trump on trade. With his IEEPA tariff authority struck down as…

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Who Gets to Shape Healthcare?

Transcript Harlan Krumholz: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz.Howard Forman: And I’m Howie Forman. We’re physicians and professors at Yale University, and we’re trying to get close to the truth about health and healthcare. Ordinarily, we have a guest. Once a month we go into the studio, we catch up on the incredible volume of news around us. This week we are taping a little bit early because…

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Solving Operational Problems Is the Real Engine of CarMax’s Success

Austin Ligon co-founded CarMax in 1991 as an executive at Circuit City and served as president and CEO of the spun-off company until 2006. Today he is an angel investor and advisor to retail, service, and educational startups.Q: Where did the idea for CarMax come from?We were looking for areas that no big-box retailer had put effort into. Automobiles were obvious, but new cars are heavily controlled by franchise laws…

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Why Do Moderate Voters Support Extreme Candidates?

Americans are frustrated by their increasingly polarized government. Their trust in government is at an all-time low, with just 4% saying that the political system is working extremely or very well. And yet political scientists have demonstrated that voters routinely elect politicians whose views are more ideologically extreme than their own. The seemingly incompatible match between moderate public opinion and politicians’ extremism can be accounted for by rational individual behaviors…

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A Guide to Getting Agentic AI Right

This commentary was originally published in Fortune. The views expressed are the authors’ own.In April 2025, an AI agent named “Sam” working in customer support for the developer tools company Cursor told users that their licenses worked on only one device. Subscriptions were canceled, complaints flooded Hacker News, and the company scrambled to clarify that no such policy existed. Sam had invented it. The technology took on a life of…

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Lee Schwamm: Onboarding AI at the Hospital

Howie and Harlan are joined by Lee Schwamm, the Yale School of Medicine’s associate dean for digital strategy & transformation and chief digital health officer of the Yale New Haven Health System, to discuss how the system is working to rapidly evaluate and deploy AI tools without compromising patient safety and oversight. Harlan highlights vaccine studies reportedly held back from publication and argues for greater scientific transparency; Howie reports on…

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The Colorado River Is Overdrawn, and a Corporate Reckoning Is Imminent

This commentary is adapted from a post in Todd Cort’s Substack newsletter The Real Price of Risk. The views expressed are the author’s own. Imagine that a company had a pension fund that promised $16.5 billion in future payouts but the value of that fund today sits at only $12.4 billion. Moreover, that pension fund has been drawing down the balance for over 25 years to cover the annual shortfall.…

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