Julian Hayda

On the show’s last noontime broadcast, Worldview’s producers Steve Bynum and Julian Hayda, alongside longtime culture contributor Nari Safavi, discuss what putting the show together every day was like, and what it meant to them.

Jeffrey Winters, a frequent Worldview guest and Professor and Director of the Equality Development and Globalization Studies program at Northwestern University, joins the show to discuss oligarchy. On the heels of studies that indicate the United States increasingly becoming an oligarchic society as opposed to an egalitarian, democratic one, Winters compares the American political and economic system with that of Indonesia.

Worldview ends its 25-year run tomorrow. While Jerome has hosted the show that entire time, many producers have stood beside him during some of the biggest news our world has ever seen - from the handover of Hong Kong to the launch of the Iraq War. Tune in today to hear from a few of the people that made Worldview happen every day, and how the experience has impacted their lives long after they left: Nissa Rhee, Andrea Wenzel, Breeze Richardson, Edie Rubinowitz and Jonah Meadows.

In a time of skyrocketing costs for healthcare, college and home ownership, traditional markers of success for Americans are getting further out of reach. Colin Beavan is the author of “How to be Alive,” a book exploring how to mitigate desire, live a fulfilling life and do right by the planet while you’re at it.

The Trump presidency has been dogged with allegations of collusion with Russia since before it formally began. Details are, however, now emerging about President Trump’s relationship with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump reportedly phoned Zelensky on July 25, and while discussing a range of topics, asked him to reopen a probe into Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Ukraine had been investigating a decision Biden had made while vice president to pressure the country into dismissing its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings. Biden’s son, Hunter, was on the company’s board at the time. If Trump did ask Zelensky to reopen the probe, it would constitute a request by a sitting president to a foreign leader to investigate one of his political opponents. With us to discuss is Michael Isikoff, chief investigative correspondent at Yahoo News. He’s the co-author of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.

We bring you a tape from our deep archives, from our show the day immediately following the 9/11 attacks.

Thousands of Chicago-area students participated in the global youth climate strike in downtown Chicago today, joining over 5000 other strikes in 156 countries worldwide. As part of the Covering Climate Now initiative, Worldview broadcast live from the Chicago march, which was co-organized by twenty local groups including the Sunrise Movement, Sierra Club and the Field Museum. The rallies coincide with a Climate Action Summit organized by the United Nations this weekend. Secretary General Antionio Guterres called the summit after more than a year of similar strikes led by Swedish teen Greta Thunberg. Many of the activists believe that climate change is the most preeminent social issue of our time, tying principles of social justice to the science of conservation. During this hour, Jerome McDonnell spoke with the Field Museum’s Abigail Derby Lewis and Emily Graslie, youth organizers Alondra Lozano and Allison Cavallo, Kyra Woods from the Sierra Club, and Kyla Johnson from The People’s Lobby.

2019 marks Worldview’s 25th year of covering global news since its start in 1994. To celebrate, we’ve brought you selections from our deep archives, ranging from our coverage of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the handover of Hong Kong to the launch of the Iraq War. We’re also bringing you conversations with the people who made the show happen every day. Today, we’re joined by Dave McGuire, who produced Worldview from 2003 to 2006. He’s now a Washington D.C.-based producer for the BBC World Service, and joins Jerome to talk about how he feels the world changed - and didn’t change - since his time on the show. Special thanks to the WBEZ Archives Team for cataloging 25 years of Worldview and making this segment possible.

Israel is heading back to the polls today for the second time in five months after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to win over the support of enough parties to maintain his Likud Party-led coalition government. Polling shows his Likud coalition neck and neck with the rival Blue and White coalition led by former Chief of General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces Benny Gantz. Executive director of +972 Magazine Haggai Matar joins us to talk about the key issues at play, including Netanyahu’s stated promise to annex swaths of the occupied Palestinian West Bank should he win another term.

Every Friday, our Global Citizen Nari Safavi joins us for Weekend Passport to tell you how to travel the world without ever leaving Chicago. Today, he’s telling us about the acclaimed circus and cabaret company Teatro ZinZanni’s new Chicago show, “Love, Chaos, and Dinner.” The show, set within a 100-year-old Belgian Spiegeltent, combines artists and influences from around the world. Frank Ferrante, a stage actor, comedian and director known for his stage portrayals of the legendary American comedian Groucho Marx and Amelia Zirin-Brown, a New York City-based performance artist, comedienne, singer, composer, and actor, are both in the production and join the show to tell us what audiences can expect from the evening.

Despite China’s announcements that it has closed “re-education” camps in its western province of Xinjiang, reports from human rights organizations and journalists document their continued existence. The camps have housed an estimated one million of China’s Muslim-majority Uighur ethnic minority population and reports argue that Uighurs in the camps are forced to perform hard labor, renounce Islam and swear allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party. China at first denied the existence of the camps, but after satellite imagery proved their existence, the Chinese government described them as centers for de-radicalizing Islamic extremists. Louisa Greve, Director for External Affairs for the Uyghur Human Rights Project, joins the show to discuss Uighur repression in China. She’s joined by Yosef Roth, a co-organizer of the Uighur Rally at the United Nations.

President Trump announced via Twitter this morning that he had fired his national security adviser, John Bolton, over repeated policy disagreements. Bolton had been a consistent advocate for military action and against existing diplomatic frameworks, for example, arguing for a retaliatory military strike on Iran in response to the country’s downing of a U.S. drone in late June - a decision Trump almost took before backing off as planes were already in the air. The decision to fire Bolton follows Trump’s announcement yesterday that that peace talks with the Taliban were “over” in response to a suicide attack that claimed 12 lives in Kabul, including that of an American soldier. With us to discuss what Bolton’s firing could foretell for U.S. national security and defense policy, as well as what the cancellation of Taliban peace talks could imply for the now 18-year-old war in Afghanistan, is staff writer at The Atlantic Uri Friedman.

Following months of large-scale protests in which almost two million people took to the streets of Hong Kong, the region’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced she would formally withdraw the controversial Extradition Bill. The bill would have made it easier for Hong Kong to extradite its citizens to territories it doesn’t already have an extradition agreement with, like mainland China. Lam also announced she would set up an investigation into the initial causes of the protests. Though the bill was responsible for setting off the protests, its withdrawal hasn’t caused them to dissipate. Fully withdrawing the bill was, in fact, only one of the movement’s five key demands. The others are for Carrie Lam to resign as Chief Executive, the region’s government to stop formally referring to the protests as “riots,” a full independent inquiry into the actions of the Hong Kong police and the freeing of everyone arrested as part of the protests - a number that a report from the Washington Post puts at almost 1,200 people. To understand more about where the protests go from here, we’re joined by an expert on the social movements of Cantonese-speakers in China and the Chinese Diaspora, Justin Tse.

Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas as a Category Five storm on Sunday before staying over the island for three days. The death toll from the hurricane has reached 20 so far, and the United Nations’ World Food Program has announced that up to 75,000 people could need food and other forms of aid in the wake of the storm. We’ll talk about how climate change and inequality could have played a role in the scale of the disaster with Lisa Benjamin, Assistant Professor at the Lewis and Clark College of Law. Benjamin is from the Bahamas and advised the country’s government for several years at UN Climate Convention negotiations.

Worldview is 25 years old this year. To celebrate, we’ve been bringing you selections from our deep archives and conversations with the people who made the show happen every day. Today, we’re joined by Worldview’s first producer, who began work on the show in 1994 and then continued on to host WBEZ’s Odyssey. She’s now a civil rights attorney and joins us to talk about how producing the show informed her own beliefs about the world.

This Sunday marks 80 years since Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland and the commonly recognized start of World War II. Though the war was fought nearly a century ago and many of the countries that participated in it no longer technically exist, the war is remembered very differently across Europe and selective interpretations of historical memory continue to serve modern nationalist narratives and objectives. A week before the Nazi invasion of Poland, on August 23rd, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: a mutal non-agression treaty that mandated peace between both powers and carved out “spheres of influence” for each of them in Europe. Germany would eventually break the pact by invading the Soviet Union two years later. Though the pact was a secret of the Soviet Union until 1989, the Russian State Archives opened a public exhibition of the original treaty on August 23rd of this year in Moscow. The exhibition comes as Russia and many Eastern European nations that were annexed or occupied by the Soviet Union during World War II confront differing interpretations of the pact’s necessity, and of the events that followed its signing. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced at the exhibition’s opening that, given the circumstances of late 1930’s European politics, “the Soviet Union was forced on its own to ensure its national security and signed a nonaggression pact with Germany.” Many nations such as Poland and Ukraine that found themselves within the sphere of influence of either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union and were annexed or occupied by these powers have preserved a very different memory of history and the relative necessity of signing the pact. With us to talk more about how selective memories of the pact and other aspects of World War II continue to define modern national identities is Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale University and author most recently of The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. He also wrote On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson lost his working majority in the Parliament’s House of Commons after a Member of Parliament from his Conservative Party and the former UK Justice Minister, Philip Lee, walked across the House’s aisles to formally join the Liberal Democrats. The opposition in Parliament, made up largely of the Labour Party and followed by the Scottish National Party, the Liberal Democrats, a group of Independents and other smaller parties, now holds 320 seats to the Conservative coalition’s tally of 319. Johnson’s rule “is a Government with no mandate, no morals and, as of today, no majority,” Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said as Lee joined the Lib Dems. The shift in balance of power is supplemented by a group of within the Conservative Party publicly referred to as the “rebels” who also refuse to support Johnson should he push for a “No-Deal” Brexit. Not all of the Rebels have publicly announced their opposition to Johnson’s deal, but various estimates put the group at between 13 and 20 strong. Johnson has threatened to expel any MP from his party that refuses to support a Brexit deal that he negotiates, and announced that there were “no circumstances in which I will ask Brussels to delay” the Brexit process further. MPs will vote on whether or not to support a bill that would force another extension to the Brexit negotiations, and Johnson has also announced he’ll seek a snap election if that measure passes. The prospect of “No-Deal” became more likely for the United Kingdom after Johnson announced last week that Parliament would be suspended for five weeks starting next week and resume on October 14, two weeks before the United Kingdom’s October 31st deadline for formally agreeing to a withdrawal deal with the European Union. Failing to either extend the deadline or agree on a deal would result in the United Kingdom leaving the European Union with no formal trade agreement, and no set agreement governing UK nationals’ status in the European Union, and vice versa. Joining us to unpack latest events, as well as the potential outcomes for Brexit and the United Kingdom is Adam Roberts, Midwest Correspondent for The Economist.

Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg arrived in New York on Wednesday a two-week journey from England via an emission-free racing yacht. She’s there to speak at the United Nations. Noted Chicago firms like Studio Gang, bKL Architecture, and Pappageorge Haymes Partners have joined the organization Architects Advocate for Action on Climate Change, which is organizing a #StandWithGreta campaign. We’ll hear more about what to expect from the strike, and why so many Chicago-based architects decided to be a part of it, from Thomas Jacobs, cofounder of Architects Advocate for Action on Climate Change. He’s a partner at Krueck and Sexton Architects.