Ideas Festival Emory

Atlanta Music Icon Jermaine Dupri sits down with Georgia Tech Culture Scholar Dr. Joycelyn Wilson for a deep dive on how Atlanta grew to become a global cultural phenomenon. Through her work as an ethnographer, Dr. Wilson has been able to trace the cultural forces that have shaped the city’s unique identity as the thriving epicenter of Hip Hop and R&B. This conversation will be recorded for the Sing For Science podcast and moderated by its host, Matt Whyte. Sing For Science is a Top 10 Music Interview Podcast on Apple’s charts - past guests include David Byrne, SIA, Korn and dozens more.

Consider the many ways the media plays a vital role in our country. Journalists inform us, act as watchdogs, investigate wrongdoing, hold public servants accountable, shape public agenda, disseminate critical information and tell true stories that help us better understand the complex world we inhabit. But we are living in a moment of history in which the Fourth Estate, a pillar of American democracy, is in rapid transition. Disrupted by the digital age, newspapers and magazines are struggling to find sustainable business models and ways to regain dwindling public trust. What is the best path forward at this juncture and how can we ensure a vibrant and free press for generations to come?

In 2018, Molly Webster developed, hosted and produced the award-nominated Radiolab series Gonads. After pursuing biology in college and ultimately graduating from New York University’s science writing program, she has reported and produced for outlets including National Geographic Adventure, Scientific American, Nature and Freakonomics Radio. An Ohio native, when she isn't at Radiolab, you'll find her outside, staring off into the distance.
Webster is an awardee of Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation outreach initiative, through Radiolab.
Little Black Hole, a children's book about a lonely space phenomena, is her first book.

Will D Campbell was one of the most important southern white religious figures of the Civil Rights Era. He escorted black students during the Little Rock integration and was present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In an era when other Southern Baptists were strongly opposing Civil Rights, Campbell supported Freedom Riders and addressed issues like desegregation and the assassination of Medgar Evers.
Campbell's theology emphasized concern for all souls, including bigots, which sometimes put him at odds with other activists. He protested the Vietnam War, opposed the death penalty and abortion, and distrusted government. He authored numerous works, including "Race and the Renewal of the Church," "The Glad River," and "The Stem of Jesse." His autobiography, "Brother to a Dragonfly," was a National Book Award finalist in 1978.
David Dark is an American writer, the author of We Become What We Normalize: What We Owe Each Other In Worlds That Demand Our Silence, Life's Too Short To Pretend You're Not Religious, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons and The Possibility of America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea, which was included in Publishers’ Weekly’s top religious books of 2005. He also contributed a chapter to the book Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive (Chicago: Open Court, 2009). Following years of teaching high school English, he received his doctorate in 2011 and now teaches at the Tennessee Prison for Women, Charles Bass Correctional Facility, and Belmont University where he is associate professor of Religion and the Arts.

Since releasing their first album There Is a Bomb in Gilead in 2012, the road-worn Birmingham, Alabama band – singer and guitarist Lee Bains, bassist Adam Williamson, and drummer Blake Williamson – has built a reputation as being what NPR calls “punks revved up by the hot-damn hallelujah of Southern rock” who carry on “the Friday-night custom of burning down the house,” a raw live sound that they captured with Texas punk producer Tim Kerr on studio albums Dereconstructed (2014) and Youth Detention (2017) before recording a full-on live album at their favorite hometown dive, Live at the Nick (2019).
Their work has come to be known, too, for Bains’s lyrics and their literate, incisive social commentary on the band’s beloved homeplace, leading him to publish poetry in the New Yorker and speak at universities from Mississippi to Sweden. Bains and the Williamson brothers can also be found collaborating with artists like Lonnie Holley and Swamp Dogg, lending their bombast to truck-bed protests of Donald Trump and Roy Moore, playing benefit shows for striking Alabama coal miners and Southern Black LGBTQ liberation organizations, and presenting gospel-music live streams for Birmingham and Atlanta food banks.

Sari Botton, editor of Oldster Magazine, explores what it means to travel through time in a human body—of any gender, at every phase of life. It focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly we experience with each milestone, starting early in life. It’s about the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures.
Remember when you were about to turn 20, and it was a big, scary deal? Or 30? Or 40? Remember the first time you realized that moving into a new phase of life—graduating, getting married, becoming a parent, getting a major promotion, retiring—meant that you would be leaving behind another phase of life? Join Sari and Jessica as they talk about how we all navigate these changes. Interviewed by Jessica Handler

Dr. Jacquelyn Gill is an internationally recognized paleoecologist and multiple award-winning science communicator. She is a Professor of Paleoecology and the Director of the BEAST Lab at the University of Maine. In addition to her passion for research and teaching, Dr. Gill is also dedicated to sharing science with the public. She was the co-creator of one of the first climate podcasts Warm Regards, as well as the forthcoming show Jax & Phoebe Make a Planet. Interviewed by Maryn McKenna.

Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A. But instead, in 1982, he came out with an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded by himself, for himself. But more than forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteen’s most important record—the lasting clue to understanding not just his career as an artist and the vision behind it, but also the man himself.
 
Nebraska is rough and unfinished, recorded on cassette tape with a simple four-track recorder by Springsteen, alone in his bedroom, just as the digital future was announcing itself. And yet Springsteen now considers it his best album. Nebraska expressed a turmoil that was reflective of the mood of the country, but it was also a symptom of trouble in the artist’s life, the beginnings of a mental breakdown that Springsteen would only talk about openly decades after the album’s release.

This session will be moderated by Paste Magazine's Josh Jackson and have songs from the album performed by Joe Henry.

At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. One was so devoted to a life of isolation that he’d had his teeth extracted and replaced with a set of steel dentures.
As Hancock and his fellow American explorers would witness, paradise had turned into chaos. The three sets of exiles—a Berlin doctor and his lover, a traumatized World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian baroness with two adoring paramours—were riven by conflict. Petty slights led to angry confrontations. The baroness, wielding a riding crop and pearl-handled revolver, staged physical fights between her two lovers and unabashedly seduced American tourists. The conclusion was deadly: with two exiles missing and two others dead, the survivors hurled accusations of murder.
Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia—and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.

Carrie Buse is Head of Design for Mattel’s Future Lab, an innovation team focused on pioneering the future of play through tech-enhanced products, virtual collectibles, and mixed reality experiences. She also spearheads Mattel’s Design & Development initiative to ethically integrate AI-enabled processes into workflows and consumer-facing products.During her 20-year career at Mattel, Carrie has championed the intersection of physical and digital play through advanced concepts that put the needs of the user first. Her credits include Hello Barbie, a fashion doll powered by speech recognition and natural language processing; Hello Dreamhouse, a tech-enabled playset designed to give the child more control over bringing their stories to life; and Barbie Video Girl, a doll inspired by YouTube trends in which kids made videos with their dolls. (Keep an eye out for Video Girl’s cameo appearance at the Weird Doll’s house in The Barbie Movie.) Carrie also co-created the content and curriculum for the Barbie™ You Can Be Anything™ programming experience on Tynker, teaching over 1M kids basic coding concepts via playful Barbie themes. In addition to the Barbie brand, Carrie has supported Monster High (both OG and the reboot), Hot Wheels, Mattel Games, and Fisher Price.Prior to Mattel, Carrie freelanced as a Writer/Producer/Experience Designer crafting award-winning interactive content for Universal Pictures, Women in Film, and Philips Media Games.

The importance of engaging diverse audiences is critical if today’s legacy media and modern media companies are to survive. Atlanta Journal Constitution industry experts will explore the role diversity plays in the future of media consumption and the strategies needed to effectively reach and resonate with these growing audiences, including the launch of UATL, the AJC’s new Black culture vertical.
They’ll also discuss the challenges and opportunities in ensuring that the media reflects today's multicultural society. Attendees will gain insights into how diversity drives innovation, influences consumer behavior, and shapes the media landscape for years to come.

Global dance music stars SOFI TUKKER celebrate the release of their new album “Bread” in a chat about the beloved food staple and the chemistry that makes it so delicious with food scientist, Dr. Maria Ortiz. Dr Ortiz runs the popular Instagram page "All You Knead Is Bread” where she illustrates the fascinating science behind bread chemistry and her delectable sourdough recipes. This conversation will be recorded for the Sing For Science podcast and moderated by its host, Matt Whyte. Sing For Science is a Top 10 Music Interview Podcast on Apple’s charts - past guests include David Byrne, SIA, Korn and dozens more.