Ideas Folgen

The 2023 detainment in Russia of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich made international headlines. Two years post-release, he’s taken the story back in a book: This Cursed Beautiful Land. He discusses journalism, freedom and international law at the 2026 Graeme Gibson Talk, along with fellow writers Carol Off and Philippe Sands.

In the wake of the U.S. midterm elections, Kim Lane Scheppele is relieved that the electoral process ran smoothly. Yet she believes there is still reason to fear for the health of American democracy. She argues that not all government coups require long knives, tanks, kidnapped politicians, renegade army officers or even clear illegality. There’s such a thing as “constitutional” coup, says the Princeton politics professor. This type of coup gradually overcomes safeguards through legal and norm-changing measures, using the tools of democracy itself, until all that remains is one-party autocratic rule. Scheppele draws on her years living in Hungary and Russia, plus her study of democratic collapses around the world, to propose a ten-point checklist that helps us spot when such a constitutional coup is underway. And like many American experts on autocracy, she’s now turning her analytic gaze on her own country.

You likely have never heard of Matilda Joslyn Gage. Gloria Steinem calls her “the woman ahead of the women who were ahead of their time.” Matilda worked side by side with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to get women the vote in the United States and co-wrote the history of the women’s movement with them. IDEAS producer Dawna Dingwall looks into why the towering figure was erased by her peers, and the work that is being done to write Matilda back into history. *This episode originally aired on Feb. 26, 2026."The Matilda Effect" was a term coined by a historian Margaret Rossiter to describe women whose work had been overlooked and erased from history, like Matilda Gage. Listen to this podcast to hear about the lost women of science and how Rossiter gave them the credit they deserved.Guests in this episode:Angelica Shirley Carpenter, author of Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical SuffragistMichael Patrick Hearn, author of the Annotated Wizard of OzGita Dorothy Morena, great-great-granddaughter of Matilda Joslyn GageCiarrai Eaton, executive director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage FoundationThe late Sally Roesch Wagner, former ED of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation appears courtesy of The Book Dreams Podcast, WCNY's Repeating History podcast, the International Wizard of Oz Club and filmmaker Jeremy Kagan.