TALK

Two Superpowers: Navigating China and America in the New Age of Uncertainty

Starbucks is opening a new store in China every 15 hours and TikTok is redefining American social media – even as tensions build over Taiwan, cyberhacking and threats to global health. For the first time in a generation, the world has entered an era dominated by two superpowers. Unlike rivals in the Cold War, the U.S. and China are also entwined on an unprecedented scale. Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and numerous other honors for his reporting on China, Evan Osnos, one of our preeminent analysts of global affairs and U.S. politics, combines deep knowledge with up-to-the-minute insights to assess the new global balance of power. Are China and America on a collision course, or can we find common ground?

As the world’s foremost forest ecologist, Suzanne Simard has reshaped the way we understand the life and growth of plants. In her groundbreaking work Finding the Mother Tree, Simard explained how trees interact and communicate using below-ground fungal networks. Her research established the existence of “mother trees” that play an important role in the flow of information and resources in a forest. The concepts she developed have influenced everyone from earth scientists to artists – think James Cameron’s Avatar and Richard Powers’ The Overstory. Join Simard for a dazzling journey through the unseen world going on above our heads and under our feet.