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Air Dates: December 11-17, 2023  

The year began with chaos in the U.S. House of Representatives and ended much the same.  Along the way, we saw technology demonstrate its potential to reshape human productivity and creativity; we have seen wars and violence; and we have worried aloud about the health of American Democracy. Dr. Evelyn Farkas helps us take stock of all of that and name our 2023 “Story of the Year.”  

Farkas is one of the nation’s premier voices on American foreign policy and geopolitics, and one of the nation’s most-trusted experts on U.S.-Russia relations. Some of her former positions include: the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the U.S. Department of Defense’s top Russia expert under President Barack Obama and advisor to three U.S. Secretaries of Defense during her tenure at the Pentagon. She serves as a Senior Fellow, German Marshall Fund of the United States and worked in Congress as well as the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). She was a professor of international relations at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Marine Corps University and is the author of “Fractured States and US Foreign Policy: Iraq, Ethiopia, and Bosnia in the 1990s.” Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe, and more.  

On this episode of “Story in the Public Square,” Farkas discusses the upcoming election and Artificial Intelligence. She says, “In terms of the election of 2024, I do worry about the use of AI to propagate, as you said, disinformation. There’s not a lot of time to verify deep fakes or any kind of misinformation and AI can very rapidly get this into the information bloodstream. There’s a real danger that AI will mislead voters that we’ll need to counter with real leaders coming out and setting the facts straight quickly.”

“Story in the Public Square” broadcasts each week on public television stations across the United States. In Rhode Island and southeastern New England, the show is broadcast on Rhode Island PBS on Sundays at 11:00 a.m. and is rebroadcast Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. An audio version of the program airs Saturdays at 8:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. ET, Sundays at 4:30 a.m., 2:30 p.m., 9:30 p.m. ET on SiriusXM’s popular P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States), channel 124. “Story in the Public Square” is a project of the Pell Center at ������. The initiative aims to study, celebrate and tell stories that matter.