Podcast: The Sound of Soft Power
The clearest through line to understanding soft power in geopolitics may not run through policy at all, but through ecology. For decades, scientists believed trees competed for resources in silence. What they later discovered was something closer to a conversation of roots sharing nutrients, warning signals, and information through vast underground networks—an exchange so constant and essential that dependence, not isolation, proved essential for survival. Those unseen systems beneath the surface that allow life to endure are on the forefront of my mind as I log on to chat with Christopher Wurst, a former foreign service officer and the host...
Champions of the Golden Valley
Snow sprays as young men and women race down the slopes of the mountains surrounding Bamyan, Afghanistan. Without a ski lift in sight, and with many of them on handmade wooden skis, skiing takes on an elevated purpose in this community. Champions of the Golden Valley is a heart-warming new documentary produced by RPCV Baktash Ahadi that follows Alishah Farhang, a skier who, after failing to qualify for the Olympics as Afghanistan's first winter Olympian, returns home to start a ski club in his mountain village. In the days and weeks leading up to the club’s annual Ski Challenge, the documentary...
Frostbound and Down
The wind howls desolate, and the numbing of my fingers inch further and further up the wrist alarmingly. These unrelenting high velocity winds continue to crank at unfathomable knots and send flurries of hard-wrought regrets ringing between the ears. The ears that are also like icicles at the moment as I toe the start line of the almighty Antarctica Marathon. The desire to run a full 26.2-mile marathon in one of the world’s most inhospitable environments in existence isn’t without its fair share of cocked eyebrows and earnest inquiries into one’s mental health. The journey to the continent alone is...
What Does Peace Corps Do for America?
Every Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV)’s experience is unique and challenging. Facing the unknown, learning a language (or two), developing sensitivity to very different cultures, growing new relationships, identifying and completing projects, and overcoming physical difficulties are but a few of the tasks that PCVs face. When they return home, their stories tend to revolve around the experiences they had during their service and the impact they had in the countries they served. But service in the Peace Corps also affects the United States in ways that are equally important to document. The Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Oral History Archival Project...
The Great Peace Corps Book Exchange
Books have always played an outsized role in the lives of Peace Corps Volunteers. PCVs spend hours thumbing through paperbacks while waiting (and waiting) for public transportation in their host countries; they learn about these countries by reading local writers; and they enter fictional worlds to alleviate their homesickness. While today’s Volunteers continue the grand tradition of reading, the way they do it has evolved with technology, changing how they access books, exchange them, and consume them. Yet they still tend to read the same types of books—whether about their host countries, their jobs, or just for fun—and they continue...
Born to Serve
At the end of 2024, just days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the world lost one of the most eminent moral voices ever to sit in the Oval Office. President Jimmy Carter, whose life spanned a century, was also the biggest presidential champion of Peace Corps since John F. Kennedy. Both his mother, Lily, and his grandson, Jason, served, and numerous RPCVs have found meaningful work at the Carter Center, joining the fight to eradicate global diseases and to promote democracy worldwide. WorldView’s Robert Nolan spoke with Jason Carter, now the chair of the Carter Center board, who...
Literary Legacy
For as long as Peace Corps Volunteers have been sent to the remote corners of the world, they have brought back journals that capture day-to-day life in their communities, with all its ups and downs. Years and even decades later, these records give Returned Peace Corps Volunteers a way for them, and maybe a few loved ones, to relive the stories and contemplate the lessons learned from their service. But some of these journals go on to have a much larger reach as they are transformed into compelling memoirs, fiction, and other stories published professionally and even climbing to the...
Reading Room: RPCV Book Clubs
Nobody joins Peace Corps without a hunger to understand cultures beyond their own. But where does that hunger go once Volunteers are home again, amid traffic, school pickups, and email pings? For many, book clubs have become a doorway back to service, a place where returned Volunteers can feel the same spark of curiosity that once led them across oceans. Each meeting is an echo of those shared nights in far-flung Peace Corps sites, trading tattered copies of The Poisonwood Bible for One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Portland, Oregon, Bill Stein (Niger 1990–93) has been tending one of the...
A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey
This enthralling memoir from a former Peace Corps director follows the life of a curious and dedicated public servant, starting with her abandonment at age 3 and taking us through the next 76 exciting, joyful, and sometimes painful years of her life. Thankfully for the Peace Corps community, much of Jody Olsen’s life has included the agency, and her candid recollections are fascinating to read. But despite its title, A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey is as much about Olsen’s personal history as her professional one. She explores the dynamics of her childhood in a strict Mormon family, the...
Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben
I was just back from my Peace Corps service in Zaire when famed climate scientist Dr. James Hansen marched up to Capitol Hill in 1988 and told Congress—for the first time—that global warming was real. Fossil fuel combustion worldwide was overloading the atmosphere with carbon, he said, and overheating the planet. A year later, author Bill McKibben published his lyrical masterpiece The End of Nature, which grappled with the economic, social, and spiritual implications of a future where natural planetary rhythms give way to rampant wildfires, incessant sea-level rise, and heat waves that trap people, plants, and animals in their...