connection and conflict in the melting arctic

A Salon with Kenneth R. Rosen

 Ideas Festival  / Sat 21st Nov / 5pm - 6.30pm

*Hours might change*

Somewhere beneath the Arctic ice, a communications cable goes dark - severed, deliberately, in the middle of the night. It's one small, chilling image from a much larger story: as the fastest-warming place on Earth thaws, distant lives that once had little reason to touch are being pulled into sudden, unavoidable proximity. What happens next?

Award-winning investigative journalist Kenneth R. Rosen, has spent his career documenting individuals and communities caught inside systems that are fraying, colliding, or failing around them. Today, his focus is the Arctic.

He traces how a warming Arctic is reshaping supply chains, security, and geopolitics far beyond the polar circle, forcing nations and communities into new, often fraught, forms of contact. Connection, in Kenneth's reporting, is forced, hostile, and destabilizing - the kind that happens when melting ice opens new shipping lanes, exposes untapped resources, and drags rival powers into the same contested space.

Join Kenneth as he discusses how a polar war might affect people, communities and their land. 

Kenneth R. Rosen is an award-winning narrative journalist and author. He narrative reporting from around the world focuses on how major geopolitical issues and conflict shape individual lives. He has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic, and reported from more than two dozen countries. Rosen was a 2025 Ira A. Lipman Fellow at Columbia University. He received the 2022 Kurt Schork Freelance Award for his reporting from Ukraine, Syria, and Malta. His earlier book Troubled prompted government inquiries into abuses at youth care facilities.

GOOD READS

Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic (2026); Troubled: The Failed Promise of America's Behavioral Treatment Programs (2021); Bulletproof Vest (2020).