from WNYC studios I'm Brian Lerer this is my daily politics podcast it's Friday

July 26th so one obvious feature of American politics right now is the high levels of

polarization right That word has

certainly got a lot of meanings, though, that go beyond having differences on key issues. And so even

in this election year, when people are rightly working for victory in their party's races,

polarization is a topic unto itself. Biden and Trump have both been known to call for unity,

though they tend to use the word differently. The Carnegie Corporation of New York has begun

stepping into this fray. Their current president, Dame Louise Richardson, former president of

Oxford University, has committed to making a fight against polarization

their top priority for the foreseeable future. And we'll talk to her now about that.

Dame Louise, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

And it's a pleasure to be here. And for those unfamiliar with the Carnegie Corporation of New York, what kind of not-for-profit

organization is it?

What has it done in the past?

Who funds it?

Give us the basics.

Well, the basics are that we were founded by Andrew Carnegie more than 100 years ago.

He was an immigrant to the U.S. from Scotland, started life as a child labourer, a bobbin boy in a cotton factory, went on to become the richest man in the world.

But he didn't believe in inherited wealth, and he didn't believe he had any right to this money, so he resolved to give all of it away before he died.

He tried to give it all away. He built 2,700 libraries, Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, and a raft of other institutions,

but discovered that he wasn't quite going to succeed in giving it all away. So towards the end of

his life, he created us, the Carnegie Corporation.

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