Pavlína Louženská is a trend forecaster, helping banks, startups and other organisations understand likely developments in the coming years – and plan accordingly. When we spoke, the conversation took in the methods Louženská employs to predict the future, why Czechs may be less bothered about keeping up to date than other nations, whether it’s embarrassing to be a “laggard” – and much more.

Jana Ciglerová is just about to become Czech Radio’s correspondent in Washington. Unusually the journalist is moving there not from Prague but Florida, where she has lived for the best part of a decade and worked for a Czech media outlet. Ahead of this big switch, I asked Ciglerová about everything from keeping up with the non-stop pronouncements of President Trump to how living in the U.S. has shaped her sons’ lives.

This week saw the first screening in Prague of the independent movie Wooden Hearts, which stars Vít Hořejš, founder of the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre. The fiction film also features many of the traditional puppets that Hořejš – who left Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s – uncovered in an old Czech church in Manhattan several decades ago. He and his life partner Bonnie Stein, who produced Wooden Hearts and also appears in the charming picture, stopped by at our studios just ahead of the screening.

Devade (Nineties) is the title of a fascinating new book and exhibition looking at architecture in Prague in the first decade after the Velvet Revolution. Among the best known buildings referred to are hotels such as the Hilton and the Don Giovanni, as well as the Myslbek Palace and the now iconic Dancing House. I discussed the challenges faced by Prague’s architects in the 1990s – as well as the advantages they enjoyed – with one of the book’s authors Jan Bureš, an architect and journalist who was himself born in 1996.

Jitka Exler has enjoyed great success in the US, designing and making puppet characters for TV hits The Muppet Show and Sesame Street and working for major toy manufacturers. Exler had been forced to leave her native Czechoslovakia after signing the Charter 77 human rights document at the age of 19. The artist currently has a joint exhibition at the Czech Center New York.

As a presenter on Canal+ Sport Karel Häring is one of the faces of the English Premier League for many Czech football fans. How has he managed the switch after decades as a print journalist? And what is it like working, and travelling, with star player turned pundit Karel Poborský? I discussed these questions and more with Karel Häring at our Prague studios.

TV journalist Darja Stomatová has been reporting from Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Last week Stomatová received the Ferdinand Peroutka Prize, perhaps the most prestigious honour in Czech journalism, for her coverage of the conflict. I spoke to the 34-year-old at our studios in Prague.

Czech interest in this year’s Academy Awards will centre on Mr. Nobody Against Putin, a Danish-Czech production nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category. The film contains footage shot surreptitiously by a teacher, Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, who wanted to expose war propaganda in schools in Russia. Talankin had no choice but to flee his native country before the documentary’s release and is now based here in Czechia. Radovan Síbrt is one of Mr. Nobody Against Putin’s two Czech producers – and I spoke to him just days after it also earned a BAFTA nomination.

Bet Orten studied fashion photography in London after a stint as an assistant to a well-known celebrity photographer in New York. But for the last decade and a half Orten, whose Instagram profile describes her as a “female photographer taking pictures of other females”, has been living here in her native Prague. We spoke at our studios ahead of an exhibition she has coming up in the Czech capital this spring.

The Trump administration’s refusal to rule out taking the Danish territory of Greenland by force has caused shockwaves in Europe, with the threat to a fellow NATO member raising grave questions about the alliance’s future. If NATO does cease to exist in its current form, what will that mean in practical terms for European countries such as Czechia? I discussed that and related questions with Michal Smetana, a security expert at Prague’s Charles University.