Aspen Ideas to Go

The United States is a more secular society than many, and the percentage of people who don’t identify with organized religion is rising. Some of the impacts from that shift might be obvious, such as declining membership in congregations or decreased support for religious organizations and institutions. But some of the consequences are less obvious. How do we change as people when we don’t practic...

About two decades ago, NPR host Mary Louise Kelly had her first child and went down the extremely common yet commonly daunting life path of balancing a demanding career with a family. As a national security correspondent on assignment war zones, she missed family events and emergency phone calls from her kids’ school. As the daily weekday co-host of “All Things Considered,” she missed almost all o...

Artificial intelligence is clearly going to change our lives in multiple ways. But it’s not yet obvious exactly how, and what the impacts will be. We can predict that certain jobs held by humans will probably be taken over by computers, but what about our thoughts? Will we still think and create in the same ways? Author and former Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson has been writing biograph...

When Sal Khan created Khan Academy, he was trying to scale up the successful experiences he’d had tutoring his cousins one-on-one in math. He saw how effective it could be for students to go at their own pace, ask questions and be questioned about their reasoning, and he wanted to make those benefits available to as many kids as possible. The organization eventually grew to include free online con...

The White House has declared hostage-taking to be a national emergency. In July 2022, Biden issued an executive order outlining steps to deter the practice and help bring Americans back sooner. Increasingly, autocratic nation states such as Russia and Iran are detaining U.S. citizens unlawfully or on minor and bogus charges with the aim of getting something they want. Hostage diplomacy is no longe...

Almost everyone agrees that immigration policy in the United States is lacking, but despite decades of debate, Congress has not been able to pass comprehensive reform on the issue. For some, the primary issues are border security and economic concerns, and for others, labor needs and a commitment to humanitarianism take precedence. Why is it so hard to find common ground, and what are some visions...

Actor Rainn Wilson had his dream job on the hit TV show “The Office,” but was still being kept up at night by anxiety, depression, and life’s big unanswerable questions. He went on a quest to discover the world’s spiritual teachings, reading all the holy books of the world’s major religions. For several years, he researched and pondered concepts like truth, love, free will, and suffering, and he e...

The automotive industry is going through a time of profound transformation, facing internal and external pressure to electrify America’s fleet of personal vehicles. General Motors has made a bold pledge to phase out internal combustion and produce only electric vehicles by the year 2035. CEO Mary Barra is leading the ambitious effort to revamp the company, after about a decade in the top role. Jou...

Populations around the world have been electing more and more autocratic leaders in the past couple decades, via supposedly free, fair, and democratic elections. The freedom of the press is being impinged upon in many places, and fear, outrage and misinformation are often taking the place of reasoned debate. Minority populations in some countries are increasingly oppressed and vulnerable. Is democ...

Merely defining gun violence is difficult, and coming to agreement on what to do about it often seems near-impossible in the United States. But people on all sides of the debate agree that they want to feel safe, even if they have different ideas of how to achieve security. What will it take to truly listen to each other and make progress on this issue? U.S. Representative Lucy McBath, advocate Jo...

The U.S. Supreme Court continues to issue major decisions that have profound impacts on the lives of Americans and the political future of the country. During the term that just ended, the court ruled on affirmative action, voting rights, gay rights and student loan forgiveness, among other issues with broad reach. But the justices are not a monolith, of course, and there is much to be learned fro...

Like all technology, artificial intelligence can be used for good, and it can be used for evil. What little federal regulation the United States has governing technology and the internet was written before artificial intelligence existed in its current form, and as a society, we’re flying blind and in way over our heads as we enter this next phase of digital life. What could we possibly do to help...

Why is it that simple pleasures such as bubbles, rainbows, and hot air balloons bring joy to most people? Designer Ingrid Fetell Lee says, “there’s something really powerful in the idea that we all find joy in the same things,” especially items with little significance otherwise. Fetell Lee studied how our physical environment impacts our well-being, both physically and psychologically. She believ...

The desire to try and stop people from reading certain printed material has been around since material was first printed. In the modern era, book banning has waxed and waned in popularity, experiencing peaks during McCarthyism and again in the 1980s. We’re now in the midst of another wave, mostly targeting books by people of color and LGBTQ identities. In 2022, the number of U.S. attempts to ban b...

The age of technology and the internet provides constant easy access to sexual content and information about sex, for all tastes and curiosities. But survey data show that young people are having less sex than people of previous generations did at their age, and the experts are trying to figure out why. In this 2019 talk from the Aspen Ideas: Health archives, three professionals with inside knowle...

As a budding journalist in Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks was assigned to the horse racing beat in the sports department, with no experience or knowledge of the subject. She went to every single horse race in the city and reported on the results in great detail. It wasn’t until her 50s that she actually became personally interested in horses, and returned to the subject in her latest historic...

During the period of several months in 2018 when the Trump administration was separating migrant families at the U.S. border with Mexico, NBC News and MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff was exposing the raw details of the situation. He toured a detention facility holding young boys in Texas, and interviewed parents hundreds of miles away in California. He gave the public stark and simple descriptions o...

Even people who agree that climate change is a problem don’t necessarily agree on what to do about it. And some people still need a little more convincing that the threat is as serious as climate scientists and activists have been telling us it is. It can be difficult for skeptics with serious, well-intentioned questions to find a forum for getting answers. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens k...

A problem as big as climate change relies on millions of incremental solutions of all sizes, but also requires leaders who can keep their eye on the big picture. Not all the movement on climate needs to come from the government, but making progress will rely in large part on executive action. Vice President Kamala Harris has a clear vision for the role that the U.S. government can play in solving...

Today’s young people have not seen a lot of good examples of adults working together to solve problems. Generation Z is coming of age amidst daunting issues like climate change, gun violence, and a teen mental health crisis, and trusted adults seem few and far between to many of them. The rift goes both ways — Baby Boomers and Generation X also report distrust and dislike of young people. Members...

Heat waves. Wildfires. Floods. This summer has served up some of the most extreme weather on record, and it’s clear many of us are overwhelmed by climate change news. We usually hear more about problems than solutions, and it’s often difficult to find helpful information about managing our fear and discomfort. Alaina Wood is a scientist and climate communicator, known for her TikTok videos about u...

A traumatic event can literally change the way our brain functions, and live on in our body in unexpected ways. The field of psychiatry has not always acknowledged or fully studied the physical impacts of trauma, and mental health practitioners are often not aware of appropriate treatments for traumatized patients. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has been researching trauma as a clinician for abo...

What is it that pulls one person toward another, and connects them? What does love and attraction do to our brain, and vice versa? Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher has been studying questions of love and relationships for over 40 years. Through detailed data collection, research questionnaires and even brain scans, she has collected massive amounts of information on the topic, and identified...

We could look at people who veer off society’s dominant tracks into moral gray zones as simply bad, or damaged, or living the consequences of bad choices. But from the inside, people always have reasons for doing what they do, and when all the cards are on the table, morality can become murkier. New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe is fascinated by what drives people who land outside the norm, a...

Kids growing up in the U.S. today are facing some terrifyingly real, daunting problems. Almost every day, they hear about political polarization, racism, climate change, gun violence and a host of other complex societal issues. They’re learning how to comprehend those challenges and the emotions they evoke at the same time they’re trying to learn everything else, and that overwhelm has consequence...