An Extraordinary Gathering
The Aspen Ideas Festival
By DANTE AMODEO / Photos By DANIEL BAYER
In June, the Aspen Institute will host the 20th anniversary of the Aspen Ideas Festival with a blend of thought-provoking, moderated discussions from over 300 speakers ranging from heads of state and athletes to artists, musicians and writers.
The Aspen Ideas Festival,
and even the birth of Aspen as a popular resort destination, traces back to the vision of Walter Paepcke, a philanthropist and Chicago businessman inspired by the beauty of the idyllic mountain town in the mid-1940s. When Paepcke saw Aspen, “he envisioned an ideal gathering place for thinkers, leaders, artists, and musicians from all over the world to step away from their daily routines and reflect on the underlying values of society and culture,” according to the Aspen Institute.
That vision has indeed come to fruition in the Aspen Ideas Festival, a10-day celebration taking place in June that functions as a nexus for curious intellectuals to explore some of the most pressing and innovative ideas of our time, while simultaneously honing into the spirit Aspen was built upon: the intersection of mind, body, and spirit.
Nestled beneath the Rocky Mountains, nearly 4,000 festival attendees will enjoy the opportunity to peruse the Aspen Institute’s picturesque 40-acrecampus, which is also home to the newly renovated Aspen Meadows Resort. On the agenda is a blend of thought-provoking, moderated discussions from over 300 speakers ranging from heads of state to athletes to artists, musicians and writers, as well as a variety of outdoor and wellness activities like yoga, hiking, morning runs and bird watching.
The 2024 festival marks its 20th anniversary and is shaping up to address the opportunities and challenges facing the planet, with the theme poetically dubbed “Bright Minds for Dark Times.”
The festival will be guest curated by award-winning journalist Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker, editor-in-chief of Tatler and Vanity Fair, founding editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast and founder of Women in the World and the Sir Harry Evans Global Summit, among other prestigious accolades. Brown will gather the kindling for what Graham Veysey, Executive Director and Executive Producer of the Aspen Ideas Festival calls, “an extraordinary gathering of thinkers and doers.”
A critical component to the event isn’t just procuring the right speakers, but the right combination of speakers. “Our bread and butter is really more about the moderated conversation than presentation,” says Veysey. “We have very few single speaker presentations and we work hard to provide diversity of opinion to help people think about things in multiple perspectives. That really happens with the more spontaneous conversation.” In turn, this adds complexities to the curation phase: For example, how does one find the ideal moderator to facilitate a productive conversation dynamic, which in the heat of a live moment, could turn south? This is especially true when tackling tightly coiled issues like the Israel-Hamas Conflict.
Nevertheless, the festival won’t shy away from “gritty” conversations, in fact, “they’ll be addressed first thing in the morning,” says Brown. This will parallel the structure of last year’s “Wicked Problems,” which kicked the day off with a contentious discussion of topics like gun control between multiple perspectives on stage.
Brown, who’s no stranger to generating fresh content, believes that this year’s content should strive for the ideal combination of “intellectually challenging and gritty with joyful and escapist,” the latter of which she calls “an intellectual sorbet course.” She goes on to clarify, “If you’ve just come out of an intense conversation about Ukraine, you don’t want to go into another about what’s happening in Myanmar, but you might want to hear something about music or culture or lifestyle. ... You don’t want to make people feel their heads are exploding.”
“A thought line of the festival this year is going to be “World on Fire,” says Brown, “which I think needs no explanation, but we must remember, the world’s also on fire with ideas, good ones. Although you want to talk about the enormous challenges and problems facing the world, you also want to talk about the people who are solving them and offer that respite and the spiritual havens which can help us to live our lives with pleasure and sanity.”
Some of the topics Brown mentions she wants to explore include the space revolution and AI. “They are of huge interest to people and I’m going to see how we can discuss these both in ways that are also very much linked back to humanity,” she says, “so that these are not what I call ‘conversations in the ether,’ but answer how these amazing tech innovations are going to affect us as a human race.”
Also on the agenda: journalism, a profession close to her heart. “I want to bring that strand of truth tellers to Aspen because one of the things I feel very keenly about is how we defend democracy with journalists, [who]are under tremendous attack from everywhere,” says Brown. “People don’t know what to believe. Facts are spewed out and you don’t know where they come from. Are they coming from a partisan source or AI? I think the whole of how we uphold truth telling and understand what is real and what’s false is a very big discussion for us.”
Brown hints that she aspires to include global voices to “bring the world outside us in.” Additionally, she envisions a variety of disciplines discussing topics. For example, she says, “It’s wonderful if you’re asking, ‘What does America stand for?,’ to have a terrific writer, perhaps somebody marvelous from the theater, as well as political experts. I think it’s much more interesting to hear from people who don’t normally talk about politics, which is not really what you see a great deal of, certainly in television coverage.”
What’s also important will be to include new and unexpected voices. According to Veysey, “while everyone wants to know ‘Who are the big speakers?’, often the speakers that have the most impact are ones that you least expected or potentially never heard of.”He recounts one such presentation that stood out to him: “It was with a guy named Steven Jones who was running a bread lab at the University of Washington, and he was talking about going back to our roots and baking with ancient grains and why that is so important to our ecosystem and the way we eat.”
While the event will be intellectually stimulating, there will also be an important emphasis on bringing joy and fun to the experience, a celebratory element that involves the outdoors. According to Veysey, another team is working on “how to activate this beautiful campus, whether it’s through receptions in our parks, dinners in our facilities or field trips where we’re taking people to the Maroon Bells to experience the beauty of a sunrise at the most picturesque peaks in North America.” This balance highlights the philosophy of mind, body, and spirit that the foundation of Aspen was built upon.
While spirit can mean a variety of things to each person, one of the most compelling reasons to attend the Aspen Ideas Festival isn’t just for the content, the location, or even the activities, but for the people who will gather there.
.Passes for the 20th Aspen Ideas Festival, June 23 – 29, 2024, can be purchased at AspenIdeas.org
Contact Us
For advertising inquiries, please contact [email protected]