“Only 4% of Americans host other people.”
In the sessions I attended at Aspen Ideas, belonging came up a lot.
Several speakers highlighted the crumbling of “inherited belonging” (think about the town, ethnic group, or faith community your ancestors were born into versus your own origin story). They argued that the need to “create” community intentionally is a recent and unusual proposition.
Continue reading “Individual Community Building”“Infrastructure connects and divides” ~ Michael Maltzan
Michael Maltzan is the renowned architect who designed the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Sixth Street Viaduct — a bridge connecting (rather than dividing) two disparate neighbourhoods in LA, several affordable housing developments and many other landmarks.
Continue reading “Well-imagined infrastructure”My favourite session at Aspen Ideas was a talk by David Brooks. He got a standing ovation and made me weep.
His book, How to Know a Person, was on my list of favourites from my Wiser by Choice book club titles from last year. And I read his NYT columns regularly. So my fandom didn’t come as a complete surprise.
Continue reading “Brilliant Friendly Dad”When you sign up to attend the Aspen Ideas Festival, you don’t know which listed speakers will be there on the same dates as you. I was really hoping to hear David Brooks, Jonathan Haidt, Krista Tippett and Brené Brown. I got three out of four (sorry, Jonathan), plus dozens of other impressive speakers I may not have known about previously.
Continue reading “AI and Bren锓Every wise and graceful life I’ve encountered is a life marked by hope”
~ Krista Tippett
In her Aspen Ideas session with Jason Reynolds called “Hope is a Muscle,” On Being podcast host Krista Tippett said that hope requires imagination because it represents an insistence that the world does not have to be this way.
Continue reading “Hope is a Muscle”
