Short but insightful post from Timothy Noah at The New Republic:
Today’s New York Times op-ed page carries two separate citations from last week’s Aspen Ideas Festival, which probably means the thing has already paid for itself. The ideas cited are good ones, but the increasing dominance of corporate-sponsored idea-disseminators like the Aspen festival and the TED conferences (gently lampooned by my friend Nathan Heller in a recent New Yorker takeout) makes me wonder whether ideas upsetting to the moneyed classes will become harder to shoehorn into the national conversation. “Your blood will run in the streets” is not, I would guess, an idea that is welcome at such conclaves, even when meant metaphorically. I note with selfish interest that income inequality, a topic that has generated considerable interest of late, was not on the menu at Aspen, just as it wasn’t on the menu at the latest World Economic Forum.
Read the rest here.
