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April 4, 2024
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PODCAST
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What Makes a Life Worth Living?
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For years, Yale undergraduate students have lined up to take a wildly popular course called Life Worth Living, and it’s not the class you might expect at an Ivy League school — it teaches students to look beyond traditional markers of success for deeper meaning. Theology professor Miroslav Volf is one of the co-teachers, and at the 2023 Aspen Ideas Festival, he joined podcast and TV host Kelly Corrigan to introduce the framework of the class and start an extended and lively conversation with a wide variety of writers and thinkers. After setting the stage with Volf, Corrigan poses probing questions
to Mónica Guzmán, the author of “I Never Thought of It That Way,” James Ijames, a playwright who won a 2022 Pulitzer for his play “Fat Ham,” Alexandra Reeve Givens, a lawyer and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Rainn Wilson, the actor who played Dwight Schrute on “The Office” and recently wrote a book about spirituality called “Soul Boom.” The group contemplates key questions such as: what’s worth doing, who are we responsible to, how should we deal with failures, and what can keep our values and our behavior aligned?
🎧 Listen
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SESSION
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The Writing Journey With Amor Towles
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Have you ever wanted to sit down with one of your favorite authors and learn how they craft a beloved book? This conversation is for you. “When I'm writing a chapter, what I want to be driving the process as I string sentences together is my subconscious,” says Amor Towles, bestselling author of “The Lincoln Highway” and “A Gentleman in Moscow.” He sat down with Jenna Bush Hager, co-host of “TODAY with Hoda & Jenna,” to talk about his winding journey to becoming an author, the subtle connections between each of his novels, and his unusual writing process. Towles’ latest book,
“Table For Two,” was published this week.
🎥Watch
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20 YEARS OF IDEAS
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Who Do We Become When We Talk to Machines?
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Technology can’t be reduced to just panacea or plague, so it’s worth wrestling with the question of what we gain and what we give up as our reliance on technology grows. One of those things we’re losing, argues MIT professor Sherry Turkle, is empathy. In 2015, Turkle delivered one of the Big Ideas at the Aspen Ideas Festival opening session, and her words are just as pressing today. She spoke about the "robotic moment" we’re living in and the impact of our dwindling face-to-face conversations on empathy.
🤖 Watch
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