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Capital Ideas
New Haven's International Festival of Arts & Ideas wants to borrow your brain for a couple of weeks
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BNH
6/1/2000
By: Michael C. Bingham
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It's no revelation that marquee arts performers such as the Royal Shakespeare Company or Wynton Marsalis tend to get most of the attention when the International Festival of Arts & Ideas rolls around in June. But there's little question that the “Ideas” component of the two-week event is where the heavy mental lifting takes place.
The 2000 ideas program counts more than 50 individual discussions, seminars, speakers, readings and discussions in the festivals host cities of New Haven, Stamford and New London. IFAI Director Paul Collard has hewed carefully to his original goal to have the ideas program grounded in real-world issues.
Take health care, for example. Stem-cell research may be the greatest medical breakthrough since antibiotics. Yet the fact that the research employs cells from fetuses and embryos has unleashed a firestorm of moral controversy.
IFAI will bring former Reagan advisor and now U.S. News & World Report Editor-at-Large David R. Gergen to New Haven to moderate a June 15 discussion by a physician, an ethicist and a member of the President's National Bioethics Advisory Commission to examine “The Ethics of Stem-Cell Research” at Yale's Linsly-Chittenden Hall. Like most of the ideas events, this discussion is free. (For a complete schedule of IFAI events, call 203-498-1212 or visit www.artidea.org.)
Yale School of Management professor Theodore S. Marmor is a national Medicare expert whose book, The Politics of Medicare, has entered its second edition. With “Medicare: Myths, Realities & Remarks,” Marmor will shed light on the real story behind Medicare from the 1960s to the present, including the underpinnings of American health policy and why reform attempts have failed.
Then there's the New Economy. On June 23 Graeme Browning, editorial director of the “Briefing the President” project at the Internet Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. will team with Kim Alexander, founder of the trailblazing California Voter Foundation, to explore “Net Democracy” in a session at Linsly-Chittenden. Alexander and Browning will probe the Net and current political campaigns, privacy, campaign finance, voter education and other election-year issues.
Three days later at the same venue, Jonathan Zittrain, who heads the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, will pose the question, “Is There Really No One Controlling the Internet?” The answer, one supposes, is no, and Zittrain will outline the forces shaping what tomorrow's World Wide Web will look like - and who will be puppet and puppeteer within it.
Following Zittrain's talk, entrepreneurs of local Internet startups will exchange ideas and experiences in a “New Haven Dot.Coms: Panel Discussion” moderated by Jack Balkin, a Yale law professor who heads his school's Information Society Project.
Scheduled participants include Greg Belinger of Freshnex, Bluenet Ventures' David Meyers, Richard Schultz of Metaserver, Music-Listings.com's David Whitmore, Jim Wong of Synnap LLC, and representatives of the Yale Entrepreneurial Society.
Anyone with children will want to know about “E-Mail, E-Commerce, E-Kids: Parenting in the Internet Age” June 27 at the Joseph Slifka Center on Wall Street. David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, will boil down all the research on children and the digital revolution and offer information that makes sense.
Speaking of kids, the Millennium brings the festival's first-ever Ideas event to feature teenagers. A youth roundtable entitled “What Is Safety?” will feature five New Haven and three suburban teens discussing what safety means, why their world isn't safe and what can be done about it. The event takes place June 20 in the Aldermanic Chambers at City Hall.
A potent pair of Ideas events probe recent and distant scars on the American experience.
A two-hour June 29 symposium (Linsly-Chittenden Hall), “Assassinations & the 1960s: The Hurt, Hope & healing of America” will examine the impact of the murders of the two Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. on American culture as well as the long-term political, historic, social and spiritual consequences of these cataclysmic events.
Panelists will include Marion Wright Edelman, founder and executive director of the Children's Defense Fund, and civil-rights expert Vincent Harding.
The IFAI found a first-hand expert for its June 28 session, “Voices of Freedom: Experiences of Slavery” (Linsly-Chittenden Hall). Moctar Teyeb, an escaped slave from Mauritania, discusses the meaning of freedom and the problem of slavery in the world today. Teyeb's talk will be moderated by Jim Silk, executive director of the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Rights at the Yale Law School.
Immediately following the event the Interracial Dialogue Project will host facilitated small group discussions on the theme “Responding to Evil.”
The Bard continues to loom large at this year's IFAI, and not just by virtue of productions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar. Veteran New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges will use Shakespeare to illuminate the realities of war in a June 23 Linsly-Chittenden discussion entitled “Shakespeare, War & the Modern Conscience.”
Meanwhile, at UConn/Stamford, Shakespeare scholar Lynda Boose will pair with Hedges for a conversation about “Shakespeare, Women & War” June 22.
Moving from war to business (aren't they the same thing?), the co-authors of Power Plays: Shakespeare's Lessons in Leadership & Management will discuss their book (and sign copies) June 23 at Stamford's Ferguson Library. Former CEO John Whitney was recently named “most outstanding professor” at the Columbia Business School, while Tina Packer is founder, president and artistic director of Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox, Mass.
Which sounds like good company to be in, indeed. BNH
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