Elliot Gerson is the executive vice president at the Aspen Institute responsible for its Policy Programs, its Public Programs and its relations with its International Partners. The Institute’s more than 30 Policy Programs focus on both domestic and international issues. They foster candid dialogue among leaders and policy experts, advocate new policy, and have enormous impact on the ground. The Institute’s public programs – including the Aspen Ideas Festival, The Aspen Security Forum, CityLab, and many smaller programs across the country and world – open the Institute’s doors to a broader audience and further both its educational goals and its promotion of ideas to lead to action. The Institute has International Partners based in the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Romania, Spain, and Ukraine. Gerson also administers the US Rhodes Scholarships. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a US Supreme Court clerk, practiced law in government and privately, held executive positions in state and federal government and on a presidential campaign, and was president of start-ups in health care and education, and of two leading national insurance and health-care companies. He has served on many non-profit boards, especially in the arts.
Previously
Constrained neither by the private sector’s quest for profit nor the political structure of government, foundations have tremendous leeway to pioneer ideas, pilot novel strate...
White House climate czar points out the Inflation Reduction Act in your backyard, experts on extreme temperature weigh in on hot solutions, and an architect builds an argument...
Whom do we trust to tell us what to read and, perhaps more importantly, should we trust anyone to tell us what not to read? And why? We put our trust in people and organizatio...
Is a thing of beauty, as Keats wrote, “a joy forever?” Or is it, as in the view of Camus, “unbearable”? The precise nature of beauty and how to understand its role in our live...
Yuliya Tychtivska is the dynamic executive director of Aspen Institute Kyiv, an Aspen Institute partner organization in Ukraine, founded in 2015. Less a conversation about th...
Our politics is polarized, and, with Donald Trump poised for a comeback, democracy is in peril. Drawing on themes from his book, The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common G...
We’ll kick off the Festival with Big Ideas, followed by a dialogue on the implications of the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade.
Originally recorded by Sydney Pollack over two days at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, LA, in 1972, and then brought to life decades later by producer Alan...
Many Americans worry that our country is hopelessly divided — that we lack even the most basic common experiences, beliefs, or traditions, resulting in a society devoid of emp...
Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic Paul Goldberger shares an entirely new look at the history of baseball, as told through the stories of the stadiums where the game...
Among the most potent new challenges to liberal democracies around the world is the powerful reemergence of authoritarianism as a geopolitical phenomenon. Coupled with disrupt...
The resignation of Theresa May and the subsequent victory of Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party in the EU Parliament elections paint a portrait of an extremely polarized United K...
The algorithms used in machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence are remarkable in the speed at which they can analyze vast quantities of data to identify pa...
The grand European experiment of a shared currency, economy, and joint governance — a Nobel Peace Prize-worthy idea that has kept the continent at peace longer than ever befor...
While more than 100 countries have adopted democracy over the last two centuries, it’s already been a decade since political scientist Larry Diamond posited a “democratic rece...
The United States and Germany have much in common: advanced industrial economies, high living standards, first-class universities, and leading companies. They also share the s...
Thirty-two million gallons of mercury are trapped under the immense ice sheets in the Arctic Circle. As the Earth warms and the permafrost thaws, that toxic chemical could be...
It’s been called one of the worst self-inflicted political wounds of modern times. British Prime Minister Theresa May, seeking to solidify her mandate for a hard exit from the...
Governor Hickenlooper believes that States are the laboratories of Democracy, especially when it comes to a secure and clean energy future. Join him and Aspen Institute’s Elli...
The high seas comprise more than 40 percent of the surface of our planet and 60 percent of the surface of the ocean, yet are largely ungoverned and unprotected. The team at th...
Are we a union, or are we 50 states? States are finding themselves at odds with federal policy on a wide range of issues: immigration enforcement, marijuana legalization, envi...
The world of health care, and how to deliver it, is a constant topic for headlines. Beyond congressional wrangling over the next iterations of public policy, however, what pre...
US Senator Mitch McConnell has just announced that he will bring health reform legislation to the Senate floor for a vote next week. What is actually proposed in this bill, wh...
As a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia wearily sustains, Ukraine’s government still feels the two-year-old burn of Russia’s unlawful Crimea annexation. And although this de...
Technologists and reputable research now predict a huge potential for disruption in jobs as the pace of technology accelerates. Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, GiveDirectly,...
If you’ve only been reading the headlines, you might think it was all about El Chapo and a wall, but there’s a lot more to the US-Mexico relationship. After decades of economi...
The proliferation of infections that can not be treated is a nightmare scenario we have not done nearly enough to prevent. Half of all prescriptions written for antibiotics in...
After 40 years of largely cooperative Sino-US relations, policymakers, politicians, and pundits on both sides of the Pacific see growing tensions between the United States and...