Highlights From the Festival

The Ideas Festival is over and I'm on my way back to D.C. (technically, I'm sitting in the Denver airport waiting for a delayed flight - along with Karl Rove, oddly, who's Blackberrying a few seats away from me), and on the off chance you weren't checking the Ideas Festival blog all the time last week, here are some highlights: James Bennet and Jim Fallows on Bill Clinton; why Tobias Wolff doesn't think much of James Frey; Corby Kummer on the iPhone and Rupert Murdoch's favorite drink; Colin Powell: strategically incoherent and having it both ways; Fallows on China, on China again, and with yet more China; the Stephen Breyer-Ted Olson steel cage death match; Lynne Cheney wants to fight a land war in Asia; Richard Branson wants to go to the moon; why the suburbs are the future of the city; what good reporters really do; oil: just another commodity?; Aspen's dearth of social scientists and its surfeit of jet age glamour; and, of course, the coarsest moment at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Regular blogging will resume tomorrow. I hope.

Update: And here's all kinds of YouTube.

Comments

"Never get involved in a land war in Asia." Are you referencing The Princess Bride?

Posted by Inconcievable | July 9, 2007 12:23 PM

This from Secretary Powell is declared
"Strategically incoherent":
He said that the Iraqi civil war would be resolved only by a "test of arms," adding, "The Shias, in my view, will ultimately prevail."
Please somebody, get it! He's saying that Iraq IS going to be ethnic partitioned, that because of the massive intermingling around Baghdad it's going to take open civil war to do it and there is NO POSSIBLE US STRATEGY THAT CAN ALTER THOSE FACTS! But, forces must remain available as a matter of our responsibility to prevent total genocide. So the future is a matter of making tactical responces as genocidal assaults occur. Strategy has massively failed, only limited tactics remain.

Posted by Roger Tompkins | July 9, 2007 1:14 PM