The Aspen Institute
The Aspen Institute is a global nonprofit founded in 1949 that works toward a free, just, and equitable society through dialogue, leadership, and action on challenges facing the United States and the world.
The Colorado River Is Overdrawn From Snowpack to Delta
National Geographic photographer and filmmaker Pete McBride uses Witness to Water to argue that the Colorado River’s crisis is already visible across the basin, from diminished snowpack near Aspen to mud and cracked earth in the Sonoran Desert delta. Following the river through reservoirs, canyons, farms, cities and tribal lands, McBride presents it as an overdrawn system asked to supply drinking water, crops, hydropower, recreation and habitat beyond what a hotter, drier watershed can reliably provide. His case for hope is conditional: restoration and compromise are possible, but only if water users demand less and work at the scale of the river’s losses.
A Nonfiction Book Begins With Reader, Frame, Authority, and Timing
In an Aspen Ideas Festival workshop, Anne Amienne argues that a nonfiction book begins not with a credential or subject area, but with a specific reader and a frame that gives the material motion. Her method asks prospective authors to turn expertise or lived experience into a clear book concept by testing what the reader needs, why the book matters now, and why the writer has the authority to write it. The goal is not a finished proposal, but a sharper idea that can survive contact with readers, agents, and editors.
Joy Can Survive Uncertainty Without Turning Loss Into Gain
At a live taping of The Happiness Lab at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Kate Bowler, the Duke religious historian and author of Joyful, Anyway, argued that joy is not the payoff for suffering well or getting life under control. In conversation with Yale psychologist Laurie Santos, Bowler rejected the cultural pressure to turn loss into growth, gratitude or self-improvement, making the case that joy can survive alongside grief, uncertainty and unfinishedness precisely because it does not require denial.
Universities Serve Democracy Through Disagreement, Access, and Self-Governance
Princeton president and constitutional law scholar Christopher Eisgruber argues that American universities are being judged too often by their most visible conflicts rather than by their central work: teaching students to argue, learn and govern themselves under academic norms. In an Aspen Ideas Festival conversation with Daniel Porterfield, Eisgruber defends universities as democratic institutions that advance free speech and equality together, broaden access to talent, and require autonomy from political, donor and administrative pressure. His case is not that universities avoid failure, but that their value lies in disciplined disagreement, principled self-governance and opportunity widened beyond traditional pipelines.
Playful Connection, Not Passive Leisure, Makes Free Time Restorative
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Catherine Price, Elizabeth Dunn, and Laurie Santos made the case that fun is not a frivolous reward for finishing serious work but a condition for sustaining it. Drawing on psychology and behavioral science, they argued that adults lose fun when overwork, phones, passive leisure, and performance pressure crowd out the playfulness, connection, and absorbed attention that make life feel energizing. Price defined fun as playful, connected flow; Dunn’s research added that social time, active leisure, and protected time affluence are central to a genuinely good day.
Health Work Requires Contact Across Disciplines and Institutions
In its 2026 closing video, Aspen Ideas: Health presents the gathering as a case for health work that crosses disciplines, institutions, and assumptions. The Aspen Institute frames the June event not as a forum built around one profession or answer, but as a community whose value comes from participants meeting unfamiliar people, testing ideas outside their usual settings, and carrying new connections back to patients, research, teams, and communities.
U.S. Anti-Liberalism and Retrenchment Are Weakening the Postwar Order
Foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan argues that the United States is not simply declining but voluntarily abandoning the liberal principles and global commitments that gave its power strategic purpose. In a live Aspen Ideas Festival conversation with former national security officials Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer, Kagan links America’s retrenchment abroad to an anti-liberal turn at home, warning that the result could be a more unstable multipolar world and a domestic test over whether the country still believes in the Declaration’s universal claims.
Patient Stories Expose Medicine’s Failure to Hear Illness
Patients in the discussion described arriving in medicine through identities already waiting for them: anxious woman, easygoing patient, bad patient, racialized risk, redemptive survivor. Meghan O’Rourke, Jonathan Gleason and Walela Nehanda argue that patient stories matter because they contest those imposed narratives and reveal what clinical categories can miss. The piece makes the case that patient testimony can expose diagnostic uncertainty, racism and structural neglect, but that listening requires time, resources and systems capable of receiving what patients know.
Environment Design Beats Willpower in Closing the Intention-Behavior Gap
Psychologist Beth Cabrera argues that the usual language of discipline and willpower misunderstands why people struggle to live healthier lives. Drawing on her forthcoming book, Being Well, she makes the case that the gap between intention and behavior is better closed by designing environments, routines, and social conditions that make good habits rewarding in the present. Positive emotion, self-compassion, social support, and small sources of agency are not ancillary to well-being, she argues, but part of what makes healthier behavior sustainable.
A Good Death Requires Specific Wishes and People Who Show Up
Death doula and cultural anthropologist Darnell Walker and comedian Tig Notaro argue that death should make ordinary life more deliberate, not more abstract. In a conversation at Aspen Ideas: Health, Walker describes end-of-life care as presence, planning, honesty and witness, while Notaro draws on the final year and death of poet Andrea Gibson, the subject of Come See Me in the Good Light, to show how humor, community and small daily attachments can shape a good goodbye.
Modern Indoor Life Has Replaced Sunlight With a Narrower Light Diet
Rowan Jacobsen argues that modern indoor life has stripped away much of the broad, intense light spectrum humans historically received outdoors, leaving people not just with less brightness but with a different “light diet.” His case is that sunlight should be understood as a dose-dependent biological input—ultraviolet, visible and infrared wavelengths acting through different mechanisms—rather than only as a skin-cancer risk or a source of vitamin D. He does not dismiss that risk, especially burns and susceptible skin types, but argues the larger public-health question is how to restore moderate, regular outdoor light without treating sun exposure as harmless.
Pandemic Preparedness Is Being Built and Dismantled at Once
At Aspen Ideas: Health, Blythe Adamson, Ashish Jha, John Nkengasong and Jessica Malaty Rivera argued that the world is still not ready for the next fast-moving infectious threat, even as WHO members negotiate the first legally binding pandemic agreement. Their case was that preparedness now depends as much on early detection, engineered-biology safeguards, regional response capacity, trusted communication and global financing as on vaccines and stockpiles — and that several of those systems are being weakened at the same time they are supposed to be built.
Psychedelic Therapies Near Approval Before Care Systems Are Ready
Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai and Matthew Zorn of HHS argue that the arrival of prescription psychedelic therapies will turn less on the drugs alone than on the clinical systems built around them. In a discussion at Aspen Ideas: Health moderated by William Brangham, they describe a field nearing FDA review while still facing unresolved questions about evidence, training, reimbursement, patient selection and the risk that approval is mistaken for a general green light.
Gut-Brain Signaling Is Reshaping Models of Parkinson’s and Chronic Disease
Gastroenterologist Trisha Pasricha and brain-gut researcher Emeran Mayer argue that the gut should be understood as an active nervous, hormonal, microbial, and immune system in continuous communication with the brain, not as digestive plumbing. In a live Science Friday discussion at Aspen Ideas: Health, they make the case that this bidirectional system may reshape how clinicians think about Parkinson’s disease, GLP-1 drugs, diet, mental health, and early-life development, while warning that much of the consumer “gut health” market has moved faster than the evidence.
Dying Clarifies What the Living Should Stop Postponing
Death doula and cultural anthropologist Darnell Walker and comedian Tig Notaro argue that dying clarifies life less through grand revelation than through specific acts of presence: saying what needs to be said, making plans, laughing when grief allows, and staying with people at the end. In an Aspen Ideas: Health conversation rooted in Notaro’s documentary about poet Andrea Gibson’s final year, they describe death care as practical, relational work that families often already do, whether or not they have a name for it.
Nutrition Advice Shifts From Nutrient Targets to Minimally Processed Foods
At Aspen Ideas: Health, NPR’s Allison Aubrey moderated a nutrition panel with Jessica Knurick, Ty Beal, and Dariush Mozaffarian that argued the clearest dietary advice is also the hardest to implement: eat mostly whole or minimally processed foods, and change the food environment so that choice is easier. The speakers treated fights over seed oils, protein, saturated fat, alcohol, glucose spikes, and plant-based labels as real but often secondary to the larger questions of ultra-processed foods, school-meal infrastructure, food access, and policy incentives.
Feeling Good Can Close the Gap Between Health Intentions and Habits
Psychologist Beth Cabrera argues in her forthcoming book, “Being Well: A Positive Path to a Healthier, Happier You,” that the main obstacle to better health is not ignorance but the gap between intention and action. In a conversation with Elizabeth Cohen, Cabrera makes the case that lasting behavior change depends less on discipline and guilt than on designing daily environments, relationships, and routines so that healthy choices feel rewarding and become easier to repeat.
Bowel Habits Are a Daily Signal of Gut and Nervous-System Health
Gastroenterologist Trish Pasricha argues that bowel habits are a meaningful health signal, not a taboo subject or a once-a-day performance target. In a conversation with John Torres based on her book, You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong, she makes the case that people should know their own baseline, pay attention to changes, and treat stool form, effort, timing, diet, posture, and pelvic-floor mechanics as clinically relevant rather than embarrassing.
South Texas Cities Test Blue Zones Prevention at Million-Person Scale
Methodist Healthcare Ministries chief executive Jaime Wesolowski and Blue Zones founder Dan Buettner argue that South Texas can become a large-scale test of longevity work built around prevention rather than clinical care. In a session at Aspen Ideas: Health, they described a potential seven-city Rio Grande Valley effort that would use local institutions, city policy, food environments, walkability, faith groups and social networks to make healthier daily choices easier for roughly 1mn people. Their case is that the region’s severe chronic-disease burdens coexist with cultural assets — family, faith, connection and traditional foodways — that could be amplified rather than replaced.
AI and Biotech Convergence Makes Governance the Central Health Challenge
Futurist Jamie Metzl, author of Superconvergence, argues that AI, genetics, biotechnology and related fields are no longer separate revolutions but a compounding system giving humans the ability to read, write and alter life itself. In his Aspen Ideas: Health talk, Metzl says those powers could extend healthier lives and remake medicine, food, materials and research, but only if institutions and individuals put governance and values ahead of technological capability.
Psychedelic Medicine’s Main Challenge Is Delivery, Not Drug Approval
At Aspen Ideas: Health, trauma researcher Rachel Yehuda and federal health adviser Matthew Zorn argued that the central question for psychedelic medicine is not simply whether compounds such as MDMA and psilocybin can win approval, but what kind of treatment they would become. Yehuda cautioned that the molecule alone is not the intervention: preparation, setting, trained clinicians and integration may be essential to both safety and benefit. Zorn said federal momentum could move the field toward medical use, but approval would leave unresolved the harder problems of delivery, coverage, evidence and access.
ARPA-H and XPRIZE Push Longevity Science Toward Measurable Function
Alicia Jackson of ARPA-H and Jamie Justice of XPRIZE argue that longevity science should be judged less by promises of longer life than by whether it can compress the years people spend in decline. In a discussion moderated by Latif Nasser, they describe two funding models — government milestone funding and outcome-based prizes — meant to force evidence around healthspan interventions before hype or institutional inertia takes over. Both frame the central bet as restoring measurable function in areas such as muscle, cognition and immunity, while testing even radical ideas against predefined standards.
Telehealth Specialists Are Helping Rural Hospitals Reverse Default Transfers
Wellstar Health System and its rural partners argue that the rural care crisis cannot be solved by transferring more patients to urban hospitals or acquiring local facilities. They describe a Digital Care Network that gives rural emergency, inpatient, and ICU teams 24/7 specialist support by telemedicine, allowing many patients who would previously have been transferred to stay in their local hospital. Matt Lyon of Augusta University’s Medical College of Georgia said the mature model has reversed the expected pattern, with about 70% of comparable patients kept locally rather than sent out.
Young Researchers Target Diagnostic and Modeling Bottlenecks in Pediatric Health
At Aspen Ideas: Health, Francis Collins moderated three teenage researchers whose work targets gaps between biological evidence and clinical care. Maya Hammoud described an organoid model linking ASXL3 loss to neuron deficits in neurodevelopmental disorders; Claire Jiang presented a cell model intended to make juvenile idiopathic arthritis easier to study; and Edward Kang argued that AI analysis of retinal images could help refer children for autism or ADHD evaluation earlier, without replacing behavioral diagnosis.