When we talk about technology and the movies these days, we’re often talking about the movies becoming smaller.

Put down that smartphone. Step away from the remote. “Dreamlands” is here.

This election’s first Presidential debate will be held on September 26th, the anniversary of the first televised Presidential debate, between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, in 1960.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

This August, as a new school year was about to begin, the University of Chicago captured media attention with the letter it addressed to incoming first-years.

John Donvan of Intelligence Squared U.S. tells what reforms are needed to make the presidential debates truly debates, instead of stump speeches and one-liners.

One of the country’s most experienced political commentators, a senior columnist at The New York Times, bemoans the disgraceful spectacles that presidential debates have turned into. 

Finally, America may have a shot at real presidential debates — debates that require the candidates to discuss substantive issues with depth and nuance, to marshal relevant facts, to respond to challenges, and to demonstrate their ability to transcend memorized sound bites and actually think on their feet. 

I’m a big fan of the Intelligence Squared US (IQ2) debate program, so when I learned that the program had compiled data on the 119 debates it had held since 2006, I was eager to dive in. https://www.hastingsconlawquarterly.org/

The five reaming Republican candidates will debate tonight in Houston. The debates have draw big ratings wins for news organizations—13.5 million people watched the last GOP debate on CBS two weeks ago.

Prime-time presidential debates were a brilliant innovation of the 1960s, meant to inform voters and let them see the candidates in action. Their format, however, is due for an update.

Since 1985, the Rosenkranz Foundation, under the guidance of Robert Rosenkranz, has worked to encourage intellectual diversity in the realms of public policy, higher education, and the arts.

“Recently, political discussions relegated to cable news anchors and Twitter feeds have come to share a common criticism of lacking intelligent, nuanced debate. 

Rosenkranz Foundation directors Robert Rosenkranz and Alexandra Munroe have been selected as honorees by The Speyer Legacy School...

Last summer, Donald J. Brown, the Philip R. Allen Professor of Economics, taught Yale students in a virtual classroom.

A reporter checks out a live taping of the cult podcast hit, whose new season starts tonight.

Intelligence Squared U.S., the nonpartisan public policy debate series airing on public radio and some public TV stations, is coming to PBS Plus in January, with Chicago’s WTTW as the presenting station.

Mitt Romney’s speech on foreign affairs this week was surprisingly moderate.

Wednesday night. Romney vs. Obama. Live.

With the debate moderators announced and the dates set, America awaits this year’s three presidential and one vice presidential debates.

Think of all the moments in the day when your mind is idle: when you’re getting dressed, commuting, cooking dinner, cleaning, going for a run.

“My parents were communists,” volunteers Robert Rosenkranz, “but not in any sophisticated way.” 

Dick Cheney hadn’t planned to speak, but others at the dinner in Manhattan noticed him growing a grimmer shade of grim. 

Former Vice President Dick Cheney swung quietly through New York City Tuesday night to watch his daughter, Elizabeth, a former State Department official, argue the conservative side in a debate over American policy toward Iran, and to express his own skepticism of President Obama’s promised negotiations.

“The art market is less ethical than the stock market.”

It won’t help anyone recoup the money lost in the housing bubble or the market crash or the recession, but there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing where to put the blame.

“Very aggressive policy.”

An Oxford-style debate held last night at New York’s Rockefeller University featured an argument over whether Washington or Wall Street “was more to blame for the financial crisis.” 

“IT IS A CONTEST of wit and logic and ideas and facts and argument and, most of all, persuasion.” 

The art market is still alive.

It’s a topic that is likely to come up more and more after President-elect Barack Obama moves into the White House next week.

Karl Rove made the claim as the president’s inner circle launched an unofficial “Bush legacy project”, with their old boss preparing to leave the White House next month.

Karl Rove, a close confidant and former adviser to President Bush, said Tuesday he did not believe the administration would have gone to war in Iraq had intelligence indicated Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, contradicting some of his former boss’s previous statements.

Karl Rove — the architect, the one-time senior White House adviser to President Bush — walked into the lion’s den Tuesday night to argue that his former boss is not the worst president of the past 50 years.

George W. Bush is the worst United States president of the last fifty years.

The question on the table is “Google violates its ‘don’t be evil’ motto.”

A sequel to the ballyhooed debate in 2007 over the motion that “Global Warming is Not a Crisis” has been scheduled in New York City in January, this time exploring a new premise: “Major Reductions in Carbon Emissions are Not Worth the Money.”

Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske thinks having more guns in the community doesn’t deter crime, and he plans to argue that Tuesday night in a New York City debate.

Tonight in New York City, I’ll be participating in a gun control debate hosted by Intelligence Squared, in partnership with National Public Radio.

NEW YORK–The other night we attended the first-of-the-season Intelligence Squared debate. 

As of last Wednesday at 5:44 p.m., according to the minute-by-minute count on the Web site of the United Network for Organ Sharing, there were 75,629 people awaiting kidney transplants in the United States. 

By the end of a spirited and high-level debate held here last week, many in the audience of about 400 dramatically shifted their opinions and agreed with the proposition that “Islam is dominated by radicals.”

America is pretty schizophrenic when it comes to performance-enhancing substances – we drag jocks who juice before Congress even as we spend a fortune on fountain of youth drugs.

NEW YORK — It might be the formula for an intriguing cocktail party, or the set-up to a long and elaborate joke.

MANHATTAN — The Oxford-style Intelligence Squared debates at the Asia Society are precisely what I hoped to discover moving to New York City last spring: Provocative, unabashedly intellectual, lively.

NEW YORK (AP) — Just hours after baseball assured Congress it’s working to address the sport’s doping problem, another group debated whether performance-enhancing drugs should even be banned.

TUESDAY NIGHT MARKED the eleventh Intelligence Squared U.S. debate hosted at the Asia Society and Museum on Park Avenue. 

Robert Rosenkranz, New York multi-millionaire, wanted to do something different.

Robert Rosenkranz, 64, is chairman and CEO of Delphi Financial Group, Inc., and the founder and host of Manhattan’s celebrated IQ2 Forum, a monthly gethering of the city’s top movers & shakers in social change.

There’s no use arguing about it—global warming is an imminent catastrophe

NEW YORK CITY – In the intellectual equivalent of a pro-wrestling “smackdown,” two teams of combatants enter a plush, packed auditorium on the Upper East Side for a debate titled “Global Warming Is Not a Crisis,” staged by a group called Intelligence Squared U.S.

When it comes to worthy recipients of noblesse largesse, a well-meaning multimillionaire in New York has no shortage of gratifying options: the sick and the poor; cultural institutions; universities; the public sector.

Last week saw two events in Washington that illustrate the complexity of the Sino-US relationship.

Better more domestic surveillance than another Sept. 11, 2001, type of attack on U.S. soil?

Vice President Gore returns this afternoon to the Senate in which he represented the Volunteer State and served, as vice president, as the tiebreaking vote.

There couldn’t be a better week to poke the hot- button issue of climate change.

How the Rosenkranz Foundation is injecting substance and civility into public policy discourse through its modern Oxford-style debate program by Bryan O’Keefe.

SERIOUS TALK He made a fortune in private equity, but Robert Rosenkranz’s passion is public policy.

Ask almost any American about the state of public discourse in this country, and he or she is likely to express disappoint-ment and frustration.

The name of Robert Rosenkranz, the businessman and philanthropist, is not universally recognized, even on Park Avenue.

In a packed auditorium at the Asia Society and Museum earlier this month, a panel of distin­guished scholars, editors, and filmmakers debated the motion: “Hollywood fuels anti-Americanism abroad.” 

N.Y.C. businessman and philanthropist Robert Rosenkranz is bringing the lively British debate “Intelligence Squared” to the states this fall.

Few would argue that the level of public discourse in our society has reached a dangerously low point.

The term patron is usually associated with Italian Renaissance families like the Medici and sounds a bit out of place in this age of outcome-based philanthropy.

A Chinese intellectual gifted at both writing and painting, Mu Xin, who is now in his mid-seventies, ran afoul of Maoist ideologues at the outset of the Cultural Revolution.

”Enigma Variations” might be an apt title for the landscape paintings of the contemporary Chinese-born artist Mu Xin, seen in a lean, penumbral exhibition at Asia Society. 

We understand artists’ work much better after reading their journals and seeing their ideas form. Recently, three artists — Mu Xin, Michiko Itatani and Robert Lostutter — showed notebooks and journals in Chicago.