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What the press has to say about IQ2 US:


Dick Takes Manhattan
So now the ex-veep can't stop talking

By Howard Fineman
May 16, 2009

Dick Cheney hadn't planned to speak, but others at the dinner in Manhattan noticed him growing a grimmer shade of grim. He was listening to Nicholas Burns, a former State Department official in Cheney's own Bush administration, wax eloquent about the virtue of diplomacy: how a new joint effort with France, Britain, Germany and even Russia and China could prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and terrorizing the Persian Gulf region and the world. In other words, President Barack Obama's position. The host asked if the former vice president wished to respond. Yes indeedy, he did.
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Cheney in Manhattan: 'A giant conspiracy' on Iran
By Ben Smith
May 12, 2009

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.
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The New York fairs
By James Panero
April 2009

On 1Q2US, the Winter Antiques Show 2009, The Armory Show, The Art Show, and “Placing Avery: Paintings and Prints from the Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art” at the UBS Gallery, New York.
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Who's to Blame: Washington or Wall Street?
March 30, 2009
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.
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Now Geithner Needs To Get Down To Business
By Robert Lenzner
March 20, 2009

"Very aggressive policy."
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Whodunit
By John Fund
March 18, 2009

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."
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For Love or Money
By Michael Wilson
February 7, 2009

"IT IS A CONTEST of wit and logic and ideas and facts and argument and, most of all, persuasion."
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Bidding for stability in a time of uncertain values
By Georgina Adam
February 7, 2009

The art market is still alive. That was the relieved verdict of the dealers and collectors who braved the snow in London this week to watch Sotheby's and Christie's hold the first Impressionist and Modern art sales of the season.
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Is combating climate change worth the cost?
By David Biello
January 14, 2009

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.
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Karl Rove launches 'Bush legacy project' with Iraq war claim
By Philip Sherwell in New York
December 6, 2008

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.
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Rove: Bush hardly worst president
By Jon Ward
December 3, 2008

NEW YORK | 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.
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Rove Defends Bush: He's Not Worst President Of Past 50 Years
By Sam Stein
December 3, 2008

George W. Bush is the worst United States president of the last fifty years.
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Is Bush the Worst President in the Last 50 Years?
By Russell Goldman
December 3, 2008

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.
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Debating the Vices and Virtues of Google
By Saul Hansell
November 20, 2008

The question on the table is "Google violates its 'don't be evil' motto."
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Up Next for Debate: Carbon Costs
By Andrew C. Revkin
November 17, 2008

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." Those in favor of the motion (some additions may come, organizers say) will be the "skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg; Philip Stott, the British biogeographer who has become a prominent critic of global warming worriers; and Peter W. Huber, the Manhattan Institute scholar, lawyer and mechanical engineer who has written that energy waste is unavoidable and beneficial.
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Police chief to join gun debate
Kerlikowske taking part in N.Y. forum

By Scott Gutierrez
October 28, 2008

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.
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Where's Wayne?
By Paul Helmke
October 28, 2008

Tonight in New York City, I'll be participating in a gun control debate hosted by Intelligence Squared, in partnership with National Public Radio.
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A Show of Hands
By James Taranto
September 18, 2008

NEW YORK--The other night we attended the first-of-the-season Intelligence Squared debate. We've been going to these for a while and always find them interesting and stimulating. This week's topic was health-care policy, and one of the panelists arguing for more federal control was former Enron adviser Paul Krugman.
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Are Kidneys a Commodity?
By Jerry Adler
May 26, 2008

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.
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‘Islam Is Dominated By Radicals’
By Gary Rosenblatt
April 23, 2008

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.”
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The Great Debaters
By Wayne Coffey
January 20, 2008

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.
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Public Affairs: Intelligence Squared Brings Oxford Union Debating to the Land of Loudmouths
By Stephen Brunt
January 19, 2008

It might be the formula for an intriguing cocktail party, or the set-up to a long and elaborate joke. An ethicist, a famous retired ballplayer, a pediatrician, a very loud sportscaster, a libertarian, a former anti-doping czar and one of the more famous faces in American television take the stage in the auditorium of the Asia Society and Museum.
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Intellectual Juicing
By Shawn Macomber
January 18, 2008

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. How could anyone who slogs through the pathetic, pandering spectacle of modern American politics not love a debate series with a mission statement that includes a promise to "transcend the toxically emotional and reflexively ideological"?
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Doping Debate
By Rachel Cohen
January 15, 2008

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.
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The Cool Peace? Resolved: Russia is becoming our enemy again.
By Michael Weiss
November 07, 2007

TUESDAY NIGHT MARKED the eleventh Intelligence Squared U.S. debate hosted at the Asia Society and Museum on Park Avenue. Generously endowed by the conservative philanthropist Robert Rosenkranz, IQ2US underwrites a series of intellectual exchanges modeled on the full-blooded forensic style of the Oxford Union, though given that the august society has lately invited speakers like Nick Griffin, head of the fascist British National Party, and David Irving, Holocaust denier in chief, one wonders if like so many other British traditions this one has better thrived by crossing the Atlantic.
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Today’s Debate is on Erotic Art in the Bathroom
By Haim Handwerker
November 06, 2007

Robert Rosenkranz, New York multi-millionaire, wanted to do something different. He manages insurance and financial businesses dealing with a turnover of six billion dollars a year and frequently donates to Yale University. He collects Chinese and Asian Art and funded the first Arabic translation of the American Declaration of Independence. However all this did not satisfy him. He wanted to be influential--therefore he chose to establish a debating club in New York.
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60 Seconds with... Robert Rosenkranz
By Marcia Stepanek
October, 2007

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.
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Standing the Heat - A Global Warming Face-Off
By W. James Antle III – The American Spectatore
September 2007

There’s no use arguing about it—global warming is an imminent catastrophe. At least that’s what the media-accredited experts keep telling us, and they aren’t shy about driving the point home. According to a headline in USA Today, the nation’s largest-circulation daily newspaper, “The debate’s over: Globe is Warming.” Apparently Rolling Stone has its own resident climatologist, who went a step further, declaring, “No serious scientist doubts that humans are warming up the planet.” The title of a 2006 Brookings Institution working paper is “Case Closed: The Debate Over Global Warming Is Over.”
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Global Meltdown
By Andrew Revkin - AARP The Magazine
July & August 2007

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.
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A Hobby That’s Part Party, Part Debate, All Intellect - Eric Konigsberg
June 02, 2007
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.



Wary of the dragon? - Frank Ching
May 30, 2007
Last week saw two events in Washington that illustrate the complexity of the Sino-US relationship. The first involved 15 ministers from China, led by Vice-Premier Wu Yi , who took part in a high-level economic dialogue. Some progress was made, including an agreement to double daily passenger flights from the US to China by 2012, worth an estimated US$5 billion to American airlines.
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Legal Thinkers Clash in Debate on U.S. Surveillance
Ari Kaplan - Special to Law.com
April 23, 2007

Better more domestic surveillance than another Sept. 11, 2001, type of attack on U.S. soil? That was the question in a lively, sold-out, Oxford-style debate sponsored by The Rosenkranz Foundation at the Asia Society's New York headquarters Wednesday night.
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Gore's Return - New York Sun Editorial
New York Sun Editorial - March 21, 2007
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. He will be testifying before the Committee on Environment and Public Works, which has scheduled a full committee hearing titled, "Vice President Al Gore's Perspective on Global Warming." With speculation afoot that Mr. Gore could yet enter the Democratic presidential field in 2008, his appearance will probably attract as much press attention as his appearance at the Oscars, which is to say, a lot.
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The climate's just perfect for a debate - Ellis Henican
March 16, 2007 
There couldn't be a better week to poke the hot- button issue of climate change.The past two days, the temperature in New York was crowding 70. By this morning - well, have you looked outside? Do not leave the house without your boots on.
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Inteligence Squared
February 14, 2007 
How the Rosenkranz Foundation is injecting substance and civility into public policy discourse through its modern Oxford-style debate program by Bryan O'Keefe
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SUITS
By Geraldine Fabrikant - Sunday Business - February 11, 2007 
SERIOUS TALK He made a fortune in private equity, but Robert Rosenkranz’s passion is public policy. That passion has led Mr. Rosenkranz, chief executive of the Delphi Financial Group, to organize a series of public policy debates under the rubric Intelligence Squared US.
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5 Questions for...
Robert Rosenkranz, Chairman, Rosenkranz Foundation - February 9, 2007
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. Hoping to do something about the increasingly partisan and ideological nature of that discourse, philanthropist Robert Rosenkranz and the Rosenkranz Foundation launched Intelligence Squared US, a series of Oxford-style debates that address hot-button concerns of the day, last September. The debates, which feature one three-person team proposing and a second team opposing a sharply framed motion, will be held on Wednesdays throughout the spring at the Asia Society in Manhattan, and are produced for radio and distributed nationally by WNYC/New York City Public Radio and National Public Radio.
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Dept. Of Discourse: Oxford On The Hudson
By Rebecca Mead - January 8, 2007
The name of Robert Rosenkranz, the businessman and philanthropist, is not universally recognized, even on Park Avenue. “I know a variety of Rosenkranzes—which one is he?” asked Robert Albertson, a principal at Sandler O’Neill, as he mingled at a reception at the Asia Society and Museum the other evening.
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New Debate Series Addresses Pressing Questions of the Day
By Annie Karni - Special to the Sun - January 2, 2007
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." The hour-and-a-half conversation about whether the film industry or the war in Iraq was more to blame for growing international ill-will toward America was part of a new live debate series called Intelligence Squared, which is funded by the Rosenkranz Foundation.
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... Georgette Mosbacher, Bruce Kovner and other assorted policy wonks chuckled at last week's IQ2 US debate when the International Crisis Group's Karim Sadjadpour tried to give his neocon opponent Bill Kristol a compliment. "When I was in high school, I used to watch you on TV with total admiration," said Sadjadpour, whose team argued in favor of the U.S. tolerating a nuclear Iran. "You were so thoughtful, so sensible. ... I thought for sure you were a liberal." Kristol's team had the last laugh, defeating the nuke proposition. ...


SMART TALK: N.Y.C. businessman and philanthropist Robert Rosenkranz is bringing the lively British debate "Intelligence Squared" to the states this fall. As in London, where the show attracts curious, on-the-ball ordinary folks and celebs with more on their minds than we give them credit for, the series will present the hot political, cultural and social issues of the day in an Oxford-style, three-on-three debate. "Intelligence Squared U.S.A." begins at New York's Asia Society and Museum this September with this subject up for discussion: "We Must Tolerate a Nuclear Iran." Visit www.IQ2US.org for more information or to purchase tickets. This is the sort of thing that should be on TV, to remind people numbed by the current "shout-downs" that pass for debate and discussion that there is another way to make a point.


OPEN TO DEBATE by Gary Rosenblatt
Few would argue that the level of public discourse in our society has reached a dangerously low point. Witness the mean-spirited partisanship of Congress and the belligerent rudeness of cable television discussions of the issues of the day, which themselves tend to be more about celebrities and scandals than thoughtful analysis of pressing topics like the struggle against Islamic militancy, global warming, and improving our children’s education.
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  The Rosenkranz Foundation
 

The Philanthropy Roundtable
 
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. Yet it seems to fit Robert Rosenkranz. A tax lawyer and one-time economic analyst for Rand Corp., Rosenkranz is chairman and president of Delphi Financial Group, an insurance holding company. He started his Rosenkranz Foundation in New York some 16 years ago, after liquidating a company he controlled. "Rather than establishing a foundation whose staff would control its investments and grantmaking," Rosenkranz tells Philanthropy, "I decided to invest the assets myself and give to causes I support." It has proven a shrewd decision on both the grantmaking and investment fronts.
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  Mu Xin Exhibition:
Reviews:
 

 

Mu Xin (b. 1927, China)
Eroding Inscription of the Han
Ink and gouache on paper
Promised gift of the Rosenkranz Charitable Foundation to Yale University Art Gallery



 

Holding his Life in his Mouth
Artnet
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.
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Dungeon Master
New York Magazine
The imprisoned Chinese painter and writer Mu Xin blended East and West in his misty landscapes—and saved himself in the process.
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Captive Visions Flourish Amid a Delicate Secrecy
New York Times
''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. Even the artist himself is something of a mystery.
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  Features:
 
Conversations with the Chinese Literati
Asia Society
The work of Mu Xin (b. 1927, fig.1) is, in part, a dialogue with the past masters of Chinese painting and, thus, with Chinese history in general. This dialogue is a key factor in connecting Mu Xin with the continuous tradition of Chinese landscape painting, begun in the 10th century, which is embedded with meanings both personal and profound.
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Art of Mu Xin survives oppression of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution
University of Chicago Chronicle
During the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted a decade (1966 to 1976), artists and intellectuals experienced a level of oppression that is difficult, even now, to comprehend.
In an attempt to survive during this period, artist and writer Mu Xin held low-profile posts and chose not to participate in official life. Even so, he was imprisoned three times, and more than 20 book-length manuscripts and hundreds of paintings that he had produced in secret were destroyed.
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Exhibit features Chinese artist's prison paintings, notes
Yale Bulletin & Calendar.
When the Chinese government put him into solitary confinement for 18 months, artist and author Mu Xin discovered a match could be a form of entertainment. "All I had to do was plant the stick gently in the ashes of the ashtray and watch it burn from top to bottom," wrote Mu Xin during his confinement. "For several months I have been directing the same drama: the ashtray resembles a circular stage on which the matchstick, like a legendary diva, sings her swan song before she slowly falls on the ground and dies."
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Unique Chinese art comes to gallery
Yale Daily News.
Chinese artist Mu Xin secretly created 33 landscape paintings while he was under house arrest from 1977 to 1979, during the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.
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Contact The Rosenkranz Foundation
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