Cap Times Idea Fest 2023 save the dates | Paul Fanlund … – The Capital Times

The most important thing about todays column is to ask you to save the dates for our big annual thought festival Sunday through Saturday, Sept. 17-23.

The second thing is to start to share details about this years Cap Times Idea Fest, our seventh annual event in which we gather brilliant speakers national and local to explore issues of the day across politics, economics, racial justice, business, culture, sports and other topics.

Our past national speakers have included Eric Holder, Tom Perez, Tammy Baldwin, Ron Johnson, Amy Klobuchar, David Axelrod, Marty Baron, Jamie Raskin, Dan Balz, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, among many others.

The first of the major-stage sessions at this years festival will be Tuesday night, Sept. 19, in Shannon Hall, the largest theater in the University of Wisconsin-Madisons Memorial Union.

The session will focus on the history of free speech and expression on campus as well as issues around speech today and in the future. It would be impossible, I think, to find a moderator and three speakers who are more authoritative on the topic.

UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin will talk about current conversations around speech on campus and, importantly, where she thinks that discussion will be many years from now.

Paul Soglin, who was elected mayor of Madison six times and whose political career was born out of his student days protesting the Vietnam War, will talk about speech during those tense and tumultuous days and more.

Daniel Tokaji, dean of UW-Madisons Law School and a First Amendment scholar who teaches on the subject, will help describe the rich history of UWs devotion to academic freedom and free speech for more than 125 years, back to the days when sifting and winnowing became a thing on campus. The topic also aligns nicely with the universitys 175th anniversary celebration this year.

The moderator will be David Maraniss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist and Madison native who has been a mainstay at Idea Fest from the start.

His expertise on UW campus speech was gained through writing They Marched Into Sunlight War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967. His brilliant narrative ties the fighting in Vietnam with the campus protest scene in Madison. Worth noting is that Soglin is mentioned about 80 times in the book.

Ticket information for the speech event and other sessions, including the marquee Friday night and Saturday sessions, will be announced later this month. To be the among the first to hear the news, sign up for theCap Times Idea Fest newsletter.

The other session we can reveal now is the second edition of the support local journalism fundraiser we debuted last fall with the appearance of legendary journalist Carl Bernstein. This years event will be on Thursday night, Sept. 21, in a venue to be determined soon.

This years fundraiser will feature the high-powered wife-and-husband journalism duo of Judy Woodruff, who stepped down as anchor of the PBS NewsHour at the end of 2022, and Albert Hunt, who wrote for The Wall Street Journal for nearly four decades.

The duo has covered politics for five decades, Woodruff for NBC, CNN and PBS. She co-anchored the PBS NewsHour for 10 years, and served as sole anchor after the death of co-host Gwen Ifill.

At the Journal, Hunt was a reporter, bureau chief and executive Washington editor. He also wrote the weekly column Politics & People. A frequent and prominent television commentator, Hunt retired as a columnist for Bloomberg in 2018.

Woodruff and Hunt first met at a softball game that pitted journalists against the staff of presidential candidate and later President Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Maraniss, a longtime acquaintance of the couple, will moderate, as he did with longtime friend Bernstein last fall.

The concept for this event is a more intimate conversation with a major speaker or speakers in a small, exclusive venue with provided drinks and appetizers. A separate, higher-price ticket is required.

There are many exciting but as yet tentative plans for other national speakers.

It is important to note that, as in the past, Idea Fest is also home to many conversations about local and statewide issues. Many of those sessions are virtual only and more will be announced about them in weeks to come.

Since its 2017 debut, Idea Fest has evolved from a fully in-person festival to todays post-pandemic hybrid of live and virtual sessions. We have also sprinkled our sessions with national speakers over weekday nights so as not to overwhelm the audience with too many consecutive or even simultaneous sessions on the weekend.

Look, we know the Madison calendar is jammed with interesting events of all kinds on-campus and off, serious or simply fun around food and music, and, of course, arts of every imaginable kind.

We too have food and music and fun, but Idea Fest is built on the idea that Madisonians love to hear provocative speakers on important topics. And where else could you see Bernstein and U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin from the Jan. 6 committee and the authors of His Name is George Floyd on successive days?

At Idea Fest, you could do that last year.

Not coincidentally, supporting Idea Fest means you are supporting the cause of independently owned local journalism at a time when that is in increasingly short supply.

Again, the week of Sept. 17, culminating on Saturday, Sept. 23. You wont even have the conflict of a football game that Saturday because the Badgers game is on Friday night that week.

For now, all we ask is that you mark your fall calendar and stay tuned.

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Cap Times Idea Fest 2023 save the dates | Paul Fanlund ... - The Capital Times