Our Cultural Identity

Expert panel on the future of a generation that continues to shape the future of our nation. This year, the Boomer generation’s youngest members celebrate 50th birthdays. And most who celebrated their 50th can expect to celebrate their 80th. As life expectancies hit a new peak, the wave of millions of adults living active, adventurous lives is so great in size and shift, it’s creating a new life stage -- something that hasn’t occurred since we created the “Retirement” life stage in the 1950s, and “Adolescence” at the turn of the 20th century. Boomers are changing ageing for everyone that will follow them, and creating new models of ageing informed by new expectations, different goals, and an entirely new way of thinking. What will this life stage look like? How will Boomers change the way our policies our executed, our cities our shaped, and our entertainment is produced? Throughout 2014, AARP will celebrate Boomers@50+. This panel will reflect on how Boomers have changed the world and ask – what’s next? Joseph F. Coughlin, Jeffrey Cole, Myrna Blyth, Ronald Brownstein

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and James Fallows discuss.

Ever wonder what America's hidden conversation about race sounds like? Michele Norris has attempted to tap into that private discourse through her Peabody-award-winning exercise called The Race Card Project where thousands of people from all over the world have submitted Six Word essays on Race and Cultural identity. Each of those microscopic essays represents someone's attempt to distill their thoughts, observations, experiences, or views about race or cultural identity into one sentence with just six words. Some are funny. Many are painful. Some might make you nod in agreement, while others could cause you to squirm with discomfort. All of them will make you think and imagine life as lived by someone else. The vast collection of six-word essays and the individual stories they represent have formed the basis for a powerful theatrical production that takes audiences deep inside the beating heart of racial experience from all points of view. Underwritten by AFT. Speakers: Michele Norris, Jeffrey Goldberg, Angelica V. Hernandez, Mark Oppenheimer, Anand Giridharadas

Our nation is drunk on violence. Cities across America are grappling with a relentless drumbeat of death. On average, 40 US citizens are lost to violence each day. Nowhere is America's crisis of violence more evident than in African-American communities, where homicide is the leading cause of death for males between the ages of 15 and 24. What is the real cost? How do we change it? While some of the solution lies in a greater focus on prevention rather than prosecution, intervention rather than incarceration, there is an even simpler, fundamental premise that we must accept—the lives of African-American men and boys matter. Mitch Landrieu

America is in the middle of a demographic overhaul. Americans are growing older, more unequal, more diverse, more mixed race, more digitally linked, more tolerant, less married, less fertile, less religious, less mobile, and less confident. Drawing on the Pew Research Center’s extensive archive of public opinion surveys and demographic data, Paul Taylor offers a roadmap to what he calls the “next America,” where social cohesion will be tested by the generational gaps he sees opening in just about every facet of American life. Taylor takes us on a tour from the middle of the last century to the present, and beyond, to the drama unfolding in slow motion across the nation. Paul Taylor

The True American tells the story of Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a Bangladesh Air Force officer who dreams of immigrating to America and working in technology. But days after 9/11, an avowed “American terrorist” named Mark Stroman, seeking revenge, walks into the Dallas minimart where Bhuiyan has found temporary work and shoots him, maiming and nearly killing him. The True American traces the making of these two men, Stroman and Bhuiyan, and of their fateful encounter. It follows them as they rebuild shattered lives — one striving on Death Row to become a better man, the other to heal and pull himself up from the lowest rung on the ladder of an unfamiliar country. Anand Giridharadas, Ray Suarez

From Tony Hsieh to Amy Chua to Jeremy Lin, Chinese- Americans are now arriving at the highest levels of American business, civic life, and culture. But what makes this story of immigrant ascent unique is that Chinese-Americans are emerging at just the same moment when China has emerged — and indeed may displace America — at the center of the global scene. What does it mean to be Chinese-American in this moment? And how does exploring that question alter our notions of just what an American is and will be? Eric Liu, Elliot Gerson

After a rapid increase in their ranks over the last decade, the “nones,” or those who claim no particular religious affiliation, now represent one-in-five US adults. What portrait does this leave us of the future of faith in this country? And how are communities of faith changing internally as they witness the same demographic and generational shifts as the population at large? Will church groups see the same hollowing out of the middle as the political and economic landscapes, with a trend toward both ends of the conservative vs. reform spectrum? Peter Beinart, Arsalan Iftikhar, Leon Wieseltier, Molly Worthen, Ray Suarez

For the past year, Deborah and James Fallows have been flying their propeller airplane across the country, visiting smaller cities in the middle of economic, educational, or political turnarounds. From Maine to Mississippi, from inland California to Vermont, they have found trends at odds with, and more encouraging than, the national trends of bitter division and inability to solve big problems. They have reported on their findings in "The Atlantic" and via “Marketplace” radio, and they will share the latest surprises and future plans with us. Deborah Fallows, James Fallows, Kai Ryssdal