Aspen Peak - Niche Media - Aspen living at its peak
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/601986
photography courtesy of John Molner (couric and Molner); riccardo savi, courtesy of the aspen institute (festival) "i always leave the aspen ideas festival feeling excited about ideas and about everything that i'm carrying with me." — katie couric Couric with her husband, John Molner, in Aspen. right: Couric discussed life and love with New York Times columnist David Brooks at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival. Talk of Town kaTIE CoURIC RIffS on HER faVoRITE aSPEn MoMEnTS anD PaSTIMES. mountain woman: "I like hiking and biking. I'm not as outdoorsy and athletic as I would like to be. I feel like a real hiker, and then I see these 75-year-old men in their spandex riding their bicycles, and with zero body fat—like General Petraeus. I keep seeing him on his bicycle and I say, 'Damn, I get winded walking up the stairs.'" tuning out: "I like hanging out with my friends and trying to discon- nect. I'm really working on that. Online you can go from one trashy article to another... and suddenly, two hours later, you're thinking, I could have been reading a good book or exercising or talking to a friend." best eats: "Matsuhisa Aspen (303 E. Main St., 970-544-6628; matsuhisaaspen.com)." guilty pleasures: "A-1 Oriental foot massage (517 E. Hopkins Ave., #102, 970-925-9755) and truffe fries—but not at the same time!" winter wonderland: "Après-ski at Chair 9 at The Little Nell (675 E. Durant Ave., 970-920-4600; thelittlenell.com); skiing with my father-in-law, Herb Molner, the hottest instructor in Aspen; and hot chocolate at Gwyn's High Alpine Café and Bar (100 High Alpine Lift Road, Snowmass Village, 970-923- 5188; gwynshighalpine.com)!" what are some of your takeaways from this year's Ideas fest? I always leave this week in Aspen feeling excited about ideas and excited about— my head is about to explode—everything that I'm carrying with me. There are very few times when you can just sit and listen to smart people talking about important topics. I'm being exposed to some really interesting thinkers and topics for stories I didn't even know were out there. I don't have to go to the usual suspects all the time. I've got a notebook full of ideas and a wallet full of cards. That's great, because one of the ques- tions people ask is how to put the ideas presented at the festival into action. I can take some of these big ideas and fgure out how to make them visual, under- standable, digestible, and interesting to the people outside of this event. There are a lot of things that need to be talked about that aren't being talked about. It just inspires you to think of things more deeply and differently—I sound ver y "Kumbaya" here. But I went to a breakfast for My Brother's Keeper [a White House initiative to help boys and men of color advance in society and stay out of prison]. I was stimulated by conversations about race in America, about policing, about implicit bias. These are things I'm already interested in given some of the events of this year. Now I'm working on a docu- mentary about gun violence. All of these things intersect. one of the topics that we saw come up repeatedly was gender. from Lean In , facebook Coo Sheryl Sandberg's female empowerment tome, to "women can't have it all," where do you fall? It's dangerous to prescribe one path for everyone. This one-size-fts-all approach doesn't necessarily work. But I sort of agree with a lot of people who have written about this. I agree with Sheryl that some- times women hold back because they're worried about having everything or "doing it all"—I think that saying should be struck from the English language. But sometimes we talk about that and it feels at odds with our desire to be globally competitive. I would have liked my daughters to be STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] freaks, but they're pretty much humanities girls. My daughter is going to Stanford, and I always say, "You should learn how to code there." And she's like, "Mom, you learn to code." I think all we can do is make sure that we're good role mod- els, that we're mentoring young women and helping them along when they're struggling or making [tough] decisions, that we're giving them opportunities, and that we're mindful of de facto discrimina- tion that occurs in the workplace or the unintentional marginalization of women [due to] cultural factors. In terms of the workplace, technology has shifted journalism dramatically since you started out. How have you evolved? I've done the ultimate adaptor behavior by going to Yahoo!… I got a sense early on, back in 2007, that there was some- thing really valuable about people being able to watch [what they want] when they want, and that people gathered around the TV for the evening news is part of a bygone era. When someone is watching online, they're truly engaged. It's not in the background while they're doing other things. and then what do you do to unwind? I try to disconnect. After seeing the talk about what technology is doing to our brains—it can be such a time suck. A lot of your inspired thinking comes to you in the shower because you don't have anything else distracting you. That's why I think daydreaming, ironically, is a good thing. You used to be told to stop daydreaming, and now I think people should be told to start daydreaming a little bit more. AP 80 aspenpeak-magazine.com CULTURE View from the Top