Martin Schneider writes:

The curious are invited to have a look at our Flickr set with photos from the New Yorker Conference:

I don’t have anything deep to say about the conference (although plenty of other people had deep thoughts to share). It was an exhilarating and exhausting experience, watching so much intelligent discourse in such a compressed manner. I salute the planners for enabling even a congenital wallflower such as myself to enter into the thrum of community over the two days.

I asked a fair number of people to assess this year’s event alongside its 2007 predecessor. There was some feeling that last year featured bigger names (Arianna Huffington, Barry Diller et al.) but that this year had more speakers. The duration allotted to each panelist decreased in the name of increasing the number of overall panelists. And, of course, the event was extended by a day. I definitely got the sense that the audience members were satisfied with the direction that The New Yorker had chosen to take the event. (Myself, I have no objection whatsoever to including speakers on the model of Paco Underhill or Jane McGonigal, highly esteemed experts in narrow, specialized fields.)

After the conference, I realized that the program exhorted participants not to take pictures. If anyone has a problem with these pictures being posted here, by all means write me and I will subject myself to the comfy pillow torture (and take the pictures down).