Special Edition: OZY Fest’s Talented Lineup

OZY Fest was canceled this weekend due to the heat wave sweeping the U.S. Whether you were planning to join us in New York’s Central Park, or are enjoying OZY from across the globe, we still want you to celebrate the talent and bold ideas we had in our lineup — and that make our annual festival so powerful.

When Trevor Noah took the reins of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, critics wondered whether he could live up to the reputation of his scathing satirist predecessor, Jon Stewart. Four years later, the question facing the South African comedian is much bigger: not whether he can survive in America, but whether his brand can conquer the world.

Don’t believe it? Just consider that Noah, 35, with his made-for-television childhood (literally, now that his best-selling memoir Born a Crime is receiving a film adaptation), gives him a truly global perspective that none of his late-night contemporaries can match. Not Stephen Colbert of the Late Show, nor Seth Meyers at Late Night. Nor even John Oliver, who is British, but reiterates the firmly Anglo-Saxon tone of his talk-show peers. “This is still clearly very U.S.-centric kind of stuff. But he does manage to slip in a lot of perspectives we don’t get anywhere else on late night. He manages to do it in ways that are usually really funny,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

U.S. women’s national team star Megan Rapinoe scares the bejesus out of a lot of people, and she couldn’t care less. She’s taken on World Cup opponents as well as the White House in recent weeks, clearly unafraid to speak her mind to power.

“She really doesn’t care,” laughs Shaun Singletary, a former soccer coach and player. “Stars like Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain were very aware of the impact they had and were almost molds of your traditional cookie-cutter, well-behaved athlete. Rapinoe doesn’t care what people think about her and seems to have fully embraced being who she is.”

Iran seized a British-flagged tanker in the Gulf on Friday, sparking a heightening of tensions between Tehran and the West. We turned to former CIA deputy director and OZY columnist John McLaughlin for insights. First up, we asked about Iran's game plan in seizing the tanker, and this was his response:

This gets more dangerous by the day. I fear that neither side has a real game plan. It’s more like we are testing each other to see where the red lines are — the danger being that this keeps Iran and the U.S. on the edge of escalation, even though I don’t think either side really wants to go to war.

If I had to guess, the closest thing Iran has to a game plan is in two parts: First, they are stressing that they can cause trouble at the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil moves. Second, they are retaliating for the recent British seizure at Gibraltar of an Iranian oil tanker heading for Syria.