Open to Debate
Organization
Open to Debate Foundation, formerly Intelligence Squared U.S., is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media group that produces nationally broadcast debates and conversations spanning technology, law, global affairs, culture, science, medicine, and public policy issues. The mission of the organization is to "address the extreme polarization of our nation and our politics" and "restore critical thinking, facts, reason, and civility to American public discourse".
Open to Debate has produced more than 200 live debates since 2006, when it was the U.S. division of the London based media group Intelligence Squared. In 2019, it hosted the first debate ever between an artificial intelligence and a human being, in partnership with IBM's "Project Debater".
Open to Debate episodes have been broadcast on NPR since 2007, in addition to Bloomberg Television, BBC, PBS, Newsy, C-SPAN, and education streaming platform Wondrium.
In April 2023, Intelligence Squared U.S. changed its name to Open to Debate to reflect their shift toward a model of open discussion which they hoped would help combat rising levels of polarization in US politics.
Founding
Open to Debate was founded in 2006, originally named Intelligence Squared U.S., by philanthropist Robert Rosenkranz as a nonprofit organization based on Intelligence Squared in the UK. It was created as a distinctly nonpartisan, nonprofit institution with a mission to "raise the level of public discourse" in America. Based in New York City, Open to Debate produces a weekly debate program that is broadcast as a radio program, podcast, and digital video. Open to Debate hosts debates around the country and partners with a variety of institutions in the private and public sectors.
Programming
Open to Debate programs a variety of debate formats, including Oxford-Style inspired by the Oxford Union, Unresolved, Agree-To-Disagree, and interviews on American public discourse trends.
“Open to Debate” enters the record as organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Debate and Organization can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Open to Debate” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Debate and Organization provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q114351052. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2019, 2007 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “Open to Debate” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.