Guest Thinkers

Business reporter Spencer Soper of The Morning Call has won the October Sidney Award from the Sidney Hillman foundation for his expose of Dickensian conditions in Amazon.com’s warehouse in Pennsylvania. […]

Even before Occupy Wall Street invaded the National Mall in Washington, DC, and closed down the National Air and Space Museum, Andy Warhol had already occupied several other museums for […]

Women care about height and for many short men who are looking for a wife that means either settling for one who is less attractive or not finding one at […]

Maybe there are no atheists in foxholes, as William T. Cummings famously said. But who wants to live in a foxhole? Most of us would prefer a room with a […]

In a bid to increase newsroom transparency, UK newspaper The Guardian is making its schedule of upcoming stories available to the public in a two-week experiment.

50/50 is a pretty profound movie.  It’s also as perfectly cast as MONEYBALL, apparently because they were cast by the same person. MONEYBALL, of course, is about the attempt to […]

“By honoring the lives of those we admire, we make our own values known. Perhaps more clearly than words ever could.” -Steve Jobs This is hardly the most well-known Steve […]

Was the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki legal? Was it wise and did it make Americans safer?

My recent post on the godlessness of the Constitution has attracted some attention. Over the weekend, I came across a reply from another of Big Think’s bloggers: Peter Lawler, a […]

Crowdsourcing began as a legitimate tool to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to solve complex business and scientific challenges. Unfortunately, these very same techniques are increasingly being adopted by the criminal underground for nefarious purposes.

College in a Nutskull is a wickedly entertaining collection of bloopers from college students’ exam books. It includes this gem of unwitting brilliance about post-millennial marriage: “By being intelligent and […]

College in a Nutskull is a wickedly entertaining collection of bloopers from college students’ exam books. It includes this gem of unwitting brilliance about post-millennial marriage: “By being intelligent and […]

Though the Bush administration never admitted it, its tax cuts would almost certainly push the incomes of rich and poor further apart.  As incomes became more widely dispersed, the gap […]

At least 24 people have been killed and dozens more injured in clashes between Catholic demonstrators and military police outside the state television building in central Cairo.

Facebook has largely won the war of the online identity platform, however identity online creates big markets and there are still large openings for a secondary mainstream player and probably […]

I love Product Design. As consumer tech has matured, I think the most interesting challenges have largely moved from pure technology problems in to more general interface problems – helping […]

In an illuminating recent paper, “Capitalism in the Classical and High Liberal Tradition” [$$$], University of Pennsylvania philosopher Samuel Freeman seeks to offer some justification for the secondary status conferred […]

The title to the new collaborative blog is “Education Recoded.” We picked this title for a variety of reasons, but most importantly we feel it is an apt description of […]

President Obama is asking his supporters to tweet at Congress to pass his jobs proposal. His campaign website has a tool that matches your ZIP code to your Members of […]

While psychologists have cornered the market on what it means to be happy, other fields are slowly examining metrics that might give us a new perspective on the age-old pursuit. 

I’ve often written about the moral system I advocate, which I’ve dubbed universal utilitarianism. Although people have a broad range of individual preferences, human nature is, in general, fixed and […]

Like many others, I was not very enthusiastic about the launch event of the iPhone 4S. The expectations where simply too high, and the whole event seemed to lack the […]

Given the increasingly complacently atheistic tone of many of the BIG THINKERS, I thought I’d introduce some realism about our Constitution’s silence on God.  My position will be, of course, somewhere […]

What should be done to Wall Street in the aftermath of the financial crisis? This question has lingered for some time, without much action being taken by Washington, until eventually […]

A small but growing vanguard of people, mostly with rare diseases and cancers, have come to better understand their condition through sequencing their families’ genome. 

At this year’s F8, Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote was opened by Andy Samberg doing a 5 minute impersonation of Zuck (or, as Samberg began calling his character, “The Zuck Dawg”).   Turns out […]

Earlier this week, Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism flagged a disturbing finding from a September survey of U.S. households. The survey, which was conducted by a consortium of financial planning […]

So, we’ve had a couple of days to settle in and kick the tires, and my move to Big Think is now complete. As I said I’d do earlier, www.daylightatheism.org […]

Like other local and state governments, Topeka, Kansas is in the grips of a dismal budget crisis. So this week, Topeka’s City Council did something desperate. They debated decriminalizing domestic […]

The author Sam Harris was, to my knowledge, the first of the New Atheists to make a novel and important observation about the way religious privilege operates in our society. […]