Guest Thinkers

The author of our Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, carefully distinguished in private letters between the modern life devoted to the pursuit of happiness and happiness itself.  He says that Epicurean philosophers […]

Onto some news … Japan: The Shinmoe-dake Crater at Kirishima continues to be noisy – producing another impressive explosion Monday morning. However, the order for people in the region closest to […]

As intellectuals go, B.F. Skinner was pretty dismissive of intellectuals—at least the insufficiently hard-nosed and scientific ones who blathered unproductively about “freedom” and “dignity.”

Will a Middle Eastern oil disruption crush the economy? New research suggests the answer is no—and that a major tenet of American foreign policy may be fundamentally wrong.

Besides making cities more affordable and architecturally interesting, tall buildings are greener than sprawl, and they foster social capital and creativity.

Is the exchange of amorous declarations between partners now forever delegated to the insulting greetings card and the wholly unpassionate email?

Kanye West‘s album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy came out too late to be nominated for the Grammy Awards being held tonight, so we’ll have to wait until next year […]

My favorite films are ones like The Little Foxes, or Twelve Angry Men, or Glengarry Glen Ross, all movies that were adapted from plays to the big screen. The Sunset […]

Even as crime rates have gone down around the country over the last 20 years, our fear of crime hasn’t changed much. Between 1990 and 2009, the national violent-crime rate was halved.

When it comes to grief and loss, America is no longer a nation of stoics; we are a nation of feelers. But is our expression of grief helping or hurting our ability to heal?

Hollywood writer and director Paul Haggis resigned from the Church of Scientology saying that, for the first time, he had explored outside perspectives on the church.

How veiled is our language? Euphemisms can be private or public, trivial or deadly, serious or joky—but they can’t be dispensed with, says Ralph Keyes in his new book.

Thousands of protesters flooded the streets of the Algerian capital Algiers on Saturday, defying a ban on demonstrations and calling for political reform in the North African country.

So for the slow weekend, I thought I’d stick in some more thoughts of movies I saw a year or so ago, before I became a BIG THINKer. I saw A Single […]

Al-Ittihad, a newspaper from the UAE, has a story out today that claims Said Ali al-Shihri was killed when a bomb he was assembling exploded, killing him and wounding five […]

Online dating sites provide a marketplace to easily shop around and find interesting people to meet, but building lasting relationships requires more offline maintenance.

Sheril Kirshenbaum, a research scientist at the University of Texas, decided to put the kiss under a microscope. She recently spoke about why a kiss really is more than just a kiss.

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, love is in the air. Or is it oxytocin? Research suggests that the so-called “love hormone” isn’t all roses and heart-shaped chocolates.

With Hosni Mubarak out, there are key things the U.S. should do to help Egypt not go the way Iran, Russia and China went during their revolutions, allowing tyrannies to take over.

Two years before opening his Barnes Foundation in 1925, Dr. Albert C. Barnes vowed that in his new institution, “negro art will have a place among the great art manifestations […]

Well, not everyone can live at C Street… Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is demanding an investigation into reports that at least 32 members of Congress are […]

Where did the week go? Some news! Webcams: Eruptions readers have been keeping an eye on a lot of volcanoes lately – and it sounds like it has paid off. […]

Last week TSA Administrator John Pistole bestowed very limited collective bargaining rights on the nation’s 40,000 Transportation Security Officers. Even if the TSOs vote to unionize, they will be barred […]

Last week, I introduced a course I am teaching this semester on “Science, Environment, and the Media,” and asked students as well as readers to describe in the comment sections […]

Sex-abuse scandals involving priests have shaken Ireland but is that enough to break the grip of the Catholic Church?

Why are young men in porn-rich Japan growing indifferent or even averse to sex with live partners? Today’s synthetic hyperstimulation triggers more potent dopamine trips.

There’s a young field at the interface of science and mathematics called spatial statistics. It’s so new that its first international conference is taking place next month in the Netherlands.

Will man really become immortal in the year 2045? The singularity movement is gaining momentum in the science world and in the media.  

The largely unregulated capitalism of the 19th century meant terrible conditions for many ordinary Americans and was a source of social unrest that threatened to bring down our economic and political system.

And so to another inconvenient truth that should trouble anyone interested in the clash of ideas, real passion in journalism, polemic and a radicalism worthy of its name. Iconic, radical […]