Guest Thinkers

Let me get this straight. I’m supposed to come to work with you and work every day with the singular goal of maximizing the value for faceless, nameless people who could blow us off in a nanosecond if they had a bad hair day. Am I right?

Yesterday was Constitution Day.  Let’s face it.  It’s a commemoration that hasn’t caught on. A few years ago Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia snuck through some legislation requiring that every […]

What happens when one of America’s most successful and beloved companies suggests that consumers reduce their purchasing of new products? Outdoor outfitter Patagonia did just that – raising the economic […]

EVEN President George Bush played lip service to the idea of a ‘two State’ solution for Israel/Palestine. That, after all, is the default position of the international community. It is […]

“Who the White House needs to fire” I said yesterday while taping a radio segment, “is the person who tried to schedule the president’s jobs speech to the joint congress […]

I have a soft spot for old comic strips/cartoons.  One of my favorites is Peanuts and its star Charlie Brown.  Throughout the comic there is a running gag in which […]

So I promised you proof that David Brooks is better than he says:  He doesn’t really submit himself to the authority of the latest studies in neuroscience, and he still […]

–Guest post by Sarah Merritt, American University doctoral student. Do people seek news and information through environments on the Web that strongly align with their political identity? Do we always […]

Bill Glod, a philosopher who works at the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies (I used to work there, too), offers an interesting short discussion on the limits of the common […]

Just about everyone realizes how bad the economy has been over the last few years. What most people don’t realize is that for most Americans the economy began to stagnate […]

At the end of War and Peace Tolstoy compares belief in free will to medieval cosmologies where the Sun revolved around the Earth. To know the true cosmos, he writes, […]

The book world was saddened last week by the death of Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, at the age of 64. Project Gutenberg represented the first significant attempt […]

Touch has always played an important role in our development and in our tendency to make certain judgments and take certain risks.

Our somewhat quiet (beyond Etna’s frequent paroxysms – and the cool lava “spine” that formed after the last one) volcanic fall continues. We have been following a lot of rumbling […]

A robot around the size of a human hand has already climbed a 1,500ft rope up the Grand Canyon, driven the Le Mans circuit for 24 hours, and is set to do Hawaii’s triathlon.

In my anticipation to get out of town everything seems to take a little longer. A woman snags the last open pump at the gas station. An empty bucket of […]

Mention the school of Pop Art to casual art lovers and you’ll immediately get the response, “Andy Warhol.” Warhol sucks up most of the oxygen in any discussion of Pop, […]

1. The post on David Brooks is coming.  But for now—due to popular demand—some comments on the Tea Party debate. 2. The problem with the Tea Party members is somewhat […]

Watson will soon be diagnosing medical cases – and not just the everyday cases, either.

“If you’ve just had a bad week at the office,” suggests Keith Broomfield in a recent article in The Scotsman, “then spare a thought for 19th-century artist John Everett Millais […]

On Sunday the New York Times published reviews of the two best new fiction books I’ve read in 2011: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, and Anatomy of a […]

The eccentric magiciansPenn and Teller used to come onstage naked at the beginning of performances, to demonstrate they didn’t have any “tricks up their sleeves.” And yet, Penn Jillette (the […]

Take two strapping young men. Give one of them a job as a lifeguard from May until September. For the same period, pay the other one to “farm gold” in […]

The Center for Media and Democracy and The Nation magazine have won this month’s Sidney Award for excellence in socially conscious journalism, the Sidney Hillman Foundation announced Tuesday. The winning […]

I am thinking about investing in a husband. While it is true that I won’t be able to sell him in the future if I ever need some quick cash […]

For some strange reason, I ended up watching the new movie The Help yesterday, less than twenty four hours after viewing Driving Miss Daisy for the first time. The most […]

Guest Post by Jenna Le. Jenna Le has worked as a physician in Queens and the Bronx, New York City. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Six Rivers, was published by New York […]

We have argued for decades that we are running out of space for our garbage in the thousands of landfills currently peppering the globe… Now we are faced with another […]

It has been awhile since I’ve talked about the volcanoes of Colombia – they’ve had a fairly quiet year, but that doesn’t mean that nothing is going on. If you […]

My friend Bryan Caplan, the iconoclastic George Mason economist (redundant?), has long waged jihad against the “self-interested voter hypothesis,” which is the hypothesis that voters prefer and vote for policies […]