Guest Thinkers

That’s right. It’s happening. Print is being phased out and new digital platforms, which will require subscriptions to read, are being phased in. Today, a news corporation, a journalist and […]

Birds do it. Bees do it. But primate species don’t sing and dance, except for Homo sapiens. Why is music-making part of human nature, then? Why do we enjoy singing […]

American support of President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan mirrors its ill-advised support of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam. A shortsighted and simplistic foreign policy is to blame.

Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón has militarized his country’s war on drugs, a task once reserved for the police. The consequences have been dire, says the editor of Mexico’s La Jornada.

“China’s growing thirst for water is driving one of the world’s biggest mass relocations, with 440,000 people leaving their homes to make way for a huge man-made canal project.”

“America’s biggest—and only major—jobs program is the U.S. military.” Robert Reich says we need a jobs program for public goods like light-rail and renewable energy, not outmoded weapons.

Just as better off New Yorkers head for the Hamptons in August and the French head en masse on holiday, clogging up roads, the British see August as the month […]

The Ice Storm, Rick Moody’s novel, was published in 1994, set in 1973. One of the things readers who loved the book but were not yet born (or were barely […]

It’s been a good year for Emily Pilloton, founder of social-good nonprofit Project H Design and author of the excellent Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People. A PopTech fellow […]

In the study of uniquely human traits—language, mathematics, moral behavior—there are few academic stars as bright as Marc Hauser, a psychologist at Harvard. His collaborators in academia are top-shelf (they […]

This has been the “Summer of the Spill.” Since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion on April 20, 2010, the epic BP oil spill has oozed into imaginations trying to […]

Why are we using 1970’s style distribution techniques for anything in 2010? I was tooling through the black conservative website Booker Rising when I came across a comment by one […]

“Many problems which are more prevalent lower down the social ladder are worse in societies with bigger income differences, and second, almost everyone would benefit from reduced inequality.”

“A lack of women during men’s teenage years still haunts their health decades later.” The Economist reports on a surprising study that hints at an important formative sexual period.

“The point in prehistory when our early ancestors first picked up a sharp-edged stone to butcher animals has been pushed back one million years with the discovery of ancient bones.”

Frank Rich’s piece in the New York Review of Books, “Why Has He Fallen Short?” questions the benefits of raw intelligence as the key skill for political life. Or rather, […]

The legal fight over same-sex marriage in federal courts is just beginning, and the outcome is far from certain. But in the aftermath of Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling overturning California’s […]

My new television show “Sci-Fi Science” on The Science Channel is inspired by my book “Physics of the Impossible.” The first season of the show takes viewers through the wildest […]

My new television show “Sci-Fi Science” on The Science Channel is inspired by my book “Physics of the Impossible.” The first season of the show takes viewers through the wildest […]

My new television show “Sci-Fi Science” on The Science Channel is inspired by my book “Physics of the Impossible.” The first season of the show takes viewers through the wildest […]

Following up on Monday’s post about WikiLeaks, today I address the moral correctness of the organization. There is no evidence that WikiLeaks disclosed the names of Afghan informants; there is inductive evidence that […]

Stanley Fish argues that plagiarism is not a “big moral deal” because the taboo against passing off someone else’s work as your own is just an arbitrary disciplinary convention. Fish […]

We are but two days away from Friday 13th August, which for all of those who are superstitious about black cats or walking under ladders, threatens to be something of […]

As the German military pays $5,000 to every family that lost a member in an airstrike in Afghanistan, Spiegel looks at how much the life of a dead civilian is worth.

Explaining our predisposition to religious belief, just as scientists can explain taste and perception of color, does not make it a nonsense, says neuroscientist Michael Graziano.

The controversy over the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” comes down to one thing: no one should be denied the right to build a house of worship solely on the basis […]

Df s;dlkj;fdslk ;lkfdj;lfdsjlkfdj My wife laughs at my penchant for taking photographs of sculpture when we travel. It’s as if I’m trying to bring these huge stone and marble marvels […]

Everyone has grown up hearing fantasy stories about the “fountain of youth.” We are still far from finding the fabled Fountain, but today the real question is quickly becoming “Would […]

Here is the uncomfortable truth for those, like me, who oppose Google and Verizon’s policy suggestion to the FCC concerning net neutrality: money talks and money walks. Investment and innovation […]

According to Ole Ole Olson at The Public Record, over the past year an invitation-only Yahoo group called “Digg Patriots” has been systematically pushing right-wing content and “burying” liberal views […]