Guest Thinkers

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Percy Shelley wrote in 1821. Not surprisingly, this claim has earned some snickers from people who think of poets as barely able […]

People who can name only one painting in the world usually name the Mona Lisa. For better or worse, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of (probably) Lisa del Giocondo rises above […]

Pity the poor Fifth of July. Americans don’t love it the way they love its neighbor, the loud and flag-bedazzled Fourth of July. The Fourth is hard to beat. A […]

Well, I’m really not.  But a lot of BIG THINKERS must be, because we have nary a post so far talking up THE AMERICAN HOLIDAY.  So HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY! […]

Treasury Secretary Geithner warns that if Congress doesn’t act to raise the federal debt ceiling, it would be “unthinkably damaging to the economy.” As Ezra Klein reports, the governments options […]

Politically and economically exhausted, Europe and America are no longer very capable of imposing their values and interests through costly military interventions in faraway lands.

It is impossible for me to fathom the amount of courage it took back in 1774 for Caesar Sarter, a former slave, to publish his anti-slavery essay in The Essex […]

One of the most frustrating experiences one can have is when we are not able to understand each other. The most common but also less frustrating situation is of course […]

Quick note for this evening – Twitter follower @ikmar made me aware of an eruption at Soputan in Indonesia. The little news I’ve found about the eruption (Indonesian) have been […]

Washington was scandalized recently when MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin called President Obama “a dick” on Morning Joe. Halperin quickly apologized and was suspended for the remark, which he admitted was […]

When I dropped my daughter and her friends off at their senior prom last week I thought it would be fun to take a walk into the foyer of the […]

The words in every story I read about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape case seem to trill at the thought that he may go free. I am seriously convinced that we […]

Right now, mother nature seems to be assaulting 3 nuclear sites in the United States, one at Los Alamos and two in the state of Nebraska, all within the same […]

Plato’s vision of a harmonious state would scandalize liberals and conservatives alike. But some of his advice might be worth taking.

Comedian Stephen Colbert is satirizing the impact of money in politics by applying to form his very own Super PAC. The comedian submitted a real application and testified before the […]

We’ve been getting bits and pieces of the lava flow from Nabro for the past few weeks, but some images from earlier this week reveal the full reach of the […]

My friend Tom Wayne, co-owner of Prospero’s Books in Kansas City, recently mentioned that he had come across the phrase “old school” in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, written and published […]

Right now, we are in an unprecedented situation where three of our nuclear sites are simultaneously in danger of floods and fire. So far, there is no immediate concern for […]

As the August 2 deadline approaches, Congress continues to fight over whether and under what conditions to raise the federal debt ceiling. Both Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s have warned […]

Now the stuff of history books, the iconic photographs of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States were once front-page news: snarling dogs, baton-wielding police, high-pressure fire hoses, and […]

While we consider the Internet to be fundamental to the flowering of democracy abroad, what about here in America? The Founding Fathers could never have imagined an Internet “Kill Switch” bill passing through the Congress, or the government-mandated seizure of domain names, or the decision of the government to selectively shut down certain parts of the Internet. They also could never have imagined Wiki-Leaks or Anonymous or LulzSec, and the limits to what type of information governments should have to divulge.

How does someone decide whether or not to offer a bribe? While there is a general consensus that bribery is not exactly the most moral act in the world, the […]

Self-control: we could all use more of it. Even those of us who are best at exercising self-control on a daily basis have so-called hot triggers, the special circumstances that would make us, too, lose our cool and start to behave less than rationally.

We won’t be able to prevent the next major Flood, Earthquake or Tsunami. Kevin Steinberg of the World Economic Forum’s Risk Response Network says we will need to be really good at coordinating the response.  

Our memories affect our choices. It makes a whole lot of sense: we decide based on what we know.  And if we don’t have any experience with a particular decision, […]

A book, any book, is for us a sacred object. Cervantes, who probably did not listen to everything that everyone said, read even “the torn scraps of paper in the […]

Late last week Frank Cilluffo and Clint Watts released a policy brief from George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute entitled “Yemen and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula: Exploiting a […]

How do you reconcile your desire to honor your own values without forcing the people you want to help into more dangerous conduct? Former New York Times columnist Randy Cohen tackles this ethical query.

Brief post today after a few longer ones … but first, A reminder: Tomorrow (Friday July 1) is the deadline to submit your questions for Dr. Clive Oppenheimer. Take this opportunity […]

According to this expert, that president’s big advantage is that he’s not attracted primary opposition in his bid for re-election.  The left may be dissatisfied with him for not showiing […]