Guest Thinkers

If the Eighties was the decade of greed, then the Seventies was the decade of Satan. Some would argue that Satan is always with us (you know who I’m talking […]

I had a conversation with Scott Meech at Edubloggercon this year in which we discussed the fine line between ‘naming the problem so we can solve it’ and ‘shaming and […]

The NASA Earth Observatory has been doing an excellent job of monitoring the eruption at Eritrea’s Nabro using all their eyes in the sky. The latest image, taken from the […]

Three significant events are going to take place in America in the next 18 months. We will increase our nation’s debt ceiling, despite all the political showboating. We will not […]

Arguably, the invention of the ATM by IBM nearly 40 years ago was one of the greatest moments in the history of modern consumer banking. These ATMs revolutionized the way […]

And if it’s literature, do we care if it’s violent? “Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed,” wrote Justice Scalia, in his majority opinion in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants […]

Rosetta Stone CEO Tom Adams explains why the best leaders embrace the future now and ask questions later.  

We talk a lot about the hazards that are present at Washington’s Rainier mostly in terms of what might happen if the volcano erupts. However, remember that even when Rainier […]

Here are three interesting items that make the process of packing, eating and separating trash a bit more practical, fun, and smart.  I love the idea behind the packaging of […]

Friday’s New York Times touts the health benefits of good posture: it helps avoid the pain (both physical and financial) of back and neck problems, improves muscle tone and breathing, […]

When Walmart comes to your town, there are always two different reactions: “No! They’ll kill all the small businesses!” Or “Yes! Big selection at low prices!” A similar phenomenon is […]

Consider the big effort being made to engineer equality at a particular Swedish pre-school.  Here’s the meat of the article: Breaking down gender roles is a core mission in the […]

Immolating yourself on the courthouse steps to underscore your belief that you were wrongfully separated from your wife and denied custody of your children is the ultimate self-refutation. Especially if […]

Disputes about evidence in social science can drag on for decades. I bet many a researcher has fantasized about the day when a world-famous panel of judges looks at the […]

We’re still getting little in the way of news about the Nabro eruption from Eritrea – I’ve been looking around and the best figure I’ve found is that at least […]

The 31st annual New York City Pride March was held just two days after Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill making New York the sixth and largest state to achieve […]

It has been awhile since the last in my Q&A series, but I think the new Q&A guest will make up for that lapse. Dr. Clive Oppenheimer (top left) has agreed […]

David Ropeik, a leading expert in risk communication, has joined Big Think as a regular blogger.  Among his inaugural posts at “Risk: Reason and Reality,” Ropeik discusses a fascinating new […]

How do we speak and write about things when things are not going the way that we want? Not just little things, like lunch, but big things, like wars. Do […]

Huntsman is now the Republican darling of the liberal press. The truth is his speech before the Statue of Liberty (which echoed Reagan in terms of location) was shallow and […]

Smart phones even more than tablets are the perfect all-in-one purpose devices. And as we are using them a bit more every day in a multitude of situations that just […]

Wednesday evening the bipartisan negotiations on raising the debt ceiling collapsed when House Majority Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced he was pulling out of the talks. Cantor refused to continue the […]

People’s attitudes lag behind their times, as Hermann Broch observed. At the height of the European Enlightenment, philosophers who dreamed of universal rights accepted that men would be broken on […]

Last night, an equal marriage bill passed the New York State Senate and was signed into law by Governor Andrew Cuomo. New York has become the sixth, and largest, state […]

Nature doesn’t litter, people do. In the US that trash amounts to 1.4 billion pounds per day. And 40% of that is packaging. Recently, Greenpeace tried to provoke the global […]

In Milwaukee, the fourth-poorest city in America, educators have launched a “guerrilla classroom” initiative that transforms urban locations into impromptu classrooms for parents and children. Across Milwaukee, playgrounds, bus stops […]

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recentlywrote that while members of the U.S. armed forces may as a group be politically conservative, “they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos.” Kristof’s […]

We all draw as kids, yet most of us stop drawing somewhere around the fourth or fifth grade. Doodles seem unserious by then, and adulthood only makes us less likely […]

In his recent essay, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” star reporter Jose Antonio Vargas recalls being sent to the U.S. at the age of 12 to live with his […]

The title of Nathan Mhyrvold’s Modernist Cuisine, a 40 lb. compendium of food history and philosophy, is meant to evoke the radicalism of 20th-century artists like Picasso and Pound, whose motto was “make it new.”