Guest Thinkers

A couple of years ago a published paper reported that girls who lost their virginity early were less likely to finish high school. The authors claimed that the only plausible […]

So as Americans like our Queen, we Brits tend to like your Presidents. I happen to like this President, which meant that the usual bile I reserve for the saccharine […]

Sunday May 22 was unification day in Yemen, the anniversary of the date in 1990 in which north and south Yemen united to form a single state.  It was also […]

Sunday May 22 was unification day in Yemen, the anniversary of the date in 1990 in which north and south Yemen united to form a single state.  It was also […]

A school superintendent asked his state to provide for his students the same way it provides for prisoners. 

Here’s a graphic from the new Center on Education and the Workforce report, What’s It Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors, that shows median earnings by undergraduate major. As […]

Yesterday, the New York Timeslaunched the first in a series of stories focusing on the challenges of adapting to climate change.  The feature profiled the city of Chicago which joined by New […]

The ash from the Grímsvötn eruption in Iceland has now made its way to the British Isles and over 200 flights have been delayed or cancelled due to the ash, […]

Electronic ‘backchannels’ at conferences are commonplace these days. But are we ready for teachers who try to incorporate backchannels into their classroom instruction? Earlier this month the New York Times […]

There was something missing from last night’s premiere of Too Big To Fail, a made for HBO movie which portrayed the inner workings of the U.S. Treasury during the financial […]

Ahead of the formal G8 summit this week in northern France, the world’s technology visionaries are gathering in Paris to meet with the G8 leaders to discuss the future of […]

Baby Boomers have had it easy in many ways. One of the advantages of being born during a baby boom is that your generation is always going to be large […]

A traditional marriage consists of a husband, a wife, and the marriage itself. New York Times columnist David Brooks tells Big Think this type of relationship can only be understood as a whole. 

Sam Tanenhaus interviewed Harold Bloom for The New York Times; the video is here. It’s a very cool, very short, interview. It will be historic, too—not only for capturing Bloom […]

On a recent sushi night out, a friend of mine attempted to joke with the waitress asking her whether the sushi she had just served him was radioactive. She didn’t find it […]

Alice Bell, science communication lecturer at Imperial College London, is a visiting scholar this month at American University.  At the end of the semester, she gave a guest lecture to […]

Actively pursuing happiness may not lead to an actual increase in happiness. In fact, it can do the opposite and make you less happy at the end of the day. 

We’re now into the third day of the new eruption from Grímsvötn in Iceland. So far, the ash from the eruption has fallen only on Iceland and the North Atlantic […]

A new study led by my brother Erik Nisbet, a professor of communication at Ohio State University, offers several revealing implications for public diplomacy across Arab states.  From the OSU […]

The Viennese Waltz differs from other waltzes in the speed of the rotation—a dervish-like dance in which the dancers are spun out of their normal existence. That dizzying disorientation helps […]

I’ve been asked whether I should reconsider my recent praise of AMERICAN IDOL as an admirably and characteristically American mixture of wisdom and consent.  Although I can’t really speak as […]

One or two decades ago we still lived in a world in which contacts with other cultures were rather peripheral. Sure, there used to be immigrants from other countries and […]

An update for today (May 22, 2011) on the eruption at Grímsvötn in Iceland: The eruption itself (video) is still ongoing, albeit possibly with a slight decrease in intensity according […]

This post is a review of The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts by Neal Bascomb. My short recommendation? This book […]

We’re supposed to be about learning in schools, right? How many schools have a mission or vision or purpose statement that says “blah blah blah life long learning blah blah […]

As many of you know, today we saw a new eruption at Grímsvötn under Vatnajökull in Iceland – its first eruption since 2004 … and boy, it was a doozy. […]

Well, it looks like Iceland is going to be in the news again this summer. Jon Frimann and others noted a sharp increase in seismicity under the Vatnajökull icecap at […]

In his interview with BigThink, Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria quotes Lincoln on the relationship between character—moral character—and power. There are many celebrated quotes about character, and Nohria references […]

The other day I was stopped by police officers as I was going through security at the House of Commons. Astonishingly they took me to one side and confiscated a […]

The latest nutritional thinking has zeroed in on carbohydrates as a likely cause of heart disease, the biggest killer of Americans, yet government nutrition policy recommends 6-11 servings.