Guest Thinkers

“We might ask ourselves,” writes Noam Chomsky about the Bin Laden mission, “how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped […]

“Art,” Auguste Rodin once said, “is only a kind of love. I know quite well that bashful moralists will stop up their ears. But what! I express in a loud […]

After seeing how mobile and social networking technologies led to popular revolutions in places like Tunisia and Egypt, is it possible that we’ll soon see a similar type of revolution inour own backyard?

Among the many deplorable effects of reading this blog, according to old-school journalists, is that you can’t count on what The New York Times (here, scroll down to section B5) […]

If you love The Economist, you likely know and love its back page, its obituary page. Economist obituaries are models of the magazine’s style and, more broadly, models of a […]

This just came in via Dr. Boris Behncke (on Twitter) – after some signs such as increasing seismicity that activity was about to start on Etna, sure enough, the volcano […]

The first issue of the Journal of Animal Ethics unexpectedly ruffled some feathers with an editorial note on terminology. The editors raised critics’ hackles by calling upon contributors to use […]

The death of Osama Bin Laden caught the country by surprise. There was no warning, no preamble, no crescendo of media build up, just a simple announcement that crackled through […]

Three months after popular protests began in earnest, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Salih continues to cling to power.  His military has split.  Powerful tribal shaykhs have deserted him and protesters […]

Today I just wanted to bring up a few examples of bad “science” floating around the internet. Finding articles/posts like these always get me riled up, but I wonder how […]

Aging is new. Lifespans today in the industrialized world are 30-40 years more than they were 100 years ago. Older adults are among the fastest growing cohorts in developing economies. […]

Hedonistic Sustainability is not an intellectual paradox. It is, instead, the latest and most exciting evolution of the green movement that is just now coming into its own as a […]

Anti-porn feminist Gail Dines manages to completely miss the point of the Slut Walk marches being organized in cities around the country. Dines and her co-author think that the marchers […]

I am buried in the final days of the spring semester (and academic year), so I thought it might be a good time to post a new Mystery Volcano Photo. […]

Question: How do you remain mindful when juggling two, three, four, however many things at once? Answer: You probably don’t. For a long time, cognitive scientists have observed that processing […]

A few days ago a friend of mine showed up carrying a city map of Amsterdam in the form of one of the simplest and smartest product redesigns I’ve seen. […]

Try this as an exercise. Give yourself an honest score on a scale of one to ten that represents where you believe you sit in the distribution of physical appearance […]

The always fascinating English philosophic intellectual John Gray has written a book about the various ways most of the leading philosophers and scientists of the late 19th and early 20th […]

It’s Mother’s Day. Are you thinking about mom? No, not because it’s Mother’s Day, but because mom is a trendsetter a virtual thermometer of what’s hot and what’s not. I […]

Smaller-budget documentaries are increasingly shaping debate over energy issues, writes Michael Nagle in a guest post today.  Yet widening the scope of their reach and impact has taken some investment […]

Scrolling through POLITICO last Friday night, the words “Orangeburg, S.C.” caught my eye. Colin Powell was in my hometown that day to deliver this year’s commencement speech at my father’s […]

This week I will be participating in a symposium on the “Ethical Challenges of Communicating Science in Political Controversies” hosted by the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa […]

The light at the end of the finals tunnel has appeared – only one set of papers (where I posed to my volcanoes class the question “if someone asked you […]

In order to grapple with the future, we must first take a big step back and understand the historical pattern of technology disruptions. The story begins by recalling the original […]

Here’s an exaggerated account of the slide of our professors into the proletariat given by The Nation, our leading journal on the left.  Let me repeat what I’ve said before:  Good […]

On September 21st, 2001, then President George W. Bush gave a speech to a joint session of Congress in which he spoke about justice, and addressed frankly what the American […]

I had high hopes for Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live send up of natural childbirth. Fey is very talented and natural childbirth subculture is ripe for parody, in part because […]

In  the  days  of the Wild West, the posters used to read ‘Wanted! Dead or Alive’.  Now  in  the White House we must presume they read, ‘Wanted! Dead,Not Alive!’ This  […]

Pitzer College, a small liberal arts school in Southern California, will launch a Department of Securlar Studies this fall: “It’s not about arguing ‘Is there a God or not?’ ” Mr. […]

I briefly wrote about digital dementia in my post about demand driven education. The term deals with the fact that people tend to outsource information to digital devices we had […]