Guest Thinkers
All Stories
The innocuous white vapour trails that criss-cross the sky might have contributed to more global warming so far than all aircraft greenhouse gas emissions put together.
British research aimed at helping farmers cut their contribution to climate change shows how to reduce the amount of methane produced by cows and sheep belching and breaking wind.
Hertzberg wrote one of the simplest, and most elegant, blog posts (this form truly needs a new descriptive terminology) in response to President Obama’s speech on Libya. It was concise. […]
Those of us who lived through the 1980s remember well the phenomenon of the Members Only jacket. Whether you’ve found one in the back of your closet or not, you […]
IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. So wrote Jane Austen in the opening […]
After yesterday’s monster post about the prospects of drilling into the mantle (sorry, the petrologist side of me overpowered the volcanologist), today we catch up on some of the news: […]
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and thus making video calls via services like Skype or Google Talk are already a well established standard in the tech community. According to a […]
The other day I asked for examples of practical post-rationality—changes in law or policy that happened because institutions have stopped assuming that people behave rationally. A number of people wrote […]
Have you heard of Rebecca Black? If not, you may be living under a rock. Her (sickly-sweet-teeny-bopper) song recently got over 62 Million views on Youtube in less than 50 days. […]
My doctoral student, Trent Grundmeyer, wants to study alumni of 1:1 laptop schools for his dissertation. More specifically, he’s interested in those students’ perceptions of their college readiness, college learning, […]
As educators, parents, and citizens, we need to begin envisioning the implications of new characteristics for learning, teaching, and schooling.
@BronxZoosCobra has 12,165 twitter followers as of this writing. We live in the digital age, communicating instantaneously across continents, but we’re still just a bunch of primates chattering about where […]
If it lives up to its initial promise, the much-ballyhooed new app Color represents a fundamentally new type of mobile social network that, in many ways, is almost the polar opposite of Facebook. What’s so radical about it? For one, Color has done away entirely with the notion of the Friend.
In less than two weeks, I’ll be taking a short pilgrimage from San Francisco to Monterey for the e.g. — an event that has been summarized to me by a previous attendee as “what TED […]
We have never learned how to use instructional media in our schools in any predictable or systematic way. An even greater problem is that we have not learned how to […]
Getting over half a million hits on your very first post is every blogger’s dream. That’s what happened to Prof. William Cronon, a distinguished professor of American history at the […]
The utility at Fukushima (TEPCO) announced that radioactive water was found to be 10 million times normal levels at Unit 2, prompting evacuation of that site and world wide anguish […]
As I’ve noted before, long-term demographic trends in the U.S. work against the Republican Party. As Michael Grunwald put it, the country is steadily becoming “less white, less rural, less Christian.” […]
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different,” wrote T.S. Eliot in a […]
Can and should we try to drill deep into the earth, past the crust and into the mantle? We’ve tried in the past but haven’t gotten far. If the earth was an orange, we’d have barely zested it.
As Europe takes the lead on the Libyan intervention, it’s a powerful signal of America’s weakening global influence. Peter Beinart on Obama’s Jeffersonian turn—and the end of an empire.
Germany and Pakistan may be apples and oranges, but the point is that the current artistic and creative ferment in Pakistan is not sustainable, just as the Weimar Republic fell to fascism.
Forbes’ Gordon Chang echoes American politicians’ calling for military intervention in Syria. Our foreign policy interests are at stake, he says, and it’s not worth waiting for international consensus.
An Amnesty International reports says that while opposition to the death penalty has gained much global support, powerful countries like the U.S. and China continue to execute convicts.
As the world rallies behind the Libyan population, it is hard to understand why the Ivory Coast—where civil war is brewing—is just a footnote in international news and on the diplomatic agenda.
By day, Aleksei N. Navalny is a lawyer in Moscow. By night, he runs a website that exposes corruption in the Russian energy sector. A friend of the people, he is making government enemies.
Analysts in the U.S. and Europe did not expect revolutions in the Arab world, and those who did, did not expect them to come from such unlikely actors or be this widespread and peaceful.
Three of the world’s great armies have suddenly conspired to support a group of people in the coastal cities of Libya, known, vaguely, as “the rebels”. But what do we really know about them?
The reactor situation in Japan suffered yet another setback yesterday, with water levels in Unit 2 registering 10 million times normal levels.
A deadly Egyptian cobra is AWOL from the Bronx Zoo. Anybody got a spare mongoose? [Photo credit: Pandiyan, Creative Commons.]