Zachary Shtogren
Zach Shtogren has worked as a translator at PEN and as a journalist for the now-defunct Catalonia Today and BCN Week. Zach has also worked as an environmental educator in the Peace Corps, taught New York school children urban ecology, and managed the Grand Canyon National Park's greenhouse and nursery. He is also a former Big Think editor. He graduated with a degree in French from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Times’ Jeff Zeleny might have gone a bit too far with his adjectives at last night’s 100-day press conference. Zeleny asked Obama to tell the world what surprised, humbled, […]
The new brain sciences are upon us. There’s neuroeconomics to analyze how we make financial decisions. There’s neuromarketing to sell our brains stuff. There’s Ray Kurzweil to explain how our […]
Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter was never quite a darling of the right, but his abandonment of the Republican Party—announced today—does more than raise the ire an already struggling conservative political […]
How does a president simultaneously extricate a country from myriad domestic crises, play a strong hand overseas to end inherited wars, stave off new wars, control a pandemic from swine, […]
Big Think’s latest livecast will feature Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram and Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain as they offer a look at the Wolfram Alpha, a soon-to-launch engine that […]
A growing chorus of academics wants to count higher education along with health care and fossil fuel dependency as one item on the list of “big reforms of our time.” […]
Clintonian Democrat, lefty progressive, restrained partisan, closet wonk, post-racial unifier, hunk. The monikers used to describe Barack Obama’s executive style swirl about the man in a cloud of political columnist […]
In blogospheric guru Adam Singer’s ever expanding quest to help us all become more productive and valuable individuals, he takes on the bane of creatives everywhere: overthinking. It keeps us […]
The one-hundred day shindig is not only being celebrated by the president this week but by the entire White House hierarchy. Though a bit on the sleepy side, Assistant to […]
One hundred down and 1160 to go. Though the problems just seem to stack up, the Obama administration must feel at least some sense of accomplishment during this benchmark of […]
Obama’s signed thousands of crusading volunteers into America’s failing classrooms this week with the stroke of a pen. The expansion of Americorps represents a key step in the president’s agenda […]
In addition to an increased risk of needing Lasik surgery and an unnatural LCD-like glow to your complexion, excessive time on Facebook may be keeping you from your family and […]
The so-called Instinct Diet attacks the two primary drivers of failure in dieting: deprivation and hunger.
Stem cells are medicine’s next frontier. Stem cells are political thin ice. Stem cells mark our moral Armageddon. The positions on stem cell research are as various as the diseases […]
As the Americans hem and haw about the perils of socialism or semi-socialism or quasi-socialistic thinking, book sales of Marx have been downright skippy since the financial crisis broke out […]
Like a great gravity-eating vortex, the world of “pull” is increasingly at our digitized fingertips with new ways to bring previously out-of-reach information into the realm of practical individualized use. […]
The free-for-all world of the blogosphere is set to get a Nielsen-style ratings system that could finally open a new age in classifying weblogs. But to get an understanding how […]
It started with a man in a piebald clown’s wig throwing his clown’s nose at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It ended with a walkout of all E.U. delegates to the […]
Finding a job, a date, used clothing, golden retriever, or pretty much anything else has been facilitated immensely by the online classifieds site Craigslist. But the ease with which users […]
Following the resounding success of last week’s “Can Monopolies Save the Internet?” webcast from Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center, Big Think, in collaboration with the Wisconsin School of Business, will […]
It’s April 20th, known the world over as International Pot Smoking Day. If you’re reading this you’re probably not stoned. Although given the increasingly numerous reasons to be stoned, you […]
One outstanding task on the global conversation to-do list is how to communicate across languages on all our various new media. Now, a linguistic brain trust at MIT has stepped […]
This article, from 2009, laments the lack of popular US protest movements at the time. What would the author say now?
In a move that many media analysts say was inevitable, The New York Times has decided to pare down its weekly content. Sections with regional and niche appeal will be […]
Americans in gun-loving states have always bought and sold their heat with gusto. In a downturn however, arms small and large are being traded like barrels of light sweet crude […]
All too familiar with the ravages of the late-90s tech bubble, tech companies are not playing the fool this time around. Though they are by no means seeing stellar profits–in […]
The day in 1909 when Congress passed the sixteenth amendment to levy income taxes on states without any obligations to share the financial fruits with them is remembered as a […]
If you conscientiously object to ponying up your income this year, be advised that 2009 could rank as a tough one for tax evasion. Offshore accounts are increasingly scrutinized, year-end […]
Today, throughout America, modern-day revolutionaries are quiety scattering tea bags around state capitals in a mass protest more akin to weekend suburbanites mulching their front lawns than the Boston Tea […]
On a day of mind-numbing acronyms that few aside from tax preparers can decipher without IRS instructions, we should note one that could mark the way to tax system salvation. […]