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One year ago I wrote an article for Big Think with the title walking across campus whilst sitting on your couch in which I introduced my readers to the AnyBot, […]

As you may be aware, this past Sunday was Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, in which freethinkers are exhorted to draw pictures of Mohammed to reaffirm their right to free expression […]

Guest post from Beth Becker… Social media has always been a fast moving field.  What’s new and exciting one day quickly gets tossed aside for the next shiny new toy.  […]

Any day now, the Supreme Court will release its ruling on the individual mandate in President Obama’s healthcare reform. It will inspire pontification about how far the government can “interfere” […]

There’s this weird kid called Ali on the playground. I’ve never liked the looks of him, and Benji told me this kid doesn’t have any friends. I think he has […]

At the end of a long and weary day, with the last drops of twilight bleeding out of the darkening midsummer sky, I turned my key in the lock of […]

All I can say is thank you to the readers who suggested that I pick up 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. I loved it. But it wasn’t because of the language, […]

In the car, I listen to country music. Country has an ideology. Not to say country has a position on abortion, exactly. But country music, taken as a whole, has […]

The massive southern continent was a supposed to be a counterweight for the lands of the northern hemisphere 

The atheist community is abuzz over a discussion at last month’s Women in Secularism conference, in which it inadvertently emerged that there are prominent speakers who have a reputation for […]

Amidst growing public perception that Facebook is using us to make billions of dollars using data we’re freely posting online, there is another sinking suspicion: Web startups we don’t keep […]

Katie Hinde is the Director of the Comparative Lactation Laboratory at Harvard University. Her research examines mother’s milk and how it contributes to infant development in humans and primates–including behavior, cognition and the brain.  Here, she discusses the effects of breast milk on behavior, what she thinks human mothers should know and the recent (and controversial) Time magazine breastfeeding cover. 

Here’s a distinguished political scientist—Jacqueline Stevens—who agrees with me that the NSF ought to cut the funding for political science.  The Republicans in Congress think that these “scientists” are covertly […]

One of my favorite books on leadership is The Future of Management by Gary Hamel. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so. You can read my […]

Would you exchange your personal privacy for an Internet that’s not boring? Companies like Airtime – which launched to a mix of acclaim, hype and skepticism last week – certainly hope so. They hope that you will allow certain […]

For most of the world, music lessons are a luxury of the bourgeois class. Both musical instruments and music lessons are pricey. As the average American moves his home several […]

What is the Big Idea? While Congress dukes it out over the federal interest rates on student loans, venture capitalist Peter Thiel has a solution for college students who don’t […]

Growing up in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, “made in Asia” always held a less than positive connotation. Back then, most people believed–mostly because of poorly-made electronics, […]

What is the Big Idea? French voters go to the poll today for the first round of the presidential election. Nicolas Sarkozy, and his Socialist challenger, François Hollande, will probably emerge as […]

We’ve all noticed it – on television and the social web, an increase in politically partisan polemic and cultural isolationism. This “us vs. them” mentality doesn’t reflect the best of America, past or present, says author and  essayist Marilynne Robinson.  

David Brooks has written a trendy column about the crisis in confidence in higher education.  Expensive colleges, shaken by the study Academically Adrift that shows that too many students don’t […]

        They are looking for Etan Patz again. He was 6 years old when he went missing in New York City in 1979, a disappearance that, along with those of […]

Google’s “augmented reality” glasses are upon us, complete with stylish company codename (“Project Glass”) and Orwellian rhetorical judo: “People I have spoken with [i.e., Google employees] who have have seen Project […]

“We are stardust. We are golden. We are billion year old carbon. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” sang Joni Mitchell in her song “Woodstock.” Every […]

In the avalanche of analysis and speculation about Chief Justice Roberts’ stunning decision to side with the Supreme Court’s liberal wing to uphold Obama’s healthcare law, one strain paints Roberts […]

A Berkeley physics discussion group asked “the late night big questions of quantum theory” which served to refocus the field of quantum physics. 

So the final issue in my class in PUBLIC POLICY this semester is HIGHER EDUCATION.  Here are some controversial propositions generated from papers I’ve just read from the class.  I’m […]

Sometimes it’s better to do something – anything – rather than nothing at all.  That’s the lesson of the old parable of Buridan’s ass, where the poor animal is faced with two haystacks and, unable to decide which is bigger, dies of hunger. . .

Conventional farming practices favor corporate agriculture and are widely considered environmentally unsustainable, but can organic farming feed a world with nine billion people?

Rosalind Franklin was instrumental to the discovery of DNA, but as the film photograph 51 demonstrates, hers was a life out of balance.