Guest Thinkers

Before I start with this post, apologies for the past weeks of silence here on Disrupt Education. I had to travel a lot and moderate an event in Germany so […]

Crack open any standard text on modern art since the end of World War II and you’ll read how New York City took over as the art world capitol from […]

Congress is not very popular. With its reputation for petty partisan bickering, Congress rarely is particularly popular. But the current Congress’ popularity has reached incredible new lows. According to a […]

One of the most visible signs of progress to date that the Affordable Health Care Act for Americans is working will begin next Friday, October 1st, when the Community First […]

You’ve seen the spam. You’ve heard legends. But is there any actual science behind the promise of penis enlargement? Quite a lot, it turns out: Thousands of years worth of trying. 

For the first time, researchers have shown that a cell-based therapy for HIV/AIDS can reduce the amount of virus in infected people. Never before has the virus been eliminated. 

Throughout this spring and summer, while Yemen’s protesters have continued their call for President Salih to step down, myself and several other Yemen observers have repeatedly warned the US not […]

This blog was published in 2011 at www.pamelahaag.com Few institutions invite—perhaps require?–cognitive dissonance like marriage. It’s remarkable, a marriage’s capacity to say one thing and do another, while all the […]

This was originally posted at www.pamelahaag.com One of the more important facets of our post-romantic age is that for perhaps the first time in history, you stand a good chance […]

As you have probably noticed, BigThink.com has undergone several cosmetic changes today, all intended to enhance your reading and viewing experience. We hope you like it, but we’re not done […]

This was originally published in 2010 at www.pamelahaag.com I was browsing through Amazon’s directory of book reviewers to find someone, and I ended up lost in the weeds for hours. […]

I confess that I’m a marriage rubbernecker. I was a fiendish eavesdropper even as a young girl, much to my mother’s embarrassment, and the dubious habit has finally been put to good use.

Americans are growing more interested in and perhaps enamored of matchmaking and arranged marriage, which used to call to mind Fiddler on the Roof or an expose on “primitive” custom. This tentative interest in arranged marriage in Western cultures co-exists with an international, thoroughly romantic, “love before marriage” trend, which suggests an amusing and fascinating cross-pollination.

Recently, while working on a piece about memory and smell, I came upon a concept that I’d never before heard about: blind smell. I’d read often enough about blindsight, the […]

Quick update for late on Friday – much more to say on Monday. I promise. Really. Anyway, some brief news: Alaska: The dome is continuing to grow at Cleveland in […]

It’s hard to normalize the celebrity marriage and divorce for the rest of us.  After all, we’re highly unlikely to end up married to an immigrant ex-bodybuilder, mega-Hollywood action star turned Governor who impregnates a member of our full-time housekeeping staff. These divorces should be consigned to the marriage equivalent of a Special Victims Unit.  

THIS BLOG WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE HUFFINGTON POST ON FEBRUARY 9, 2011 Romance fades.  Everyone knows this. The first flush of true love in marriage mellows into something less […]

Kris Broughton, a classy and eloquent BIG THINKER, is a particularly fervent defender of our president.  Nonetheless, he’s warming up to MITT ROMNEY.  He even believes that his anti-Obama rhetoric […]

Like a biblical parable, the typical human-behavior experiment is easily told and easily reduced to a message: People who pay with credit cards were more likely to have potato chips […]

Economist Daniel Altman predicts that “deep factors,” including endemic corruption and a Confucian business culture, will limit China’s growth, causing it to surrender the top spot shortly after becoming the world’s biggest economy.

If 19th century relationships were about forming alliances, and 20th century relationships about passion, how will the relationships of the 21st century be defined?

What is wrong with Mitt Romney? Why is the Republican Party wasting its time looking under every rock in Creation (pun intended) for someone who is just about guaranteed to […]

Remember back in June when President Salih narrowly escaped an assassination attempt and flew to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment?  A number of people predicted that was the end.  Analysts […]

Sean Parker rocked the music world when he created Napster; his vision and paranoia helped to shape Facebook. Now 31 with $2.1 billion, he says he is just getting started. 

I’ve spent much of today traveling, but there is still a lot going on in Yemen.  Hopefully in the next couple of days Waq al-waq will have more of a […]

–Guest post by Paula Orlando, American University doctoral student. Should it take a public intellectual to decide what a public intellectual actually should be? The literature on public intellectuals presents […]

My friend Jason Brennan, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown, offers a short and sweet argument against the death penalty: Even if we grant for the sake of argument that […]

Google’s director of research, Alfred Spector, explains why artificial intelligence is crucial to the search company’s future in areas like natural language, machine learning and speech recognition. 

Here’s a question that doesn’t get asked often enough in the “death of print” debate. If print books are limping toward extinction, why do so many writers—even the youngest, Web-savviest […]

The state of Georgia just killed Troy Davis. Which is to say, a number of individual human beings acting under the imagined authority of the state of Georgia killed Troy […]