Guest Thinkers

While defining spirituality is ‘like shoveling fog’, an increasing number of Americans self identify as spiritual but not religious. One political scientist sees it as an outgrowth of the 1960s.

“Is the international scholarly pecking order about to be overturned?” America’s dominance in higher education is being put into question by emerging institutions overseas.

An expert on constitutional law at the University of Berkeley says yesterday’s ruling against California’s same-sex marriage ban could ultimately undermine broader gay rights objectives.

Bzzz. Bzzzzzzzz. Bz. Is that the sound of your caffeine buzz, or is it the hum of the millions of happy native bees you’re helping to house when you choose […]

One of the most overlooked aspects of the life of Frida Kahlo is that the artist who exemplified Mexican national identity had a father born in Germany. Thanks to exhibitions […]

A federal appeals court ruled today that California’s Proposition 8 is unconstitutional. Same-sex marriage is legal again in California—at least for the moment. Proposition 8 had amended the California Constitution […]

Some time ago, we looked at EyeWriter – an innovative eyetracking device that allows paralyzed patients to write with their gaze. Today, we’re turning to another form of sensory input […]

Part One of Two I often receive e-mails from my fans who state that my ability to popularize science and technology is reminiscent of the late Carl Sagan; This got […]

Making America fall in love with Don Draper is dangerous, because we will want to be him, or be with him, and both of these will bring moral compromise.

Good communication is a matter of getting “in sync” with others, as you’ve probably noticed when you’ve seen people match their steps perfectly as they walk, and imitate each other’s […]

While many minorities in our society face discrimination, being gay is a little different, according to GLAAD President Jarret Barrios. “You don’t wear that on your sleeve,” says Barrios. “It’s […]

While psychologists have preferred the term ‘blended family’ to ‘broken home’, true blending rarely occurs in second-marriages. Fracture at home is becoming a tolerable reality of modern families.

China takes in 30% of the worldwide pornography revenue, and prostitution income makes up 8% of its massive GDP.

“Making nice doesn’t work. It was worth a try, but it didn’t work. So we’d better try something else.” A Methodist Sunday school teacher proposes standing up to inaction over climate change.

While nearly every social movement claims Enlightenment ideas—freedom, democracy and science—as their own, this very claim to authority cuts against the revolutionary English moment.

“If I wanted to sponsor a bill,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) asked, “and it said, ‘Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day,’ and I got […]

How do you persuade people to eat less and exercise more? We love to think it’s a matter of getting them to see facts and make good decisions, because that […]

Traffic perhaps the greatest environmental liability and biggest daily annoyance of urban epicenters. Between the number of cars in the streets, the tendency of ground-level public transportation vehicles to jam […]

It’s a sad day for bigots in New York City. Opponents of a planned Islamic cultural center and mosque at 47 Park Place failed in their last-ditch effort to usurp […]

Could recycling actually be hurting the environment? In a recent policy paper, “Recycling Myths Revisited”, Professor Daniel K. Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) […]

Despite what the brainiacs from the Ivy League say, citizen’s arrests are not vigilante acts, according to Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.  In fact, he insists that they have been […]

Orangutans spend all day exercising, slowly swinging from tree to tree, munching on low-fat plants, but they’re still kind of pudgy. It turns out that your average orang, for all […]

Diane Johnson at The New York Review of Books draws on five books to write about the current state of marriage in the U.S. which has the most marriages per capita in the West.

“Two years after the US subprime crisis, China is seeing its own real estate bubble as a result of massive state stimulus programs. Many economists are warning it could burst soon.”

Air conditioning, sometimes necessary and sometimes about status, has made it possible for us to live almost anywhere in the world, but its effects on the environment are “chilling”.

A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology finds that wearing red makes men appear more powerful, more likely to make money and more likely to climb the social ladder.

At one level you can but admire the chutzpah of CNN President Jonathan Klein who is replacing the venerable Larry King with an English presenter, who King says he” wouldn’t […]

I got an email from an editor at a major black-oriented website last week, asking me if I would write a rush article on Charles Rangel the same Thursday afternoon […]

While Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece The Gross Clinic undergoes a facelift on the east coast in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew (my […]

Tell your children not to write anything down. Tell them that this phenomenon, this global mania for being public about every aspect of our lives, is something that will catch […]