Guest Thinkers

The photo to the left is founder Marco Arment’s four letter tweet after seeing Apple launch a competitor to his popular startup, Instapaper. There’s been a lot of coverage as […]

New York magazine has a fascinating feature this week on the shift over the past half-decade in the movie industry from big budget films marketed around big ticket stars to […]

[ARCHIVE: Did you miss the webinar? Watch it here! (65 minutes) Be sure to read the comments too! Want to continue the discussion? Look over the resources on the webinar wiki […]

Whenever making claims about the brain and political attitudes, tread with care. It’s easy to open yourself up to intense criticism from the scientific community, on anything from methodology to […]

Jeffrey B. Rubin, PhD, is the author of the new book, The Art of Flourishing: A New East-West Approach to Staying Sane and Finding Love in an Insane World, available […]

I am beginning to think the volcanoes plan it this way, but what is up with two of the biggest eruptions of 2011 falling on the weekend? Definitely makes it […]

I spent last night in an Egyptian hospital – don’t ask, not serious – but the time away from my computer and books with only BBC Arabic and al-Arabiya gave […]

Salman Khan and his Khan Academy evoke strong feelings. Although Khan has many influential supporters, his detractors are beginning to emerge… [Side note: We are going to have a FUN […]

The uprisings sweeping the Arab world appeared to have won their third victory over authoritarian rule by overthrowing President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen after 33 years in power.

The oft-quoted aphorism by Winston Churchill was in reference to the RAF’s heroic stand against fascism. And yet, this phrase is equally attributable to those few who fight today’s wars, such as Navy SEAL Eric Greitens.

The past two weeks have seen a whirlwind of innovation in the music industry – everything from Amazon.com’s $0.99 blowout offer for Lady Gaga’s new album to Apple’s decision to […]

Are you still wondering what all those check-ins via FourSquare, Gowalla or all the others in the space are all about? Just to receive a discount on a lemonade it […]

Late last night – after hours of rumors – Ali Abdullah Salih left Yemen for Saudi Arabia and more medical attention.  My guess is that his wounds are much more […]

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) claims his recent budget proposal will “save Medicare.” Medicare, he says, will run out of money in the next ten years and is “headed for a […]

I don’t think I have ever told you about the time that a man I was seeing felt the need to confess to me about many years of regular prostitute […]

Sometime very soon, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban ki moon, is set to announce his intention to run for a second five year term.  In this he […]

GUEST POST BY JASON SILVA “Intertwingularity” is a term coined by Ted Nelson to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge.   He wrote: “EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an […]

So my previous post on Walmart being change that’s, on balance, bad for us as social beings was one of my most popular and, apparently, least controversial.  That’s because many so-called […]

UPDATE 8:00 PM (Eastern): It looks like Bariloche is being heaviest hit by the ash from the eruption – looks like a lot of ash on the ground in the resort town. You can see […]

I don’t know how many teenage girls I am following on Twitter, mostly because Twitter doesn’t have bouncers who card people before they can get in. Now there is one […]

Cultivate your passions, they can be a huge engine of joy in your life. Do you have so many passions that you could drop one without losing an important source of happiness?

One of my favorite outdated slang phrases is “drop a dime,” which alludes to the days when a phone call still cost 10 cents and means to tell the truth […]

V.S. Naipaul is without question or controversy one of the finest living writers. Yet the controversy surrounding his recent interview with the Royal Geographic Society, in which he effectively takes […]

It has been a bad 10 years for the economy. As I’ve written before, the last decade was, economically, a lost decade. As this graph from Ezra Klein shows, there […]

The news continues to come fast and furious out of Yemen, much of it just rumors – but still it comes.  Even as someone who spends a good deal of […]

Americans waste 14% of all the food we buy, and rote adherence to “use-by” dates is part of the problem, explains an Iowa food scientist: But, it turns out, in […]

A lot of volcanoes produce 3-km ash plumes on the regular basis. Right now, there are probably two or three volcanoes in Kamchatka or Indonesia alone that are generating plumes of […]

This week, the USDA unveiled a new icon for healthy eating, MyPlate, a successor to the Food Pyramid and MyPyramid. There’s a lot to like about the new visual. The […]

The news is coming fast and furious out of Sanaa.  Not much is known for certain and it will likely be a while before we have all the details, but […]

The Global Commission on Drug Policy has concluded that, when it comes to drugs, ‘just say no’ policies for youth are a complete failure. Perhaps we’ll now do the same […]