Blog

On March 17th, the delegate country names lining the rows of seats in the main “theater” of the United Nations were replaced with the names of the colonies that were home to the crew of Battlestar Galactica. Whoopie Goldberg...
POSTED Thursday, April 30, 2009

It would be naïve to say that the times we are going through are not as bad as they seem. Millions are hurting, many are hurting badly. The global financial crisis is a tragedy of uncommon proportion. But the...
POSTED Friday, December 19, 2008

I remember the excitement and hope that accompanied JFK into the White House. This is the first time in half a century that I sense the same excitement. When I look at the racial situation in the US during...
POSTED Friday, November 14, 2008

Right now, I am in Basel, Switzerland, keynoting the Swiss Innovation Forum, so I have witnessed firsthand the European reaction to Obama’s victory. The European response has been ecstatic. People spontaneously organized many election parties to watch the election...
POSTED Thursday, November 13, 2008

Barack Obama’s election is the single most historic moment I have personally lived through. It’s not just a historic American moment — it seems like most of the planet is cheering at America now. Seeing how much of a...
POSTED Wednesday, November 12, 2008

The election is upon us, and we all look forward to it being over. Both presidential candidates have stated their positions with regard to science, e.g., in response to Science Debate 2008, not always with equal clarity. Many thoughtful...
POSTED Monday, November 3, 2008

Conventional wisdom says that foreign policy does not determine the winner in US Presidential elections. Particularly not when domestic economic anxieties are high — and that kind of anxiety has probably never been higher in several generations. Still —...
POSTED Monday, October 27, 2008

It’s time to vote. Yes — in the elections in November — but not only that. I’m talking about the voting you do every day. Every time you drop a dollar, yen, mark, yuan, frank, rial or pound on...
POSTED Wednesday, October 8, 2008

If you want to save the world, you have only so much money, time and attention. So the question is - what effort should you throw yourself into that provides the biggest bang for the buck? The Copenhagen Consensus...
POSTED Monday, September 29, 2008

I spent Wednesday and Thursday of last week at Zeitgeist, the annual meeting that Google hosts for its partners and a few invited guests. On Wednesday afternoon, during the “Serious Sustainability” session, the award-winning author and journalism professor Michael...
POSTED Tuesday, September 23, 2008

On the first day of February 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson had a phone conversation with Senator Eugene McCarthy in which he hoped to tone down McCarthy’s criticism of America’s escalating military involvement in Vietnam. Johnson, clearly frustrated by...
POSTED Wednesday, September 3, 2008

I think saving the world is important, but so far the world — at least as represented by the wealthy and the powerful in the less wealthy countries — seems to show no need to be saved. The wealthy...
POSTED Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Consider this scenario. Your doctor feels a small lump in your gut. You ask her what to do next. And this is what she says: “There is a test we can order to determine if this lump is an...
POSTED Wednesday, August 13, 2008

On May 2, 2008, Cyclone Nargis touched down on Burma’s western coast, and – according to top U.S. diplomats – may have claimed the lives of 100,000 people. As Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science has...
POSTED Wednesday, August 6, 2008

I wrote the following as part of an oped directed at the media industry. My profound belief is that we need to give people sense of vision and possibility. They no longer can imagine what a better future might...
POSTED Monday, July 28, 2008

In this year’s Presidential campaign, we have seen little debate between candidates about science, even with an unprecedented movement to encourage them to debate. The science community is not of one mind about the wisdom of such a debate...
POSTED Monday, July 28, 2008

The current system of education in the U.S. and most of the industrialized countries revolves around a factory mentality that was designed to serve the industrial era. Just as the assembly line worked for producing goods, it was thought...
POSTED Monday, July 28, 2008