Guest Thinkers

On Sunday, the LA Times ran two major feature articles on the emerging influence and power of documentary film. One article contrasted the works of Michael Moore and Ken Burns. […]

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the best selling books of the past decade have been converted into a video game for kids and young adults. That’s right, available […]

Last week, analysts at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty released a 70 page analysis of the strategies, tactics, and messages of the Sunni insurgent propaganda campaign. It’s the most interesting thing […]

Pew has released an analysis of the most frequently used words at the most popular sections of the presidential candidate Web sites, their candidate biographies. The findings are somewhat surprising, […]

Big Tobacco.Big Oil.Big Pharma.Big Biotech.Big Nanotech?Each of these phrases are examples of frame devices, words that act like triggers in activating underlying cultural meanings. In fact, these frame devices instantly […]

As I’ve argued at this blog many times and in our article at Science, defining evolution in terms of medical progress is probably the best way to translate its’ importance […]

Oxford University Press has published a new edited volume featuring research on public opinion and media coverage of the plant biotech debate in the US, Europe, Africa, India,and Brazil. The […]

Gallup has released an analysis of how support for various presidential candidates breaks down by church attendance. Somewhat surprisingly, in a general election match up, Hillary and Rudy are neck […]

Gore’s Live Earth concert series was supposed to catalyze American public attention around the problem of global warming, but did it? Polling data is not yet available regarding the concert’s […]

Has the effort by liberals to re-brand themselves as progressives been successful? What about Republicans who no longer describe themselves as a conservative but rather as a “Reagan Republican”? Rasmussen […]

In journalism, professional norms favor telling gripping stories about individuals and places. Applied to the debate over global warming, many journalists believe that if they can recast the complex issue […]

Last week I posted on the “Misunderstood Meanings of Science Literacy,” noting that scientists, policymakers, and journalists tend to narrowly focus on the recall of facts about science as the […]

The philosopher Paul Kurtz has published a new position booklet that addresses much of what I have been arguing is missing–and so deeply troubling–about the New Atheist movement. Below is […]

As part of their conversation series with scientists, the NY Times this week runs an interview with Harvard’s Eric Mazur featuring the headline “Using the ‘Beauties of Physics’ to Conquer […]

As I’ve argued, one of the reasons I find the New Atheist PR campaign so troubling is that it is has radicalized a movement that feeds on anger and fear […]

To date, nanotechnology has followed a public trajectory similar to that of plant biotechnology in the United States. Relatively low levels of attention have been paid to the still nascent […]

I’m obviously a bit late in commenting on the scientist-journalist debate that went on through last week, so I’m not going to weigh in at this point. (Round up of […]

Chris Mooney’s Storm World is reviewed in Sunday’s edition of the NY Times, a major moment for any author since the attention will surely give a major boost to the […]

Across the Atlantic, it’s a parallel universe when it comes to a focus on framing and its political uses. While here in the States, liberals have decried the use of […]

In an essay at the Web site of Skeptic magazine, David Sloan Wilson, author of Darwin’s Cathedral, concludes that when it comes to a scientific understanding of religion, Dawkins is […]

Pew has released a survey analysis comparing American Muslims to other American religious groups, comparing levels of religious intensity, political identification, and policy preferences. I summarize and quote from some […]

The Center for American Progress has released a valuable analysis of the factors that account for the huge ideological imbalance in political talk radio. Here’s what they pinpoint as the […]

The Sunday Washington Post leads with a story that greenhouse gas mitigation proposals in Congress are likely to stall, in part because several key lawmakers believe (or at least claim) […]

One of the common claims that has been amplified by the Dawkins/Hitchens PR campaign is that “atheism is a civil rights issue.” (For an example, see the comments section of […]

On June 4, more than 120 people turned out for the Nisbet & Mooney Speaking Science 2.0 talk at the New York Academy of Sciences. The talk is now part […]

Over at the Intersection, Chris generated a discussion of what issues might be the next big science policy debates. I’d like to turn the question in a slightly different direction […]

The news frenzy over Andrew Speaker, the honeymooning lawyer with a rare strain of anti-biotic resistant TB, did little to shape public views on the disease as a global health […]

In new survey released by Pew, Americans see few ideological differences among the three broadcast TV news networks, but among regular viewers of cable TV news, content differences are readily […]

In 2004, when California voters approved a $3 billion dollar funding program for embryonic stem cell research, all eyes turned to the Golden State as the new national center for […]

Facebook and similar social networking sites hold vast potential for reaching non-traditional audiences for science. As the NY Times reports today, Facebook has 25 million users and growing as the […]