Richard C. Levin

President of Yale University

We leave together. You leave Yale College after four years; I leave the Yale Presidency after twenty. I find myself thinking about a Grateful Dead song written in 1970, the year I came to Yale as a graduate student. You know the words: "Lately it occurs to me, what a long, strange trip it's been." It's been a long trip, but, for us, more wonderful than strange.

Robert Reich

Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley; Author, 'Beyond Outrage'

Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. "competitive."

Barbara Ficarra

Journalist; Founder, Healthin30.com; Media broadcaster

Do we all have the power of empathy? Are we hardwired to know what other people want? Is it easy to think about other people's thoughts?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

President, Waterkeeper Alliance; Senior Attorney, NRDC

Those who bother to read these historical snippets will find many important departures and only tenuous parallels between the Obama Administration's IRS affair and Richard Nixon's Watergate-era IRS scandal.

Mike Hogan

Executive Arts and Entertainment Editor, The Huffington Post Media Group

Though this week's Game Of Thrones certainly served up plenty of doom and gloom, it also gave the optimists among us new reason to hope, as Tyrion, Sam and even Ser Davos notched some unlikely victories over the generally ascendant forces of destruction.

Rebecca Solnit

Author, 'A Paradise Built in Hell'

The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had not stopped the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space.

Michelangelo Signorile

Editor-at-large, HuffPost Gay Voices

We sometimes forget that getting laws passed and getting court rulings declared is, comparatively, the easy part. The hate is still out there, however, and the haters are getting more desperate. Our worst enemies right now are complacency and the seductive message that we've "arrived."

Dr. Peggy Drexler

Author, research psychologist and gender scholar

While men seem to welcome the existence of dual income households, and marriages marked by (mostly) shared responsibilities, there's a hitch: The guys still want to be the primary breadwinner. That is, she can bring home the bacon, so long as it's not all of it.

Ralph Nader

Consumer advocate, lawyer and author

A bipartisan legislative movement toward legalizing the growing of industrial hemp is finally on the rise.

Creed Bratton

Actor, 'The Office'

Well, that's that. Tears have been shed. Stories have been finalized and Creed ends up right where he belongs... jail. Sometimes the days were long, sometimes the coffee was odd, but the company was always... hmm, well, odd also.

Josh Horwitz

Executive Director, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence

The NRA didn't just throw down the gauntlet to our government in Houston. It also articulated a vision of America and its ideals that is the antithesis of what our Founders intended, and which would mean the absolution of our Constitution.

Dr. Michael J. Breus

Clinical Psychologist; Board Certified Sleep Specialist

Dr. Vatsal Thakkar, who is also a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center, makes a powerful argument for the need to consider sleep problems as a possible cause when evaluating patients for ADHD.

Christine Geiser

Half The Sky Movement community ambassador

One of the countless benefits I have received from yoga is feeling empowered to raise awareness about and money for communities that are suffering around the world.

Hal Taussig

Author, 'A New New Testament: A Bible for the 21st Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts'

More than 75 otherwise unknown documents from the early Christ movements of the first and second centuries have been discovered in the past 150 years. As they have been translated and studied, it's become clear that many of them belong to the very heart of Christian beginnings.

Josh Silver

Director, Represent.Us

It would be foolish to believe that a culture of corruption that developed over decades can be undone overnight. It will take time, exactly the same kind of slow and painful social change that created the corruption in the first place.

James Zogby

President, Arab American Institute; author, 'Arab Voices'

I might suggest that we first take a deep breath and make an effort to put the events of the past week in some perspective, but I know it wouldn't do any good. There is blood in the water and in deeply partisan Washington, the struggle for advantage and power always trumps reality.

Wendy Kopp

CEO & Founder, Teach For America, and CEO & Co-founder, Teach For All

When I started Teach For America, I wasn't trying to come up with an idea that would change the world. I was trying to solve a problem much closer to home: I was a senior in college and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life! I'm sure that doesn't sound at all familiar.

Steven Cohen

Executive Director, Columbia University's Earth Institute

Climate change requires that we transition to a fossil fuel free economy: But at what pace? How will we fund this transition? Who will pay the costs? What technologies will be used? If the transition takes place too slowly, we bear the risks of climate change.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Cesar Gaviria, Ricardo Lagos and Ernesto Zedillo

After more than four decades of a failed war on drugs, calls for a change in strategy are growing louder by the day. In Latin America, the debate is positively deafening.

Chrissie Hynde

Lead singer of the Pretenders

Force-feeding causes the birds' livers to balloon to up to 10 times their normal size and become diseased with what is known as hepatic steatosis. In addition to being miserably ill with a painful and debilitating disease, the geese can barely breathe because their grotesquely enlarged livers displace their lungs and other internal organs.

Deepak Chopra

Co-author, 'Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny, and The American Dream'; Founder, The Chopra Foundation

As the uniting factor that sets us free, "consciousness" is a term that is repugnant to many scientists -- mostly from an older generation -- and mysterious to all. But that doesn't excuse blindness and neglect.

Jay Michaelson

Author, 'God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality'

Mark Carson's murder highlights the shortcomings of a rights-based, marriage-based approach to LGBT equality, and cries out for deeper, and more difficult, forms of engagement.

Elizabeth Kucinich

Pure food and vegan advocate

Don't want a children's toy containing lead paint manufactured with child labor in your state? Congressman King and the House Agriculture Committee say "tough." Want the workers in your state to have a better chance? Your state won't have the right to choose. The Feds are encroaching.

Steven Strauss

Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Are the Clintons simply too powerful for Colbert to "speak truth to power"? Because if prominent satirists are now afraid to make fun of powerful politicians, our American Republic is in trouble, and it's no laughing matter.

Leo W. Gerard

International President, United Steelworkers

Permitting Tea Party, left-wing, libertarian, middle-of-the-road -- whatever -- groups to define themselves as untaxed social welfare organizations that may accept unlimited, untaxed, secret corporate gifts and sponsor political ads is a sarcoma on democracy.

Michael Brenner

Senior Fellow, the Center for Transatlantic Relations; Professor of International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh

John Kerry and Chuck Hagel have been at the helm of American foreign and security policy for some months now. Much was expected from new faces, new approaches and -- perhaps -- some new thinking. How are they doing?

HuffPost Radio

What a week for Republicans! It started with Obama fighting off simultaneous scandals and 24 coming back this Fall. But as Spitzer and Reagan discuss, by Friday the Scandals Scorecard revealed more smoke than fire. Who'll tell FOX?

Ken Page

Psychotherapist and author, upcoming "Deeper Dating" (Shambhala, 2014)

If we can name our own awkward, ardent gifts, and extricate them from the shame and wounds that keep them buried, we'll find ourselves on a bullet train to deep, surprising, life-changing intimacy.

Amy Blumenfeld

Writer

Those birds and bees conversations once reserved for junior high health class are now taking place between kids in the sandbox.