Robert Kuttner

Co-founder and co-editor, 'The American Prospect'

The student loan program calls attention to the double standards of debt relief. Corporations are able to declare bankruptcy under Chapter 11 and write off old loan -- but college debt follows former students literally to the grave even if they go bankrupt.

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."

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.

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?

Desmond Tutu, Sohaila Abdulali and Jacob Lief

Yes, governments must step up. But so should we all. Why shouldn't rape be dinner table conversation? We talk about war, we talk about death, we discuss values with our children. But on the subject of sexual assault, we remain silent and squeamish.

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."

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.

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.

Michael F. Jacobson

Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest

The Times not only fanned unfounded fears that cutting sodium is risky, but it failed to inform readers that vanishingly few Americans consume the very-low-sodium levels that the IOM considered.

Linda Bergthold

Health policy researcher

Why do people think Obamacare no longer exists? It is already being implemented and it will continue to be implemented in January 2014.

Roy S. Gutterman

Director, Tully Center for Free Speech, Newhouse School, Syracuse University

Even as a staunch free press advocate, I admit that the government has an obligation to protect certain state secrets. But once information reaches the press and the public, the resulting investigative witch hunts raise questions about how free our press really is.

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.

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.

Leah S. Goodman

Eighth-grader at John F. Kennedy International School in Berlin

Tumblr is so much more than a website at this point. It has grown into such a huge community, one that could be easily destroyed by the sort of reckless marketing that Yahoo must be about to unleash.

Jim Yong Kim and Ban Ki-moon

Africa's Great Lakes region can silence the guns, boost trust and trade between neighbors, educate millions of out-of-school children, empower women, and create economic opportunities that will help the countries forge a path to prosperity, good governance, and lasting stability.

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.

Andrew Jenks

Award-winning filmmaker

I was a 25-year-old documentary filmmaker from New York working on a show for MTV. He was a 21-year-old dancer in East Oakland trying to move on with his life after the murder of his little brother. I spent a year embedded in his life, and got a front row seat to an American epidemic.

Annette Insdorf

Director of undergraduate film studies, Columbia University, and author of PHILIP KAUFMAN

The first few days of the Cannes Film Festival have been marked by surprises -- whether in the shifting national identity of movies, or peace-making efforts between towering directors -- and parties that defy the rain.

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.

Don Tapscott

Advisor to government and business leaders; Author, 'Macrowikinomics'

We're in the early stages of a massive transformation. Just like the printing press moved the world from a feudal, agrarian society to industrial capitalism, the Internet ushers in a new era.

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.

Abbie Rumbach

Blogger, "The Kids Made Me Fat"

Every now and then, the girls have actual conversations while we're cruising down the road, my favorite among them being "What are you going to be when you grow up?"

Mike Lux

Co-Founder, Democracy Partners

Hundreds of homeowners who have been playing by the rules while the big banks have cheated them are risking arrest at the Department of Justice to make an unmistakable statement: it is about time for the government to side with poor and middle class folks.

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.

Macie Melendez

Assistant editor, Home Energy magazine

These laws have formed the basis of a modern-day witch-hunt that thrives on the vagaries of the Internet and too often captures individuals who make relatively simple errors online, rather than those who produce such material or directly abuse children.