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.

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.

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.

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."

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Raymond J. Learsy

Author, 'Oil and Finance: The Epic Corruption Continues'

Unlimited exports of U.S. natural gas without restoring honest supply-and-demand-based markets worldwide will permit us to kiss goodbye to the jobs that would have been created, as gas prices will be pumped to artificially determined world levels, much to the glee of the 'oil patch.'

Jarrett L. Carter

Founding Editor, HBCUDigest.com

Barack Obama visited Morehouse College on Sunday to give a refrain on the responsibility of Morehouse Men and black America to find dignity and progress in self-reliance, a refrain that has simultaneously proven exciting and excruciating for African Americans over the last four years.

Eli Lehrer

President, R Street

For all of its populist appeal, the corporate income tax is arbitrary and exempting some organizations from paying it is equally arbitrary. Abolishing the corporate tax altogether would supercharge the economy and wouldn't serve any particular set of political interests.

Azeem Khan

Co-founder, Supshot

I have a huge issue with what happened that day. And what happens to me every single time I go to an airport. This was supposedly a random search. But it wasn't a random search at all. It was a "you're a Muslim" search.

Mikah Meyer

Countertenor singer; author, ‘Life’s More Fun When You Talk to Strangers’

I ask you, fans across America and around the world, to root for Memphis -- both the Grizzlies team and the city. Maybe a Grizzlies championship can provide just the "grits" this Southern city needs.

Guideposts

Monthly magazine

Casey wasn't the most popular dog in her owner Carol Baird's neighborhood. She had a heart of gold but a nose for trouble. So when a man rapped on Carol's door, said he lived three blocks away and then asked for her dog's name, Carol braced herself.

Shozan Jack Haubner

Author, 'Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk'

I was working beneath the composting toilets, churning shit with a shovel, trying to turn it into food for the earth, when a voice rose up from the depths: I just have to tell people about this.

Meredith Bodgas

Blogger, MeritalBliss.com

Even if you're nervous, smile anyway. Think about how lucky you are to be marrying your soul mate. Looking scared makes people wonder if you're confident about your decision -- and makes them second-guess why they came out to support you in the first place.