George Heymont

San Francisco-based arts critic

With nice supporting work from Mitchell Lewis and Gustav von Seyffertitz (I just love the sound of that man's name!), The Docks of New York proved to be a highly atmospheric surprise.

Kelly Rigg

Executive Director, GCCA

If you've ever had the feeling that your lifestyle changes amount to tiny drops in a very large proverbial bucket, I invite you to consider taking one of these 'Top 5 actions' to fight climate change.

Bishop Minerva G. Carcaño

Bishop in The United Methodist Church

The opportunity to reunite their families should be extended to all immigrant families, including LGBT families. It is the just and right thing to do. It is the humane thing to do. It is what we must do.

William Bradley

Political Analyst, NewWestNotes.com

Season 2's slinky cool "The Jet Set" has been definitively dethroned as Mad Men's kookiest episode ever. We've gone from time out of mind to out of mind time.

Dom Phillips

Journalist

I just know that he was an artist, not just in what he did in his life, but in how he lived it. He touched me and I knew him very briefly, just twice, two unforgettable times, two decades apart.

Mike Sandler

Political economist, climate change professional and sustainability advocate

The first Indiana Jones movie opens with our hero having his prize stolen from him by a rival archeologist. No one remembers that the statue actually belongs to the Peruvian tribespeople. In 2013, Californians are witnessing an allegory with the repeated raiding of the revenues from the carbon price under state law AB32 that should be theirs.

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.

Heather Laine Talley

Writer, teacher and sociologist; Editorial Collective member, The Feminist Wire

The "crazy" Zelda that has emerged in our popular imagination is as much Scott's making as The Great Gatsby itself. This is, in and of itself, part of the F. Scott legacy. His work depended on Zelda's silence.

Mary Ellen Hannibal

Author, 'The Spine of the Continent'

As I wander through the land of environmental nonprofits, I'm always asking myself: What works? Because on one level, nothing is working. Every year more land and water is converted to human use.

John Pavley

CTO @ The Huffington Post, Blogger

It's the second day at Google I/O 2013 in San Francisco. While the other members of the HuffPost tech team on site have been pursuing sessions on Android and Google Glass, I've been focused on something much more mundane: the World Wide Web.

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.

Mark E. Robson, M.D.

Attending Physician, Clinic Director, Clinical Genetics Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

I have been involved in research in this area for 17 years, since shortly after BRCA1 and BRCA2 were discovered, and I have no idea what I would do if I were a woman faced with this decision. The diagnosis of a mutation is just words on paper, but the risks they foreshadow are very real.

Vicki Chandler

Scientist, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

How could we truly distinguish great science from good science? Often, we can't. Nor should we, in many cases -- although journal "impact factors" are being used to try to do just that.

Ken White

President, Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA

Get your animals spayed or neutered. And while your pet's annual veterinary check-up certainly includes the sort of hands-on exam that may detect a lump, it's important to know your pet's body well enough on your own to offer up what in fact saved Sugar Rub.

Lisa Mirza Grotts

Author, Etiquette Expert

If you don't have rules for your house guests, you may wish to consider some after reading this article. You may have been working harder than you needed to! And if you have been invited to be a house guest, a list of tips on how to be asked back are at the end of this article.

Robert Julian

Writer and actor; star, 'Golden Gays'; author, 'Postcards From Palm Springs: A Memoir' and 'Hollywood or Lust'

The San Francisco I fell in love with was a place of welcoming bonhomie and a sense of community. It was politically correct before the concept of political correctness existed. Now the cool, gray city of love is undeniably cold. It has become a hard place.

Ronald L. Wasserstein

Executive Director, American Statistical Association

Your chance of winning the lottery on a single ticket is one in 175 million. That seems tiny, and it is. In fact, it's so small that it is difficult for us to grasp. Understanding how small this number is provides the key to understanding how likely -- or unlikely -- it is you will become the next big winner of the Powerball jackpot.