To start the new year off right, the Monitor asked various thinkers around the world for one idea each to make the world a better place in 2011. We talked to poets and political figures, physicists and financiers. The results range from how to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world to ways to revamp Hollywood.

Roger Kimball – If we cannot defend our culture, we are doomed to lose it.

J. Matt Barber – Sometimes the most effective way to deal with a bully is to simply pop him in the chops. While it may not shut him up entirely, it usually gives him pause before he resumes flapping his toxic jaws.

Soccer games may supplant Sunday school, but parents keep the faith by making home the rock of belief more than church-going.

Carey Roberts – Pushing an agenda that includes the avowed destruction of marriage and the family.

NAS member Roger Scruton has a fascinating article in the most recent issue of the American Spectator, “Multiculturalism, R.I.P.” He declares that the reign of the ideology that has dominated political language and education for decades is…over.

Special undercover interviews of a Nazi officer, one of Himmler's inner circle, who was at the trigger point of the Holocaust in 1941. This exclusive video is from the PJ Institute, the education and research arm of Pajamas Media and PJTV.

Americans no longer think the U.S. economy is No. 1, a new Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll shows.

Paul Craig Roberts | Western Civilization no longer upholds the values it proclaims, so what is the basis for its claim to virtue?

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says it will not back down from its decision to label the Family Research Council and other socially conservative groups as hate groups, on par with the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations, for their views about homosexuality.

Conversations with God and Conversations with God for Teens, written by Neale D. Walsch. They sound harmless enough by their titles alone. The books have been on the New York Times best sellers list for a number of weeks, and they make truth of the statement, “Don’t judge a book by its cover or title.”

'Americans understand this lawsuit seeks to impose agenda that has been rejected'

Barry Rubin – The motive to reform Islam from within is weaker than the motive of those like Martin Luther, as Islamists can point to the decline of Christian belief and assume the same would happen to Islam.

'Yet this is work far more influential than Shakespeare in spread of English'

America told to ensure food supplies, stop 'natural disasters' in poor nations

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, gave a lecture titled "Cutting the Fuse: Moving Beyond the War on Terror" on October 28, 2010, at Georgetown University. The room in which it was held was packed to full capacity, which gives an idea of his celebrity.

With autism diagnoses on the rise, autism awareness organizations are banding together to increase early detection and education practices for students with the disorder….

You do not have to look too hard to find negative images of how disabled people have been portrayed throughout history

Peter Hitchens – Iain Duncan Smith has indeed thought a lot about welfare. But his colleagues forbade him to think about the real problem that the welfare state has deliberately encouraged parasitism.