Questions

Recently I ran across a link to The World Question Center on the Edge website. Each year the editors posed a question and invited answers from a wide variety of contributors, which are posted on the site. It's a pretty cool site in that it gives you a window on the generative thinking of many thoughtful and articulate writers, and challenges you to consider how you might go about answering the questions yourself. The 2008 question, for example, has answers from 165 different people, including Alan Alda, Joan Baez, Freeman Dyson, Brian Eno, Howard Gardner, Steven Pinker, and Clay Shirky.Here's a listing of the questions for each year:


1998: What questions are you asking yourself?
1999: What’s the most important invention in the past 2000 years, and why?
2000: What’s today’s most important unreported story?
2001: What questions have disappeared?
2001: What now?
2002: What’s your question?
2003: What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?
2004: What’s your law?
2005: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
2006: What’s your dangerous idea?
2007: What are you optimistic about?
2008: What have you changed your mind about? Why?
2009: What will change everything?
2010: How is the internet changing the way you think?