The Pew Research Center is an American think tank organization based in Washington, D.C. that provides information on issues, attitudes and trends shaping the United States and the world. The Center and its projects receive funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts. In 1990, Donald S. Kellermann was named to serve as the first director of what was initially known as the Times Mirror Center. It was then part of the opinion polling operation run by Times Mirror, the parent of the Los Angeles Times.

The Pew Research Center's work is carried out by seven projects:

The Pew Global Attitudes Project is a series of worldwide public-opinion surveys and reports aimed at understanding worldwide attitudes on various issues. The Project is chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Danforth. The project is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, with a supplemental grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

A research center is a facility or building dedicated to research, commonly with the focus on a specific area. There are over 14,000 research centers in the United States. Centers apply varied disciplines including basic research and applied research in addition to non traditional techniques.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.