It’s all over the news. The Big Idea journalist, Jonah Lehrer, fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan in his best selling book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. You can follow the breaking news on Google. (Note that Imagine is one of the books I reference on this site.)

What to make of this? Lehrer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has recalled the book. You can’t even find it new on Amazon. Wow! As of this writing three used copies are being offered—is everybody else hanging on to their copies in hopes they will increase in value? And Lehrer resigned his new dream job as a science writer at the New Yorker. And there will surely be more to come. Discoveries of other problems with Lehrer’s books? An in depth mea culpa from Lehrer? We will see.

But there is something else going on here. It has always been hard to write a real book. Now it appears that many people can no longer even read a real book. Read the rest of this entry »

On this site, and in my book, Visionary Creativity, I say that creatives swim in the culture of their day and manifest in their work the spirit of the age. The things they create—in art, design, science, technology, business—embody that spirit, and at the same time are a little off center for us, somehow not what we expected, presenting a discontinuity that stretches us, restructures our consciousness, pulling us into the future.

What do I mean by discontinuity? Let’s start by flipping through the pages of an art history book. The most obvious thing we notice about art is that it changes. For example in modern painting we see the change from the realism of Courbet, to the everyday subjects of Manet, to the Impressionism of Monet, to the Post-Impressionism of Cezanne, to the Cubism of Picasso. What is the reason for these changes? Read the rest of this entry »

In the June 28, 2012 issue of The New Republic, Deirdre N. McCloskey, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Gothenburg, published an article titled “Happyism: The creepy new economics of pleasure.” In it she describes the truly scary social “science” of “hedonics,” the supposed study of what makes people happy, and proscriptions for social and even governmental policy to enforce happiness.

Later she writes, “… nowadays there is a new science of happiness, and some of the psychologists and almost all the economists involved want you to think that happiness is just pleasure. Further, they propose to calculate your happiness, by asking you where you fall on a three-point scale, 1-2-3: “not too happy,” “pretty happy,” “very happy.” They then want to move to technical manipulations of the numbers, showing that you, too, can be “happy,” if you will but let the psychologists and the economists show you (and the government) how.” … Some of the quantitative hedonists have taken to recommending governmental policy for you and me on the basis of their 1-2-3 studies; and some of them are having influence in and on the Obama administration.

She writes, “The knock-down argument against the 1-2-3 studies of happiness comes from the philosopher’s (and the physicist’s) toolbox: a thought experiment. “Happiness” viewed as a self-reported mood is surely not the purpose of a fully human life, because, if you were given, in some brave new world, a drug like Aldous Huxley’s imagined “soma,” you would report a happiness of 3.0 to the researcher every time. Dopamine, an aptly named neurotransmitter in the brain, makes one “happy.” Get more of it, right? Something is deeply awry…

McCloskey’s critique of hedonics is devastating. But how should we understand happiness? Read the rest of this entry »

In the past few years several writers looking at creativity have relied on the work of psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, finding that mastery of just about any discipline requires ten thousand hours of “deliberate practice”—working on technique, seeking feedback, and addressing weaknesses. Problem is, mastery is not creativity. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few weeks we have seen extensive news coverage of the badly handled Facebook initial public stock offering. What we have not seen is discussions of what Facebook means.

Facebook is involved in the creation of a new… a new what? A new industry? How about a new way of being in the world?

In my book, Visionary Creativity, I write: “Visionary Creatives feel that our world is no longer what we have thought it to be and that a new world is struggling to be born. They wonder what is wrong with others that they do not also feel this and they are driven to produce work that will help others feel what they feel. As Shelley wrote, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Read the rest of this entry »