“Definitions of creativity were offered; tests were devised; testing practices were institutionalised in the processes of educating, recruiting, selecting, promoting and rewarding. Creativity increasingly became the specific psychological capacity that creativity tests tested. There was never overwhelming consensus about whether particular definitions were the right ones or about whether particular tests reliably identified the desired capacity, but sentiment settled around a substantive link between creativity and the notion of divergent thinking.” – Aeon
Author: Douglas McLennan
A Prominent Journal Implodes. Was It The Editor Or The Field?
A narrative took hold among critics of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, The controversy, at root, wasn’t just about the journal or its editor, but also the ways in which contemporary anthropology is a morally corrupt, harmful institution in which the powerful prey upon the weak. – Chronicle of Higher Education
Sign Of The Times: “Museum Of The Year” Prize Gets Split Five Ways
In recent years, the Museum of the Year winner has received £100,000, with four other shortlisted institutions getting £10,000 each. This year, the five winners will pocket £40,000 each. The Art Fund said the shake-up was a response to the “unprecedented challenges that all museums face this year”. – BBC
A Model? Geffen Playhouse Scores A Virtual Hit And Sells Out Box Office
“When all is said and done, “The Present” will have grossed more than $700,000, an astronomical figure for regional theaters scrambling, often blindly, to devise entertainment for a virtual audience.Cates compared that number to what a typical show in the Geffen’s 500-seat mainstage auditorium might gross during a nonpandemic five-week run — if heavily promoted and highly successful.” – Los Angeles Times
Study: How Horse-Race Election Coverage Polarizes
“While researching Reporting Elections, we found that TV viewers are likely to see more policy coverage in countries with public service broadcasters. But even then, the overwhelming conclusion from looking at dozens of studies examining the nature of election coverage is that ‘who is going to win’? is a more compelling question than ‘what will they actually do when they win’?” – The Conversation
This Critic Read 150 Trump Books So You Don’t Have To. Here’s What He Learned
“From his vast reading, Carlos Lozada, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, has concluded that “the most essential books of the Trump era are scarcely about Trump at all.” Rather than works that focus on White House intrigue, scandals and policy disputes, he believes that the most important books today place our nation’s conflicts within the larger context of our “endless fight to live up to our self-professed, self-evident truths.” – Washington Post
Why People Believe In The Unbelievable
“You don’t have to be a big believer in the power of survey data to see that behind the monster stands meaning. Belief in the existence of monsters rarely starts with a chance observation in the woods. It requires psychological preparation. Often, a sinuous neck, a flipper, is just the tip of something that sits much deeper in the waters of culture and history.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
How Much John Steinbeck Hated Criticism (Of Any Kind)
“Over the course of a long writing life, Steinbeck had won many prizes, among them the Pulitzer and then, remarkably enough, the Nobel, but no matter how many hundreds of critics and millions of readers declared him a national treasure, he not only raged at those who refused to extend him the accolades he hungered for, he scorned those very accolades when they came his way.” – The New Republic
When Great Things Result From World Disasters
“History is studded with oddly salubrious side-effects to truly awful happenings. For instance, The Renaissance (worthy of a cap on the article surely), seems to have entirely ironic parentage. The fall of Constantinople in 1453? Terrible. But… to escape the Ottomans, classical scholars scurried off to Italy carrying armloads of ancient Greek and Latin texts. And suddenly Italy is rereading its past. . . and producing the present. Our present.” – 3 Quarks Daily
Why Science Didn’t Become A Thing Until The 17th Century
“Science has produced some extraordinary elements of modern life that we take for granted: imaging devices that can peer inside the body without so much as a cut; planes that hurtle through the air at hundreds of miles an hour. But human civilization has existed for millenniums, and modern science — as distinct from ancient and medieval science, or so-called natural philosophy — has only been around for a few hundred years. What took so long?” – The New York Times