“A new research paper suggests that amateurs can, indeed, be trained to be better judges of creativity—at least when it comes to children’s paintings.”
Category: ideas
Why Are Some Years “Greater” Than Others?
“What is it about some years that they come to hold such a prominent place in our culture, decades after their passing? Are some years really that much more important than others?”
The Purpose Of Failure
“Since we cannot succeed simply by not failing, we should stop spending so much energy trying to avoid failure or engineer it away. Instead, we should embrace it — smartly.”
How Open-Source Is Changing The Way American Business Thinks
“Open-source software is no longer synonymous with “cheap, good-enough software.” It’s now driving the innovation agenda for the entire industry, offering higher-quality software and more room to shape that software to meet individual needs.”
How The Tree Became The Visual Metaphor For Organizing Information
“The greatest impact of trees was in the realm of taxonomy, as visual representations of abstract religious and scientific concepts. Religion illuminated the way, with 13th-century scribes drawing trees to show relationships between scriptural texts, to aid memory and encourage exegesis – the practice of critical interpretation of texts common in monasteries.”
Paralyzed by Pluralism? Millennials: We’re Not Apathetic, We’re Undecided!
Zachary Fine: “Unlike those adults who encountered pluralism with their beliefs close at hand, we entered the world when truth-claims and qualitative judgments were already on trial and seemingly interchangeable. As a result, we continue to struggle when it comes to decisively avowing our most basic convictions.”
Greed Is Good: A 300-Year History of a Dangerous Idea
“We sometimes forget that the pursuit of commercial self-interest was largely reviled until just a few centuries ago. ‘A man who is a merchant can seldom if ever please God,’ St. Jerome said … It was not until the mischievous moralist Bernard Mandeville that someone attempted to gloss greed as anything other than a shameful motive.”
Magazine Sends Its Staff To Luxury Hotel Internship To Learn Art Of Service
“The idea is that reliable, top-notch service at a hotel translates to any high-end brand, including magazines.”
Albuquerque Has Gorgeous Abandoned Rail Yards That Could Be A Superb Cultural Economic Driver
“Developers, neighbors, city-planners and Burqueños are eyeing the property, imagining what those 18 buildings can house, what opportunities they present—and who will benefit.”
The Time Warp Of Pompeii’s Dead
“Pompeii is not a fragment of lost time. It is lost time thrust into the present, wholesale. This is disconcerting, to say the least. There is no buffer in Pompeii, no visible signal of decay as there is in the normal ruin.”