Creativity
Story Stream
The Great American Malaise September 11, 2024
An observation. There are few interesting and new political ideas, and few innovative works of imaginative literature. Politics and literature are both on a decline; political and literary genius are increasingly rare. American politics and literatur...
On Samuel Franklin’s “The Cult of Creativity” September 11, 2024
In June 2023, University of Montana researchers evaluated the capacities of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot system released by OpenAI. To gauge the capability of the flashy new technology, psychologists tested it using an older tool for ...
How Should We Create Things? September 11, 2024
In 1977, the artist, musician, and producer Brian Eno was in Berlin, working with David Bowie on the album that would become “Heroes.” They’d been collaborating on a song in an unconventional way, using a deck of cards called “Oblique Strategies,” wh...
Language and Leonard Michaels September 05, 2024
All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books! —Elif BatumanCatachresis leads to anthropophagy. —David Bentley HartOrdinary people have a right to feel harassed when their language is criticized. We have grammar school for that kind of thing afte...
Harmony Korine Says Hollywood Is Starting to Crumble September 02, 2024
Harmony Korine doubled down on his thoughts about the current state of the film industry at a Venice press conference on Saturday, saying that we’re “starting to see Hollywood crumble creatively” because it’s “so locked in on convention.”As he puffed...
Addicted in Art June 14, 2024
The American photographer Nan Goldin has not had an easy life. Growing up in 1950s suburbia, she was a witness to her sister Barbara’s severe mental health struggle, her brutal institutionalisation, and eventual suicide at the age of eighteen. Goldin...
The Many Lives of Arielle Dombasle June 03, 2024
Arielle Dombasle seems capable of almost anything. She is a singer, actress, director, model, and burlesque dancer widely considered a gay icon and a creative muse. She has inspired the work of legendary film directors like Eric Rohmer and Alain Robb...
Everyone Failed Ronda Rousey April 23, 2024
Women’s mixed martial arts pioneer Ronda Rousey’s new book, Our Fight, is a remarkable document. If her first book, 2015’s best-selling My Fight / Your Fight, was intended to establish the Bronze Medal-winning judoka and then-UFC women’s bantamweight...
AI and the End of the Human Writer April 23, 2024
The most nauseating, addictive thing about writing is the uncertainty—and I don’t mean the is-anyone-reading? or will-I-make-rent? kind. The uncertainty I’m talking about dogs the very act. This business of writing an essay, for instance: Which of te...
The Perils of Solo-itis April 19, 2024
Two of the most fearsome words in the entire rock ‘n’ roll lexicon: solo career. The genre is strewn with the wreckage of great and near-great bands that shattered into lesser side projects, seldom managing to summon the magic that attracted a mass a...
The Great American Speculator April 11, 2024
Emerson is a difficult subject for a biography; on one hand, a biographer must compete with his journals. And because some of Emerson's most famous and important essays were in the mode of biography–the strange and wonderful “Representative Men” seri...
Maggie Rogers’s Journey from Viral Fame to Religion April 10, 2024
In the fall of 2021, the singer and songwriter Maggie Rogers entered the graduate program at Harvard Divinity School. For anyone unacquainted with the particulars of the degree Rogers was pursuing—a master’s in religion and public life—it might have ...
Inside Danny McBride’s Lowcountry Comedy Commune April 05, 2024
Danny McBride and his old friend David Gordon Green were sitting around the Charleston, South Carolina, office of Rough House Pictures one typical morning recently, talking about improvements they might make to the movie-going experience....
The Rick Rubin Guide to Creativity March 28, 2024
The Rick Rubin method: It’s not for everyone. Warm-voiced, flowing, bearded like a deity, the legendary record producer (nine Grammys) is about mindset. He’s about essence. He’s hands-off, allowing the possibilities to manifest, and then abruptly, di...
Ray Bradbury, Sci-Fi Traditionalist March 22, 2024
The science fiction and fantasy author Ray Bradbury holds an unusual place in American letters. Ignored or undervalued by a sizable portion of the critical elite during his lifetime, he nevertheless became one of the most popular and anthologized aut...
The Age of Cultural Stagnation March 22, 2024
It is the age of signing open letters, then issuing apologies for signing them a few days later; of fretting about the effect of AI on human creativity, then boring anyone who will listen with “hilarious” responses generated from ChatGPT prompts; of ...
An Interview With Rita Bullwinkel March 20, 2024
Rita Bullwinkel is the author of Belly Up, a story collection that won the Believer Book Award. The winner of a 2022 Whiting Award, she is the editor of McSweeney’s Quarterly, a contributing editor at NOON, and an Assistant Professor of English at Un...
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Nowhere March 20, 2024
Four years ago this month, my northern California county closed the schools, offices, and shops, and went into pandemic lockdown. I was four months into being a national humor columnist for The Saturday Evening Post.This is my story.When I began writ...
On Trying to Create Something Real March 18, 2024
Writer Alexandra Tanner discusses dramatizing life, eliminating artifice, and the internet’s ability to bring out our worst selves....
Asteroid City: The Quest for Infinity February 01, 2024
In Asteroid City, Wes Anderson has delivered possibly the most ambitious film of his career, broader in scope and loftier in aspiration than all his previous creations. In its relatively concise running time, the film parabolically explores the roles...
In Praise of Borrowed Ideas February 01, 2024
In a world where memories are bought and sold, a struggling artist discovers a mysterious booth that offers forgotten memories. Two individuals living in parallel universes discover ways to communicate through a mysterious book. In a hidden library, ...
