About: Good Stuff

I live in the deepest depth of curiosity: where bottomless vision is served fresh each day, where honest ingenuity is …Continue reading »...

A sweeping cultural history of the ideal of sincerity.

Of the anthropology of truth, lies and everything in between.

"Irony is the hardest addiction of all....
Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”

A fantastic and inspiring interview with Ray Bradbury, author of Farenheit 451, who died last week after 70 years of truly visionary science fiction writing.

Here's a bit of the interview.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you write science fiction?

RAY BRADBURY

Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction.

If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

New ways of relating religion and science emerge. By Rosemary Joyce, Ph.D....

"... The anthropological study of religion is as old as the field, and has been a rich source of insight into how human life has been organized. Indeed, some anthropologists would argue that religiosity is a core part of what makes us human.S... But there is definitely something new about how anthropologists are approaching this sensitive topic.

Take Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann as one example. In her recently released book, When God Talks Back, Luhrmann explores how prayer allows believers in an American evangelical church to hear the voice of god. While she disclaims a position on whether or not God exists, Luhrmann is clear that

"people did hear what they described as God's voice, and they sometimes heard that voice audibly."

Luhrmann, in ethnographic work, explored how believers cultivated the capacity to hear what others could not. Her work combined traditional ethnography with experiments that demonstrate real distinctions between those who used prayer to cultivate inner awareness, and others who did not:"I found that the prayer practice did sharpen people's mental imagery.... It also increased the chance they would report an unusual sensory experience....Some of them reported feeling God touch their shoulder or speak with them or interact with them in a way they actually experienced with their senses..."

How can personal projects feed our professional development? Ji Lee changed his career trajectory with 30,000 stickers and a guerrilla art approach.

Bored with his ad agency gig and the uninspiring work he was producing, Ji Lee – now Creative Director of Google Creative Lab – decided to take matters into his own hands in 2002. The result was the ad-spoofing Bubble Project, in which Lee placed blank speech bubbles on ads around New York City. The masses responded and the project went viral, gaining Lee recognition and ultimately forwarding his professional career. Here, Lee talks about how he created, financed, and marketed the project single-handedly...

Daily quote from a favorite book, thematically matched with a song. A side project by Maria Popova.

by the way, brainpickings is one of the best websites for anyone looking to make sense of it all with a smile... or a smirk.

check it out, you will find tens of marvellous postings about creativity, art, literature, and life in general.

love it!

seriously.

This lecture may be from 1991, but the topic is timeless, the discussion is lucid, and it's all delivered by Basil Fawlty himself. Here's 36 minutes of John Cleese discussing the psychology of being creative.

"Creativity is not a talent, it's a way of operating" (John Cleese)

Alain de Botton suggests how culture might still save our souls.

"Centuries ago, religions gave people advice on how to live with others, how to tolerate other people’s faults, how to assuage anger, endure pain and deal with the petty corruptions of a commercial world. These days, [de Botton] argues, teachers, artists and philosophers no longer even try to offer such practical wisdom. “We are fatefully in love with ambiguity, uncritical of the Modernist doctrine that great art should have no moral content or desire to change its audience,”..."