Among my pet peeves is the commonly accepted notion that creativity slips away with age. What pressure that puts on the first half of life! Imagine that you’re 40, still young. Are you really in the eighth inning – okay, the seventh – of an imaginary baseball game? Social pressure compounds the idea that creativity [...]
Like millions of people, I watched the Trump/Clinton presidential debate the other night. I learned very little new, but was happy to see, in my opinion, boorish Trump scrunched in every category, starting from the first sentence when he asked permission to call Clinton Madame Secretary to his last-incoherent rant about trade as an answer [...]
In her comprehensive biography, The Invention of Nature (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), Andrea Wulf tells how Alexander Humboldt (1769 -1859) was the first to understand that the natural world “was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’.” Humboldt saw “unity in variety.” He was the first to consider different plants, animals and inanimate nature interdependent and [...]
