IdeaFestival

"How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare"

"Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" (Stephen Greenblatt)

If you've ever wanted to understand what makes great people, particularly colossal talents like Williman Shakespeare, great, read this book. You won't be disappointed.

Stephen Greenblatt, who is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, writes in superbly smooth and elegant prose of the life - remarkably little is known - and times of William Shakespeare. His knowledge as a Renaissance scholar of the social norms (very little movement between the gentle/noble class and the rest of society), religious strife (paranoia and upheaval prevail) and politics (often violent and grisly) are plain. Yet Greenblatt is always more interested in understanding how the culture emerged in Shakespeare's art. For that reason, the book reads almost like a novel - it has pace and plot - not an academic work. It's subtext: what made this enigmatic man who said next nothing about himself the greatest author ever to work in the English language?

I was also reminded at several points of the brief work Who Designed Brunelleschi's Dome?, which argues that the times inhabited by great artists also matter a great deal in the art and science produced.

This New Yorker review of the book, however, describes what Greenblatt accomplishes much, much better. The last quoted sentence is absolutely true.

Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives....

Greenblatt’s book is startlingly good—the most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read. Greenblatt knows the life and the period deeply, has no hobbyhorses to ride, and makes, one after another, exquisitely sensitive and persuasive connections between what the eloquent poetry says and what the fragmentary life suggests.

What makes a creative genius? Read this book for one unique and compelling answer.

Wayne

Technorati Tags: creativity, imagination, poetry, Shakespeare, theatre

Wanted: Live billionaires

Speaking as a veteran in the NGO industry, Ethan Zuckerman enumerates the differences between working for a live and a dead billionaire.

I've never heard it put like that, Ethan.

He sheds some light on his experiences working with NGO's, the practicalities of giving away billions of dollars in assets and the serious business of philanthropy. One of the practical issues: in addition to the problem of giving that much wealth away (it's harder than it seems), recipients in many parts of the world are simply unable to soak up that much money, making "capacity building" a big part of Ethan's job.

Given the recent decisions by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, I found the post immensely interesting for all the reasons Ethan discusses. Here's another: I think the growing sophistication and success of NGOs calls into question what it means to govern, particularly when so many governments have utterly failed their people. It's a study in political science.

Wayne

Technorati Tags: philanthropy

TED, talks

TEDblog has introduced a series of downloadable media of speakers from prior conferences called TEDtalks. The initial release includes Al Gore, Tony Robbins, David Pogue, Majora Carter, Hans Rosling and Ken Robinson. More releases are forthcoming and all are "downloadable as audio or video, searchable and free."

Here's hoping the upcoming releases include Joshua Prince-Ramus, Clifford Stoll and Rick Warren.

More information on subscription options is available from this TED page.

Wayne

Technorati Tags: TED

NBC, YouTube deal

NBC and YouTube have sealed a business deal, according to Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the broadcasting company will make promotional clips available, market its new fall line of shows using YouTube and promote the narrowcaster on television.

As one person points out on Steve's blog, NBC only recently raised a big stink when a clip of Saturday Night Live appeared on YouTube. Yesterday's foe is today's ally I guess.

Thanks to the continuing development of media software and the explosion of storage and bandwidth, the "mass" in mass media is more problematic than it has ever been. To illustrate the point, Johnnie Moore links to a story and Alexa chart tracking the reach of the New York Times v. YouTube. I've seen these kinds of charts several times, but the point is still salient. Media distribution is a tough business these days and there will be business winners and business losers as media creators and distributors seek a favorable position.

Apple, for example, now makes lossless video production possible in its ACC format and Engadget speculates that this could open the door to tiered pricing on iTunes, something Cupertino has thus far opposed. More to Apple's liking, it might also spur sales of the iPod or some future Apple designed hardware. Though the company has made of habit of making the right moves lately, you get the idea.

What to do?

Wayne

Technorati Tags: Power laws, YouTube

Business fads and fairy dust

Business Innovation Insider posts on business management fads, the result of a symbiotic relationship between consultants looking to cash in on the next big idea and desperate executives eager for a short cut. I'm not going to add anything, one, because I've learned to be skeptical of short cuts and cure alls and two, because I hear Rob at BusinessPundit clearing his throat now.

His "business fundamentalism and magic bullets" touches on the same issue in my view.

Rob?

Wayne

Technorati: management fads, business, innovation

Addiction: solved?

We increasingly understand addiction as a brain disorder, according to the New York Times article "An Anti-Addiction Pill?," which reported on a recent invitation-only addiction conference hosted by the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT.

The conference was a celebration of the new ways scientists and addiction researchers are conceptualizing, and seeking to treat, addiction. While many in the treatment field have long called addiction a 'disease,' they've used the word in vague and metaphorical ways, meaning everything from a disease of the mind to a disease of the spirit. Many assumed that an addict suffers from a brain-chemistry problem, but scientists had not been able to peer into our heads to begin to prove it.

Now they can, using advances in brain-imaging technology. And they tend to agree on what they see, although not necessarily on how to fix it: addiction — whether to alcohol, to drugs or even to behaviors like gambling — appears to be a complicated disorder affecting brain processes responsible for motivation, decision making, pleasure seeking, inhibitory control and the way we learn and consolidate information and experiences.

If addiction can be correlated with brain activity, the Times author also reports on animal experiments by researchers that suggest it can also be associated with boredom, loss of purpose or early stresses that leave people vulnerable to addiction later in life. As described by the article, the people in attendance at the conference heard from William C. Moyers, the son of the journalist Bill Moyers, who provided his perspective:

'I have an illness [addiction] with origins in the brain. . .but I also suffered with the other component of this illness,' he told the gathered researchers and scientists, some of whom dutifully took notes. 'I was born with what I like to call a hole in my soul.. . .A pain that came from the reality that I just wasn't good enough. That I wasn't deserving enough. That you weren't paying attention to me all the time. That maybe you didn't like me enough....'

There was no word on a forthcoming soul pill.

Wayne

Technorati Tags: addiction

"Prototyping the future"

Conferenza describes the "relentlessly diverse" conference, PUSH 2006. By the descriptions here, here and here it appears to have lived up to that description.

"Prototyping the future" appeared in one of the Conferenza posts and I thought it fit the spirit of the meeting.

Wayne

"Screens"

The venerable New York Times announces Screens, a new blog covering online video - on whatever screen it may appear.

"Screens" will find, review and make sense of all those senseless new images: web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, embedded video ads, web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, webisodes, mashups and more.

Wayne

Industrial art and serious design

I love good industrial design. BusinessWeek runs down a few of the more interesting business furniture designs to emerge from the recently concluded furnishing showcases - NeoCon, New York's International Contemporary Furniture Fair, and Milan's Salone del Mobile.

The image here is of the "industrialized wood desk," which was developed via multiple scanned drawings combined into one rendering. My eye was drawn to it because it contains, as the BusinessWeek points out, references to earlier furniture making periods. I'm thinking French Empire or Rococo.

If you like this kind of functional art, you may also be interested in the SOFA, the twice annual sculpture objects and functional art shows or the Furniture Society, a gathering of some phenomenal crafts people working in a variety of materials.

I'm a fan of Charles Radtke's work.

Have a great weekend,

Wayne

Image source: BusinessWeek

Technorati: functional arts, craft, furniture, design, innovation, industrial design

Imaginary forts and infinite choice

The recent USA Today article Tech creates a bubble for kids describes some of the ways that personal media is changing children and teens.

The piece goes into some length about virtual isolation and social expectations, saying that given the same social situation youth and adults (and by adult, think "grown up") will often make different decisions. A lack of social awareness by teens is attributed in part to individual and small group communications bubbles, the virtual equivalent of the imaginary forts I inhabited as a child - no grown-ups and girls allowed. Expanded exponentially by mobile computing and communications, the article suggests that perhaps this power to withdraw will affect social cohesion, which is based in part on subtle physical cues. Since I tend to be skeptical of these kinds of articles  - "kids today!" - let me just say that no grown-ups and girls is a lousy way to run a universe. Sooner or later most of us figure that out.

But it did make me think about the idea of choice. My young sons will grow using communications and information technology as second nature and will have far more technology-aided choice than I ever had. Choice is a significant issue in game playing, for example, where research shows that by honing decision making and problem solving skills, games can contribute to smarter kids or perhaps train future business leaders. Behavior economists also study personal choice in a discipline known for its focus on the idea of scarcity. We now know that these choices do not necessarily - or even, often - follow rational decisions and that thanks to an ability to make things in advanced economies, even scarcity is rarer that it used to be. One result: some conclude that choice can be paradoxical, that more choice is inhibiting.

So here's my question drawn from the article. What does it mean to have infinite choice?

Wayne

Hat tip: Putting People First

Technorati: behavioral economics, choice, gaming, infinity, anthropology, value theory