After the Japanese collector and entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa bought Jean-Michel Basquiat’s skull painting for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s auction the other day (the same picture sold for $19,000 in 1984!), he proudly posted on his Instagram account, “I am happy to announce that I just won this masterpiece. When I first encountered this painting, I [...]
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 [...]
On April 22, Earth Day, I joined thousands of frustrated people marching for science from the Washington Monument to the Capitol. This was my second protest march this year, the first being for Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration. The rain didn’t keep anyone away. To my eye there were thousands marching, holding [...]
In 1417, Poggio Bracciolini, the protagonist of Stephen Greenblatt’s remarkable book, The Swerve, discovered a poem, On the Nature of Things, written 1,500 years earlier by Titus Lucretius Carus (99 BCE – 55 BCE), who was virtually unknown. This poem is his only surviving work. One might think that Poggio’s discovery of a new author from [...]
My wife Lona protects me at social gatherings from my mild prosopagnosia – difficulty in recognizing faces – by greeting friends and acquaintances by their name as soon as we meet them. I’m often uncertain of someone’s identity, even if I know him or her rather well, especially when they cross my path out of [...]
Although I marvel at creative technical achievements – a paper clip, a computer, an airplane – and appreciate how multitudes, including me, benefit from them, I am more personally drawn to creative arts – visual, written, musical – which are directed to individuals rather than groups, such as ill patients, or the population in general. [...]
