Judging by the number of TED talks or books bouncing up and down the bestseller lists offering to help us bottle that elusive djinn, we should be living in the Age Of Creativity. If that's true, though, why are so many books and talks about creativity filled with so many clichés? How can books and talks about creativity––and, indeed, the whole weird creativity business as a whole––be as bereft as a bovine of the very imagination that it claims to harness? Jonah Lehrer's book reads as if it were written by an asinine algorithm hooked up to a database of MBA undergrad anecdotes.Those are the questions posed by a thought–provoking article called "TED Talks are lying to you" written by Harper's columnist Thomas Frank. It's a polarizing read, and Frank's take on people who are in the creativity business isn't exactly kind, but he's got a point: the business of creativity isn't practicing what it preaches. Dissecting semi–disgraced self–plagiarist Jonah Lehrer's 2012 bestseller, Imagine: How Creativity Works, Frank asks himself how a book that aims to break creativity down can be so unapologetically trite. To Frank, Lehrer's book reads as if it were written by a particularly asinine algorithm hooked up to a database of MBA undergrad anecdotes: how Procter & Gamble invented the Swiffer, how Bob Dylan writes a song, how Pixar makes movies, how 3M invented the Post–It Note, and so on.Read Full Story Continue reading at 'Fast Company'
[ Fast Company | 2013-10-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
Judging by the number of TED talks or books bouncing up and down the bestseller lists offering to help us bottle that elusive djinn, we should be living in the Age Of Creativity. If that's true, though, why are so many books and talks about creativity filled with so many clichés? How can books... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-10-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Jonah Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker after Tablet Magazine discovered Lehrer had fabricated quotes by Bob Dylan in Lehrer's latest book "Imagine: How Creativity Works." Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2012-07-31 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Canongate has stopped the distribution and sale of Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-31 00:00:00 UTC ]
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