Can evolutionary biology explain the human impulse to create? By Natalie Angier.

at a time when technology advancements are changing the meaning of originality, experts within the field of design try to redefine what makes an authentic.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” For a long time I thought I understood this quote. It’s so straightforward, there seems little room for misinterpretation. And yet, there is. See, for many years, I thought Lao Tzu was saying that every journey begins with that first, single physical step. We put a foot out in front of us, lean forward slight, and then whoosh! Away we go.

From Thaddeus Wolfe to Amber Cowan, these artists are taking the medium in radical new directions.

Blank on Blank

We traced the substance from cave paintings to glitter bombs, what makes glitter annoying is also what makes it powerful.

Daniel Martínez Lara and Rafa Cano Méndez

Both geniuses and madmen pay attention to what others ignore. By Dean Keith Simonton.

Video of him doing the drawing.

When your fingers are on the keyboard, your focus is the writing. But when you hit publish? A new hope takes wings. Please let them like this… If we truly were writing for ourselves, why would we publish? We’d save it for ourselves, hoarding words in dog eared notebooks or hidden on hard drives. Writer’s eyes and reader’s eyes aren’t the same.

A new study reports highly creative people appear to have more connections between their brain hemispheres.

Bill McKibben reviews “The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter” by David Sax.

After a crisis of confidence, the Swedish pop musician – celebrated for dispensing nuggets of advice to fans – has learned some new life lessons of his own.

In the last century, originality has killed one once-flourishing art form after another, by replacing variation within shared artistic conventions to rebellion. The impact of German Romantics on the artist. By Michael Lind.

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer shares notes and extracts from early drafts as he breaks down how he adapted Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.”

Why we don’t like what we struggle to categorize. By Tom Vanderbilt.

New research out of Northwestern University suggests that—for some people—a bombardment of sound can actually be a good thing.

Now there's a hobby. Very impressive. :-)

Trawl is an exploration game, but not in the traditional sense of the word. Like Woolf, it would seem creators Nate Gallardo and Danny Gallagher have cast themselves to the bottom of the ocean, brokeb tradition, and returned with a new genre for their art form. Unlike other exploration games, you do not walk around a pre-rendered and beautiful world or solve puzzles—in fact the closest thing to a puzzle in Trawl is the bewildering enigma of creation.

It's worth reading about.