David Foster Wallace: On Real Freedom→

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings…
​
​The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
​
​That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

​​DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, IN HIS OWN WORDS | More Intelligent Life

The Week's Links: April 12, 2013

All the links posted on social networks this week:

• An Interview with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay ➞
• Procrastination Continued ◉
  
• A game when games were new ➞
  
• Isaac Asimov on Curiosity, Taking Risk, and the Value of Space Exploration in Muppets Magazine, 1983 ➞
  
• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The Comma From Which My Heart Hangs. ➞
  
• How the Science of Swarms Can Help Us Fight Cancer and Predict the Future ➞
  
• Documentary about actor and magician Ricky Jay ➞
  
• Scientists Figure Out What You See While You're Dreaming ➞
  
• Backed By NEA, 500 Startups, Felicis & Others, Tynker Launches Its Visual “Learn To Code” Platform For Children ➞
  
• Microbes Buried Deep in Ocean Crust May Form World's Largest Ecosystem ➞
  
• Hand In Hand: Advice For Writers ◉
  
• What Makes Rain Smell So Good? ➞
  
• 10 New Things We Know About Food and Diets ➞
  
• Henry Rollins Advice For Young People ◉
  
• Love this: The Architectural Origins of the Chess Set ➞
  
• What Major World Cities Look Like at Night, Minus the Light Pollution ➞
  
• Michael Benson's Awe-Inspiring Views of the Solar System ➞
  
• Photos: Rarely Seen Central American Ceramics Dating from 1,000 Years Ago ➞
  
• How IMAX Pulled Spaceflight Down to Earth ➞
  
• Photos: Scenes From Life Under the Sea ➞
  
• The Secret to Olive Oil’s Anti-Alzheimer’s Powers ➞
  
• Subscribing to Smarter Creativity ◉
  
• Five-Year-Old Girl Discovers Fossil of Previously Unknown Pterosaur ➞
  
• Do you worship the tools of your trade as much as ballerinas worship their pointe shoes? ◉
  
• Creativity Top 5: Week of April 8, 2013 ◉
  
• With Music, What You See Affects What You Hear ➞
  
• Can A Brain Scan Predict Your Future Criminality? ➞
  
• Astronomers Discover Baby Supernovae ➞
  
• Public for the First Time: A Last Letter from Dying Antarctic Explorer Captain Scott ➞
  
• This Microbe Isn’t Either Male or Female, It Has Seven Options to Choose Between ➞
  
• How Your Brain Reassures You That You’re Better Than Other People ➞
  
• Musicians: How Many Hours a Day Should You Practice? ➞
• Cool: NBC releases Bryan Fuller's illustrated pilot script for 'Hannibal' ➞
  
• "Just a Theory": 7 Misused Science Words ➞
  
• The Unstoppable Ballerina: Michaela Deprince’s Journey, from Sierra Leone to the heights of American ballet. ➞
  
• Love these images: Signs of Spring ➞
  
• Caitlin Freeman's 'Modern Art Desserts' cookbook shows how to make treats inspired by artworks ➞
  
• 8 Guys, 6 Weeks: How the Cell Phone Was (Finally) Invented ➞
  
• First there was the recent radio play and now, on stage: 'Neverwhere' Conjures a Dank, Fantastical Netherworld ➞
  
• Second Sleep ◉
  
• So great: Fascinating Behind-The-Scenes Photographs Of Popular Movies ➞
  
• How to Tour the World's Greatest Science Labs ➞
  
• ‘100 Years of Flamenco in New York,’ at Public Library ➞
  
• Remains of poet Pablo Neruda exhumed to determine if he was executed by Pinochet regime ➞
  
• What Are You Tweeting For? ◉
  
• 7 great reads: this year’s ASME finalists in feature/profile writing ➞
  
• Exciting news: Dance Theater of Harlem Starts New Life ➞
  
• How Much Does a Cloud Weigh? ➞
  
• Meet Harry Beck, the genius behind London's iconic subway map ➞
  
• How To Run Your Meetings Like Apple and Google ➞
  
• The History of the World in 46 Lectures From Columbia University ➞
  
• The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in China ➞
  
• IBM On Brand ◉
  
• Why The Inventor Of Pong Says We're More Creative Now ➞
  
• When Simplicity Is the Solution ➞
  
• Game designer Jason Rohrer designs a game meant to be played 2,000 years from now, hides it in desert ➞
  
• A Videogame That Teaches Kids To Code ➞
  
• Joss Whedon On Worthy Work ◉
  
• Love this: Beautiful Paper-Cut, Pop-Up Cards Of London’s Famous Landmarks ➞
  
• 6 Ballet Directors Discuss Current Evolution of Form ➞
  
• The 5 Most Dangerous Creativity Killers ➞
  
• How JWT broadcast live ads from Afghanistan ➞
  
• How Climate Change Could Eventually End Coffee. Taking climate change seriously now? ➞
  
• Brené Brown: Life Lessons We All Need to Learn ➞
  
• My Year of TED: How 54 talks changed a life ➞
  
• Expecting the Best— And Getting It ➞
  
• 26 Free Charlie Chaplin Films Online ➞
  
• So clever: Book Jackets Transform Into Parcel Packaging ➞
  
• George Bernard Shaw: The playwright used this postcard to respond to unsolicited mail. ➞
  
• Brand New: 2012 Brand New Awards: Winners ➞
  
• Dennis Hopper Reads From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Timeless Guide to Creativity, Letters to a Young Poet ➞
  
• Dance despite war: Season of Cambodia Dance Festival in New York ➞
  
• Amazing: Images from on top of the Great Pyramid ➞
  
• TED Playlists: What does the future look like? ➞
  
• Primatologist Frans de Waal on memory-champ chimps, tool-using elephants and rats capable of empathy ➞
  
• Time: The 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013 ➞
  
• Murdered By Google: What Happens When The Internet Kills You? ➞
  
• IBM's Long-Form Content Shows Its Technology in Action ➞
  
• Digitized Materials From The Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room, Library of Congress ➞
  
• Check out this collection of interviews: On Creativity ➞
  
• What Should I Read Next? Book recommendations from readers like you ➞
  
• Let Yourself Go: Classic Dance Routines ➞
  
• New Oscar Wilde letter found with advice for writers. ➞
  
• Ten Reasons a Pessimist Can be Optimistic About the Future of the Book ➞
  
• Fear factor increases, emotions decrease in books written in last 50 years ➞
  
• The Making Of Descender: Andrew Wyatt On Creativity, Violin Repair Stores, And Discontent Orchestras ➞
  
• Love this: Sound Recordings from Around the World ➞
  
• Ebert on Twitter ➞
  

Recommended This Week: 

Hand In Hand: Advice For Writers→

For Shared Worlds 2013, we have asked some of speculative fiction's finest artists, editors, and writers to write advice on their own hands and send us a picture.

Here are some of my favorite images and advice from the Shared Worlds 2013 Hand in Hand project: ​

Neil Gaiman

Gregory Norman Bossert

Lev Grossman

Patrick Rothfuss

Subscribing to Smarter Creativity

The recent announcement of the retirement of Google Reader, and Feedburner most likely following, has led me to revisit the ways you can subscribe to the blog and the growing collection of feeds related to it. 

You can follow us on the usual social networks. You'll get a stream of related links and everything we post on the blog. 

You can still subscribe to our various feeds via RSS using the following direct links: 

SmarterCreativity RSS feed for all the blog's content.
​DanceMoves.Me RSS feed for the blog's dance related content only. 
​WordsMove.Me RSS feed for the blog's writing related content only. 
​MusicMoves.Me RSS feed for the blog's music related content only. ​
​The Week's Links RSS feed for the blog's weekly collection of all the links posted on social networks plus all the blog's posts and book recommendations. 

In addition, many of you asked to subscribe via email. Below you can subscribe to a daily email delivered in the late afternoon, with the days' posts, or to a weekly email that delivers the week's links only, delivered in the late afternoon on Fridays. 

If you already receive the blog posts via email I would ask that you re-subscribe below. The emails you are receiving now are generated by Feedburner and there are no guarantees they'll continue to work past the retirement of Reader. 

Subscribe to receive Smarter Creativity posts.

Subscribe to receive our weekly list of links only.

Let me know if you experience any problems and thank you for following the blog and for all the great things you share with me, especially for your reactions to something you found useful in your own creative work. 

Creativity Top 5: Week of April 8, 2013

The spots from the 60s are so witty. ​