June 2009
"I'm on a mission from God" →
In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.
Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:
“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this...
May 2009
Watch
From Jackson Pollock to John Coltrane — how... →
How does imagination happen? How does the mind create on command? William James described the creative process as a “seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity.” In the last year, two separate experiments have attempted to see inside the cauldron, to figure out how a loom of electric cells finds the exact right notes on the upright...
Watch
Our society would seem noisy, perplexing and maybe psychotic … All you have to do is sit in classrooms every day for 16 years to learn counterintuitive skills, and then work and commute 50 hours a week for 40 years in tedious jobs for amoral corporations, far away from relatives and friends, without any decent child care, sense of community, political empowerment or contact with nature. Oh,...
