“Hello China!...... there are just so many of you.” Stefani Germanotta, better known by her Queen-inspired moniker, Lady Gaga, made that appeal to 15,000 screaming teenage Chinese girls in a large concert hall in Macau in the summer of 2009. By virtue of an English teaching gig in Hong Kong, I was ...

The first time I listened to Pinkerton, Weezer’s second studio album, I hated it. And so did almost everyone else. Rolling Stone readers ranked it as the third worst album in 1996. Writing for Entertainment Weekly Jeff Gordinier compared it to “a collection of get-down party anthems for ...

Several years ago Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid teamed with violinist, composer and neuroscientist Dave Soldier to explore popular music preferences in the United States. They determined what music people enjoyed or disliked based on a series of questionnaires and used the data to profile “the ...

One of the most robust findings in psychological science is our tendency to gravitate towards likeminded people. Psychologists call this homophily - literally “love of the same” – and it exist in nearly every culture. Despite where we grow up or how we grow up, familiarity is comfortable; we like ...

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is an annual competition created by Scott E. Rice, Professor of English at San Jose State University, in which participants are invited "to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels." Rice named the contest after the English novelist and ...

One paradox of good fiction is that it centers on sadness. If fiction gives us pleasure, then why are we drawn towards what’s gravely unpleasant? Think about classics in the Western cannon. Romeo and Juliet ends with a double suicide; Anna Karenina throws herself in front of an oncoming train; in ...

What hasn’t been said about Louis C.K.? The New York Times called him a “comedic Quentin Tarantino.” Writing for the Los Angeles Book Review Adam Wilson said he was “television’s most honest man.” GQ suggested that he is the “funniest comic alive.” Then there’s C.K. himself who in stand up routines ...

We live in an era where readers of science books on the human condition expect clever psychological studies to explain every nook and cranny of our complex nature. They expect specifics, what happens in the brain when musicians improvise or when we experience a-ha moments, and they expect ...

The human brain is fickle when it comes to commitments. Between 60 and 80 percent of people don’t use their gym memberships. Most diets work at first but backfire in the long run. According to a 2007 survey conducted by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman, about 88 percent of New Year’s ...

One paradox of creativity is that it’s restricted by the senses. The eyes and visual cortex perceive a narrow slice of the electromagnet spectrum. Our sense of taste and smell is minuscule compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. We’re deaf to most frequencies. If creativity sees no boundaries ...

By the time he put the finishing touches on the Rite of Spring in November of 1912 in the Châtelard Hotel in Clarens, Switzerland, Stravinsky had spent three years studying Russian pagan rituals, Lithuanian folk songs and crafting the dissonant sacre chord, in which an F-flat major combines with an ...

In the late 1970s economist Richard Thaler considered two scenarios. In the first, a man owns a case of good wine he bought in the late 1950s for $5 a bottle. When a wine merchant offers to buy his wine for $100 a bottle the man refuses, even though he never paid more than $35 for a bottle of wine ...

A few months ago I reported on a 2009 study out of the Kellogg School of Management by William Maddux and Adam Galinsky. Through a series of five studies Maddux and Galinsky found that students who traveled abroad scored higher on tests of creativity (for example, they solved Duncker’s candle ...

“[T]he Author of Nature has determin’d us to receive… a Moral Sense, to direct our Actions, and to give us still nobler Pleasures.” That appeal was made in 1725 by Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson, and it captured one side of a debate that tries to answer the question: Where does morality ...

Sometime later today, I’ll get tired. Coffee induced inspiration will guide me through the morning and into the afternoon, but eventually my muse will leave me for another lowly writer. Doubting basic cable will keep my attention, I’ll collapse onto my bed, close my eyes and slip into dreamland ...