Self-Motivation
David Goggins
Former Navy Seal
Career Development
Bryan Cranston
Actor
Critical Thinking
Liv Boeree
International Poker Champion
Emotional Intelligence
Amaryllis Fox
Former CIA Clandestine Operative
Management
Chris Hadfield
Retired Canadian Astronaut & Author
Learn
from the world's big
thinkers
Start Learningfrom the world's big
thinkers
LIVE ON MONDAY | "Lights, camera, activism!" with Judith Light
Join multiple Tony and Emmy Award-winning actress Judith Light live on Big Think at 2 pm ET on Monday.
11 July, 2020
Add event to calendar
<p>
In this Big Think Live session, multiple Tony and Emmy Award-winning actress Judith Light (
<em>Transparent, Ugly Betty)</em> and host, writer, and actor Winsome Brown will discuss the art of acting, the challenge of choosing the right roles, and why any career is made better by asking "How can I be of service?" instead of "How do I get more...?" From her work fighting for equality and dignity at the height of the AIDS epidemic (and long after) to advancing acceptance of the LGBTQ community through screen and stage, Light will share insight from her incredible career that can help you fine-tune your own goals toward a greater good.
</p><p>
Ask your questions for Judith Light during the live Q&A!
</p><p>
<strong>Join the stream 2 pm ET on Monday, July 13.</strong></p><p><strong>STREAMING LINKS:</strong></p><p>
<strong><a href="https://edge.bigthink.com/live_streams/100">Big Think Edge</a> | <a href="https://youtu.be/KY69l1pik9Y">YouTube</a> | </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom/posts/10157497938128527"><strong>Facebook</strong></a>
</p>
Keep reading
Show less
How Hemingway felt about fatherhood
Parenting could be a distraction from what mattered most to him: his writing.
05 July, 2020
Ernest Hemingway Holding His Son 1927 (Wikimedia Commons)
Ernest Hemingway was affectionately called “Papa," but what kind of dad was he?
<p>In my role as Associate Editor of the <a href="https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/hemingway-letters-project" target="_blank">Hemingway Letters Project</a>, I spend my time investigating the approximately 6,000 letters sent by Hemingway, 85% of which are now being published for the first time in a multivolume series. <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/literary-texts/letters-ernest-hemingway-19321934-volume-5?format=HB&isbn=9780521897372" target="_blank">The latest volume</a> – the fifth – spans his letters from January 1932 through May 1934 and gives us an intimate look into Hemingway's daily life, not only as a writer and a sportsman, but also as a father.</p><p>During this period, Hemingway explored the emotional depths of fatherhood in his fiction. But his letters show that parenting could be a distraction from what mattered most to him: his writing. </p>
<h2>'No alibis' in the writing business</h2><p>Hemingway had three sons. His oldest, John – nicknamed "Bumby" – was born to Ernest and his first wife, Hadley, when Ernest was 24 years old. He had Patrick and Gregory with his second wife, Pauline.</p><p>Hemingway initially approached fatherhood with some ambivalence. In her 1933 memoir "<a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608711.txt" target="_blank">The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas</a>," Gertrude Stein recalls that one evening Hemingway came to visit and "announced…with great bitterness" that he was "too young to be a father."</p><p>As the fifth volume of letters opens in January 1932, Hemingway is trying to finish "<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Death_in_the_Afternoon.html?id=Wn69QsdwDlQC" target="_blank">Death in the Afternoon</a>," his nonfiction account of bullfighting, in a household with a six-week-old baby, a three-year-old who ingests ant poison and nearly dies, a wife still recovering from a C-section, along with all the quotidian problems of home ownership, from a leaky roof to faulty wiring.</p><p><a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342233/original/file-20200616-23227-ywfum4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip" target="_blank"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342233/original/file-20200616-23227-ywfum4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip"></a></p><p>Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, with Gregory, Patrick and Bumby in Key West, 1933. (Princeton University Library, Author provided)</p><p>Hemingway explained to his mother-in-law, Mary Pfeiffer, that if his latest book fell short, he couldn't simply take readers aside and say, "But you ought to see what a big boy Gregory is…and you ought to see our wonderful water-work system and I go to church every Sunday and am a good father to my family or as good as I can be."</p><p>There are "no alibis" in the writing business, Hemingway continued, and "a man is a fool" to allow anything, even family, to interrupt his work. "Taking refuge in domestic successes," he added, "is merely a form of quitting."</p><p>For Hemingway, work didn't simply entail sitting at a desk and writing. It also included the various adventures he was famous for – the <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Hemingway-on-Fishing/Ernest-Hemingway/9781476716411" target="_blank">fishing</a>, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/hemingwayadventure/africa.html" target="_blank">hunting</a>, traveling and socializing with the people he met along the way. Though he would teach the boys to fish and shoot when they were older, when they were very young he didn't hesitate to leave them with nannies or extended family for long stretches of time.</p><p>This separation was <a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-hemingway/strange-tribe/" target="_blank">particularly hard</a> on the youngest, Gregory, who, from a very young age, was left for months in the care of Ada Stern, a governess who lived up to her last name. Patrick sometimes joined his parents on their travels or stayed with other relatives. Bumby, the oldest, divided his time between his father and his mother in Paris. The children's lives were so peripatetic that at the Letters Project we maintain a spreadsheet to keep track of their whereabouts at any given time.</p>
<h2>'Papa' explores fathers and sons in his fiction</h2><p>However, it would not be accurate to say that Hemingway did not care about his children. In the latest volume of letters, three are addressed to Patrick, two of them decorated with circled dots, a Hemingway family tradition called "toosies," which represented kisses.</p><p><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342482/original/file-20200617-94044-1rk64fc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip"></p><p>In his letters to his kids, Hemingway would sometimes draw dots called 'toosies,' which represented kisses. (Princeton University Library, Author provided)</p><p>In Hemingway's fiction, we can see the depth of that paternal feeling, and in his letters, the domestic moments that inspired him.</p><p>In November 1932, with his two youngest sons ill with whooping cough and being cared for by their mother at their grandparents' home in Arkansas, Hemingway postponed a trip to New York to stay in Key West with Bumby.</p><p>"He is a good kid and a good companion," Hemingway wrote his editor, Maxwell Perkins, "but I do not want to drag him around the speakies [bars] too much."</p><p>That same month Hemingway worked on the story of a father and son traveling together that would become "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathers_and_Sons_(short_story)" target="_blank">Fathers and Sons</a>" in the collection "<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Winner_Take_Nothing.html?id=Bc8C0Hb9B5YC" target="_blank">Winner Take Nothing</a>." It's one of the only stories in which Nick Adams – a semi-autobiographical recurring character – is portrayed as a parent, and the reflective, melancholy piece was written just three years after Hemingway's own father <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2926355?seq=1" target="_blank">had died by suicide</a>.</p><p>In the story, Nick is driving along a stretch of highway in the countryside with "his son asleep on the seat by his side" when he starts thinking about his father.</p><p>Nick recalls many details about him: his eyesight, good; his body odor, bad; his advice on hunting, wise; his advice about sex, unsound. He reflects on viewing his father's face after the undertaker had made "certain dashingly executed repairs of doubtful artistic merit."</p>
<p>Nick is surprised when his son starts to speak to him because he "had felt quite alone" even though "this boy had been with him." As if reading his father's thoughts, the boy wonders, "What was it like, Papa, when you were a little boy and used to hunt with the Indians?'"</p><p>Hemingway's letters show that another story in the collection, "<a href="http://crmsl.weebly.com/uploads/6/3/1/4/63143381/a_day%E2%80%99s_wait_by_ernest_hemingway.pdf" target="_blank">A Day's Wait</a>," was inspired by Bumby's bout with influenza in the fall of 1932. It is a seemingly lighthearted story about a young boy's misunderstanding of the differences between the centigrade and Fahrenheit scales of temperature. Like Bumby, the protagonist, "Schatz" – one of Bumby's other nicknames, a term of endearment in German – attends school in France but is staying with his father when he becomes ill. Schatz had learned at school that no one can survive a temperature of 44 Celsius, so, unbeknownst to his father, he spends the day waiting to die of his fever of 102 Fahrenheit.</p><p>But there is more to this story than the twist. "You don't have to stay in here with me, Papa, if it bothers you," the boy tells him. "It doesn't bother me," his father replies. He unwittingly leaves his son to believe, for an entire day, not only that the boy is going to die, but that his death is of no importance to his father.</p><p>In this slight story – one of those stories he told Perkins was written "absolutely as they happen" – we find an unexpected Hemingway hero in the form of a nine-year-old boy who bravely faces death alone.</p><p>Though he once wrote that he wanted "Winner Take Nothing" to make "a picture of the whole world," Hemingway also seemed to understand that no one ever truly knows the subjective experience of another, not even a father and son.</p><p><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/verna-kale-408674" target="_blank">Verna Kale</a>, Associate Editor, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway and Assistant Research Professor of English, <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/pennsylvania-state-university-1258" target="_blank">Pennsylvania State University</a></em></p><p>This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com/" target="_blank">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-hemingway-felt-about-fatherhood-139801" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
Keep reading
Show less
Creativity: The science behind the madness
Human brains evolved for creativity. We just have to learn how to access it.
03 July, 2020
- An all-star cast of Big Thinkers—actors Rainn Wilson and Ethan Hawke; composer Anthony Brandt; neuroscientists David Eagleman, Wendy Suzuki, and Beau Lotto; and psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman—share how they define creativity and explain how our brains uniquely evolved for the phenomenon.
- According to Eagleman, during evolution there was an increase in space between our brain's input and output that allows information more time to percolate. We also grew a larger prefrontal cortex which "allows us to simulate what ifs, to separate ourselves from our location in space and time and think about possibilities."
- Scott Barry Kaufman details 3 brain networks involved in creative thinking, and Wendy Suzuki busts the famous left-brain, right-brain myth.
LIVE JUNE 30 | Happiness hack: Approach life like an Italian chef
If you're interested in reinvention and adaptability, turns out Italian cooking is an instruction manual for life.
27 June, 2020
Add event to calendar
<p>
What does an adaptive and inventive life look like? Well, it looks a lot like Italian cooking. <strong>Tuscan chef Gabriele Corcos</strong> and <strong>American actor Debi Mazar </strong>bring their creative forces to Big Think Live to discuss risk-taking, career pivoting, and why your approach to food can be an instruction manual for reinvention, love and family.
</p><p>
Ask your questions during the live Q&A!
</p><p>
<strong>Join at 1pm ET on Tuesday June 30. Streaming via <a href="https://youtu.be/pqqL3WMu9-w" target="_blank">YouTube</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom/posts/10157454482278527" target="_blank">Facebook</a>, and via <a href="https://edge.bigthink.com/live_streams/97">Big Think Edge</a> (for subscribers only).</strong>
</p>
Keep reading
Show less
Unleash your inner da Vinci with these art and science drawing lessons
Learn how to draw realistic figures for comic books, anatomy courses, and more.
14 June, 2020
- Masterpieces like the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper followed countless hours of anatomical studies.
- Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by the human form.
- The Complete Creative Art & Science of Drawing Bundle teaches you how to draw human bodies, heads, and more.
<script async="true" src="https://widgets.stackcommerce.com/js-deal-feed/0.1/widget.js" type="text/javascript"></script><p>Fans of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper are captivated by Leonardo da Vinci's exceptional eye for human forms. Those masterpieces followed countless hours of anatomical studies. Da Vinci was fascinated by the human form, most famously expressed in his classic sketch The Vitruvian Man. </p><p>There are many ways of capturing human figures through drawing, from precise anatomical sketches to essences of characteristics. <strong><a href="https://shop.bigthink.com/sales/the-complete-creative-art-science-of-drawing-bundle?utm_source=bigthink.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=the-complete-creative-art-science-of-drawing-bundle&utm_term=scsf-395850&utm_content=a0x1P000004sOitQAE&scsonar=1" target="_blank">The Complete Creative Art & Science of Drawing Bundle</a></strong> will teach you how to draw a wide range of human bodies, heads, movement, perspective, and much more. </p><p>In this 12-course bundle, you'll learn how to draw 3D objects that appear to occupy space. A human figure drawing course instructs you on the basics of anatomical perspective. From there, you can home in on heads, one of the most challenging aspects of the human body to draw. </p><p>Perhaps you're not that interested in photorealism. That's fine; there's a course on dynamic superheroes that will prepare you to create the comic book that's been in your head. Or, you can forget bodies altogether. Maybe you're more interested in textures and patterns. This bundle has you covered in that aspect as well. 3D objectives and environments? Check. </p><p>No drawing bundle would be complete without a course on animals. In 31 lessons, you'll be given the tools to create the best cat memes around. Two courses on shading will also help you master depth. And if you're intrigued by digital drawing, a master class in creating fantasy art in Manga Studio 5 is included as well. In other words, you'll be well on your way to calling yourself an artist.</p><p><strong><a href="https://shop.bigthink.com/sales/the-complete-creative-art-science-of-drawing-bundle?utm_source=bigthink.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=the-complete-creative-art-science-of-drawing-bundle&utm_term=scsf-395850&utm_content=a0x1P000004sOitQAE&scsonar=1" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The Complete Creative Art & Science of Drawing Bundle</a></strong> is on sale now for $39.99, a 96% discount from the regular cost of $1,172.</p><p><em>Price subject to change.</em></p><h3><strong>More from the Big Think Shop</strong></h3><ul class="ee-ul">
<li><em><a href="http://shop.bigthink.com/collections/work-from-home-essentials?utm_source=bigthink.com&utm_medium=referral-subdeal&utm_campaign=home-2020"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Work-from-home accessories</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to keep you productive</span></em></li>
<li><em><a href="https://shop.bigthink.com/collections/diy-deals-to-keep-your-mind-busy?utm_source=bigthink.com&utm_medium=referral-subdeal&utm_campaign=home-2020"><span style="font-weight: 400;">DIY projects</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to keep you entertained indoors</span></em></li>
<li><em><a href="https://shop.bigthink.com/collections/learn-something-new-while-wfh?utm_source=bigthink.com&utm_medium=referral-subdeal&utm_campaign=home-2020">New skills</a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> you can learn without leaving home</span></em></li>
</ul><script type="text/javascript"> (function (s,o,n,a,r,i,z,e){s['StackSonarObject']=r;s[r]=s[r]||function(){
(s[r].q=s[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},s[r].l=1*new Date();i=o.createElement(n),
z=o.getElementsByTagName(n)[0];i.async=1;i.src=a;z.parentNode.insertBefore(i,z)
})(window,document,'script','https://www.stack-sonar.com/ping.js','stackSonar');
stackSonar('stack-connect-p', '393');
</script><p><em>When you buy something through a link in this article or from <a href="https://shop.bigthink.com/" target="_self">our shop</a>, Big Think earns a small commission. Thank you for supporting our team's work.</em></p>
Keep reading
Show less
Popular
