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Creative research is all about collecting the dots. It’s more common to think of “connecting the dots” but the truth is that you can’t connect the dots you can’t see. And we can only hold a tiny number of things in our brains at once. So a space for collecting (and organizing) the dots is a crucial foundation for thinking, creativity and more:

collect raw material, then think about it. From this process comes pattern recognition and eventually the insights that form the basis of novel ideas.

“You can re-sign your lease, but I have to raise it by $250 a month because I realized there was a bigger number your rent could be,” Turley informed his tenant of six years, attributing the rent increase to a need to keep up with the rising numbers he could envision. “Look, you’re a good tenant and all, but I thought of a bigger number and that puts me in a bind. Did you know that $2,850 is larger than $2,600? Most tenants don’t concern themselves with things like that, but as a landlord, I always have to be adjusting my leasing requirements to match the larger amounts that happen to come to mind.”

RIOT’s musical prowess is mostly self-taught. At 10, RIOT (born Ephrem Lopez Jr.) learned everything there was to know about loops and arrangements; at 15, he got his first DAW (digital audio workstation) and mastered Reason Studios, a music production software that remains his go-to.

“It's funny because Hype was just trying to call me a lyricist. I wouldn't consider myself a lyricist. Obviously, lyrics go into music and I do think about them and I do be having bars in my music but they're just super simple,” she says. “I want them to be digestible, I don't want them to fly over people's heads and they never catch it. I want people to hear it right away and be like, ‘OK, that was cute.’ But it's also fun at the same time.”

Ice is keenly aware of the comments made about her, but she isn’t interested in thoughts from nameless, faceless figures. In fact, she’s figuring out what internal rest looks like. Right now? It means she’s seven days into creating a workout and reading routine (her trainer just gave her James Clear’s bestseller Atomic Habits), taking frequent social media breaks and keeping her phone perpetually on DND (do not disturb), even putting me on to iPhone’s sleep mode. “It’s like super DND,” she giggles. “Very, very calming.”

So, aside from the people in her corner, whose opinion does she care about? “The critics,” she admits. “Because they actually study music and care about it. So I feel like I’d rather hear their opinion. ​​I'm more interested in that because at least it’ll be paragraphs explaining why they feel that way and I'll be able to understand the person better versus just one little hateful ass comment from a private page. At least there's an author and a face attached.”

Ice is leading a new class of women, including the likes of Kenzo B and Maiya the Don, who are changing what the drill scene looks and sounds like in New York, and appealing to an audience beyond its borders

The shift is happening in tandem with Latin music’s continual crawl further into the mainstream as pop’s leader in revenue and pace of growth. However, Ice has helped recenter hip-hop in mainstream culture and pop charts. Her take on the genre and unexpected rise might have been the reason why so many people had something to say about her landing the final slot on a Complex list ranking the best 50 New York rappers of all time.

The man-child. The people who so loved playing characters that they played characters in their real lives, too, without actually transforming themselves into more mature human beings. He knew the cliché about celebrities staying developmentally the age that they were when they became famous. But how is a beloved movie star meant to change the right way? How is he supposed to grow up? How does he meaningfully evolve his life and art without killing his core?

What happens when you deliberately defy the moves that led you where you’d always wanted to go, and try something altogether different? It was a risk. But it made perfect sense. It happens. Your family members start to die. Your elders get replaced by your peers. You pack up your life and plant roots elsewhere. You put down the instrument that made you known and pick up another one instead. You plug it in. Do you hear that? That’s the buzz of something new. Wait till you hear what it sounds like when you strum.

Your best thinking is when you are fully engaged in the stuff in front of you, connecting it to other stuff—and finding your unique perspective amongst it all.

An airstrike near the Jabaliya refugee camp had just killed at least 27 people, mostly women and children, according to Hamas authorities, and dozens were wounded. When asked how he would clean their wounds, he said that he would use what little tap water they had, even if it was mixed with sewage.

When Israel severed electricity to Gaza, the desalination plants all shut down. So did the wastewater treatment stations. That has left the entire territory without running water. People buy dwindling jugs from municipal sanitation stations, scour for bottles in supermarkets or drink whatever fetid liquid may dribble out of their pipes.

It took 35-year-old Noor Swirki two hours on Saturday to find a box of six bottles she will try to stretch throughout the coming days. She took her first shower in a week Saturday, using a cup of polluted tap water and splashing it over her husband and two children before rubbing the remaining moisture on her skin. “We are here without anything, even the most basic thing,” she said, shouting over the persistent noise of crying children in the U.N. shelter in southern Khan Younis, where she sought refuge after an airstrike demolished her Gaza City apartment. “We’re worried about our safety in the bombing and now there’s this other issue of survival.”

Even Obsidian’s most dedicated users don’t expect it to take on Notion and other note-taking juggernauts. They see Obsidian as having a different audience with different values.

Obsidian is on some ways the opposite of a quintessential MacStories app—the site often spotlights apps that are tailored exclusively for Apple platforms, whereas Obsidian is built on a web-based technology called Electron—but Voorhees says it’s his favorite writing tool regardless.

When I first read a history of Israel, I was amazed at the image of Israel being like an onion: there always seems to be a deeper layer and an older claim to the land

White phosphorus ignites when exposed to atmospheric oxygen and continues to burn until it is deprived of oxygen or exhausted. Its chemical reaction can create intense heat (about 815°C/1,500°F), light, and smoke. Upon contact, white phosphorus can burn people, thermally and chemically, down to the bone as it is highly soluble in fat and therefore in human flesh. White phosphorus fragments can exacerbate wounds even after treatment and can enter the bloodstream and cause multiple organ failure. Already dressed wounds can reignite when dressings are removed and the wounds are re-exposed to oxygen. Even relatively minor burns are often fatal. For survivors, extensive scarring tightens muscle tissue and creates physical disabilities. The trauma of the attack, the painful treatment that follows, and appearance-changing scars lead to psychological harm and social exclusion.

At precisely 9 in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one. At 10, Phase II began, during which our entire membership did not force a single man to suck another man’s penis. Also, none of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place. No civilians were literally turned inside out via our powerful explosives. In addition, at 11, in Phase III, zero (0) planes were flown into buildings. (function (d, s, n) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; js = d.createElement(s); js.className = n; js.src = "//player.ex.co/player/162bfe8a-78e8-4153-ad38-598cc7a94451"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'exco-player')); During Phase IV, just after lunch, we were able to avoid bulldozing a single home. Furthermore, we set, on roads in every city, in every nation in the world, a total of zero (0) roadside bombs which, not being there, did not subsequently explode, killing/maiming a total of nobody. No bombs were dropped, during the lazy afternoon hours, on crowded civilian neighborhoods, from which, it was observed, no post-bomb momentary silences were then heard. These silences were, in all cases, followed by no unimaginable, grief-stricken bellows of rage, and/or frantic imprecations to a deity. No sleeping baby was awakened from an afternoon nap by the sudden collapse and/or bursting into flame of his/her domicile during Phase IV.

No teeth were pulled in darkened rooms. No drills were used on human flesh, nor were whips or flames. No one was reduced to hysterical tears via a series of blows to the head or body, by us. Our membership, while casting no racial or ethnic aspersions, skillfully continued not to rape, gang-rape, or sexually assault a single person.

As night fell, our membership harbored no secret feelings of rage or, if they did, meditated, or discussed these feelings with a friend until such time as the feelings abated, or were understood to be symptomatic of some deeper sadness.

It should be noted that, in addition to the above-listed and planned activities completed by our members, a number of unplanned activities were completed by part-time members, or even nonmembers. Advertisement Advertisement In London, a bitter homophobic grandfather whose grocery bag broke open gave a loaf of very nice bread to a balding gay man who stopped to help him. A stooped toothless woman in Tokyo pounded her head with her hands, tired beyond belief of her lifelong feelings of anger and negativity, and silently prayed that her heart would somehow be opened before it was too late. In Syracuse, New York, holding the broken body of his kitten, a man felt a sudden kinship for all small things. Advertisement Even declared nonmembers, it would appear, responded to our efforts. In Chitral, Pakistan, for example, a recent al-Qaida recruit remembered the way an elderly American tourist once made an encouraging remark about his English, and how, as she made the remark, she touched his arm, like a mother. In Gaza, an Israeli soldier and a young Palestinian, just before averting their eyes and muttering insults in their respective languages, exchanged a brief look of mutual shame.

Since the world began, we have gone about our work quietly, resisting the urge to generalize, valuing the individual over the group, the actual over the conceptual, the inherent sweetness of the present moment over the theoretically peaceful future to be obtained via murder. Many of us have trouble sleeping and lie awake at night, worrying about something catastrophic befalling someone we love. We rise in the morning with no plans to convert anyone via beating, humiliation, or invasion. To tell the truth, we are tired. We work. We would just like some peace and quiet. When wrong, we think about it awhile, then apologize.

There is new content, of course, so much content, and there are new themes; there are new methods of production and distribution, more diverse creators and more global audiences; there is more singing in hip-hop and more sampling on pop tracks; there are TV detectives with smartphones and lovers facing rising seas. Twenty-three years in, though, shockingly few works of art in any medium — some albums, a handful of novels and artworks and barely any plays or poems — have been created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences accepted in 1999. To pay attention to culture in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around. The suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten.

this is not some rant that once everyone was so creative and now they’re all poseurs. I am asking a different and peskier question: why cultural production no longer progresses in time as it once did.

As the economist Robert Gordon has shown, the transformative growth of the period between 1870 and 1970 — the “special century,” he calls it — was an anomalous superevent fueled by unique and unrepeatable innovations (electricity, sanitation, the combustion engine) whose successors (above all information technology) have not had the same economic impact.

more than the economics, the key factor can only be what happened to us at the start of this century: first, the plunge through our screens into an infinity of information; soon after, our submission to algorithmic recommendation engines and the surveillance that powers them.

In this dark wood, today and yesterday become hard to distinguish. The years are only time stamps. Objects lose their dimensions. Everything is recorded, nothing is remembered; culture is a thing to nibble at, to graze on.

One upshot of this digital equation of past and present has been a greater disposability of culture: an infinite scroll and nothing to read, an infinite Netflix library with nothing to watch. Though pop music still throws up new stars now and then (I do really like Ice Spice), the market for new music fell behind older music in the middle of the last decade, and even the records that sell, or stream, cannot be said to have wide cultural impact. (The most popular single of 2022 in the United States was “Heat Waves,” a TikTok tune by a British alternative-pop group with little public profile called Glass Animals; and what’s weirdest is that it was recorded in 2020.)

by and large the technologies that have changed filmmaking since 2000 have stayed in the postproduction studio: computer-graphics engines, digital tools for color grading and sound editing. They have had vanishingly little influence on the grammar of the moving image, in the way that lightweight cameras did for the Nouvelle Vague or digital kits did for American indie cinema.

Really, the kind of image that distinguishes this century is less the spectacular Hollywood image than what the German artist Hito Steyerl has called the “poor image” — low-res compressed pictures like memes, thumbnails, screenshots — whose meaning arises from being circulated and modified.

What cannot be categorized cannot be streamed; to pass through the pipes art must become information.

This institutional hunger for novelty combined with digital requirements for communicability may help explain why so much recently celebrated American culture has taken such conservative, traditionalist forms: oil portraiture, Iowa-vintage coming-of-age novels, biopics, operettas barely distinguishable from musical theater.

the core project is communication,” English said, “anything that resists the art-communications apparatus fails to leave a mark.

Without ever worrying about novelty, you could still speak directly to your time. You could express your tenderest feelings, or face up to the upheavals of your age, in the overlapping styles of artists long dead.

Winehouse, as producers and collaborators have reminded us since her death, was an inveterate collector and compiler of musical clips. (The drummer and music historian Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, remembered: “She would always be on her computer sending me MP3s: ‘Listen to this, listen to this. ... ’”) She was living through, and channeling into “Back to Black,” the initial dissolution of history into streams of digital information, disembodied, disintermediated, each no further from the present than a Google prompt.

The most ambitious abstract painters working today, like Albert Oehlen and Charline von Heyl, are doing something akin to Winehouse’s free articulation: drawing from diverse and even contradictory styles in the hunt for forms that can still have effects.

Vaccines are not only immensely useful; they also embody something beautifully human in their combination of care and communication. Vaccines do not trick the immune system, as is sometimes said; they educate and train it. As a resource of good public health, they allow doctors to whisper words of warning into the cells of their patients. In an age short of trust, this intimacy between government policy and an individual’s immune system is easily misconstrued as a threat. But vaccines are not conspiracies or tools of control: they are molecular loving-kindness.