Interesting opinion piece by David Brooks over at the New York Times, using the entrepreneurial success of Peter Thiel as a way of positioning creativity as more important than competitiveness:

[Thiel's] lecture points to a provocative possibility: that the competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires.

Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.

May you all create your own “competitive monopolies.”

The lovely backstory of a recently rediscovered design icon. The next time I visit the UK, I have a new stop to hit for used books. What a beautiful store!

I’ve been meaning to give a nod to one of my favorite new (to me, anyways) blogs, Brain Pickings, for months now. Brain Pickings is a wonderfully curated art and culture blog with consistently high quality content. They definitely deserve an add to your rss reader (alternatively, you can subscribe to a weekly email digest as well). This week, Brain Pickings found some very nice vintage literacy project posters, the top-most of which suggests “read[ing] the books you’ve always meant to read” in March.

It got me a touch inspired to go for a monster novel this month, so off I went to Project Gutenberg for a free download of “Moby Dick.” Odds are very high that this book will not be finished in March, but I’m committed to getting started. I’ll also be on a boat for a week at the end of the month on vacation, so it seemed appropriate to have a seafaring read.

What about you? Any of you have a book you’ve always meant to get to? Why not start in March?

“Fear was the only factor found to significantly increase sublime feelings,” the researchers report. Having just been jolted by that frightening film clip “resulted in significantly higher sublime scores than all other conditions, which did not differ significantly from each other.”

To talk about painting is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too. You can only express in words, what words are capable of expressing, what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

A collection of beautifully animated “Calvin and Hobbes” snowman creations. Happy holidays everyone!

Stunning examples of light writing photography.

(via Jan Leonardo Wöllert Photography (NOTCOT))

I finished 1Q84 myself this weekend and found this quote, indeed this entire review, reflected my opinion of the experience. I still recommend “Wind Up Bird,” “Norwegian Wood,” and “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” - steer clear of this one, the payoff and ingenuity are sadly nowhere to be found.

A well-made video street art battle to the finish.

A collection of 17 photos of very famous artists’ sketchbooks. This Frida Kahlo one is probably my favorite but there are others that are definitely worth a look.

(via Flavorwire » Inside the Sketchbooks of Famous Artists)