I read Inside Steve’s Brain, by Leander Kahney, a compelling business biography of Steve Jobs and Apple. Jobs is a business genius by all accounts (and regularly a jerk on the job, by most accounts). Why has Jobs been so successful as an innovating entrepreneur? One factor is knowing clearly whether consumers or producers drive […]
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Some fascinating glimpses of Franz Liszt, the virtuoso pianist and composer. Biographer Alan Walker writes:
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Beethoven, according to biographer Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven: “Wegeler tells us that when a series of lectures on Kant was organized in Vienna in the 1790s, ‘Beethoven didn’t want to attend even once, even under my urging.’ Rather, Beethoven preferred self-education through voracious reading in popularizations of the works of the major thinkers; through rich encounters
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All from the twenty-first century: * Sorcerers stealing or shrinking men’s penises in Congo. * Black magic murders in Brazil. * Witches beaten and humiliated in in southern India. * God punishes Haiti for its witchcraft and other immoralities. * Though progress in Ghana: a call “for the immediate abolition of witches camps and witchcraft
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A few excerpts from Rudolf Wittkower‘s important essay “Individualism in Art,” published in Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961), 291-302. From guild monopolies to individual entrepreneurism: “It would seem that with the breaking of the guild monopoly in the course of the XVth century the artist’s attitude to his work changed. Instead of
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born into a highly musical family. His father was was a skilled violinist and his older sister played the clavier excellently, so from his infancy he was surrounded by music. Yet, as he wrote in a letter to a friend, that was supplemented by deep study. “it is a mistake to
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Shooting the last two days in Florence, where republican politics, relatively free markets and innovative business, relaxed religion, and humanistic philosophy laid the groundwork for the explosion of artistic creativity in the 1400s — Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Ghirlandaio, Leonardo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, and the list goes on. Awesome. Visual delights everywhere, a strong sense of living
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Popular Science‘s “Looking Back at the 100 Best Innovations of 2009.”
Bridge over the Colorado River Read More »