Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

The Guardian publishes an excerpt from a lecture by Neil Gaiman explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens:

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.

It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end … that's a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

Adam Savage: Ground Rules for Success

The infinitely curious, brilliant, and kind Adam Savage gave the closing benediction at Boing Boing: Ingenuity theatrical experience at a former Masonic Lodge in San Francisco on August 18. The co-host of Mythbusters, co-founder of Tested, and Boing Boing contributor inspired us with his personal story of becoming a maker and outlined ten ground rules for success. 

Ben Chestnut: Creating an Environment for Creativity and Empowerment

Ben Chestnut is MailChimp's co-founder and CEO. After studying industrial design and physics at Georgia Institute of Technology and working as a designer for an mp3 website, Ben founded The Rocket Science Group in 2000. There, he built web apps—before they were even called web apps—for companies like BellSouth, CNN, Coca-Cola and The Arthritis Foundation. Within a year, Ben launched MailChimp, which grew alongside The Rocket Science Group. MailChimp was a hit, and he started focusing exclusively on it in 2005. Since then, MailChimp has grown from 9,000 users to more than 3,000,000. MailChimp makes it easy to design and send beautiful emails, manage your subscribers and track your campaign's performance. It takes powerful tools like segmentation, a/b testing and ROI tracking, and turns them into something anyone can use.

This presentation was recorded live at The Summit, hosted by The Youth Cartel on November 10 and 11, 2012.

New Beginnings: NYC Ballet's 9/11 Tribute

I have no idea how I missed this until today. It resonates so much with me. I spent the morning of 9/11 with my friends and colleagues at American Repertory Ballet getting ready to begin a new season of dance when the news began to pour in. In my mind, in my heart, that morning and dance will forever be linked together.

DDB New York and the New York City Ballet quietly did a wonderful tribute called "New Beginnings," intended as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a tribute to the future of the city.

The video shows NYCB principal dancers Maria Kowroski and Ask la Cour performing on the 57th-floor terrace of Four World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The backdrop, of course, is One World Trade Center. The dancers perform an excerpt from choreographer Christopher Wheeldon's poignant "After the Rain" pas de deux—signifying new beginnings in New York City. 

The film, directed by Davi Russo and produced by Radical Media, was posted at sunrise (6:34 a.m. EST) on Sept. 12 to NYCB's social channels, with the hashtag #NewBeginnings. "Our hope is that 9/12 can now be rebranded as a day of optimism and new beginnings," says Matt Eastwood, chief creative officer of DDB N.Y.

What's the Point of Creativity?

Dan Pallota for the Harvard Business Review Blog Network:

The unspoken assumption is that our goal is to gain competitive advantage, to crush the competition, to win. But I believe that the best creativity comes from a much deeper place than the desire to win. It comes from a desire to contribute to the lives of others, either by introducing something new that improves the quality of their lives or by showing people that something thought to be impossible is in fact possible. When you change people’s perceptions about what can be accomplished or achieved, you contribute to their humanity in the richest possible way. You give them hope for the future — a sense that life is not the demoralizing, unchanging drudgery day after day that the world so often teaches us that it is. When you change the way people think about possibility, it is an existential experience. It makes them feel understood. More than that, it makes them feel loved.
 
 ...

I write a lot about philanthropy. Philanthropy means, literally, love of humanity. You don’t have to give a million dollars to charity to be a philanthropist. You simply have to actively demonstrate your love of humanity. Your empathy. If the purpose of our creativity is philanthropy — if it is love for our fellow man, an appreciation that people struggle in their lives, and a desire to somehow lessen that struggle and increase their joy, with a little more leg room or with an iPad — it will change the world. And that is the greatest competitive advantage of all.