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starboybutler · 7 months ago

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Lights Up (Ch. 1)

summary: john egan, sophomore, sees a cute boy in class and gets serious about his education. (not)

word count: 3148

warnings: objectification, drugs, sh, non-con (all briefly mentioned), blowjobs, john egan is kind of an asshole

notes: first chapter of my college au fic! this went through like. five rewrites before i was happy with it and even now i still kinda hate it. but!! i hope you guys enjoy!

chapter two | chapter three | ao3 link

here's some art for this chapter!

john egan was not made for college in the slightest.

he enjoyed the experience– the parties, the friends he made, the experimenting with almost every drug in the book– but the academics? not so much.

he wasn't even sure how he got in, honestly. he did all the paperwork when he was high one night, and he gotten a letter saying he was accepted. his momma was so happy for him.

he had skipped class a lot, opting to go out and meet up with a dude he matched with on tinder instead and fucking his brains out in a shady alleyway and ghosting him the next day. when he did attend class, he would sleep through it and miss almost everything his professor said.

he was bad with his assignments too. he never turned them in on time, always promising his professors via email that he'd get it turned in by the end of the week. and when he didn't, he'd just leave it be.

that's the thing about college though– unlike high school, there was no one to breathe down your neck to tell you to do your schoolwork. they expected you to fend for yourself because you were an adult now.

john honestly never had a reason to go to class. until last week.

here he was, in god knows what class listening to his professor drone on about square roots…something like that. did he even sign up for a math class?

whatever. all he was focussed on was the pretty blonde boy that had found a seat right in front of him. he had sleepy blue eyes and pouty pink lips that put every woman he’s ever seen to shame. his hair fell in ribbons over his shoulders, shiny and soft looking. he couldn't take his eyes off of him.

he showed up last week without a word, hair in a messy little ponytail and dressed up in a frayed jean jacket and leather pants. john was so happy he decided to show up to class that day. the minute that blonde beauty walked in, he perked right up, immediately gaining an interest in this particular class.

that entire day, he watched as he wrote line upon line upon line of notes, muscles in his hand moving dutifully.

god.

john had started waking up and walking to class everyday, even opting to get here early just to watch the new boy set up his little work station. he had plenty of pens and pencils and scratch paper to take notes on, but this week he seemed to have finally invested in a laptop for his notes instead– which was a shame, because he had pretty handwriting.

despite a week passing, he had only just text curt about the new boy today, telling him every little detail he’s remembered.

curtie 🖕🏻💚

‘hello???? you’re just gonna say all this and not send a picture???’

curtie🖕🏻💚

‘you’re evil’

bucky huffed out a little laugh.

‘i don't know if you've been told this, but taking pictures of people you don't know is weird.’

curtie 🖕🏻💚

‘ITS FOR SCIENCE’

‘NO curt’

curtie 🖕🏻💚

‘FINE. i’ll just come over there’

“oh god,” john sighed, letting his head fall forward onto the table in front of him, slightly embarrassed. he loved curt to death, but he acted like he was in heat sometimes- like he just couldn't help himself around a good looking guy.

he peeked at the boy again. today, the boy was dressed a little less flashy than the previous days– only wearing a simple white shirt and gray sweatpants.

he was hyperfocused on his laptop as he soaked up the professors words like a sponge, typing his words into a well organized word document with quick, nimble fingers. his glasses slid lower on his nose, making him take a hand away from his keyboard for a split second and push them back up to the bridge.

john was hypnotized by every movement of his. he seemed so calm, collected– calculated. he seemed like everything bucky wasn't. he was the type of boy that john had always fantasized about taking home and corrupting beyond repair.

fucked up, yeah, but the thought of taking this pretty, smart blonde beauty to bed and making him scream and yell and forget everything nerdy he was typing until he could think of nothing but john’s name– bringing him to filthy, low down clubs and having him take all kinds of things and then fucking him in his car while he giggled, just happy to be there…

god, what an image he created for himself.

“issat him?”

“christ–” john sputtered, startled as curt’s voice suddenly sounded in his ear, arm suddenly slung around his shoulder. “didn't think you were actually comin’.”

“you know me, bucky.” the boy smiled, eyes fixed hard on the blonde, scanning every single little detail. “i hear about a hot guy, i just can't help myself. it's a curse.”

“i gotta get you spayed or something,” he joked, tugging the shorter boy’s hoodie so that he was sat in the chair next to him. “siddown.”

they spent a good while just staring, before curt broke the silence with a filthy whisper in bucky’s ear.

“think he'd be down for a threeway?”

“curtis.”

“what? man, god knows what you're thinkin’ i’m just brave enough to say what i’m thinking out loud.”

“yeah, in a class full of people,” he hissed, flicking curt on the side of the head. “keep your voice down.”

“what's your deal?” curt huffed, rubbing at the spot john had struck him bitterly. “you’d be flirting with a guy this hot by now. it's like you're scared or something.”

“i’m not scared– you're just bein’ too goddamn loud.” john said, elbowing him in the side sharply. “besides, he seems like the shy type- so i’ll have to get him to warm up to me before i can even suggest anything, y’know?”

“ughhh,” curt groaned, falling back dramatically and clutching his chest as if he were dying. “i dunno if i can wait johnny-boy. i wanna devour him like thanksgiving dinner and lick the plate clean.”

“i know you do.” john mumbled, rubbing at his temples. “just try and be patient, yeah? don't you got other boy toys you can sleep with in the meantime?”

“none as good lookin’ as him.”

“down boy.” john teased. “i got this. just give me a week and we'll have him in our dorm.”

curt huffed and stood from where he was seated, shoving his hands into his loose pockets. “alright, but i’ll be damned if i wait a day longer.”

and there he went, striding out of the classroom like he owned the damn place, pants falling low on his hips because he'd lost his goddamn belt somewhere the week before. that boy was more of a mess than he was.

class came to a close, and john sighed and picked up his bag nonchalantly. he had been brainstorming a way to even approach the guy, seeing as he looked like the quieter type. he had a nagging feeling that if he tried to just go up to him and strike up a conversation he'd freak him out a little bit.

he must've spaced out. when he came to, the room was empty, save for the professor organizing his haphazard work space.

“i know you aren't gonna ask me any questions about the lecture, egan,” the frumpy old man said, glaring up at him. “you know where the door is.”

“gee, thanks.” john mumbled under his breath.

he turned to leave, bag slung lazily over his shoulder, only for something glimmering under the fluorescent lights of the room to catch his eye.

he turned to look at the object. it was a pair of glasses.

he practically jumped over the table to get to where the blonde was sat previously, taking hold of the thin-framed specs in his large hand.

perfect.

he dashed out of the classroom, hoping he could still run into him somewhere outside since class hadn't ended that long ago. he made his way into the hall, which was fairly vacant, and scanned for him almost frantically.

there.

he was standing near the exit door, fumbling through his satchel for something– and john hard a fairly good idea of what he was looking for. he took a deep breath, straightened his back and walked towards him, shoving the bifocals in his pocket.

“hey,” he started, obviously scaring the blonde a bit as his eyes shot up from his bag, meeting john’s. “lose something?”

“oh, uh,”

he looked caught off guard, but his face remained surprisingly stoic. the only tell that he was nervous was his stiff posture and twitching fingers.

“yeah, lost my glasses. think i left ‘em somewhere.”

god, his voice was deep– smooth and soft with a hint of a southern twang.

his plump bottom lip twitched slightly as he took his hand out of his cluttered handbag, letting them rest at his sides. he fidgeted with nimble fingers, picking at a loose string that stuck out from his frayed jeans.

he was so much cuter up close. john could really get a good look at all of his features– his sleepy eyes, his soft hair, his straight nose, the freckles that dotted his cheeks, and the musky, sandalwood-vanilla scent that wafted off of him. john wanted to devour him.

he pulled the aforementioned glasses from the pocket of his basketball shorts, presenting them to the blonde. “y’mean these?”

the blonde perked up.

“oh, yeah,” he said, quickly taking them and sliding them back onto his face, missing the way john jumped a little as their skin made contact for a split second. “thanks. must’ve dropped ‘em.”

“nah, left them in class, actually,” john informed, nodding back to the door of the now barren math room. “saw ‘em sitting on the table, so i picked ‘em up.”

“uh, thanks,” he said, hands moving to clutch at the strap of his satchel. “how’d you know they were mine?”

john chuckled and gave his most charming smile, cocking his head to the side slightly, just to add to the charm a bit. “couldn't forget a cutie like you sittin’ in front of me.”

the boy turned his head away at the words, but john didn't miss the way his cheeks flushed a soft, sweet shade of pink. he couldn't help but smirk.

his neck tensed, letting john see all of the muscles in a way that made him want to sink his teeth into him right then and there. he didn't miss how his shirt was cropped slightly either, a little bit of skin showing as he reached to scratch at the back of his reddening neck.

gotcha.

“oh. uh, well…thank you.” he mumbled, a nimble finger running up and down the faded strap of his satchel. “nice of you to return ‘em.”

“of course. who wouldn't? i’m sure everyone would want an excuse to talk to you,” john replied, smiling wider. “what’s your name?”

“oh– it’s gale.” he said, gathering himself and making eye contact with john once more. “gale cleven.”

“nice to meet you, gale,” he crooned, holding out a large hand. “i’m john egan. friends call me bucky.”

“nice to meet you,” he said softly, a slight smile crossing his face as he took john’s hand, shaking it firmly. “bucky.”

“good boy,” he said seamlessly, watching as gale’s face went a pale pink once more. “how about you grab a drink with me? i’ll consider us even for the glasses.”

“ah, i’d love to, but,”

he faltered, and john’s heart sank for a moment. he must've overstepped.

“i don't drink. even if i did, i’m 19, so i can’t legally get a drink at bars.”

john shrugged, playing off his miscalculation as he released gale’s hand. “a’ight. how about a bite to eat then?”

gale went quiet, lip twitching once more as he mulled over john’s offer. bucky worried his bottom lip with his teeth in anticipation.

“not today,” gale exhaled. “gotta study, y’know. but i’m free tomorrow?”

“okay. i’m counting on you to keep your word on this.” he purred, flashing him a sly wink as he walked past him, out the door. “see ya tomorrow, gale.”

—---------------------

“so, did you ask him?”

“curt, didn't i say a week?” john huffed, shucking his shirt off and tossing it aside. “you're real impatient, you know that?”

“he's hot.” curt said urgently. “god, if i got a chance to talk to him i’d–”

“i know, which is why i didn't let you talk to him.” john laughed, sitting on the edge of his bed. “you’d scare him off and he'd probably report us or something. it’s happened before.”

“no one's reported us.”

“yet.”

“whatever.” curt sighed, crossing his arms like a petulant child. “did you at least get a name? what color are his eyes? what’s he smell like?”

“gale. gale cleven.” john recalled fondly. “he’s got big baby blues, and he smells real good. like those ridiculously overpriced colognes you love so much. god– his voice is so deep too, curtie.”

“...gale sounds like a chick’s name.”

“curt.”

“what, it does!”

“and you think you’d be able to get him to agree to a threeway? with a mouth like that?” john huffed. “you're such a shit talker.”

“it’s not on purpose, i promise.” he said with a bratty roll of his eyes. “i just think honesty is the best policy. ain’t that a core value or sumn?”

“it is– but not if you’re thinking of telling a cute blonde guy you wanna fuck that his name sounds like a chick’s name.”

“are you gonna tell me it doesn’t? honestly?”

“you just–” john pauses, lips pressed into a flat line. “you shouldn't say it.”

“so you agree!” he cackles, falling back with the force of his raucous laughter. “oh johnny, you're such a hypocrite.”

bucky all but pounced on curt, relishing the little yip that came from him as he was pinned against the shitty little dorm mattress. john’s hand was gripping the front of his hoodie, lifting him up slightly so that their faces were inches apart, breath mingling with one another.

“you've got such a smartass mouth, you know that?” he hissed, staring curt right in his crystal-blue eyes, which were wide with an obvious mix of arousal and fear.

this is what curt got a kick out of- riling bucky up and making him manhandle him. this wouldn't be the first time they had gotten carried away in their little friendly bickering matches, only for john to end up on top of or inside of curt. it was a little arrangement they had. they’d known one another since elementary school, and they'd only grown closer as they grew up.

curt was there for bucky throughout his worst– the drugs, the relapses- he’d seen john at his absolute worst, and he stayed right by his side.

he'd also seen curt at hit lowest, dirty and covered in blood and other fluids that were from men that curt didn't want to name because he was sure ‘they didn't mean it’.

so much they've been through together. so many nights they've spent curled up together- crying, screaming, or just silent.

“yeah?” the boy exhaled, erection poking at the back of bucky’s thigh insistently. “why don't you shut me up then?”

he didn't need anymore permission. bucky pulled his half-hard cock free from his loose basketball shorts, shoving it roughly into curt’s mouth, laughing cruelly as the boy let out a little whiny sigh.

“didn't even gag. how many cocks you suck this week, huh? how many men you let violate your pretty mouth?”

another whine, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes as he began to lick and suckle at his cock weakly, hands grasping at john’s thighs.

the words were harsh, but he knew it’s what curt liked. he loved being talked about like he was an object- a little plaything for john’s personal gratification.

he rolled his hips forward, smirking as curt gagged slightly at the nudge of john’s cockhead against the back of his throat. spit was running down the corners of his mouth, creating a pretty, messy little picture below him.

“fucking hell, love your mouth.” he sighed, settling into a slow rhythm, savoring the feeling of curt moaning and whimpering around him like a pitiful little puppy. “love when i get to take you like this. you think gale would fill you up like this?”

a downright filthy groan left curt’s mouth at that, nails biting into the plush skin of john’s thighs. bucky laughed throatily. tugging at curt’s damp curls until just his tip was in the warm chasm of his mouth.

“hah….thought he had a chick’s name? bet you don't really care. you’d still moan for his cock like the whore that you are, huh?”

curt’s tongue licked at the weeping head of bucky’s dick, shuddering at the taste of precum drizzling over his pink little tongue. his chest was heaving with each breath he took, eyes almost rolling into the back of his head as john forced him to swallow his cock once more.

“want me to cum down your throat, curtie? gonna imagine that it’s gale?”

a garbled word that sounded like ‘fuck’ escaped the shorter boy’s throat, his nails scratching down his thighs and leaving bloody little marks that would be hard to explain– but he didn't care. his thrusts got sloppier, more frantic as that familiar warmth built at the base of his spine.

“shit–”

he pulled free from curt’s throat with a filthy wet sound, jerking his wet cock as he spilled all over curt’s scrunched up face. his cheeks were pink and wet with a mix of john’s precum and his own spit, which made such a beautiful little picture as his spend was added to it.

they both sat there panting for a bit, before curt shoved him in his chest.

“i said down my throat, asshole.”

john just shrugged, smirking crookedly. “i hear cum is great for your skin. just trying to keep you looking young.”

curt shoved him again, enough to make him stumble off of his chest and onto the floor, which made them both laugh.

“god, now i gotta shower again,” curt huffed, wiping at his face with his hand. “god, you're such a dick.”

“you're welcome,” bucky called out as curt shuffled off to the bathroom, shooting him the finger as he closed the door behind him. he was left laying there, cock still wet and messy with curt’s saliva as his eyes drifted shut. images of gale, spread out below him, flushed and fucked out flashed prettily like a homemade porno behind his eyelids.

tomorrow, he was gonna win that blonde boy over no matter what.

taglist: @mooodyblue @lauvmyself @kaiistheguy @slowsweetlove

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motownfiction · 11 months ago

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domain

She may have a home of her own these days, but Lucy’s true domain is her office in the English Department.

Sure, she has to share it with another master’s student. Who cares? She has a desk of her own, a side of the room filled with her books and pictures, and best of all, the feeling of being a twenty-four-year-old professional. In a few months, when she graduates and moves on for her Ph.D., she’ll get a new office. That will be good. But she doesn’t want to think about that. This is her very first academic domain, and that means something, even more than her first home.

It’s the third week of the new semester, and she’s having one-on-one meetings with her first-year composition. This student is the last for the day. He’s also the one Lucy’s been looking forward to the least.

There’s nothing wrong with this guy. He writes well, he’s not disrespectful, and he participates in class discussion. It’s just that he’s so … eager.

He knocks on the door hinge, and Lucy takes a sharp breath in.

“Hi, Luke,” she says. “Come on in.”

Luke Egan looks like he should be in a Campbell’s Soup commercial. He has short hair, freckles, and bright blue eyes, which is what Lucy thinks she would have looked like if she was a man. He takes a seat in the student chair and smiles a little too widely. Lucy suppresses the urge to cringe in front of him.

“Hi, Lucy,” he says. “I like that you let us call you that. Lucy. It’s very college.”

“Yeah, well,” Lucy says, “Ms. Callaghan would feel too high school, and if we don’t make it very clear we’re not professors, we get crushed.”

“Crushed. What a great word.”

Lucy nods. This kid couldn’t be anymore obvious if he tried.

“You know, my mom is friends with your mom,” Luke says. “Avery Egan. She teaches Women’s Studies at Eastern.”

“Oh. Yeah, we’ve met. Smart lady.”

“The smartest. You’re probably that smart, too.”

Lucy smiles, but inside, she wants to rip off all her skin and maybe die. Don’t these students know she’s married? Don’t they know she’s a mother?

“I’ve got a long way to go,” she says. “So … this is your second semester?”

“Yeah,” Luke says. “I’m from the Ann Arbor area. Saline.”

“And you didn’t go to Michigan?”

“I only got into the commuter campus. This was the best I could do. Full scholarship isn’t bad, either.”

Lucy tries not to think about how different her life would be if she’d gotten a full scholarship anywhere. Not even faculty parents could fix that.

“Definitely not,” Lucy says. “So, what do you think you want to major in?”

“Business.”

“Hmm. Somebody’s got to make the money.”

“That’s what I was thinking. You’d like my brother better than me. He’s still in high school, but he’s really good in English class. He writes short stories. Kinda reminds me of the kid in Stand by Me.”

“Wouldn’t that make you dead John Cusack?”

“I guess so.”

Luke looks around Lucy’s desk until his face falls. Lucy traces his eye line all the way to her favorite photograph – one of her and Will, holding hands and grinning outside the Fox Theatre around Christmas two years ago, a bouquet of light behind them. They never even spotted Sadie with her camera.

“Is that your boyfriend?” Luke asks.

The question is, of course, overstepping. But Lucy sees no point in lying. She holds up her left hand in case he missed the bands before.

“Husband,” she says.

Luke’s face falls even closer to the floor.

Lucy takes no pleasure in it. Poor kid can’t control it. This is just the price of having your domain exactly where you want it.

And after this, she’ll get to go home and see Will.

(part of @nosebleedclub january challenge -- day 2! yes, this was kind of purposefully written as a crossover with my new fiction blog, @irishhills, but i kind of felt like i had to do a soft launch, lol)

#drabble #writeblr #ch: lucy callaghan #ch: luke egan #year: 1991

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citylightsbooks · 6 years ago

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Interview with Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa 39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to identify the best African writers under 40. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing. The Old Drift is her first novel, published by Hogarth. Namwali celebrates her novel at City Lights in conversation with Ismail Muhammad on Thursday, May 16th, 2019.

City Lights: If you’ve been to City Lights before, what’s your memory of the visit? If you haven’t been here before, what are you expecting?

Namwali Serpell: I've been to City Lights several times, once to read an excerpt from Rad American Women A-Z for a video series. As a thank you, I received this lovely notebook which has now become a journal dedicated entirely to The Old Drift. It's where I've drafted emails and publicity copy, and where I've sporadically scribbled my dreams, disappointments, frustrations, and joys about this debut novel. (There are a lot of exclamation points!) I love the image on the cover of the notebook, which conveys to me the feeling I get whenever I visit City Lights: a marvelously skew place, riddled with nooks and crannies, crammed with books and time and love.

CL: What’s the first book you read & what are you reading right now?

NS: My favorite book as a child of about three was Quentin Blake's Mr. Magnolia. My father would push my stroller under a row of magnolia trees in a local park on the way to his office. I now know that Mr. Magnolia’s name is entirely incidental but I pictured him as a man made of blushing blossoms. The first novel I ever read cover to cover on my own was Coral Island. I'm currently reading Maurice Carlos Ruffin's eerie dystopian satire We Cast a Shadow.

CL: What are 3 books you would you never part with?

NS: This is an unanswerable question for an English professor, as several moving companies and bookshelf purveyors will attest. I have literally hundreds of books, but I also part with them easily. I lend them out and give them away to students and friends all the time. The physical book isn't the point; its ever distributable, ever re-printable as the soul is.

CL: What writers/artists/people do you find the most influential to the writing of this book and/or your writing in general?

NS: When I first started writing The Old Drift in college, I was enamored with magical realism—Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie. Graduate school immersed me in canonical works like Heart of Darkness, “Lycidas,” and Moby-Dick, which all make cameos in the novel.

Courses I took and taught also exposed me to feminist revisions of fairy tales by Jeanette Winterson and Angela Carter, radical Marxist fiction by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and spy novels like John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The Old Drift ranges among these different genres. I remember when I presented an early chapter draft in a creative writing workshop, some of the other students were baffled by the fact that some characters had “magical” properties while others didn't. Over the years of writing since then, more models for juxtaposing many different genres have emerged, like Ian McEwan’s Atonement, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. In many ways, The Old Drift is most explicitly in conversation with Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which came out the year I started writing, and celebrates the kind of cultural hybridity in London that I wanted to explore in Lusaka, and also plays with genres—from the war story to the immigrant story to the sci-fi and political protest elements of its climax.

#namwali serpell #the old drift #hogarth #city lights #city lights bookstore #author interviews

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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Are More Democrats Or Republicans On Welfare

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/are-more-democrats-or-republicans-on-welfare/

Are More Democrats Or Republicans On Welfare

One Of The Worst Offenders Is Mitch Mcconnells Home State Of Kentucky According To This Wallethub Study

Jake Krupa colors in an electoral map at an election watching party as states are called in the 2016 election.

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BOSTON — Hey, isn’t it time all these so-called “conservatives” down in the red states actually started standing on their own two feet?

We’re not trying to be mean. But, you know: Tough love.

A new report from WalletHub confirms what we already suspected: The states that depend the most on “big gubmin”t are also the states that are are always whining the most about… “big gubmint.”

And, wouldn’t you know it, one of the worst offenders is Kentucky — the state represented in the Senate by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican.

How about that? Do you think he’s going to mention it any time soon?

Kentucky ranks fifth in terms of overall dependence on government, WalletHub determined using data on federal spending in each state, the share of households on welfare, the number of government workers and the total tax burden as a share of income.. No. 1 was Mississippi — no surprises there — followed by Alaska.

Conservative “red” states of the south and west make up eight of the 10 states with the highest dependency on government, and 19 of the top 25.

Oops.

Yes, isn’t it time to roll back government spending? You show us the way, West Virginia . And you, Arizona and South Carolina .

Let’s crack down on all those “Cadillac queens.” Except it turns out the real offenders are the “Pickup princes” in the South and West.

Some Republicans Are Taking Steps Toward Europes Model Of Religiously Inspired Social Assistance

Steven Klein

U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney recently released a bold proposal for a cash family benefit that breaks with decades of Republican Party orthodox: markets good, government bad. Romney’s proposal has sparked an extensive debate about how best to design a family benefit, with the Biden administration releasing a rival plan.

The policy world will fight over the merits of these different bills. But together they register a shift in the public debate about the U.S. welfare state. What Romney’s proposal embodies is essentially an effort to remodel the American welfare state—and, by extension, the Republican Party—along the lines of European Christian democracy.

Steven Klein is a lecturer of political theory at King’s College London and the author of The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State.

Democrats Policies Are More Popular But Republicans Are More Ideologically Unified

Many self-identified Republicans vote against their own self-interest, or so say a number of pundits. The Republican Party, which favors cutting federal spending, tends to do well in states that are most reliant on federal spending. You can see this in a graph by New York University political scientist Patrick Egan, which shows a strong relationship between how much a state relies on the federal government and the strength of that state’s vote for Donald Trump.

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Why? That’s what we examine in a recently published paper in the British Journal of Political Science. Manyobservers have noted that Americans are more likely to take the side of their party on the issues of the day in the last 30 years. But the Republicans are more unified — and as a result, more powerful.

How different are the Democratic and Republican parties? Too different to compare

Although both Democrats and Republicans are more ideologically consistent and committed than they were 40 years ago, Republicans are far more so than Democrats. The overwhelming majority are conservative not only in name but all the way down. This means identifying with one’s party’s political outlook, knowing how the main parties’ ideological positions relate, and being attached to one��s party’s ideological and policy concerns. Thanks to that greater consistency and commitment, Republicans can resist pressure to move society in a more liberal direction.

Republicans and Democrats can’t even agree about how they disagree

Corporate Welfare Is Terrible Policy But Democrats And Republicans Do It Anyway

One of the great bipartisan follies of American politics is the idea that the way to make your state more prosperous is through corporate welfare – in particular, policies meant to lure in companies with cash, tax breaks, or both. Rare is the politician in either party who dissents from the conventional wisdom that it’s the government’s task to “improve the economy” by using targeted incentives.

At best, this is a zero-sum game. The commerce and jobs that a city or state gains would have located elsewhere if it weren’t for the incentives. While a small number of residents benefit from the fact that the business located there, the overwhelming majority of the rest of the people aren’t affected. Of course, the politicians will crow that “the state gained jobs” and to people accustomed to thinking in abstractions, that sounds good.

Not infrequently, the results of these incentives make it a negative sum game. Here’s an example. In 2011, North Carolina spent $20 million to induce Chiquita Brands to move its corporate headquarters from Cincinnati to Charlotte. That was nice for a very few Charlotte residents, but it made no difference at all to the rest of the state’s population, hardly any of whom even knew about this “win” for the state.

For a few years, 320 people in Charlotte got to work for Chiquita. For everyone else, it might just as well have remained in Cincinnati – and the tax dollars in our pockets.

Who Is Richer Democrats Or Republicans The Answer Probably Wont Surprise You

Which of the two political parties has more money, Democrats or Republicans? Most would rush to say Republicans due to the party’s ideas towards tax and money. In fact, polls have shown about 60 percent of the American people believe Republicans favor the rich. But how true is that? can help you write about the issue but read our post first.

Who Gets The Most Government Benefits: Urban Democrats Or Rural Republicans

Today’s Republican Party, fueled by the Tea Party movement’s right-wing populism, rails against government benefits and those who receive them. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, for example, warns that Social Security and Medicare will turn us into “a bunch of people sitting on a couch, waiting for their next government check.” But who really receives the bulk of government benefits: urban districts represented by Democrats or rural districts represented by Republicans?

Using the New York Times’ map of the county-level distribution of government benefits, I’ve compared Republican and Democratic districts in two states. Here is California’s 9th District compared with the 19th District :

We find a similar story in Minnesota’s 5th District and the 6th District :

This is, of course, a small and unrepresentative sample – but more comprehensive studies have shown that the pattern holds: the regions of the United States most inflamed by right-wing, anti-government populism benefit disproportionately from government programs and income transfers. To put it another way, Cadillac driving welfare queens are easily outnumbered by pickup truck driving welfare cowboys.

These Are The Us States Most And Least Dependent On The Federal Government

Adriana Belmonte

States that voted Democrat in 2016 generally rely less on federal funding than Republican states, according to a study by WalletHub.

The analysis looked at the return on taxes paid to the federal government, the share of federal jobs, and federal funding as a share of state revenue.

Thirteen out of the top 15 states found to be most dependent on the federal government voted for President Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Ten out of the 15 least dependent states voted for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

How Democrats And Republicans Differ On Matters Of Wealth And Equality

A protester wears a T-shirt in support of Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who is part of … a group of Democrats looking to beat Trump in 2020. Photographer: John Taggart/Bloomberg

If you’re a rich Democrat, you wake up each day with self-loathing, wondering how you can make the world more egalitarian. Please tax me more, you say to your elected officials. Until then, the next thing you do is call your financial advisor to inquire about tax shelters.

If you’re a poor Republican, however, you have more in common with the Democratic Party than the traditional Wall Street, big business base of the Republican Party, according to a survey by the Voter Study Group, a two-year-old consortium made up of academics and think tank scholars from across the political spectrum. That means the mostly conservative American Enterprise Institute and Cato were also on board with professors from Stanford and Georgetown universities when conducting this study, released this month.

The fact that lower-income Republicans, largely known as the “basket of deplorables,” support more social spending and taxing the rich was a key takeaway from this year’s report, says Lee Drutman, senior fellow on the political reform program at New America, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

Across party lines, only 37% of respondents said they supported government getting active in reducing differences in income, close to the 39% who opposed it outright. Some 24% had no opinion on the subject.

Two Decades After The End Of Welfare Democrats Are Changing Direction

The pandemic and a set of other economic and social forces changed the calculation for Democrats when it comes to government aid. The question now is how long the moment will last.

WASHINGTON — A quarter-century ago, a Democratic president celebrated “the end of welfare as we know it,” challenging the poor to exercise “independence” and espousing balanced budgets and smaller government.

The Democratic Party capped a march in the opposite direction this week.

Its first major legislative act under President Biden was a deficit-financed, $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” filled with programs as broad as expanded aid to nearly every family with children and as targeted as payments to Black farmers. While providing an array of benefits to the middle class, it is also a poverty-fighting initiative of potentially historic proportions, delivering more immediate cash assistance to families at the bottom of the income scale than any federal legislation since at least the New Deal.

Behind that shift is a realignment of economic, political and social forces, some decades in the making and others accelerated by the pandemic, that enabled a rapid advance in progressive priorities.

Rising inequality and stagnant incomes over much of the past two decades left a growing share of Americans — of all races, in conservative states and liberal ones, in inner cities and small towns — concerned about making ends meet. New research documented the long-term damage from child poverty.

Have You Or A Loved One Been Hurt Or Injured By The Democrat Party

J.B. Shurk

“Have you or a loved one been hurt or injured by the Democrat Party?” That’s the only question Republicans should run on radio and television ads from here on out. It’s the same question civil litigators regularly use in late-night commercials when they’re looking to add new members to class action lawsuits, but compared to asbestos poisoning, the side-effects of prescription medicines, or injuries from medical devices, the Democrats are the Grand Pooh-bahs of causing physical and emotional harm to everyday Americans.

Have you been living in a run-down American city plagued by crime, awful public schools, and economic deprivation? You’re most likely living in a city that has been run by Democrats for over a century. Life does not have to be this way. Most of the country does not live this way. Vote out those who make life miserable.

Have you or a loved one experienced anti-Semitism or religious bigotry? You may be represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, or any of the many Democrats who choose Islamic terrorism over Israel’s right to exist. End the madness. You deserve to be represented by people who don’t sympathize with those who wish you dead.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.

How Is The Democratic Party Different From The Republican Party

Democrats are generally considered liberal, while Republicans are seen as conservative. The Democratic Party typically supports a larger government role in economic issues, backing regulations and social welfare programs. The Republicans, however, typically want a smaller government that is less involved in the economy. This contrary view on the size of government is reflected in their positions on taxes—Democrats favour a progressive tax to finance government’s expanded role, while Republicans support lower taxes for all. However, Republicans do support a large budget for the military, and they often aggressively pursue U.S. national security interests, even if that means acting unilaterally. Democrats, however, prefer multilateralism. On social issues, Democrats seek greater freedoms, while Republicans follow more traditional values, supporting government intervention in such matters. For example, Democrats generally back abortion rights, while Republicans don’t. In terms of geography, Democrats typically dominate in large cities, while Republicans are especially popular in rural areas.

Read more about the Republican Party.

Not A Generalization But The Majority Of Racists Are Republican

OK, as current proof of my point, http://img3.allvoices.com/thumbs/image/609/480/95031869-vote-romney.jpgSorry for the long link, but it completely proves my point. RACIST!Also, it is not uncommon for people to hold up highly offensive posters at rallies, speeches etc. For example, one said ‘Impeach the half-breed Muslim’ . Tell me again that that isn’t racist. I also want to make the point that NOT ALL MUSLIMS ARE TERRORISTS! PEOPLE SHOULDN”T CARE IF THEIR PRESIDENT IS MUSLIM ANYWAYS!!!!!!!!! I actually know many Muslims and they are awesome and some of the nicest people on earth . Just because some Muslims screwed up doesn’t mean that every Muslim is the same way. Don’t pull the argument about slavery, the parties have morphed and current examples are better.

Democrats Think Many Republicans Sincere And Point To Policy

Democrats, however, were somewhat more generous in their answers. More than four in ten Democratic voters felt that most Republican voters had the country’s best interests at heart . And many tried their best to answer from the other’s perspective. A 45-year-old male voter from Ohio imagined that as a Republican, he was motivated by Republicans’ “harsh stance on immigration; standing up for the 2nd Amendment; promised tax cuts.” A 30-year-old woman from Colorado felt that Republican votes reflected the desires to “stop abortion… stop gay marriage from ruining our country… and give us our coal jobs back.”

Other Democrats felt that their opponents were mostly motivated by the GOP’s “opposition to Obamacare,” “lower taxes” and to support a party that “reduced unemployment.”

Why Is The Democratic Party Associated With The Colour Blue

The idea of using colours to denote political parties was popularized by TV news broadcasts, which used colour-coded maps during presidential elections. However, there was no uniformity in colour choices, with different media outlets using different colours. Some followed the British tradition of using blue for conservatives and red for liberals . However, during the 2000 U.S. presidential election—and the lengthy battle to determine the winner—prominent news sources denoted Republicans as red and Democrats as blue, and these associations have persisted.

Read more about the U.S. presidential election of 2000.

Democrats Return The Favor: Republicans Uninformed Or Self

The 429 Democratic voters in our sample returned the favor and raised many of the same themes. Democrats inferred that Republicans must be “VERY ill-informed,” or that “Fox news told me to vote for Republicans.” Or that Republicans are “uneducated and misguided people guided by what the media is feeding them.”

Many also attributed votes to individual self-interest – whereas GOP voters feel Democrats want “free stuff,” many Democrats believe Republicans think that “I got mine and don’t want the libs to take it away,” or that “some day I will be rich and then I can get the benefits that rich people get now.”

Many used the question to express their anger and outrage at the other side. Rather than really try to take the position of their opponents, they said things like, “I like a dictatorial system of Government, I’m a racist, I hate non-whites.”

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, “This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.”

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, “I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much.” The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, “i really am going to have a hard time doing this” but then offered that Republicans “are morally right as in values, … going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, … going to create jobs.”

Poor States Receive More Federal Funding Through Medicaid

WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez explained that “federal funding as a percentage of state revenue was calculated as states’ intergovernmental revenue from the federal government divided by the states’ general revenue.”

Intergovernmental revenue includes funding for Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families , child welfare services, and other low-income assistance programs. For TANF, Kentucky , Alaska , and Delaware use the most federal dollars.

“Because the federal income tax is progressive,” Veuger said, “I think you can also generally say that poor states receive more federal funding through Medicaid, which is a huge part of states’ budgets.”

In the 2017 fiscal year, Montana, the eighth-most dependent state overall in WalletHub’s analysis, received the highest amount of at 80%. It was followed closely by West Virginia , Arkansas, Kentucky , New Mexico , and Arizona .

In terms of gross domestic product per capita, Massachusetts ranked first, followed by New York, Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. On the other end of the spectrum, Mississippi is the lowest, followed by Arkansas, West Virginia, Idaho, and Alabama.

Veuger noted that “all the poor states are red. Mississippi and Louisiana get a lot of Medicaid money.”

Democrat Vs Republican: Who Is Better For The Us Economy

7 7. Abortion

The Democrats and Republicans have been at loggerheads over several issues for decades, with each passing year being more polarizing than the one before. Like the American public, both parties continue to grow further apart on top priorities like what is better for the US economy and and let partisan acrimony dictate policy.

Their differences pervade all aspects of life includingideological, social, economical, and even national security. The two just can’tseem to get along.

In this article, we’ve rounded up the seven key areas ofdissent that should give you a crash course on US politics.

The Republicans’ Rapidly Expanding Definition Of Welfare

Did you know that the federal government spends more money on welfare than it does on Social Security, or Medicare, or the military? Me neither, perhaps because it isn’t true. It’s the kind of hooey that the crankier, less-informed sort of conservative is all too ready to believe. Yet the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate budget committee has lately been spreading this meme, and a variation is included in Representative Paul Ryan’s proposed budget. It’s part of a larger bait-and-switch that Republicans have been playing against Democrats, making it harder for both parties to agree on necessary spending cuts that don’t harm those in need.

The budget committee poobah is Senator Jeff Sessions. In October, Sessions put out a press release under the headline “Welfare Spending the Largest Item in the Federal Budget,” a claim repeated uncritically by Eric Bolling on “The Five,” a Fox News chat show, and on sites such as National Review and Human Events. An urban myth was born.

As recently as 2008, the federal tab was one-quarter lower. What happened? Sessions blames the Obama administration for encouraging too much participation, but the obvious problem is the economy. The Great Recession and weak recovery were a catastrophe for low-income people, making it necessary for the government to provide additional assistance, mainly through the 2009 stimulus.

The Ugly Truth: Republicans Want More Poverty And Crime

Thom Hartmann

The Republican Party is running a huge scam right now, similar to the one they ran in 1992 when President George H.W. Bush was setting up phony cocaine busts across the street from the White House having achieved his position by running his infamous Willie Horton ad four years earlier.

When Democrats work to lift people out of poverty, it lifts the entire economy. As Republicans work to cut taxes on rich people and spending on poor people, it whacks the economy.

Here’s the essential formula:

Increase levels of inequality in the country to the point where poverty and homelessness are a crisis.

Do this with huge, trillion-dollar tax cuts for rich people so they get massively richer, while gutting social safety net programs and supports for working-class people like unions.

Poverty and homelessness increase, which produces an increase in crime, and that freaks out middle-class people—the majority of voters.

Then, build your political identity and campaign around being “tough on crime” while completely ignoring the fact that the poverty you helped create is largely responsible for much of that crime.

Blame the poverty-driven crime, instead, on “welfare” programs Democrats have put into place to try to soften the blow of the poverty caused by Republican policies.

Get elected, create more poverty; rinse, wash, and repeat.

And then there’s inequality, which it turns out is at least as consequential as poverty as a driver of criminal behavior.

As their research notes:

The Politics And Demographics Of Food Stamp Recipients

Rich Morin

Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to have received food stamps at some point in their lives—a participation gap that echoes the deep partisan divide in the U.S. House of Representatives, which on Thursday produced a farm bill that did not include funding for the food stamp program.

Overall, a Pew Research Center survey conducted late last year found that about one-in-five Americans has participated in the food stamp program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. About a quarter lives in a household with a current or former food stamp recipient.

Of these, about one-in-five of Democrats say they had received food stamps compared with 10% of Republicans. About 17% of political independents say they have received food stamps.

The share of food stamp beneficiaries swells even further when respondents are asked if someone else living in their household had ever received food stamps. According to the survey, about three in ten Democrats and about half as many Republicans say they or someone in their household has benefitted from the food stamp program.

But when the political lens shifts from partisanship to ideology, the participation gap vanishes. Self-described political conservatives were no more likely than liberals or moderates to have received food stamps , according to the survey.

Among whites, the gender-race gap is smaller. Still, white women are about twice as likely as white men to receive food stamp assistance .

Presidential Candidates On Federal Assistance Programs

Important dates • Nominating process • Ballotpedia’s 2016 Battleground Poll • Polls • Debates • Presidential election by state • Ratings and scorecards Have you subscribed yet?

Join the hundreds of thousands of readers trusting Ballotpedia to keep them up to date with the latest political news. Sign up for the Daily Brew.

For information about Social Security under the Trump administration, .

The overview of the issue below was current as of the 2016 election.Social Security is said to touch the lives of more Americans than any other federal program. At the end of 2014, 59 million individuals were receiving benefits and 166 million were paying into the system by way of payroll taxes. The ratio of workers to beneficiaries has declined over time and reduced the amount of excess funds earning interest. This ratio is not predicted to increase in the near term, particularly as more baby boomers retire. Under the present system, today’s Social Security taxes pay the benefits of today’s retirees. For these and other reasons, the system is unsustainable over the long term. The 2016 presidential candidates offered policy solutions and plans that could benefit workers and future retirees and address the system’s financial outlook should the next president take action.

See what the 2016 candidates and their respective party platforms said about Social Security and other federal assistance programs below.

What Is Governments Role In Caring For The Most Needy

Nearly six-in-ten Americans say government has a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Do these views vary depending on whether the respondent has personally benefited from a government entitlement program?

These data suggest the answer is a qualified yes. Overall, those who have received benefits from at least one of the six major programs are somewhat more likely than those who haven’t to say government is responsible for caring for those who cannot help themselves .

When the analysis focuses just on just the respondents who have received benefits from at least one of the four programs that target the needy, the gap between entitlement recipients and other adults increases to eight percentage points .

Some larger differences in attitudes toward government’s role emerge when the results are broken down by specific program, though in every case majorities of both recipients and non-recipients affirmed that government has the obligation to help those most in need.

For example, nearly three-quarters of those who ever received welfare benefits say government has a duty to care for those who cannot care for themselves. In contrast, less than six-in-ten of those who have never been on welfare agree.

Similar double-digit gaps surface between non-recipients and those who ever received food stamps and Medicaid .

The total of those who received two and three or more benefits may differ by 1 percentage point from the chart due to rounding. ?

Democrats Or Republicans: Who Has The Higher Income

In the end, many people assume Republicans are richer based on these figures. Although, this is only a look at the richest families and politicians in America though. In everyday American households, it seems that Democrats have a higher mean salary. It’s true that many of the wealthiest families in the country are contributing to Republican campaigns. On the contrary, families registered as , statistically speaking.

These findings still have some loopholes in them, of course. For instance, the data was collected over the last 40 years or so. Moreover, it is only based on the most recently collected information. As you know, demographics are constantly changing. These figures may have been affected as well. There is also a margin of error with every type of data collection like this. So, what do you think? Who is richer? Democrats or Republicans?

Democrats On Welfare In The Clinton Administration

The election of President Clinton in 1992 was a new era for Democratic views on Welfare. President Clinton put comprehensive health-care reform at the top of his agenda. The health-care reform failed due to intense ads from health-care insurance companies and push-back from conservatives. President Clinton, instead decided to reform the national welfare program, despite pushback from other Democrats, who favored federal top-down policies. Clinton’s new welfare reforms replaced the Aid to Families of Dependent Children with block grants to the states. The welfare reform instituted a new work requirement for all welfare recipients

Slavery And The Emergence Of The Bipartisan System

From 1828 to 1856 the Democrats won all but two presidential elections . During the 1840s and ’50s, however, the Democratic Party, as it officially named itself in 1844, suffered serious internal strains over the issue of extending slavery to the Western territories. Southern Democrats, led by Jefferson Davis, wanted to allow slavery in all the territories, while Northern Democrats, led by Stephen A. Douglas, proposed that each territory should decide the question for itself through referendum. The issue split the Democrats at their 1860 presidential convention, where Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge and Northern Democrats nominated Douglas. The 1860 election also included John Bell, the nominee of the Constitutional Union Party, and Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the newly established antislavery Republican Party . With the Democrats hopelessly split, Lincoln was elected president with only about 40 percent of the national vote; in contrast, Douglas and Breckinridge won 29 percent and 18 percent of the vote, respectively.

Republicans Are Racist And Not Shy To Lie About It

Today’s republicans are not Abraham Lincoln alike. The neo-cons are all racist, like Donald Trump, Jan Brewer, Donald Sterling, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Bob McDonnell… The name list just can go too long. Of course, not all republican are racists but their party has a racist culture and their public racist comments and behaviors are just too common and normal. If you talk about the history of two party, the republican party might not be that racist, but today’s republican are way more racist than any party out there. I’m neither a conservative nor liberal, that I’m independent. But I support democrat party because this party is not racist and try to direct the country’s culture to diversity and multiculturalism. It is just too late for those racist cons try to change the nation back to a white country, if you take into the consideration that there are almost 30% of people are minorities.

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cascornerfairfieldu-blog · 6 years ago

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Humanities is Cultivating Dynamic Relationships in the College of Arts and Sciences

Universities exist not only to convey knowledge, but also to engender new knowledge through faculty research and creative endeavor. The scholarly, artistic and public accomplishments of faculty in the Humanities at Fairfield are remarkable for a university of our size and scope, and many of them reflect our commitment to undergraduate research and student-faculty collaboration. Here are just a few of our recent highlights:

In September 2018, at Mystic Seaport Museum, the Humanities Institute hosted a weekend-long, public symposium on the cultural, historical and ecological importance of the sea and coastlines in southern New England. The event brought together 10 community organizations with regional and international scholars and local community members. To honor the legacy of the late Professor of Classical Studies Vincent Rosivach, students Alec Lurie and Olivia McEvoy ('19) are producing the "Vincent J Rosivach Register of Slaves in Fairfield, Connecticut (1639-1820)," which Rosivach began during his research into slavery in Fairfield, to be published in the DiMenna-Nyselius library's Digital Commons.

In Classical Studies, Professor Giovanni Ruffini (also of the History department) published the book Life in an Egyptian Village in Late Antiquity: Aphrodito Before and After the Islamic Conquest with Cambridge University Press (2018). In Philosophy, Professor Sara Brill co-edited the book Antiquities Beyond Humanism, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, and was invited to deliver the keynote address for the annual conference of the Ancient Philosophy Society in 2019. Associate Professor Kris Sealey won a $75,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to study the ethics of academic publishing practices, and Associate Professor Toby Svoboda published The Ethics of Climate Engineering: Solar Radiation Management and Non-Ideal Justice with Routledge Press (2017).

In Religious Studies, Professor Paul Lakeland was awarded the “The Best Book in Theology Published in 2017” by the College Theology Society for his book The Wounded Angel: Fiction and the Religious Imagination. Associate Professor Martin Nguyen published Modern Muslim Theology: Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination with Rowman & Littlefield (2019) and also received the 2018-19 Wabash Center Peer Mentoring Clusters Grant. Associate Professor John Slotemaker published the book Anselm of Canterbury and the Search for God (2018) with Lexington Books.

In English, students in Professor Betsy Bowen’s course “Literacy and Language” did collaborative archival research using the Library of Congress’s interviews with the last generation of enslaved Americans. It is part of a multi-year student/faculty project on literacy in which students are analyzing the 2,300 accounts to find information about slave literacy and schooling. Professor Bob Epstein published Chaucer’s Gifts: Exchange and Value in the Canterbury Tales with the University of Wales Press (2018), Associate Professor Johanna Garvey co-edited the book Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions: Aesthetics of Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and Professor Elizabeth Petrino co-edited the book Lydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural Views (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018). Assistant Professor Matt Tullis published Running With Ghosts: A Memoir of Surviving Childhood Cancer (Sager Group, 2017), Associate Professor Sonya Huber published Pain Woman Takes your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System (University of Nebraska Press 2017), and Professor Carol Ann Davis’s essay collection The Nail in the Tree: On Art, Violence, and Parenting, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2019. Also of note is that Professor Emily Orlando was named E. Gerald Corrigan Endowed Chair in the Humanities, recognizing her achievements in both scholarship and student mentoring.

In Modern Languages and Literatures, students are combining language majors with other majors and minors to create dynamic courses of study and career tracks. Lauren Jachimczyk (’18) is completing a double major in Chinese Studies and Finance, including a semester in The Beijing Center in China, and will work as an Analyst in Corporate Investment Banking at Deutsche Bank in NYC after graduation. Sarah Foley (’19), a double major in Spanish and Sociology who studied abroad in Madrid and worked as an interpreter with a community health project co-directed by the Egan School of Nursing and the Spanish program, will work for Oaktree Capital Management after graduation. In an especially exciting project, Spanish/English double major Maggie Smith (’17) has been collaborating for 2 years with Assistant Professor Sergio Adrada-Rafael to produce a new translation of the educational comic The Fate of Numantia: Aius, the slave, which will be published in both Spain and the U.S. Meanwhile, Professor Javier Campos completed a new book, El bailador de tango/ “Tango in Manhattan,” on the history of the Tango in El Río de la Plata. Assistant Professor of the Practice of Italian Sara Diaz co-edited and translated a bilingual edition of 17th century author Margherita Costa’s The Buffoons, A Ridiculous Comedy, published by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies & Iter Press in 2018. The project includes contributions by student fellows whom Dr. Diaz mentored in the Humanities Institute’s Humanities Seminar. Professor Mary Ann Carolan also received a Tiro a Segno Fellowship at NYU for spring 2019.

In Visual and Performing Arts, Professor Philip Eliasoph is serving as Faculty Consultant and blogger for The New York Times “InEducation” platform; his students join in the process of blogging, engaging in a global conversation about the uses and abuses of our visual landscape. Professor Jo Yarrington’s installation “piecemeal/peacemeal” was invited by the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Guangzhou, China; Professor Katherine Schwab’s exhibition “An Archaeologist’s Eye: The Parthenon Drawings of Katherine A. Schwab” ran from January to May 2018 at The Parthenon in Nashville, TN; and Professor Laura Nashchaired a panel at the first ever interdisciplinary conference on Disco, at the University of Sussex, England. Meanwhile, Assistant Professor Patrick Brooks’ short film “Seen From Above” premiered at the 2018 Vancouver International Film Festival, Suzanne Chamlin had an NG Art Creative Residency in Eygalières, France (May 2018), and Visiting Assistant Professor Meryl O’Connor edited a documentary, Hollow Tree, that was selected as one of the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund and Stories of Change Grantees.

Certainly not least, the Department of History has been on an amazing pace in the production of new research and learning experiences. Assistant Professors Jennifer Adair and Silvia Marsans-Sakly each recently earned a prestigious NEH fellowship, Adair for her groundbreaking research on Argentina's democratization in the 1980s and Marsans-Sakly for her unprecedented study of the Tunisian revolt of 1864. Meanwhile, Professor Gavriel Rosenfeld published The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present with prestigious Cambridge University Press (2019) and Associate Professor and chair Patricia Behre worked with the Humanities Institute and the Fairfield University Art Museum to bring to campus a breathtaking public exhibit of artist Robert Hirsch’s Ghosts: French Holocaust Children. And let’s not forget the captain of the ship: Professor and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Richard Greenwald’s book The Death of 9-5: Permanent Freelancers, Empty Offices and the New Way America Works is now under contract with Bloomsbury Press.

Overall, these are exciting and richly rewarding times in the Humanities. We are reaching new thresholds in the knowledge and expression of the human condition by cultivating the dynamic relationship between faculty scholarship, student achievement, and community partnership.

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americanlibertypac · 8 years ago

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Thomas Edison Would Have Been Given Adderall Today

“The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.” – Thomas Edison

Photo credit: Pixabay: WikiImages, CC0 Public Domain, https://pixabay.com/en/thomas-alva-edison-inventor-1922-67763/

In 1855, when he was eight years old, Thomas Edison enrolled in school for the first time. After 12 weeks, his teacher, Reverend G. Engle, called him “addled,” or unable to think clearly. Edison apparently hated school and its heavy focus on sitting, memorizing, and repeating. As biographer, Louise Egan, explains: “Tom was confused by Reverend Engle’s way of teaching. He could not learn through fear. Nor could he just sit and memorize. He liked to see things for himself and ask questions.”[1]

Edison’s mother, Nancy Edison, approached Reverend Engle about her son but found his ways too rigid. She felt that he forced things on the children. His mother quickly decided to pull Tom from school and allow him to learn at home, where he developed a passion for books and knowledge. Edison’s education was largely self-directed, with his mother avoiding most top-down instruction and instead allowing Edison to learn naturally. Edison’s biographer, Matthew Josephson, writes: “She avoided forcing or prodding and made an effort to engage his interest by reading him works of good literature and history that she had learned to love…”[2]

Nancy Edison facilitated her son’s learning by noticing the things that interested him and by gathering books and resources to help him explore those topics more fully. Nothing was forced. There was no coercion. Edison became a voracious reader, and by the time he was 12 he had read the great works of Dickens and Shakespeare and many others. He became interested in science so his mother brought him a book on the physical sciences—R.G. Parker’s School of Natural Philosophy—and he performed every experiment within it. This led to a passion for chemistry, so his mother gathered more books for him. Edison spent all of his extra money to gather chemicals from a local pharmacist and to purchase science equipment, and he conducted his first experiments in a makeshift lab in his home’s basement while still just a tween. Josephson writes that in allowing Edison so much freedom and self-direction, his mother “brought him to the stage of learning things for himself, learning that which most amused and interested him, and she encouraged him to go on in that path.” Edison himself wrote about his mother: “She understood me; she let me follow my bent.”[3]

With over 1,000 U.S. patents, Thomas Edison went on to become one of the greatest inventors of all time, creating the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and, most famously, the incandescent light bulb. Books were the foundation of Edison’s education. He was one of the first library cardholders at the Detroit Free Library, and later in his massive laboratory in New Jersey he placed his desk in the center of the lab’s library, surrounded by thousands of books. One of Edison’s chemists, Martin Andre Rosanoff, concluded: “Had Edison been formerly schooled, he might not have had the audacity to create such impossible things…”[4]

Today, I hope that Nancy Edison would have the same confidence and grit to reject her son’s label of addled, or unfocused, and avoid the push to diagnose him with, and medicate him for, an attention disorder like ADHD. What if Edison had stayed in school and were prescribed Adderall, a potent amphetamine drug commonly used to treat ADHD, for his “addled” thinking? Would we all still be sitting in the dark?

For children with a natural tendency to be active and moving, or who don’t learn best by sitting still and listening passively to an adult, school is not a good fit. These children are often frustrated by school and its rigidity, and teachers are frustrated by behavior that can make classroom control an issue. Schooling and normal childhood behaviors are very often incompatible. In fact, many of the families I know who decided to home-school their children–often without ever considering the option before–did so because they realized that schooling was crushing their child’s originality, creativity, and exuberance. Like Nancy Edison, they wanted better for their children.

Boston College psychology professor, Dr. Peter Gray, explains that ADHD diagnoses often begin with teacher evaluations and are fundamentally a school problem–not a child problem. He writes:

“What does it mean to have ADHD? Basically, it means failure to adapt to the conditions of standard schooling. Most diagnoses of ADHD originate with teachers’ observations. In the typical case, a child has been a persistent pain in the neck in school–not paying attention, not completing assignments, disrupting class with excessive movements and verbal outbursts–and the teacher, consequently, urges the parents to consult with a clinician about the possibility that the child has ADHD…. The child may then be put on a drug such as Adderall or Concerta, with the result, usually, that the child’s behavior in school improves. The student begins to do what the teacher asks him to do; the classroom is less disrupted; and the parents are relieved. The drug works.”

ADHD is fundamentally a “failure to adapt to the conditions of standard schooling.” Without schooling, as Dr. Gray discovered upon further research, “most ADHD-diagnosed kids do fine without drugs” and they “do especially well when they are allowed to take charge of their own education.” As schooling lengthens and becomes more restrictive–beginning at ever-earlier ages–ADHD diagnoses and drug treatments are likely to continue to skyrocket. According to data from the National Survey of Children’s Health, up to 15% of children are now diagnosed with ADHD. And between 1991 and 1995, the number of children aged two to four who were prescribed stimulant drugs for alleged attention disorders rose by 300 percent! [5] Toddlers on amphetamines!

Nancy Edison was brave. She saw the energy and creativity in her young son, and also spotted quickly the ways in which schooling smothers both. She removed her son from school and allowed him to learn at home in a self-directed way, through books and hands-on experimentation. She connected him to resources to help him learn and then allowed him the freedom to direct his own education. She rejected schooling in favor of learning for Thomas Edison, and today all of us reap the benefits of her wise parental actions.

[1] Egan, Louise. Thomas Edison: The Great American Inventor. New York: Barron’s Educational Series, Inc., 1987, p. 11.

[2] Josephson, Matthew. Edison: A Biography. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992, p. 22.

[3] ibid.

[4] Josephson, Matthew. Edison: A Biography. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992, p. 412.

[5] Zito, Julie Magno, et al. “Trends in the Prescribing of Psychotropic Medications to Preschoolers,” JAMA 283, no. 8 (2000).

Kerry McDonald

Kerry McDonald has a B.A. in Economics from Bowdoin and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard. She lives in Cambridge, Mass. with her husband and four never-been-schooled children. Follow her writing at Whole Family Learning.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

#education #history #Thomas Edison #Education #US History

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thegloober · 6 years ago

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How to Be Creative (Ep. 354)

Vincent van Gogh is often characterized as a tortured artist. Among the mental disorders scholars diagnose him with: manic depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. (Photo: Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “How to Be Creative.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

There are thousands of books on the subject, but what do we actually know about creativity? In this new series, we talk to the researchers who study it as well as artists, inventors, and pathbreakers who live it every day: Ai Weiwei, James Dyson, Elvis Costello, Jennifer Egan, Rosanne Cash, Wynton Marsalis, Maira Kalman, and more. (Ep. 1 of the “How to Be Creative” series.)

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

What do you think when you hear the word “creativity”? Truth be told, creativity is having a bit of a moment. There are thousands of books on the subject, many written in the past decade. It’s become a corporate buzzword, right up there with “innovation” and “disruption.” It’s at the center of a whole lifestyle movement: online classes and Facebook groups and real-life meetups. There are creativity coaches, of course, and gurus, offering to rearrange your life to add more creative spice. So we here at Freakonomics Radio got to thinking: with so many people spending so much time and money and energy in pursuit of this thing called “creativity” — well, we wondered if there’s anything systematic to be learned about it? What if we started by simply defining the term. We asked a bunch of academics who study creativity, as well as some artists, musicians, scientists, and inventors: how do you define creativity?

Charlan NEMETH: You know, it’s actually harder than one might think.

Pat BROWN: Well, people use that word in lots of different ways to mean lots of different things.

Saul PERLMUTTER: There’s a huge amount of what goes under the heading of “creativity” that just has to do with a willingness to stick to a problem and a pleasure in it.

John HODGMAN: So, starting with nothing, having an idea, letting the idea pull you forward, getting it down, making it right.

Pat BROWN: “Okay, bingo, this is how we’re going to do it.”

Teresa AMABILE: It can’t just be different for the sake of being different, because that’s the definition of madness, I guess.

Teresa Amabile is a psychologist and a professor emerita at the Harvard Business School. She’s spent her career studying creativity, particularly in education and work settings. But I asked her: how is it even possible to empirically study something as diffuse as creativity?

AMABILE: Many people have the sense that it should not be studied scientifically, that you should not try to apply science and objective thinking to the magic of creativity, that it’s somehow in the spiritual realm. As you might guess, I don’t take that approach. I think that it can be studied scientifically without destroying the excitement and the sense of magic about creativity.

For economists, the concern hasn’t been about preserving the magic of creativity; they generally avoid the topic because it seems so touchy-feely.

David GALENSON: There’s sort of two questions: why do economists care? And the answer is economists really haven’t cared about creativity.

David Galenson is an economist at the University of Chicago. He does care: his central research interest is the life cycles of human creativity.

GALENSON: Why should they care? The single-most important problem for the discipline of economics is economic growth. Why are some countries rich and others poor? And virtually all economists agree that the single-most important source of economic growth in the long run, what really makes a country rich, is technological change. Well, technological change is just a lot of people making discoveries. So, it would seem to be a very big question, how do people make innovations?

* * *

Among the scholars who study creativity, there is no real consensus on who has it or even exactly what it is.

Charlan NEMETH: I was just looking recently and reminded of that old fable that if you have people blindfolded, looking at an elephant…

Charlan Nemeth is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies entrepreneurs and creative scientists.

NEMETH: …and one of them is looking at the tail, he thinks it’s a snail he’s touching. And if you have someone approaching it from the side, he thinks it’s a wall. And it’s just a reminder, in a way, that what you focus on, to some extent, determines how you think creativity works. In many ways, it’s a very difficult, and still to some extent mysterious phenomenon. So if you get somebody studying it in business innovation, for example, separate from studying Nobel laureates, or separate from looking at it in experimental tasks, for example, in a lab. So it’s very hard to compare those because they use different definitions of the end product as being creative or not.

But you’ve got to start somewhere. And that’s why Teresa Amabile starts with a basic definition that’s accepted within the field of psychology.

AMABILE: We identify creativity as essentially novelty that works. It has to be somehow feasible, workable, valuable, appropriate to a goal. And it gets a little a squidgy when we’re talking about the arts. What does “appropriate” or “valuable” mean in the arts? But I think even there, pure novelty just for the sake of novelty isn’t really going to do it. It has to be somehow expressive of something that the artist was trying to convey or evocative of a response that the artist was trying to evoke.

“Novelty that works.” I think that’s a great starting point. What if we run that definition past a creative type — Michael Bierut for instance. Bierut is a world-renowned, much-awarded graphic designer: you’ve seen his logos; his work is in museums. How does he like defining creativity as “novelty that works”?

Michael BIERUT: Yeah. I mean there’s this famous formulation by the 20th century designer Raymond Loewy who designed the Lucky Strike package and the livery of Air Force One among other things. He used — he had this four-letter formulation: M.A.Y.A.: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. And it was based on his theory that everyone has these two impulses. And one is the desire for regularity and comfort, and the other one is the quest for surprise and novelty, right? If you have too much regularity and comfort, you get bored. If you get too much surprise and novelty, you get overexcited wired and distracted and exhausted. It’s the idea that it’s novelty with a purpose — that purpose is the element that actually is about expectation and expectations fulfilled. And the novelty part of it is the idea that those expectations might be fulfilled in a way that you haven’t seen before.

It turns out that psychologists have come up with a way to test our ability to produce “novelty that works.” Charlan Nemeth again:

NEMETH: It’s called the “Uses Test.” Basically if I ask you to give me all the uses you can for a brick, you could say that you could build a house, you could build a factory, and you could build a road. And that’d be three ideas, but they’re all basically building. A more creative answer would be that you could build a house, you could use it as a platform to hold a cup of coffee, you could use it as a missile to throw through someone’s window as protest. And other tests of creativity all have that element to it: they see if the mind tends to go wide and down different routes and that it can even make connections through circuitous ways of getting there.

That’s one way to measure someone’s degree of creative thinking. But how about studying creativity the other way around — starting with people that everyone agrees are wildly creative? That’s the route chosen by Dean Simonton. He is a professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis.

Dean SIMONTON: I wanted to study creativity and genius and leadership, but I wanted to do it in a way that was different than what most psychologists did. Because most psychologists, they study, really, college undergraduates who happen to be taking a Psych 1 class. And they have to volunteer to participate. And those are not the people I wanted to study. And so I had to figure out a way of studying people like Michelangelo or Beethoven or Einstein when I couldn’t get them to come to my laboratory — particularly since most of them were deceased, which made it kind of awkward. So, I started developing various ways of studying genius at a distance, measuring their personality, measuring their intelligence, looking at their childhood and adolescence, the nature of their career.

Stephen J. DUBNER: Did you have a pretty smooth path through academia then, to become a Ph.D.?

SIMONTON: Oh no, I had a lot of times where I had to struggle. For example, when I decided I wanted to study real creators, and real geniuses, instead of college students, I had a hell of a time trying to put together a thesis committee. Because not everybody thought that that was even a legitimate form of doing psychological research.

DUBNER: Because why?

SIMONTON: Because at that time, and it is still the case — in fact, in many ways it’s even more true — the laboratory is considered to be the acme of science, having a lab in which you collect your data. And in the case of psychology, a lab means a place where, for the most part, you bring in college students to study. Something about 86 percent of all research in psychology is based on college undergraduates.

DUBNER: That’s a very very narrow cohort, not just age-wise but also background-wise and IQ-wise and all that, it’s pretty homogenous. What about just the fact that even good lab experiments, forget about all the bad ones, that it doesn’t really represent the real world well enough, especially in the realm of psychology, but also economics, I would say. Was that a concern for you as well, or no?

SIMONTON: Oh yeah, it was definitely. To me, there’s a distinction that is made between what’s called internal validity and external validity. And internal validity has to do with the power of making causal inferences from your research, and laboratory experiments are really really great in internal validity. But external validity is — does it really tell you anything about what’s happening in the real world? What often happens when you want to study something in the lab that is actually in the real world, you do a simulation. But you have no way of knowing whether or not that simulation actually represents what happens out there. For example, I wanted to find out what were the social, cultural circumstances that were responsible for why, in some periods you have golden ages with lots of geniuses, and other times you have dark ages, where it’s really hard to find anybody who even knows what they’re talking about. Right?

DUBNER: How do you do that in a lab?

SIMONTON: How do you do that? I wanted to look at the impact of war. I wanted to look at the impact of having role models in your field when you’re growing up. I wanted to look at the impact of the political system, whether you had a lot of independent states or whether it was a big one unified empire. And those are things you just can’t study in the laboratory. You can’t say, “Hey, imagine you’re growing up in the Middle Ages, and how creative do you feel?”

So how did Simonton go about studying this incredible range of factors?

SIMONTON: Well actually the story goes back to elementary school, believe it or not. When I was in kindergarten, my kindergarten teacher came to our house and told my parents — I came from a working-class background, in fact my dad didn’t graduate from high school. And they said, if you want your son to do well in school, you need a set of encyclopedias, World Book Encyclopedias, and that it would really help him. And these books are designed from K-12 and very useful for writing term papers, and all that kind of stuff.

DUBNER: Those were expensive. That was a big deal.

SIMONTON: Yeah. That was expensive. It was an amazing purchase for them to make. And I started browsing through them. And one thing that is characteristic of the World Book, is they have lots of pictures. And I saw lots of pictures of strange-looking people, people with beards, people with long hair, people of different ethnicities, periods, whatever. And I wondered, how did they get in that? How did they get their entry?

DUBNER: Ooooh, yeah.

SIMONTON: Why were they so important? And particularly since I realized my parents didn’t have entries, my elementary school teachers didn’t have entries, I was always curious about just how you become eminent enough to end up in an encyclopedia, or just have someone write a biography of you.

DUBNER: Was it — envy is not the word I’m looking for. Did you want to belong to that tribe, and you were trying to figure out how to get there? Or you were more curious about who were these people and where did they come from?

SIMONTON: Well, it was a combination. I wouldn’t say it was envy, but it was curiosity about how they got there, and could I be in that group? Do I have what it takes?

DUBNER: And what do you have to do to get it there?

SIMONTON: Yeah. And what do you have to do? What’s the process? And is it something that you can develop as well?

Simonton learned to pay attention to all the details in the biographies he was reading.

SIMONTON: And it would talk about where they came from. Sometimes it would mention their birth order. Sometimes it would talk about their education and maybe some of the struggles they went through, and then their career. And then histories also have a lot of information about what’s going on externally, whether or not there’s any wars going on, whether or not there was a dictatorship or a democratic government. There’s also information having to do with personality, like this person was introverted or this person was extroverted. We know, for example, that Newton had a lot of characteristics that suggest that he was a high-functioning autistic. And he was very, very introverted. And we can see that from his behavior, as well as having some paranoid psychosis attached.

DUBNER: So, let me ask you the really obvious question. When you study people like Michelangelo and Beethoven and Einstein, who, I think most people would agree, were pretty good at what they did, and maybe all the way up to creative genius. Obvious question, what did you discover about creativity and genius? I guess, what do they have in common?

SIMONTON: Well first of all, I have to say that artists and scientists are not equivalent as geniuses. But they also have things that they do share. They are all very intelligent in a general-intelligence way. Not necessarily in terms of taking an IQ test, but they’re very sharp. They love what they’re doing. They’re absolutely committed to doing what they’re doing. They want to spend their whole life discovering the nature of the universe, or creating incredible paintings on the ceiling, or whatever it happens to be, and they are willing to overcome all sorts of obstacles and all sorts of struggles.

Like Michelangelo and the agony and the ecstasy scenario: even though he was recognized very early as a genius, he had constant struggles. And he often had major projects terminated, like with Pope Julius II. And it’s not easy to be a genius. All of them, whether they’re scientists or whether they’re artists, have that tremendous drive and commitment and determination to keep on going, even when they’re failing and failing and failing.

At this point, you may be starting to think: well, what Simonton’s describing sounds an awful lot like what’s known as the 10,000-hour rule of excellence.

SIMONTON: In our research, we call it the 10-year rule. There’s a little arithmetic that makes them equivalent, 10,000 hours equals 10 years. But, in any case, that is absolutely unquestionable, that you have to establish an expertise and — you have to know what you’re doing. You have to have the tools of the trade. Now, sometimes people enter fields where there’s really not that much to learn because they’re brand-new fields. When Galileo, for example, invented his telescope and pointed to the skies and saw all these things that are not supposed to be there — there weren’t supposed to be mountains on the moon. There weren’t supposed to be moons circulating around Jupiter. There weren’t supposed to be spots on the sun, and so forth and so on. He was creating a domain from scratch. So, he didn’t have to spend ten years learning something that was already obsolete. He was inventing his own field.

DUBNER: So being first is always a good idea.

SIMONTON: Yeah, if you want to avoid all the hard work of studying, just be the first in a given domain.

* * *

This is the first episode in a new, recurring series about creativity — which, for empirically-minded people like us, is a notoriously squishy topic. The psychologist Teresa Amabile again:

AMABILE: So there are a few myths about creativity that are very popular.

So let’s at least clear up a few myths, shall we? First off, when most of us think about creativity, we focus on the arts — music and film, the visual arts, writing, and so on. Maybe you also think of a scientist or a researcher in the lab, thinking up experiments to test a new hypothesis. That’s all understandable, since these are people who make a living through their creativity. But Amabile thinks that view of creativity doesn’t go nearly far enough.

AMABILE: Creativity is possible in all realms of human activity. If we define creativity as doing something novel that works, that is valuable in some way, it’s absolutely possible in everything that humans do.

One of my favorite examples of creative thinking outside the arts is the story of John Snow, the English doctor who’s considered one of the pioneers of epidemiology. In mid-19th-century London, Snow was trying to identify the source of cholera outbreaks. Many doctors thought it was spread by “miasma,” or “bad air.” Snow thought it maybe had to do with germs in the water supply. Using maps, statistics, and common sense, Snow identified one pump whose contaminated water had caused nearly 200 deaths in a single outbreak of cholera. Over the ensuing centuries, Snow’s breakthrough would help save countless lives. And that strikes me as a deeply creative act.

Seth GORDON: Yeah, I think that’s right. That’s an example of profound creativity that isn’t artistic or artistic with a capital A.

That’s the filmmaker Seth Gordon. He grew up with two social scientists as parents; now he directs big Hollywood films and also makes lots of TV shows and smart documentaries.

GORDON: I think actually the most creative discipline I’ve ever witnessed in person is probably coding. Because you’re creating the language that you then employ to make something happen. That is profoundly creative. And whether that’s for making a game or whether that’s creating a program or whether that’s — I mean, in a way maybe the most creative thing I’m aware of in the last 10 or 15 years is the Stuxnet virus.

He’s referring to the computer virus, generally thought to be created by American and Israeli programmers, which in 2010 attacked Iran’s nuclear program.

GORDON: That thing is unbelievable, like what it was, what it did, and how it accomplished it. But I don’t think anyone would call that creative in any normal sense. It’s bad, right? But it’s making something that never existed before and tricked everyone for a very long time. It’s amazing.

Creating computer code that can shut down your enemy’s nuclear centrifuges — yes, I can see how that’s creative. Some people see a lot of creativity in sports. Here’s Dana Gioia, the poet laureate of California and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Dana GIOIA: I don’t like sports, but you’ve got to admire the energy, creativity, innovation that goes into sports. And it’s very similar to arts. It’s a way of focusing human energy to create these symbolic encounters, which have enormous emotional resonance to audiences. So, I think it’s a mistake always to talk about the arts about being about artists. The arts are also about audience. It’s about community, it’s about this conversation between the creator and the receiver.

Margaret GELLER: I mean, what I think what one of the things people don’t understand is that everyday people are creative.

That’s the astrophysicist Margaret Geller, who in her everyday work helped pioneer the mapping of matter in the universe.

GELLER: You go in the kitchen to make dinner. You put a different spice in the dish. That’s creative. You’re planting your garden, you make a new flower arrangement — it doesn’t have to be a big thing to be creative.

Maybe not, but some practitioners of the creative arts — the humorist John Hodgman, for instance — do draw a line.

John HODGMAN: I would make a small distinction. It’s sort of the distinction between being a stand-up comic versus being an actor. When you are cooking, you’re following a recipe. When you’re acting, you’re following a script and direction. Those are arts, to be sure, but they’re interpretive arts, rather than purely creative arts, where you are solely, or in collaboration, responsible for creating something out of nothing. Developing a recipe or inventing a new kind of Afghan pattern or whatever it is. If you’re following a direction, right, that is an interpretive art, of which many people become craftspeople and masters of, and it’s a beautiful thing. It’s just enjoyable in and of itself.

It may be enjoyable, but as Hodgman sees it, true creativity occupies a higher realm. Teresa Amabile takes a more inclusive approach.

AMABILE: One of my favorite things to do when I’m talking to managers is say, “Okay everyone, what do you most want creativity in your organizations?” They yell out, “R&D, marketing, advertising!” Great, great, great, great. “Okay, so is there anywhere in your organization where you do not want creativity?” Somebody will yell out “accounting” and then everybody laughs. And people say, “Well, you think of ‘creative accounting,’ you think of Enron, you think of all these examples of cooking the books.” Yeah, yeah, right. That’s funny. And yes, we want to avoid that kind of creative accounting. But then I ask them, “Is it true that you don’t want people in your accounting department to think about what they do creatively ever?” Then I give the example of my colleague Robert Kaplan coming up with activity-based costing many years ago and how that was a true creative breakthrough in accounting.

But in a time when everyone is encouraged to be creative — are there downsides to that? Especially if there’s not attention to go around?

SIMONTON: Can I give you one example?

Dean Simonton again:

SIMONTON: This just happened recently, and it happened near where I live, so it’s even more prominent. We had someone who walked into the YouTube headquarters and started shooting people up because she thought that they were stifling her creativity, that she had some creativity via video uploads that was not reaching the largest possible audience. I have never seen any of her videos, and you have to know Farsi to understand most of them. But the point is that she thought it was worth killing people because her creativity was being stifled. I think she would have been better off just becoming an accountant or something, rather than trying to be a creative.

And there’s the other issue here. We live in a society where we are inundated with creativity. It is so easy to put yourself up there. You can start your own blog. You can upload your paintings. You can upload your music. You can do all that. In earlier times, you had gatekeepers. You actually had to have a patron who was willing to pay for your marble for your sculpture.

DUBNER: You sound like you’re, for the most part, not in favor of this total democratization of creativity.

SIMONTON: I don’t really care. But I mean if someone is happy being a Sunday afternoon painter, by all means do it. Just don’t give it to your relatives and force them to find some spot in the living room to hang it up.

DUBNER: When I hear that phrase, “creative genius,” and we do hear it a lot, I sometimes wonder if it’s a little bit of an unfortunate pairing. In that, people who are not geniuses don’t feel they have the permission therefore to be creative.

SIMONTON: Well, creativity and genius are separate topics, and there are many examples of geniuses who were not particularly creative. And on the other side, there’s a lot of creative people out there, a lot of creativity. There are people who are just phenomenally witty in conversations at parties. There are people who can put together an amazing recipe from just random scraps of stuff available in the pantry. And that all counts as creativity.

DUBNER: If you personally had to pick that you could only be good at one, would you be very creative or a genius?

SIMONTON: I would probably pick being creative, because I think being creative is much more fun than just being a mere genius. What do you do as a mere genius? You wallow in your genius-hood?

That’s not to say that genius doesn’t exist, or that certified geniuses haven’t come up with some pretty amazing things.

Walter ISAACSON: Well, I do think that there are certain geniuses that truly can make mental leaps the rest of us can’t.

That’s Walter Isaacson, who teaches history at Tulane and has written several best-selling biographies of big, big thinkers.

ISAACSON: That could be the way Einstein understood, after a while, that time is relative depending on your state of motion. This is something no physicist had ever even really thought of. But likewise, you can have a genius just in ordinary things. When Steve Jobs figured out the iPod and how to have it be a simple, sleek, personal product that would put a thousand songs in your pocket — in its own small way, that was a leap of genius as well.

On the other hand, there are some people, widely considered to be creative geniuses …

Elvis COSTELLO: Hello, I’m Elvis Costello.

… a songwriter, for instance, whose melodies and lyrics are practically beyond belief …

Music: Elvis Costello, “Beyond Belief”

COSTELLO: That’s a pretty good compliment.

DUBNER: I think everyone who knows your music, including me, would consider you an extraordinarily creative person. You’re the kind of person that people use the phrase “creative genius” on.

COSTELLO: That’s really crazy. I don’t really think in terms of definitions like a name tag, but if you actually asked me I say I was a worker of a kind. I work at what I do. And then there might be moments of inspiration that visit you unexpectedly.

DUBNER: Can you give, can you give an example.

COSTELLO: Any song arriving is a mysterious sort of thing. I mean, it can range from carrying around a phrase in a notebook for four years before it joins up with some other thoughts, or a line of melody that seems to bring it to life and allows you to represent something that you want to share with people. Or a song can just appear, the whole thing, the words and music. Time stops and —

DUBNER: Really, that’s happened?

COSTELLO: Oh yeah.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether Elvis Costello belongs on the creative-genius list. In any case: there’s one characteristic that we almost universally associate with such people: they’re tortured. Either they burn so bright that they flame out early and die young, or they spend long lives wracked by schizophrenia or depression or at least garden-variety neurosis. Maybe the most famous, most defining example of this is Vincent van Gogh, with his nervous breakdowns and self-mutilation, and eventual suicide. Dean Simonton has looked at the incidence of mental illness in creative types through the ages. And there is a correlation between creativity and mental illness. But it depends on the kind of creativity you’re talking about.

SIMONTON: There’s a relationship between how much constraint the creative genius has to operate under, and their tendency towards mental illness. A scientist operates under a lot of constraints. A scientist has to come up with theories that are consistent with the facts. It has to be logically coherent. It has to fit in with what previous scientists have been doing, and so forth. And, in our culture, artists don’t operate that way. Particularly since the Romantic period — anything goes. But there are times and places where the arts have extremely high constraints imposed on them. Japanese haiku, for example, is a very constrained form. You have a certain number of syllables to work with. You also have a certain number of themes that are considered to be more appropriate for haiku.

So what’s interesting is that as you get into domains that are very very constrained, mental illness tends to be very rare. And then if you go into more and more unconstrained forms of expression, then you also do it at risk of having more mental illness, as well as having all sorts of horrible experiences in childhood or adolescence. And there’s a study published on this, where you can compare Nobel prizes in physics with Nobel Prizes in literature, and they’re not cut from the same cloth at all.

DUBNER: I think if you look at American winners in literature — most of them were alcoholics, right?

SIMONTON: Yeah, alcoholics. They often dropped out of school. They had tremendous ups and downs in their education, if they even finished formal education. Whereas the physicists came from perfect family backgrounds, professional families. Nothing happened. Nobody died.

DUBNER: Excellence in physics is building within a domain that must be mastered first, and that requires a certain set of resources and skills and an ability to color within the lines. Yes?

SIMONTON: And you’re expected to stay within the box. Because the box actually defines what is science.

DUBNER: So interesting.

SIMONTON: I mean, I published an article in Nature a few years ago. But they wrote their own title, and they made it deliberately provocative. They said, “After Einstein, Genius Is Extinct.” Woah! And immediately I got inundated with all sorts of mail, e-mails mostly, from people, some of whom agreed with me.

DUBNER: And did you take credit for writing the headline in those cases where they agree?

SIMONTON: Yeah, right. But others wrote and said, “What about me?” And they said, “I’m a genius and I’m after Einstein. In fact, I’ve actually disproven everything that Einstein got credit for and I’m still waiting to get my Nobel Prize.” And they’ll publish this stuff on the web, usually their own personal website. And you look at it, and it violates all the constraints of science. I mean, a basic thing is, you have to obey high school algebra, for example. I know that seems really obsessive, but you have to obey high-school algebra.

DUBNER: Well I mean, we’re laughing about it, but on the other hand in language, let’s say, right? You can break language, you can go way outside the bounds of formal English or any other language, and it can be considered poetry. But I cede that science is a different ballpark.

SIMONTON: And in the case of poetry, it’s actually astonishing how far you can push the edge. Like Ezra Pound, for example, really pushing the edge of intelligibility.

Simonton looked at the prevalence of mental illness in different types of creative people. Visual artists and writers were on the high end of the scale, with poets the most pronounced: 87 percent of them experience some kind of mental disorder. How does that compare to the general population? According to one widely accepted study, around 46 percent of Americans experience some sort of mental disorder during their lifetimes. So artists and writers are considerably higher than average. But: Simonton found that scientists have a considerably lower tendency for a mental disorder: only around 28 percent. And if you include all creative types in the tally, Simonton found that they have lower rates of mental illness than non-creative people. Creative behavior is in fact often a marker for good mental health. So if you’re looking for some magic formula for the relationship between creativity and mental illness …

ISAACSON: I don’t think there’s one formula for that.

Walter Isaacson again.

ISAACSON: Ben Franklin was a happy, well-adjusted kid — even though he was a runaway from his brother, who tried to keep him as an apprentice. Leonardo da Vinci was pretty tortured, had all sorts of manic periods of his life where he was both depressed and elated. Somebody like Einstein, deeply focused. Steve Jobs had both demons and angels inside of his head. So I don’t think you can make one blanket pattern, to say creative people have some special mental challenges or abilities.

Let’s go back to Vincent van Gogh, who’s arguably the model of the tortured artist. There have been many posthumous attempts to diagnose Van Gogh; among the theories: manic depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. Many people, when they look at the fantastical swirls and the vibrant yellows and blues in Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” see see a picture of madness itself. But what if the arrow is moving in the opposite direction? Consider this: Van Gogh was in and out of hospitals during the final years of his life. It’s very likely that his doctors treated his epilepsy with digitalis, an extract of the foxglove plant. He even made a painting of one of his doctors posing with sprigs of foxglove. Well, one of the side-effects of digitalis? The color yellow overwhelms other shades, and swirly halos can appear around objects. So it may be that Van Gogh’s paintings were more influenced by the cure than the disease. Or maybe not. It’s impossible to know, in part because our understanding of the mind has changed so much since then. Some recent research suggests that highly creative people often have what’s called “cognitive disinhibition”— basically, they lack the filter that keeps you from getting sensory overload just by walking down the street. Which means they’re constantly being pinged by random stimuli; in theory, this could help you notice things that most people ignore. Cognitive disinhibition, not surprisingly, is also associated with mental illnesses like schizophrenia So it would seem that the line between pathology and creativity, at least in some cases, can be quite fine.

Jennifer EGAN: There are a lot of parallels between fiction writing and being schizophrenic.

That’s Jennifer Egan.

EGAN: And I’m a novelist and a journalist.

Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her 2010 novel A Visit From the Goon Squad. Her brother Graham was an artist who had schizophrenia and died by suicide in 2016.

EGAN: He heard voices all the time, but it wasn’t the way I hear voices — although he was very funny guy.

DUBNER: Joked with you that you got paid for it and he was tormented by it?

EGAN: Exactly. He heard voices intrusively, as if there were a radio on in his head. And it really kept him from being able to concentrate. His voices would speak to him in very cruel ways, and that made it very hard for him to function. It just boggles the mind to think about what that would really be day in and day out. He was in his own private war all the time and you could really see it. I mean he looked like he’d just come back from a tour of Iraq. He was drawn, and he would be exhausted. So in that way, I don’t have any of that to deal with. I feel so lucky that my brain mostly seems to work as it should. Talk about a gift. I mean a lot of people don’t have that.

DUBNER: Do you feel that the cliché throughout history of the mentally tortured artist, do you think it’s overblown?

EGAN: I don’t know. I guess it’s probably not. I mean it’s easy to romanticize that vision but that that romantic picture comes from somewhere and I am lucky enough to be on a fairly even keel, but I’ve also had a lot of therapy. I mean we have advantages now in terms of mental health that people didn’t have 100 years ago or really even 50 years ago. I mean even now honestly if my brother were a young man now becoming symptomatic for the first time he would have options that he didn’t have then. Maybe artists don’t have to live that way now in the way that they did.

DUBNER: A lot of people worry that if they need treatment including medication, a lot of creative people worry that it will kill their creativity, change their creativity, change the way they think about things.

EGAN: Well, I would tend to think that it’s the opposite, that that the craziness is actually getting in the way of the creativity more than fueling it. I mean in my brother’s case, it was so stark. I mean he was stark raving mad without medication. Absolutely out of his mind. And with medication, he still heard voices all the time, but he basically understood that they weren’t real. So for him it was the choice between having some kind of a life and having absolutely no life. So I guess I really resist the romanticization of mental illness. Virginia Woolf on medication, if I had to guess and of course I have no way of knowing, would have done all the wonderful things she did and not committed suicide and been able to do more.

So one thing we can say about creativity is that the connection between it and mental illness is far more nuanced than the stereotype. As is the case with most stereotypes. But what about the more general stereotype of the highly creative person — essentially, the idea they are a select few? The idea that perhaps they’re simply born that way — and that we muggles should content ourselves with admiring their output, perhaps envying it a bit — but that we should generally just keep out of their way. Is that really the best way to think about creativity? Or should we all strive to be creative? That’s a question we put to everyone we’ve been interviewing for this series. Here’s Teresa Amabile, who’s spent her career studying the topic.

AMABILE: Should we all strive to be creative? Yes we should, because doing things differently in ways that work is the only way that human progress happens.

All right then! Who’s not in favor of human progress? Which means that all of us — in our way, on some dimension — have reason to sharpen our creative abilities. So how do we do this? That will be one of the preoccupations of this series. But don’t expect easy answers.

SIMONTON: Too many people want a one-size-fits-all. “What do I need to do to be creative?” And I’m afraid there’s no one-size-fits-all.

That’s Dean Simonton; and here’s Walter Isaacson:

ISAACSON: I do resist the type of books that say, “Seven easy lessons to being creative,” or, “The 14 secrets to innovative leadership.” I don’t think you can distill everything into a list like that, which is why it’s useful to read the biographies of different people.

Let’s put aside for the moment that Isaacson has written biographies of people like Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci; I don’t think he’s just trying to sell more books here.

ISAACSON: The leadership skills of a Benjamin Franklin came from bringing people together, finding common ground, and being very civil in his discourse when he tried to create compromises necessary to make the Constitution. That was very different from the leadership style of a Steve Jobs, who drove people crazy, but also drove them to do things they didn’t know they’d be able to do. So I think it’s useful to look at different creative leaders and then, after you have done so, look inside yourself and to say, “I’m better off being more like Ben Franklin, or I’m better off being more like Leonardo da Vinci, trying to mix art and science. Or I’m better off being like Steve Jobs, driving a team crazy but driving them to do things they didn’t know they could do.” And you can understand your own skills by comparing them to what great innovators and creative people have done in the past.

All right, that makes sense. Given the vagaries of our topic, it also makes sense to address it both systematically and individually, interviewing creativity scholars as well as lots of creatives themselves — sound good?

* * *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam and Matt Frassica. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rosalsky, Greg Rippin, Alvin Melathe, Harry Huggins, and Zack Lapinski. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Teresa Amabile, psychologist and professor emerita at the Harvard Business School.

Michael Bierut, graphic designer.

Elvis Costello, musician, singer, songwriter, and composer.

Jennifer Egan, novelist and journalist.

David Galenson, economist at the University of Chicago.

Margaret Geller, astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Dana Gioia, poet laureate of California and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Seth Gordon, filmmaker.

John Hodgman, humorist.

Walter Isaacson, biographer and professor of history at Tulane University.

Charlan Nemeth, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dean Simonton, professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis.

RESOURCES

“Vincent van Gogh’s yellow vision,” Anna Gruener (2013).

“Are Genius and Madness Related? Contemporary Answers to an Ancient Question,” Dean Simonton, Psychiatric Times (2005).

“Scientific genius is extinct,” Dean Simonton, Nature (2013).

“Creativity and chronic disease Vincent van Gogh,” Paul Wolf (2001)

EXTRA

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf 2010).

The post How to Be Creative (Ep. 354) appeared first on Freakonomics.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/how-to-be-creative-ep-354/

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jeroldlockettus · 6 years ago