The Creativity Code by Marcus du Sautoy
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From 2019, an exploration of AI’s incursions into the arts.
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Previously on OLM: James Wood and the Fall of Man
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This profile of James Wood from the OLM archives was written by Sam Sacks in December of 2014. . .
Read MoreThe Tools We Need
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The panic that arose across the country as the incredible reality of a Trump presidency began to sink in hit the book world with particular force. In his temperament, style and values, the new president seems almost purpose-built to oppose everything Barack Obama has stood for and accomplished. (The only things they appear to have in common are a love of golf and an on again-off again friendship with Hillary Clinton.) In few aspects is the gulf wider than in their respective attitudes to reading.
Read MoreMarilynne Robinson's Psalms and Prophecy
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Marilynne Robinson began her novel Housekeeping while completing a dissertation on Shakespeare as a graduate student. Initially she wrote what now form the book’s preliminary scenes as exercises in extended metaphors. Evoking her childhood home of Sandpoint, Idaho, a lake town in the panhandle of the state (in the book she renames it Fingerbone) and remotely drawing off her ancestors, Robinson simply wanted to see if she could still write something other than scholastic essays. Also, she has said, she wanted to impress her friends.
Read MoreBoth Sides, Now
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To the naysayers who complain that critics are nothing more than parasites of art and culture, A. O. Scott has dismaying news: You too are a critic, that very opinion constitutes criticism, welcome to the club, pull up a chair. The premise of his new book Better Living Through Criticism is that the act of criticism is synonymous with the act of thinking, in the manifold ways this can done—wondering, questioning, investigating, examining, shaping ideas, forming judgments. You might imagine criticism to be a more professional pursuit—in Scott’s case, for instance, in his capacity as a film critic for the New York Times, it sometimes involves writing in-depth excurses on the latest superhero blockbuster.
Read MoreFabergé Monsters
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One of the main problems for the backyard naturalist who wants to learn about dragonflies is the scarcity of books to turn to on the subject. Novice birders encounter no such difficulty: Bookstores devote entire shelves to both the practical and spiritual aspects of the pastime; field guides are plentiful to redundancy; virtually every ornithological species has at some point been celebrated in a standalone monograph. Layperson lepidopterists have to look a little harder, but even so, butterfly watching is an honored pursuit and handbooks and pocket guides are easily procured. The same goes for lovers of trees, wildflowers, seashells and even mushrooms—go book hunting for the mycophile in your family and you’ll turn up a remarkable selection. Conjure an interest in dragonflies, however, and the pickings are slimmer, and often written for specialists.
Read MoreJames Wood and The Fall of Man
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At one point in James Wood’s novel The Book Against God, the spiritually tortured narrator Thomas Bunting is transported to a painful recollection of adolescence. Thomas is the son of a kind and intelligent Anglican priest. His childhood was filled with love and attention. Then one day when he was 14, he says, he walked into his school’s assembly hall and, as though stepping through some kind of portal, entered into a state of self-consciousness:
Read MoreChilde Harold's Children
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F. Scott Fitzgerald could never quite get over his youth. He had managed so fully to take part in its opportunities that everything in adulthood savored of anticlimax. From his first days at Princeton—“the best country club in the world”—to the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, he experienced everything that custom entitles young people to experience, no matter how stupid or ridiculous it may be.
Read MoreThe Poison Tree
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The hardest thing about watching Norman Mailer reprise his public role as a loudmouthed buffoon is seeing the damage his performance has done to his newest novel, The Castle in the Forest. Mailer has been taking the stage in this part for, it is hard to believe, sixty years, since the publication of The Naked and the Dead in 1948. For sixty years he’s been bullying his way to the front of the proscenium and bellowing forth one self-indulgent diatribe after another. For sixty years he’s been picking fights and manufacturing front-page vendettas, refusing to allow a single cultural phenomenon to pass without weighing in, in terms sufficiently coarse and supercilious to somehow make every spectacle in part about him—and rather conveniently timing these irruptions to coincide with the publication of a new book.
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