Sublime

An inspiration engine for ideas

AllPeopleCollectionsArticlesAudioBooksFilesHighlightsImagesLinksNotesTextTweetsVideosSocial

Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas. And in Jamesian solitude, Sociopaths find ideas contending in their minds. The creative destruction they script in the world of Losers and Clueless is mirrored by a creative destruction in their minds. This process creates power, but destroys meaning, especially th

Venkatesh Rao • The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space (Ribbonfarm Roughs Book 2)

Selves Left Behind Reading biography—even the brief passages above about Tom, Karen, and Raymond—inevitably

Timothy Butler • Getting Unstuck: A Guide to Discovering Your Next Career Path

All across American society, from the right to the left, from sociologists to novelists to feminists to black liberationists, postwar thinkers were united in a quest to recover the autonomous self from the morass of mass society.

Samuel W. Franklin • The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History

The legendary sociologist C. Wright Mills proposed that the “sociological imagination”—an understanding of how our own experiences reflect broader social and historical forces—could help us link our seemingly private troubles to public issues. Burnout, a personal malady that indexes a broken labor system, is a prime candidate for such reimagining.

The Baffler • The New Neurasthenia

When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused.

Malcolm Gladwell • The Tipping Point

In other words, people living in the real world are embedded in social networks that incur obligations that have long-term consequences.

Robin Dunbar • Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

‘exploratory social science’.

Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

According to the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who between 1990 and 1995 studied the lives of ninety-one exceptionally creative people in the arts, sciences, business, and government, many of his subjects were on the social margins during adolescence, partly because “intense curiosity or focused interest seems odd to their peers

Susan Cain • Quiet

It is not only information that they need—in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it.