January 21, 2012

The Rise of the New Groupthink

From the NYTimes:

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. […]

The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

Read on. (h/t: Jed)

412 notes

January 21, 2012

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

2,812 Plays →

soupsoup:

Etta James : At Last

429 notes

January 20, 2012

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else’s

Billy Wilder (via ninagarcia)

2,915 notes

January 20, 2012

bookmania:

“Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe [Manuscript, 2 p., ca. May 1849]. Clearly sensing that “Annabel Lee” would be his last poem, Poe took the unusual step, after finishing it in May 1849, of writing out several copies, of which this signed copy is one, and circulating them among his friends to ensure that the poem would not go unnoticed. Poe read the poem in lectures in Richmond and sold it, along with “The Bells,” to Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art for publication. However, it was first printed in the New-York Daily Tribune on October 9, 1849, only two days after the poet’s death, rushed into print by Rufus Griswold, who had received a copy for later inclusion in the tenth edition of The Poets and Poetry of America. Although at least four of Poe’s women friends claimed to have inspired “Annabel Lee,” the poet’s real motivation may be a reflection of his continued mourning for his wife, Virginia, who died two years earlier. (via Columbia.edu)

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January 20, 2012

CLEAN REGIME: My Holiday Skincare

thecleanbeautyblog:

I have to admit that, with sun, sand & Singapore Slings at the front of my mind, skincare was somewhere around number 143 on my list of priorities whilst I was away. Nevertheless, as someone with skin that likes to surprise me (dry! no, sensitive! wait… oily! and here’s a pimple!), I took a few products with me to keep my skin in check and, most importantly, protected from the sun’s rays.

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