David Boles Blogs Album of the Year: Neil Young’s Storytone

For most of 2014, since June, the album I played every day to help keep me awake and inspired as I worked — was Jack White’s Lazaretto — that album had great verve and energy that fit any writing mood.

However, that all changed a month ago when Neil Young‘s latest masterpiece — Storytone — appeared on my musical horizon.

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The Titular, Circular, Cyclical and the Forlorn: Rescuing Robert Frost from Himself

Robert Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry.  He was an earthy icon and, in some eyes, an American shame, for the man could love only himself and not his children or his wife. I’m not sure if that’s a crime against himself, or his promises, but there is no denying the man was an original and he knew how to write and he knew what he was.

Marred by the mistake of genius, Robert Frost cared only for his poetry, and his legacy, and that’s why the new fascination with protecting Frost’s legacy on the page is so intriguing.

Continue reading → The Titular, Circular, Cyclical and the Forlorn: Rescuing Robert Frost from Himself

Cheating the Ten Thousand Hour Rule

We live the life of the Outlier and while that is a difficult existence in all realities, there is also a certain satiety in being able to view the mainstream from afar and learn from their mistakes in mass thinking.  SuperGenius author Malcolm Gladwell argues in his “Outlier” book that the rule for finding the greatest success in life costs you 10,000 hours of practice and study.

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Intellectual Elitism: The Fake Foreign Policy Genius List

How do you feel about a new “Genius List” of the “top 100 public intellectuals” that was decided by — and then published by — Foreign Policy in May?  Yesterday we had a curious, and oddly strange, addition to that list as voted by their readership to create the “top 20 public intellectuals.” 

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Leonard Cohen and the Hallelujah Lyric

SuperGenius is born in a moment of blinding beauty and then propagated in flashes of inspiration from one mind to another.

When those sparks ignite in a rapid-fire movement, a REM-like sleep flutters across a community of open minds, a new standard is set, a fresh meme is forever created, and the originator of the beauty becomes immortal.

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Moral Futurism and the Enemies of an Open Society

Karl Popper is one of the SuperGeniuses of our time, and his brilliant book — “Open Society and Its Enemies” — is a must read for anyone hoping to understand our necessary and active place in the world.

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Deepak Chopra, the Third Jesus and the Iraqi Wonder Woman

Deepak Chopra is one of those rare gifts to the rest of us: A true SuperGenius who inspires us with the inborn rhythms of storytelling while revealing the myth-making ability to heal humanity. Deepak’s latest treading into immortality is his latest book — “The Third Jesus” — where he argues we need to celebrate a third “Cosmic Christ” as a part of our ongoing religious enlightenment:

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