Good Things to Read / Listen to

Among the interesting things that have come my way lately:

• Wired Magazine asks the question "What Kind of Genius Are You?" -- Excerpt: Picasso was a conceptual innovator. He broke with the past to invent a revolutionary style, Cubism, that jolted art in a new direction. His Demoiselles d’Avignon, regarded by critics as the most important painting of the past 100 years, appears in more art history textbooks than any other 20th-century piece. Picasso completed Demoiselles when he was 26. He lived into his nineties and produced many other well-known works, of course, but Galenson’s analysis shows that of all the Picassos that appear in textbooks, nearly 40 percent are those he completed before he turned 30. Cézanne was an experimental innovator. He progressed in fits and starts. Working endlessly to perfect his technique, he moved slowly toward a goal that he never fully understood. As a result, he bloomed late. The highest-priced Cézannes are paintings he made in the year he died, at age 67. Cézanne is well represented in art history textbooks; he’s the third-most-illustrated French artist of the 20th century. But of all his reproduced images, just 2 percent are from his twenties. Sixty percent were completed after he turned 50, and he painted more than one-third during his sixties.
• Speaking of Wired, I'm looking forward to reading Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Here's an interview with Mr. Anderson conducted by Instaspouses Glenn and Helen Reynolds.
• Lots of good content at Space and Motion having to do with science, philosophy, and other stuff. Plus, a gift shop!
• If you've never tried the BananaSlug search engine, give it a try sometime. They throw a random word into a Google search. It's really pretty cool!