"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." from NYT.

"The discovery process is remarkably social, and the social interactions come in amazingly diverse forms....People who think the Web is killing off serendipity are not using it correctly."

''There are ideas that can literally put you in physical danger, which this one can,'' he says. ''There are ideas that are socially dangerous, which this one is. There are ideas that are dangerous because of their potential to change things in a dramatic way, which this one also is. So by most definitions, I would say that not eating animals is a dangerous idea.''

"We have become information narcissists..." from NYT.

From the World Question Center 2011.

"The basic premise of construal level theory is that things that feel close get contemplated in concrete, literal terms while things that feel far away allow us to think in more abstract ways." from Wired.

"Is the beloved paper dictionary doomed to extinction? In this infectiously exuberant talk, leading lexicographer Erin McKean looks at the many ways today's print dictionary is poised for transformation." from TED.com

"The problem with these closed environments is that they make it more difficult to explore the adjacent possible, because they reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem, and they reduce the unplanned collisions between ideas originating in different fields." by Steven Johnson in the Wall Street Journal.

"What you think you know about fostering creativity is wrong. A look at what really works." from Newsweek.

…and how they got that way. A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!

The Arena for Accountable Predictions. The purpose of Long Bets is to improve long–term thinking. Long Bets is a public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake.

Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, who is curating a new exhibition at the Louvre in Paris, talks to SPIEGEL about the place lists hold in the history of culture, the ways we try to avoid thinking about death and why Google is dangerous for young people. from SPIEGEL.

"As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources...it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas." by Brian Eno in Prospect Magazine.

Introducing a New Magazine About the Ideas Behind American Culture.

Sputnik Observatory is a New York not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. We fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world.

for people who want to live well and do good.

by Getty Images.

a design-art-technology studio.

emergent intelligence and the web's potential. from adactio.

partially inspired by research work with kinetic typography.

set aside immediate technical and situational constraints.

as we collectively explore and design future directions for the web. from mozilla labs.

from the new york review of books.

an experiment in using social technology for social change.

with the right tools, and developed in a structured environment, ideas can be realized to their full potential.

the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery. by malcolm gladwell, from the new yorker.

working with your hands exercises different parts of your cerebrum than sitting and cogitating.

can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?

innovative, futuristic gadgets, devices, designs, and concepts.

from the new york times magazine.