Creativity was like a flaky friend who never remembers to RSVP but then appears at the party in a Gatsby-level gown and with a gift of expensive champagne. She didn’t seem to have a favorite day of the week or type of weather she thrived in. I imagined her swirling a dry martini and laughing at my naive hubris when I thought I could control her.
My work now depended on this invisible force who kept strange hours and threw tantrums without warning. I’d endure weeks at a time where she’d fail to visit me and I’d start doubting my judgment, and then she’d throw open the doors and come through with a dramatic “Miss me?”
But, analysis by thylacine specialists rapidly debunked the photos as a case of mistaken identity. The event is the latest in a tradition of extravagant claims about photographic or video evidence of lost or unknown species that don’t pan out. Why do these cycles occur so regularly, at times even convincing experts? The answer, psychologists say, may lie in quirks of the human mind and how we process information that is at once familiar and difficult to perceive.
As a sociocultural and material force, tourism is so large as to be incomprehensible. The difficulty of understanding it in full requires us to break it down into parts, an exercise not unlike the act of travel itself: We can’t fully take in the places we visit, so we instead form impressions from bits and pieces.
Genetic destiny is a central theme of The Code Breaker, Isaacson’s portrait of the gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna, who, with a small army of other scientists, handed humanity the first really effective tools to shape it. Rufus Watson’s reflections encapsulate the ambivalence that many people feel about this. If we had the power to rid future generations of diseases such as schizophrenia, would we? The immoral choice would be not to, surely? What if we could enhance healthy human beings, by editing out imperfections? The nagging worry – which might one day seem laughably luddite, even cruel – is that we would lose something along with those diseases and imperfections, in terms of wisdom, compassion and, in some way that is harder to define, humanity.