Virginia Prescott

Artists from one hundred and thirty-five countries have submitted sketches, doodles and ambitious notebook illustrations to The Sketchbook Project, a crowd-sourced art project that’s been exhibiting collective creativity from contributors worldwide since 2006. With more than twenty-seven thousand sketchbooks housed in its Brooklyn Art Library and a trusty mobile library hitting the road for a nation-wide summer tour, Sketchbook’s ever-growing collection of art shows no signs of slowing down; Steven Peterman, founder and director of operations for “The Sketchbook Project”, joins the program to tell us more.

Hemingway, Darwin, Joyce, Tesla and Picasso were all remarkably different in their temperament and creative output, but they had one thing in common: a successful routine. From Franklin’s solitary nude reading hour to Picasso’s silent lunch gatherings, the outstanding rituals and habits that created genius are as fascinating as they are unexpected. Combing through over 160 accounts of creative minds, Mason Currey’s new book “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work” uncovers the daily almanac of history’s most eccentric, troubled and genius figures. Mason’s writing has appeared in Slate, Print, and Metropolis, where he was an editor for six years.

A raging fire gutted the Al Hafeet tower late last month, a 20-floor residential building in the United Arab Emirate city of Sarjah.  The incident drew uncomfortable comparisons to other recent blazes in a region known for spectacular high-rise sky-scrapers.  One expert in the United Arab Emirates has estimated that 70% of high-rise buildings in the gulf are at a high risk of catching fire.  Here to discuss this growing safety concern is Bill Law, gulf analyst for the BBC News.

Last year we interviewed Pamela Yates about her documentary Granito: How to Nail A Dictator which details the indictment of General Efrain Rios Montt, believed to be responsible for the murder of 200,000 mostly indigenous Mayan Ixil people during the Guatemalan genocide.

The works of two important Chinese artists, the return of a festival of experimental sound, and a retrospective by a legend of pop art are all on the summer events radar of Michelle Aldredge.  She’s a writer and photographer and the creator of the Gwarlingo website and podcast. It’s an online resource for conversations about creativity and finds in the world of contemporary art.

After using email and using a search engine, looking for health information is the third most popular web activity for internet users. That’s according to a 2011 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. A new website combines that quest with the popularity of online crowd-sourcing...or putting communal wisdom to work on perplexing problems. CrowdMed is a site for crowd-sourcing medical diagnoses. It uses the collective wisdom of some actual – and mostly armchair -medical professionals to solve tough medical cases and diagnose rare diseases that left traditional healthcare professionals stumped.

Jared Heyman is founder of the online market research firm Infosurv, his new venture is CrowdMed.   welcome to word of mouth.

Clare Martorana worked previously as a general manager and editor-at-large of Web-MD, and now serves as an advisor for CrowdMed.

For years, fear of skin cancer has had us slathering 50+ SPF sunscreen, donning hats or avoiding prolonged sun exposure under umbrellas or shade. Some unexpected research recently out of Edinburgh University could shift the perception of sun as unrelenting enemy. In the study, UV rays were found to release a compound that lowers blood pressure. On the line to explain how we might weigh the sun’s benefits and drawbacks is Doctor Richard Weller,  Senior Lecturer of Dermatology at Edinburgh University.

Humans are vastly more social than most other mammals. Neuroscientists point to the development of our social brain as key to the survival of our species; early humans survived by cooperating with each other in the rearing of children, by hunting in bands, by organizing night watches. A battery of research reveals that people still need people.

The mass retirement of baby boomers could trigger yet another housing crisis. Boomers were responsible for roughly 80% of home construction in the 80’s and 90’s, and many of those homes were big, too big for empty nesters transitioning to a fixed income. Enter a housing solution that’s been with us all along: mobile home communities, or trailer parks.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of poet Sylvia Plath’s death by suicide, the singular lens through which many readers and academics have viewed her life, writing, and marriage. Now, a new generation is re-discovering Plath from a fresh perspective, one not colored by her sad and macabre death. 

A new data collection tool is being heralded as the first “mood ring” of the social media world. The “twittersphere” has become the home for millions and millions of micro-stories - fleeting tales of everyday life broadcast to the masses. Now, researchers at the University of Vermont are looking to extract a social pulse from Twitter’s vast output. Millions of tweets have been processed through UVM’s Hedonometer, which measures collective levels of happiness over space and time. Here to discuss the project - and the newly launched website, is Chris Danforth, associate professor at the University of Vermont’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics and one of the developers behind the Hedonometer.

In the four weeks since the Boston Marathon bombings, the One Fund set up to collect donations for victims has raised more than twenty-eight million dollars. The decision on how that money gets distributed goes to Kenneth Feinberg, the so-called “great decider”. 

At public hearings held last week at the Boston Public Library, Feinberg stated that there is not enough money in the One Fund to satisfy everyone. Here to discuss how dollars get assigned to tragedies is Juliette Kayyem, national security and foreign policy columnist for the Boston Globe. She’s former assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the department of homeland security.

After every errant tweet from another major news outlet, or the announcement of fresh layoffs from another print newsroom, many shake their heads and talk about the good old days, before false reports of WMD’s and internet news aggregators. We remember a time when Edward R. Murrow and other icons of objectivity were our revered national watchdogs, serving up the truth...one newspaper column or TV broadcast at a time.   But what if our idealistic view of American journalism's "golden age" is nothing but a nostalgic myth?  Todd Gitlin teaches journalism and communications at Columbia University. His recent article “The Myth of Journalism’s Golden Age” was recently featured in the Utne Reader.

A government lab announced earlier this month that it’s been operating a quantum internet at Los Alamos for the past two years. Which led us to wonder, um, WHAT IS A QUANTUM INTERNET???  Joining us to explain it is Rob Fleischman, Chief Technology Officer at Xero-Cole, and the guy we call to help us understand things like, you know, quantum technology.