A Deep Dive into the Mind of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson
“The rise and fall of the Beach Boys leader shows how crucial the brain’s executive function is to creativity”
Occasioned by the death of Brian Wilson on June 11, 2025, Scientific American has updated this article from 2017 (which was itself an update of a 2005 feature article) to discuss the relationship between creativity and mental illness:
Psychological studies also indicate that highly creative people share an elevated risk of serious mental illness. For certain individuals, such ailments may actually contribute to their soaring achievements. Yet often the same condition eventually ruins their inventiveness and their life. Perhaps no story better exemplifies how mental illness can free up creativity, then crush it, than that of Brian Wilson.
Summer Reading Challenges Aren’t Just for Kids
Summer reading challenges are all over the blogosphere. I’ve never participated in one because I don’t target my reading seasonally. But, according to this article, many people do: “A 2022 study found that 80 percent of public libraries in the United States have challenges open to all ages or specifically for adults.”
Are you doing a reading challenge this summer?
The Women Who Refused to Choose Between Mothering and Artmaking
“How a group of artist-mothers quietly rejected the reigning taboo of their era and forged a thriving practice of creativity as caregiving.”
In the MIT Press Reader, Jordan Troeller profiles a small group of women in San Francisco in the middle of the 20th century who resisted the era’s dominant narrative of “the ‘awful dichotomy’: the belief that artmaking and caretaking are at odds with one another, as two opposing and irreconcilable terms.”
Novels Inspired by Opinion Polls? They’re Here, and They’re Weird
“For ‘People’s Choice Literature,’ Tom Comitta wrote two books based on the likes and dislikes of American readers.”
Now, perhaps for the first time since Choose Your Own Adventure, Tom Comitta tweaks the equation in “People’s Choice Literature,” [which was published by] Columbia University Press on June 3. The hefty 584-page volume contains two distinct works: “The Most Wanted Novel” and “The Most Unwanted Novel,” each incorporating results of an opinion poll on the literary preferences of 1,045 readers from across the United States.
Neuroscience breakthroughs: Surprising truths about memory revealed in 7 recent studies
Recent discoveries in psychology and neuroscience are reshaping how we think about memory. Far from being a passive storehouse of past experiences, memory is an active, adaptable system influenced by emotion, attention, repetition, and even bodily processes like chewing.
These seven studies highlight how memories can blend together, become overly generalized under stress, or even form in non-neural cells. Together, they offer a clearer picture of the biological and psychological forces that shape our recollections and how those processes can go awry.
Four Great Sports Books That Go Way Beyond the Game
S.L. Price, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, tells us, “there’s a reason sports has long been the space where issues of race, sex, drugs, money, patriotism, civic pride and planning, child rearing, crime, international relations and, now, gender, regularly play out. We love it so much, too much probably, that we can’t help but pour all that we are into it.”
Here he offers us “a list of sports books that aren’t really about sports.”
Poisoned Pen Press Has Blazed a Trail in Subgenres to Become a Leading Mystery Imprint
This is a sponsored [read “PR”] piece, but I found the information about publishing informative.
I can’t stop using these 5 ChatGPT prompts — they’re next-level genius
My experience with AI is confined to asking Siri to turn on or off the flashlight on my phone. Yet I keep seeing articles by people who use AI to streamline their daily tasks and schedule or to ask some pithy existential questions. Here’s a case in point. I have no idea how one even goes about doing this, but I’m not losing any sleep over it.
If you have experience using AI in this way, I’d love to hear from you.
Diabolus Ex Machina
Chillingly, I found this article right after reading the one above.
Amanda Guinzburg writes:
Presented to you in the form of unedited screenshots, the following is a ‘conversation’ I had with Chat GPT upon asking whether it could help me choose several of my own essays to link in a query letter I intended to send to an agent.
What ultimately transpired is the closest thing to a personal episode of Black Mirror I hope to experience in this lifetime.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
Thank you for sharing “Diabolus Ex Machina.” I’m very glad to have supporting evidence for refusing to use AI to help with marketing my books. I’m getting tired of having to justify my position to use my own brain, even when it takes much longer than a machine.