Tom Waits For No One, above, is surely the only film in history to have won an Oscar for Scientific and Technical Achievement for its creator and a first place award at the Hollywood Erotic Film and Video Festival.
Director John Lamb and his partner, Bruce Lyon also deserve recognition for their taste in source material. Singer Tom Waits’ “The One That Got Away” is about as cool as it gets, and the animated Waits is a dead ringer for his then-28-year-old counterpart, with eyes and choppers slightly exaggerated for maximum effect.
The short was conceived as a demo model. Lyon and Lamb hoped to convince Ralph Bakshi, director of the feature-length, X‑rated, cartoon adaptation of R Crumb’s Fritz the Cat, to use their newly patented “pencil preview” technique on an upcoming project. The result is definitely more provocative than the non-narrative bouncing ball videos developers would use to show off fledgling CGI techniques a decade or so later.
A portion of raw footage shows Waits and exotic dancer Donna Gordon—who had previously appeared in John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie—slinking around a largely bare soundstage. The crew amassed 13 hours of video that were whittled down to 5,500 Rotoscoped frames. These were individually re-drawn, inked, and hand-painted onto celluloid acetate.
Gordon, whose animated look appears to have exerted quite an influence on the following decade’s cartoon femme fatale, Jessica Rabbit, recollected that her co-star was “very nice, shy and quiet” and that he smelled strongly of cigarettes and booze.
Just as Gordon’s fantasy stripper eluded the animated Waits, this innovative film failed to find distribution, and without commercial release, it sank into obscurity.
(I invite Waits fans to join me in imagining an alternate universe, in which it becomes the greatest Saturday morning cartoon ever, providing morning-after comfort to a very particular breed of hungover early-80s nighthawks.)
Last month, MTV News’ web site went missing. Or at least almost all of it did, including an archive of stories going back to 1997. To some of us, and especially to those of us old enough to have grown up watching MTV on actual television, that won’t sound like an especially long time. But if you remember the hit singles of that year — “Barely Breathing,” “Semi-Charmed Life,” “MMMBop,” the Princess Diana-memorializing “Candle in the Wind” — you’ll start to feel a bit more historical distance. And if you consider all that’s happened in not just music but entertainment in general over the past 27 years, coverage of that period of great change in popular culture and technology will seem invaluable.
It will thus come as a relief to hear that, despite Paramount Global’s corporate decision to purge MTV News’ online content (as well as that of Comedy Central, TVLand and CMT), much of the site has been resurrected on the Internet Archive, which now offers “a searchable index of 460,575 web pages previously published at mtv.com/news.”
So reports Variety’s Todd Spangler, noting that the content “is not the full complement of what was published over the span of more than two decades. In addition, some images in the archived pages of MTV News on the service are unavailable. But the new collection at least ensures, for the time being, that much of MTV News’ articles remain accessible in some form.”
MTV News itself shut down in May of last year. It had begun in 1987 as a segment called “This Week in Rock” anchored by a print journalist named Kurt Loder. “I was working at Rolling Stone and everybody that wrote about rock music, as it was called at the time, had a very down point of view about MTV,” Loder recalls in an interview with that magazine. But choosing to throw himself into this new form of infotainment gave him the chance to get to know the likes of Madonna, Prince, and Nirvana (the death of whose singer Kurt Cobain became one of his career-defining stories). “You could just fly off anywhere you wanted and do all this stuff,” Loder says. “It was a great time. I’m not sure it’ll ever be back, but something else will.” Whatever it is, may the Internet Archive be here to preserve it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
There are some words out there that are brilliantly evocative and at the same time impossible to fully translate. Yiddish has the word shlimazl, which basically means a perpetually unlucky person. German has the word Backpfeifengesicht, which roughly means a face that is badly in need of a fist. And then there’s the Japanese word tsundoku, which perfectly describes the state of my apartment. It means buying books and letting them pile up unread.
The word dates back to the very beginning of modern Japan, the Meiji era (1868–1912) and has its origins in a pun. Tsundoku, which literally means reading pile, is written in Japanese as 積ん読. Tsunde oku means to let something pile up and is written 積んでおく. Some wag around the turn of the century swapped out that oku (おく) in tsunde oku for doku (読) – meaning to read. Then since tsunde doku is hard to say, the word got mushed together to form tsundoku.
As with other Japanese words like karaoke, tsunami, and otaku, I think it’s high time that tsundoku enter the English language. Now if only we can figure out a word to describe unread ebooks that languish on your Kindle. E‑tsundoku? Tsunkindle? Contemplate the matter for a while.
The illustration above was made when a Redditor asked his daughter to illustrate the word “Tsundoku,” and she did not disappoint.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in July 2014.
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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his art blog Veeptopus.
Image via Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
Back in 2017, we featured the oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world here on Open Culture. Found in Speyer, Germany, in 1867, it dates from 350 AD, making it a venerable vintage indeed, but one recently outdone by a bottle first discovered five years ago in Carmona, near Seville, Spain. “At the bottom of a shaft found during construction work,” an excavation team “uncovered a sealed burial chamber from the early first century C.E. — untouched for 2,000 years,” writes Scientific American’s Lars Fischer. Inside was “a glass urn placed in a lead case was filled to the brim with a reddish liquid,” only recently determined to be wine — and therefore wine about three centuries older than the Speyer bottle.
You can read about the relevant research in this new paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports by chemist José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola and his team. “The wine from the Carmona site was no longer suitable for drinking, and it had never been intended for that purpose,” writes Fischer.
“The experts found bone remains and a gold ring at the bottom of the glass vessel. The burial chamber was the final resting place for the remains of the deceased, who were cremated according to Roman custom.” Only through chemical analysis were the researchers finally able to determine that the liquid was, in fact, wine, and thus to put together evidence of the arrangement’s being an elaborate sendoff for a Roman-era oenophile.
Though the funerary ritual “involved two men and two women,” says CBS News, the remains in the wine came from only one of the men. This makes sense, as, “according to the study, women in ancient Rome were prohibited from drinking wine.” What a difference a couple of millennia make: today the cultural image slants somewhat female, especially in the case of white wine, which, despite having “acquired a reddish hue,” the liquid unearthed in Carmona was chemically determined to be. With the summer now getting into full swing, this story might inspire us to beat the heat by putting a bottle of our favorite Chardonnay, Riesling, or Pinot Grigio in the refrigerator — a convenience unimagined by even the wealthiest wine-loving citizens of the Roman Empire.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you’ve lived or traveled in Japan, you know full well how much of daily life in that cash-intensive society involves the use of thousand-yen bills. Once considered the equivalent of the American ten-spot, the yen’s lately having fallen to its lowest value in decades means that it’s now worth closer to six U.S. dollars. This is good news for tourists, and especially so for tourists who appreciate the woodblock-print art of Hokusai, whose famous Great Wave off Kanagawa adorns the brand new ¥1000 banknote. Issued just yesterday by the Bank of Japan, it also bears the image of bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburō, who co-discovered the infectious agent of a bubonic plague outbreak in 1894.
The last revision of the ¥1000, twenty years ago, also featured a bacteriologist: Noguchi Hideyo, who identified syphilis as the cause of progressive paralytic disease. Before Noguchi, it bore the image of Natsume Sōseki, one of the most celebrated writers in the history of Japanese letters.
The Bank of Japan tends to roll out banknote designs for each official era, which begins whenever a new emperor ascends to the throne; the current one began in May of 2019, after Emperor Akihito stepped down and his son Naruhito stepped up. Other historical figures pictured on the currency of this Reiwa era, as it’s called, include Tsuda University founder Tsuda Umeko and “father of Japanese capitalism” Shibusawa Eiichi.”
A not just respected but popular and commercially successful artist, Hokusai knew a thing or two about capitalism himself. Yet he also had an uncommon eye for the beauty of Japan, his distinctive perceptions of which have been highly influential in both Eastern and Western art for nearly two centuries now. Japanese banknotes have previously featured images of Mount Fuji, Ogata Kōrin’s six-panel painting of irises, and a scene from the Tale of Genji. But this is the first time any has drawn from ukiyo‑e, the “pictures of the floating world” of which Hokusai was one of several masters who worked from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. A Great Wave bill is something to celebrate, but given that today happens to be the Fourth of July, let it be said that the pyramid with the eye is also pretty cool.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Americans doing “e‑mail jobs” and working in the “laptop class” tend to make much of the quantity of coffee they require to keep going, or even to get started. In that sense alone, they have something in common with Civil War soldiers. “Union soldiers were given 36 pounds of coffee a year by the government, and they made their daily brew everywhere and with everything: with water from canteens and puddles, brackish bays and Mississippi mud,” write NPR’s Kitchen Sisters. “The Confederacy, on the other hand, was decidedly less caffeinated. As soon as the war began, the Union blockaded Southern ports and cut off the South’s access to coffee.”
Smithsonian National Museum of American History curator Jon Grinspan tells of how “desperate Confederate soldiers would invent makeshift coffees,” roasting “rye, rice, sweet potatoes or beets until they were dark, chocolaty and caramelized. The resulting brew contained no caffeine, but at least it was something warm and brown and consoling.” (See video at bottom of the post.) The stark caffeination differential that resulted must count as one of many factors that led to the Union’s ultimate victory. Part of what kept their coffee supplies robust was imports from Liberia, the African republic that had been established earlier in the nineteenth century by freed American slaves.
“The Union’s ability to purchase and distribute coffee from Liberia, alongside other sources, was helping the army’s morale,” writes Bronwen Everill at Smithsonian.com. “In December 1862, one soldier wrote that ‘what keeps me alive must be the coffee.’ ” Meanwhile, a northern general famously gave this advice to other generals: “If your men get their coffee early in the morning, you can hold.” Many harrowing battles later, “at the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, Michigan soldier William Smith noted that the Confederate soldiers present were licking their lips hopefully, with ‘a keen relish for a cup of Yankee coffee.’ ” (Johnny Reb had presumably acquired this taste between those battles, when soldiers from both sides would meet and exchange goods.)
The Civil War in Four Minutes video above explains the coffee-drinking Yankee’s habits in more detail. “If there was an early morning march, the first order of business was to boil water and make coffee,” says actor-historian Douglas Ullman Jr. “If there was a halt along the march, the first order of business when the march stopped was to get that hot water going to drink more coffee.” Soldiers would keep their coffee and meager sugar rations in the same bag in order to ensure “the tiniest hint of sugar in every drop. Think about that the next time you order your caramel soy macchiato.” But such beverages were still a long way off after the Civil War, which gave way to the era of what we now call the Wild West — and with it, the heyday of cowboy coffee.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In 2013, the food writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan stumbled across an article in the Boston Globe describing a trove of digitized documents from Ernest Hemingway’s home in Cuba that had been recently donated to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, home of Hemingway’s personal archives. One line in the article caught her eye: “And the more mundane, like his instructions to the household staff, including how to prepare his hamburgers: ground beef, onions, garlic, India relish, and capers, cooked so the edges were crispy but the center red and juicy.”
Tan, a Hemingway fan and the author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, set out to find the recipe and try it. She reported her experiences on the Paris Review Daily blog. “I had made burgers before, countless times on countless evenings,” Tan writes. “This one was different; I wasn’t making just any burger — I was attempting to recreate Hemingway’s hamburger. And it had to be just right.”
Here is Papa’s favorite recipe for pan-fried hamburgers, as reported by Tan:
Ingredients–
1 lb. ground lean beef
2 cloves, minced garlic
2 little green onions, finely chopped
1 heaping teaspoon, India relish
2 tablespoons, capers
1 heaping teaspoon, Spice Islands sage
Spice Islands Beau Monde Seasoning — 1/2 teaspoon
Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder — 1/2 teaspoon
1 egg, beaten in a cup with a fork
About 1/3 cup dry red or white wine
1 tablespoon cooking oil
What to do–
Break up the meat with a fork and scatter the garlic, onion and dry seasonings over it, then mix them into the meat with a fork or your fingers. Let the bowl of meat sit out of the icebox for ten or fifteen minutes while you set the table and make the salad. Add the relish, capers, everything else including wine and let the meat sit, quietly marinating, for another ten minutes if possible. Now make your fat, juicy patties with your hands. The patties should be an inch thick, and soft in texture but not runny. Have the oil in your frying pan hot but not smoking when you drop in the patties and then turn the heat down and fry the burgers about four minutes. Take the pan off the burner and turn the heat high again. Flip the burgers over, put the pan back on the hot fire, then after one minute, turn the heat down again and cook another three minutes. Both sides of the burgers should be crispy brown and the middle pink and juicy.
Spice Islands stopped making Mei Yen Powder several years ago, according to Tan. You can recreate it, she says, by mixing nine parts salt, nine parts sugar and two parts MSG. “If a recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of Mei Yen Powder,” she writes, “use 2/3 tsp of the dry recipe (above) mixed with 1/8 tsp of soy sauce.”
Hemingway’s widow, Mary, published the same basic recipe in 1966 in the sixth volume of the Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery. The one-pound of beef was intended for only two servings. For more on Hemingway’s hamburger recipe and his culinary tastes, including a fascinating list of gourmet foods he had shipped from New York to his home in Cuba, be sure to read Tan’s article at the Paris Review.
In late-twenties Manhattan, a nineteen-year-old woman named Elizabeth “Lee” Miller stepped off the curb and into the path of a car. She was pulled back to safety by none other than the magnate Condé Nast, founder of the eponymous publishing company. Not long thereafter, Miller, who’d been studying at the Art Students League of New York, appeared on the cover of Vogue. It’s tempting to call this the first major episode of a charmed life, though that descriptor fits uneasily with the arc of her seventy years, during the last few decades of which she could never quite recover from having witnessed first-hand the liberation of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau — sights she shared with the American public as a war photographer.
Miller took pictures of not just the concentration camps, but also events like the London Blitz and the liberation of Paris. At the end of the war, she posed for an even more famous picture, bathing in Hitler’s tub on the very same day that the Führer later shot himself in his bunker.
Behind the camera in that instance was Life correspondent David E. Scherman, one of the notable men in Miller’s life. Others included the artist-writer Roland Penrose, the businessman Aziz Eloui Bey, and, before all of them, the surrealist photographer Man Ray, each of whom corresponded to a phase of the professional journey that took her from fashion model to fearless photojournalist.
You can see and hear that journey recounted by gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video at the top of the post. Just above is a British Pathé newsreel that shows Miller at home with Penrose in 1946, the year between the end of the war and the birth of their son Antony Penrose, who re-discovered and re-publicized his mother’s photography after her death in 1977. However belated her public recognition, it’s still surprising that a life like Miller’s, the events of which stretch even Hollywood plausibility, only became a movie last year. Lee still awaits wide release, but much has been written about the passion of star Kate Winslet that got it made. She’ll undoubtedly impress as Miller — but neither, rumor has it, is Saturday Night Live alumnus Andy Samberg’s David E. Scherman a performance to be missed.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
On a summer day in 1862, a tall, stammering Oxford University mathematician named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took a boat trip up the River Thames, accompanied by a colleague and the three young daughters of university chancellor Henry Liddell. To stave off tedium during the five-mile journey, Dodgson regaled the group with a story of a bored girl named Alice who finds adventure in the most unexpected places. By the day’s end, Liddell’s middle daughter, also named Alice, was so enthralled by this account that she implored the mathematician to write the story down. Some three years later, Dodgson would publish Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the nom de plume of Lewis Carroll (the pen name is an Anglicized version of “Carolus Ludovicus,” the Latinized form of Charles Ludwidge). The perennial children’s read was immediately popular, counting Oscar Wilde and Queen Victoria among its ardent fans, and has never been out of print since its initial publication in 1865.
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the original version of the book that Carroll presented to Alice Liddell in 1864, is presently housed in the British Library, which has graciously made it freely available online. You can view it here. The handwritten volume includes 37 crisp ink illustrations, all personally drawn by Dodgson. Discerning Alice readers will notice that these illustrations differ from the iconic images (and, to my eyes, very much superior) created by famed Punch magazine political cartoonist John Tenniel.
Title and illustrations aside, the original manuscript is considerably slimmer than the final version, containing roughly 12,000 fewer words.
These days, references to seventies television increasingly require prefatory explanation. Who under the age of 60 recalls, for example, the cultural phenomenon that was Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, an absurdist satire so faithful to the soap-opera form it parodied that it aired every weeknight, putting out 325 episodes between early 1976 and mid-1977? And even for those who do remember the show, it would surely require a stretch of the memory to summon to mind its minor character Garth Gimble, an abusive husband who meets his grisly fate on the sharp end of an aluminum Christmas tree. (We’ll set the question of how many remember aluminum Christmas trees aside for the holiday season.)
Garth Gimble was the breakout role for a musical comedian turned actor called Martin Mull, who died last week at the age of 80. Tributes have mentioned the characters he played on shows from Roseanne and Sabrina the Teenage Witch to Arrested Development and Veep.
But to those who were watching TV in the summer of 1977, Mull has always been — and will always be — not Garth Gimble but his twin brother Barth, host of a low-budget late-night talk show in the small town of Fernwood, Ohio, the setting of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Fernwood-2-Night premiered as a temporary replacement for that show (and thus as yet another expansion of the televisual universe created by mega-producer Norman Lear), but it soon took on a countercultural life of its own.
The fictional talk-show form of Fernwood-2-Night was ahead of its time; more daring still was its occasional arrangement of real-life guests. That roster included a young Tom Waits, himself a living embodiment of the blurred line between reality and fiction. As the show’s announcer Jerry Hubbard, Fred Willard puts all of his distinctive delivery into declaring Waits “very famous for Fernwood.” Mull plays Gimble as the kind of man on which the appeal of Waits’ art is wholly lost: “I know he sells a lot of albums, and he makes about half a million big ones in one year,” he says by way of introduction. “In my book, that spells talent.”
Naturally, Gimble is game to set the liquor-swigging singer up for an old groaner by remarking on the strangeness of talking to a guest with a bottle in front of him. “Well, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” Waits growls in compliance. This comes after his performance of the song “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King)” from his then-most recent album Small Change. It’s safe to say that many viewers on Fernwood-2-Night’s wavelength became fans of Waits as soon as they heard it. Nearly half a century later, they no doubt still remember his appearance fondly — at least as fondly as they remember the Wonderblender.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
So begins one translation of the Tao Te Ching’s 18th Chapter. The sentence captures the frustration that comes with a lost epiphany. Whether it’s a profound realization when you just wake up, or moment of clarity in the shower, by the time your mind’s gears start turning and you grope for pen and paper, the enlightenment has evaporated, replaced by muddle-headed, fumbling “what was that, again?”
“Intelligence comes forth. There is great deception.”
The sudden flashes of insight we have in states of meditative distraction—showering, pulling weeds in the garden, driving home from work—often elude our conscious mind precisely because they require its disengagement. When we’re too actively engaged in conscious thought—exercising our intelligence, so to speak—our creativity and inspiration suffer. “The great Tao fades away.”
The intuitive revelations we have while showering or performing other mindless tasks are what psychologists call “incubation.” As Mental Floss describes the phenomenon: “Since these routines don’t require much thought, you flip to autopilot. This frees up your unconscious to work on something else. Your mind goes wandering, leaving your brain to quietly play a no-holds-barred game of free association.”
Are we always doomed to lose the thread when we get self-conscious about what we’re doing? Not at all. In fact, some researchers, like Allen Braun and Siyuan Liu, have observed incubation at work in very creatively engaged individuals, like freestyle rappers. Theirs is a skill that must be honed and practiced exhaustively, but one that nonetheless relies on extemporaneous inspiration.
Renowned neuroscientist Alice Flaherty theorizes that the key biological ingredient in incubation is dopamine, the neurotransmitter released when we’re relaxed and comfortable. “People vary in terms of their level of creative drive,” writes Flaherty, “according to the activity of the dopamine pathways of the limbic system.” More relaxation, more dopamine. More dopamine, more creativity.
Other researchers, like Ut Na Sio and Thomas C. Ormerod at Lancaster University, have undertaken analysis of a more qualitative kind—of “anecdotal reports of the intellectual discovery processes of individuals hailed as geniuses.” Here we might think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose poem “Kublai Khan”—“a vision in a dream”—he supposedly composed in the midst of a spontaneous revelation (or an opium haze)—before that annoying “person from Porlock” broke the spell.
Sio and Ormerod survey the literature of “incubation periods,” hoping to “allow us to make use of them effectively to promote creativity in areas such as individual problem solving, classroom learning, and work environments.” Their dense research suggests that we can exercise some degree of control over incubation, building unconscious work into our routines. But why is this necessary?
Psychologist John Kounios of Drexel University offers a straightforward explanation of the unconscious processes he refers to as “the default mode network.” Nick Stockton in Wired sums up Kounios’ theory:
Our brains typically catalog things by their context: Windows are parts of buildings, and the stars belong in the night sky. Ideas will always mingle to some degree, but when we’re focused on a specific task our thinking tends to be linear.
The task of showering—or bathing, in the case of Archimedes (above)—gives the mind a break, lets it mix things up and make the odd, random juxtapositions that are the essential basis of creativity. I’m tempted to think Wallace Stevens spent a good deal of time in the shower. Or maybe, like Stockton, he kept a “Poop Journal” (exactly what it sounds like).
Famous examples aside, what all of this research suggests is that peak creativity happens when we’re pleasantly absent-minded. Or, as psychologist Allen Braun writes, “We think what we see is a relaxation of ‘executive functions’ to allow more natural de-focused attention and uncensored processes to occur that might be the hallmark of creativity.”
None of this means that you’ll always be able to capture those brilliant ideas before they fade away. There’s no foolproof method involved in making use of creative distraction. But as Leo Widrich writes at Buffer, there are some tricks that may help. To increase your creative output and maximize the insights in incubation periods, he recommends that you:
“Keep a notebook with you at all times, even in the shower.” (Widrich points us toward a waterproof notepad for that purpose.)
“Plan disengagement and distraction.” Widrich calls this “the outer-inner technique.” John Cleese articulates another version of planned inspiration.
“Overwhelm your brain: Make the task really hard.” This seems counterintuitive—the opposite of relaxation. But as Widrich explains, when you strain your brain with really difficult problems, others seem much easier by comparison.
It may seem like a lot of work getting your mind to relax, produce more dopamine, and get weird, circular, and inspired. But the work lies in making effective use of what’s already happening in your unconscious mind. Rather than groping blindly for that flash of brilliance you just had a moment ago, you can learn, writes Mental Floss, to “mind your mindless tasks.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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