Filmmakers Ben Watts and Ivan Kander have put together this impressive supercut of writers struggling with writer’s block, based on 53 popular films. While fun, it also reveals the depressing depiction of writers as mostly male and almost entirely white. Then again, this is just another symptom of #OscarsSoWhite – gone Pulitzer. 

Complement with the cognitive science of the optimal writing routine and Lou Andreas-Salomé, the first woman psychoanalyst, on creative block in letters to Rilke. 

(via Open Culture)

“We only own something because everybody agrees that we do.”

Fascinating Design Matters conversation with beloved children’s book author and artist Oliver Jeffers about duality and the paradox of ownership, which he explores in his brilliant allegorical book This Moose Belongs to Me. 

From Darth Vader to Marie Antoinette to Jesus, the lives of historical figures and pop culture icons in minimalist pictogram summaries. 

For George Lucas’s birthday, Star Wars reimagined as a Muppets comic. 

Russian food stylist and photographer Tatiana Shkondina recreates iconic paintings in food. Pictured here, Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” – a painting that was cross-disciplinary even in original, inspired by a famous comet and offering a visionary model for understanding the science of fluid dynamics – in blueberries and rice. 

Pair with The Modern Art Cookbook.

Thirteen teachers from four different come together with thirteen New York City high school students for two weeks to read, write, and perform an imaginative remixing of Frankenstein as part of an educational experiment called Performance at the Center.

An 11-year-old boy recreates David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in Lego – a superb addition to these visual interpretations of the massive novel.

The Art of Silence – a montage of Martin Scorsese’s “deliberate and powerful use of silence.” Pair with the origin and cultural evolution of silence.

For George Lucas’s 70th birthday today, Star Wars reimagined as a Shakespearean play.

Rise of the Patent Troll – filmmaker Kirby Ferguson of Everything is a Remix fame, a longtime advocate for how remix culture fuels creativity and predatory intellectual property laws can stifle it, is back with a fantastic new series titled This Is Not a Conspiracy Theory.

Mya Gosling’s three-panel summaries of literary classics – the best thing since Kate Beaton’s literary comics and those pictogram visual summaries of pop culture and historical events.

Pair with The Graphic Canon, a compendium of classical literature reimagined in comics. 

Mark Ronson at TED 2014.

Sure, this might be true of music – it's what Duke Ellington was doing with jazz – but it also applies to how all creativity works. Lest we forget, it was another Mark, Twain, who so memorably and insightfully observed that "all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.“

New favorite site: Corpus Libris, which applies the concept of analog augmented reality to book covers. Best thing since Sorted Books.

(via this isn’t happiness)

In an age where everything is a remix and a culture built on the fact that everything builds on what came before, the New Yorker considers whether copyright law failing to live up to the realities of art.

Also see what Duke Ellington teaches us about the gray areas of originality vs. plagiarism.

A map of the Internet in the style of antique cartography by artist Jay Simon, inspired by xkcd’s now-classic map of online communities – a charming play on the notion of maps as power and propaganda. 

(via Maps Blog)