The Fusion Of Art And Technology That

This Is How Great Intellectual Breakthroughs Usually Happen In Practice. It Is Rarely The Isolated Genius Having A Eureka Moment Alone In The Lab. Nor Is It Merely A Question Of Building On Precedent, Of Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants, In Newton's Famous Phrase. Great Breakthroughs Are Closer To What Happens In A Flood Plain: A Dozen Separate Tributaries Converge, And The Rising Waters Lift The Genius High Enough That He Or She Can See Around The Conceptual Obstructions Of The Age.

Most Of The Time, Criticism That Takes Pop Culture Seriously Involves Performing Some Kind Of Symbolic Analysis, Decoding The Work To Demonstrate The Way It Represents Some Other Aspect Of Society.

When It's A Sharing And Improvisational Meeting, Where You're Riffing Off Other People's Ideas, That Actually Can Be Productive.

I Suspect Millions Of People From My Generation Probably Have Comparable Stories To Tell: If Not Of Sports Simulations Then Of Dungeons & Dragons, Or The Geopolitical Strategy Of Games Like Diplomacy, A Kind Of Chess Superimposed Onto Actual History.

Keeping A Slow Hunch Alive Poses Challenges On Multiple Scales. For Starters, You Have To Preserve The Hunch In Your Own Memory, In The Dense Network Of Your Neurons. Most Slow Hunches Pass In And Out Of Our Memory Too Quickly, Precisely Because They Possess A Certain Murkiness. You Get A Feeling That There's An Interesting Avenue To Explore, A Problem That Might Lead You To A Solution, But Then You Get Distracted By More Pressing Matters And The Hunch Disappears. So Part Of The Secret Of Hunch Cultivation Is Simple: Write Everything Down.