The Creative Process in 10 minutes or less · Arts, Culture & Society: Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Creativity, Educ The Creative Process

“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”

“Philosophy is both an academic discipline and also something that everybody does. Everybody has to have reflective views about what's significant. They also have to justify to themselves why it's significant or important. The nature of justice itself, and the various opinions that have been written about in philosophy about justice, can get to a very high level. So there's this unusual connection between philosophy and human life. We've inherited from the Middle Ages, this incredible tradition that's now developed into a chance for young people to spend four or five years, in a way, released from the pressures of life. The idea to pursue your ideas a little further in these four years you have, exempt from the pressures of social life, allows philosophy to have a kind of position unique in the academy. In confronting what the best minds in the history of the world have had to say about these issues, the hope is that they provide for the people who are privileged enough to confront philosophy a better and more thoughtful approach to these fundamental questions that everybody has to confront.”

“We've got four billion years of biological accidents that created all of the intricate aspects of everything about life, including consciousness. And it's about what's going on in each of those cells at the time that allows it to be connected to everything else and for the information to be understood as it's being exchanged between those things with their multifaceted, deep, complex processing.”

“The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find home—that's the curse of the shoes. The title in Indonesian is Gentayanga, which is a word used to describe ghosts who exist in a liminal state. This is a metaphor for people who travel. I came up with the idea for this novel in 2009 when I was an Indonesian international student studying for my PHD in New York. When I went back to Jakarta, I felt like I was not at home, but New York wasn't my home either, so there's a feeling of being neither here nor there. I wanted to capture the sense of being everywhere, which is liberating, but also the sense of displacement.”

Environmentalists, writers, artists, activists, and public policy makers explore the interconnectedness of living beings and ecosystems. They highlight the importance of conservation, promote climate education, advocate for sustainable development, and underscore the vital role of creative and educational communities in driving positive change.

“As technology becomes more dominant, the arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch the things that the sciences can't tackle. What it's actually like to be a person? What's actually important? We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness, according to some metric. Or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. So, I think what's important really is just exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, being open-minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other as well. And the arts is an essential part of that.”