Visual, performing, and literary artists plus arts enthusiasts are becoming founding members of Res Creativa. There is no other organization that unites individual creators, regardless of discipline, based on our capacity for creative thinking and our passion for creativity and democracy. However, to coexist, interact, and move from passive observation to active engagement, Res Creativa will need…
As more creative practitioners say yes to becoming founding members of Res Creativa each founder wants to reset political chaos with tranquility and hope. Yesterday, in the first post of this series, I suggested that Res Creativa could build a civic leadership program, one that brings creative intelligence directly into public decision‑making. Today’s post, along…
When 34 people said yes to becoming Res Creativa founding members they did so before they knew exactly what they were saying yes to. I read every response, and then I read them again. What came back wasn’t a list of credentials or demands. It was something quieter and more durable. A consistent expression of belief…
You do this all the time. You start with a clear sense of where something is going before you know every step. You feel the arc of a performance before it begins. You can hear the finished piece before anyone else can. Then you build it. That is not guesswork. It is a real skill.…
There’s a conversation we keep not having. We talk about what artists contribute to culture. We talk about the economic value of the creative industries. We argue (endlessly) about arts funding. What we rarely say out loud is something more fundamental: that the cognitive habits of creative practice, the actual way a poet thinks, the way a…
Your mind, your creativity, and your skills no longer matter to these giants. Billionaire Peter Thiel’s company, Palantir, intends to upend humanity and replace the US Constitution with a 1000-year republic. In this model, an echelon of techno-nationalists will hold reign over a caste-based system of human beings. The Heritage Foundation (authors of Project 2025…
You played Saturday night. Maybe a bar, maybe a wedding, maybe a corporate event that paid the rent for two months. You were good. (You know you were good and the room felt it.) By Sunday morning, nobody in any position of civic authority knew you existed. Not the city council member deciding which neighborhoods get investment. Not…
A new community is forming to bring creative voices into democracy. Help recover our history and shape the future. Your skills are the missing piece. You Know What a Sentence Can Do Not approximately. Not in theory. You know it the way a carpenter knows wood … from years of working against the grain of…
Every city of any ambition has run one of these programs. The format is familiar. A cohort of twenty, thirty, forty rising professionals. Monthly sessions over an academic year. Tours of city hall, the water treatment plant, the hospital, the school district, the transit authority, the police department. Lunch with the mayor. A retreat somewhere…
Twenty-some years ago, an urban theorist made a compelling case for people like us. He had data. He had maps. He had a name for what he saw … a class of people whose work turned on making new things, imagining new forms, solving problems that didn’t have precedents. Scientists and architects. Composers and coders.…