A message to visual artists, performing artists, writers, composers, and everyone who has ever believed that what creators do actually matters. Who Showed Up First Some of you found Res Creativa through Substack. Some through a friend. Some through social media on a Tuesday when the news was bad again. You are sculptors, playwrights, directors, musicians…
Writers, musicians, visual artists, performers, designers … every creative discipline deserves a seat at the table where civilization gets decided. You Already Know Something Is Wrong Creativity is being treated as expendable. The arts are the first thing cut, the last thing funded, and never once consulted when the decisions that shape culture get made.…
Law has bar associations and courts. Science has academies and peer review boards. Journalism has ethics organizations and press freedom bodies. Religion has its own constitutions, its own councils, its own canon law. Medicine has licensing boards and oaths that have been taken for centuries. None of these institutions are perfect. Some of them have…
There has to be more that creative minds can do than shake their heads or their fists. I’m not interested in positioning artists anywhere on a political spectrum. That road leads straight to identity silos, and I’ve spent enough time trying to bust those up. What I’m interested in is gathering people who have an…
The most intellectually serious conversations you’ve had in the last five years probably happened on a screen. And that was nobody’s fault, was it? Not because the screen is a great place for thinking (it isn’t, really) but because nothing else was on offer. No congress, no commons, no table long enough. Just a feed.…
Your brain has more than one way to respond to the world. One response is rooted in fear and alarm. It is fast, reactive, and designed for survival. It narrows your attention to the threat in front of you. It sorts everything into safe and dangerous, us and them. It is very good at what…
Someone shared a reel with me recently. A man was explaining neuroscience research on how the brain processes threat versus curiosity. He was talking about why people think differently, why some instinctively reach for safety while others instinctively reach for the new. He framed it in political terms, and the comments were on fire. I…
A very creative person knows the feeling. You are standing in front of something that does not exist yet. There is no blueprint. There is no guarantee. There is only the decision to begin, and the set of skills you have built, through years of practice, for navigating exactly that uncertainty. A novelist staring at…
A working artist, a painter, a poet, a composer, a choreographer, a novelist, recognized and even celebrated in their field, can still feel completely unseen as a thinker. The discipline rewards the output, not the mind behind it. There is a particular loneliness in being known for your work but not for how you think. This…
A few days ago I asked my social media connections to send me the songs they reach for when they need them most. I expected maybe a handful of responses. Instead, I got a hundred songs. A hundred answers to the question of what joy sounds like. That flood of music has been sitting with…