Last week was hard. Each morning seemed to bring another reminder of how fragile our common life has become. We mourned beloved artists whose work had quietly accompanied us for decades. Floods, fires, and storms swept away homes and livelihoods. Civilians were assaulted in cities that once felt ordinary. Political decisions continued to unsettle institutions…
The imagination has a curious double life. It allows us to invent symphonies and constitutions. It also allows us to invent enemies. That may sound like a contradiction, but it is simply a truth about being human. The same faculty that helps us envision a better future can also persuade us that people we barely know…
Musicians understand something policymakers have largely forgotten: tradition is not the enemy of innovation. Every musician begins with an inheritance. A jazz standard has a structure. A sonnet has fourteen lines. A blues progression has twelve bars. A fugue has rules. A raga has conventions. Even improvisation happens within a shared framework. Form is not…
For months, I’ve been asking artists to imagine helping strengthen democracy. I’ve come to think I was asking the wrong question. The question wasn’t how artists could become more civically engaged. It was this: What have artists been practicing all along that healthy democracies cannot function without? That realization changed the way I think about Res…
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…
I thought this season of life would be quieter. Instead, the world feels louder, faster, and more unstable than I remember it ever being. Institutions feel strained. Leadership feels compromised. Public life feels staged. Many of us who have spent our lives creating feel a tension. Do we retreat into private practice? Do we disengage?…