The Novel as Journalism

Tom Wolfe is the great American novelist of the past 50 years. He was a pioneer of the “nonfiction novel” but never one to follow the crowd blindly. His Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was the nonfiction novel of the hippie movement. The Right Stuff (“What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman candle...and wait for someone to light the fuse?) was a little more nonfiction and a little less novel.

He thought the world needed a nonfiction novel about New York City and tried to write one. Instead, a single scene expanded into Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. The great novel turned into fiction: The Bonfire of the Vanities. It proved to be prophetic in two key scenes (that is, the fiction became nonfiction after the writing). One of those became the iconic news story of 1980s NY, but had to be cut from the book, causing him to ruefully quote Malcolm Muggeridge,

We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.

Wolfe reflects on the desire for new, specialized novels and shows why novels can do journalism better than journalism can.

Do You See the Volcano Tornadoes?

The American Association of Physics Teachers has posted the results of its 2015 photo contest. Sure the pictures are great; even better are some of the explanations that go with the winners.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Playful imagination and abundant talent: Postmodern Jukebox.

Design: Generating Creative Ideos

David Kelley thinks everyone is creative, at least until the creativity is driven out. He teaches a course in creativity at Stanford University in the heart of the most famously creative city in the most creative industry in the most creative country. Peter Robinson interviews him on Uncommon Knowledge.

Kelley's 5 steps in the creative process (The video gives more detail at 12 minutes.)

1. Empathize – bias for action: immerse yourself in the situation to be studied and see it from the typical user's perspective.
2. Define – Explicitly define the problem to be solved, then iteratively re-define at as your project progresses.
3. Ideate – with fluency and flexibility. Fluency says the way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas and flexibility says make them different from one another. Find your ideas from talking to users and experts, looking at other ideas and at the state-of-the-art.
4. Prototype – make something physical that lets people experience your idea.
5. Test – Put your prototype in front of your ultimate judges and see what they think. Take their suggestions and make it better.

More details in his book, his free 80-minute course or his YouTube videos.