[Attention! Despite my efforts to make this post spoiler-less, minor spoilers may have sneaked in… Read at your own risk :)] I haven’t watched many films from 2019 — yet. But I may have already noticed a trend: quite a few films released this year can be interpreted as (or…

Are there? Are there any large-scale regularities explaining how cultural items become “fashionable”? This question was asked in Alfred Kroeber’s paper “On the principle of order in civilization as exemplified by changes of fashion” precisely 100 years ago, in 1919. To answer it, Kroeber made something rather unexpected: a quantitative…

Recently, I was struck to see in the journal Science a weird piece about, of all things, Godzilla. Let’s clarify: I’m not a snob thinking that there is no place for Godzilla in a top academic journal. Quite the contrary: the more Godzillas, the better. The weirdness of this article…

Several years ago, sipping coffee at the sunny campus of Stanford, J.D. Porter, from the Literary Lab, and I were discussing cultural evolution. I tried to persuade J.D. that thinking of cultural items as “species”, which evolve, mutate, and get extinct, is a useful metaphor — or even more than…

I think that the question “How do creative ideas appear?” isn’t appreciated enough by the academics. It should get more attention. The reason is simple: if we better understand what creativity is and how it works, we can become better problem-solvers. Cancer? Poverty? Donald Trump? The biggest problems that the…

Recently I learned about Vox Borders, a travel show on YouTube, and immediately became a fan. I binge-watched all the episodes in one breath (fortunately, they were short), exhaled, and then asked myself: Why am I so attracted to it— almost addicted? …