• An essay on light in the paintings of Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour.
“When one looks at La Tour’s paintings, it is hard not to see signs of the devotional culture of his time: a Counter-Reformation Catholic world that valued stillness, interior reflection, and meditative attention, and that found spiritual meaning in restraint and candlelit quiet. This devotional context is not just part of what makes the paintings so moving, but what allows them to speak across four centuries to the question of attention. In today’s grief over the loss of it and the largely ineffective rallying cries to gain it back, the consequences are often measured by how much less we are able to learn or accomplish, but not as much is said about attention as a form of love, as perhaps the only means available to humans to elevate a person or a thing into the realm of the sacred, and how the loss of it strips us of the chance to bestow it. La Tour has something to tell us about true drama that Caravaggio doesn’t, really—about the way that it is not about drawing attention but about giving it, and how it unfolds not in the moment of action or at the apex of emotion, but in the stillness of looking so closely for so long, that it has the power to transform.”
“We often think of the Renaissance as a rediscovery of Greek and Roman thought and of the best of its humanism, but in fact, since time and history move in one direction only, it was less a rebirth than a relearning how to see. It’s something we seem to easily forget in our dark ages, both personal and historical, during those long periods in which we look but fail to attend to what we see, and forget that seeing, really seeing, is its own source of light.”
• An interview (and article) about musical variations and creativity.
“The greatest consensus around divergent thinking is that it’s the core of creativity: being able to proliferate options to an open-ended problem rather than seizing on the same solution over and over again.”
“It’s hard to imagine creativity without divergent thinking. How are you being exploratory? How are you being adventurous? A theme and variations is a very overt demonstration of that process, because the whole idea is to generate novel versions of the same source.”
“Human beings have what’s called the serial-order effect: The longer we spend thinking about something, the wilder and more unusual our ideas tend to get.”
“Gen A.I. is constrained to the most statistically likely solutions. It’s fast, but it stays within a very small sphere of possibilities. Human beings go to edge cases. Time gives us the opportunity to diversify ideas and to see how well what we’ve made holds up.”
“One of my frustrations with creativity research is that time is often written out of the equation, because most experiments are very short. I think time is one of our greatest allies in the creative process.”
“They are proficient laborers rather than artists. In what other field is taking the credit for somebody else’s brilliance so venerated?”
• Brett’s Sound Picks: Joep Beving’s “When humans do algorythms” (2026)
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