Notes

Introduction: Hitting the Hidden Target

1.     George Eliot, Middlemarch (Ware, Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 620.

2.     Darrin M. McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 229.

3.     The bizarre posthumous history of Einstein’s brain is recounted in Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain (New York: Random House, 2001).

4.     Paul G. Bahn, “The Mystery of Mozart’s Skull: The Face of Mozart,” Archeology (March–April 1991): 38–41; Luke Harding, “DNA Detectives Discover More Skeletons in Mozart Family Closet,” Guardian, January 8, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jan/09/arts.music.

5.     “Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA: Experts Unite to Shine Modern Light on a Renaissance Genius,” EurekAlert!, May 5, 2016, https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-05/tca-ldv050316.php.

6.     Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 119–20.

7.     As translated from the original German in Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 3rd ed., vol. 2, book 3, chap. 31 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1859), https://www.amazon.com/Die-Welt-Wille-Vorstellung-German/dp/3843040400, 627.

8.     Dylan Love, “The 13 Most Memorable Quotes from Steve Jobs,” Business Insider, October 5, 2011, https://www.businessinsider.com/the-13-most-memorable-quotes-from-steve-jobs-2011-10.

9.     Nikola Tesla, My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla, edited by David Major (Middletown, DE: Philovox, 2016), 55.

10.   Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, quoted in McMahon, Divine Fury, 90.

11.   See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Implications of a Systems Perspective for the Study of Creativity,” in Handbook of Creativity, edited by Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 311–34.

Chapter 1: Gift or Hard Work?

1.     Plato, Apology, translated by Benjamin Jowett, para. 8, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html.

2.     Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, edited by Nora Barlow (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 38.

3.     Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, edited and translated by H. M. Parshley (New York: Random House, 1989), 133.

4.     Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991), 284.

5.     Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, quoted in Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 179.

6.     Carmen C. Bambach, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 35, 39.

7.     Quoted in Helia Phoenix, Lady Gaga: Just Dance: The Biography (London: Orion Books, 2010), 84.

8.     Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 12.

9.     Tom Lutz, “Viewers Angry After Michael Phelps Loses Race to Computer-Generated Shark,” Guardian, July 24, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/jul/24/michael-phelps-swimming-race-shark-discovery-channel.

10.   Danielle Allentuck, “Simone Biles Takes Gymnastics to a New Level. Again,” New York Times, August 9, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/sports/gymnastics-simone-biles.html.

11.   Sade Strehlke, “How August Cover Star Simone Biles Blazes Through Expectations,” Teen Vogue (June 30, 2016), https://www.teenvogue.com/story/simone-biles-summer-olympics-cover-august-2016.

12.   “Simone Biles Teaches Gymnastic Fundamentals,” MasterClass, 2019, lesson 3, at 0:50.

13.   Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: MacMillan, 1869), http://galton.org/books/hereditary-genius/1869-FirstEdition/hereditarygenius1869galt.pdf, 1.

14.   On horse breeding and inbreeding, see Allison Schrager, “Secretariat’s Kentucky Derby Record Is Safe, Thanks to the Taxman,” Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/secretariats-kentucky-derby-record-is-safe-thanks-to-the-taxman-11556920680. On the subject of biological determinism generally, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), chap. 5.

15.   See Robert Plomin, Nature and Nurture: An Introduction to Human Behavioral Genetics (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2004).

16.   Andrew Robinson, Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9.

17.   Quoted in ibid., 256.

18.   Dean Keith Simonton, “Talent and Its Development: An Emergenic and Epigenetic Model,” Psychological Review 106, no. 3 (July 1999): 440.

19.   David T. Lykken, “The Genetics of Genius,” in Genius and the Mind: Studies of Creativity and Temperament, edited by Andrew Steptoe (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 28; Robinson, Sudden Genius?, 256.

20.   Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius (London: Hurst and Blackett, 2017 [1904]), 94 ff.

21.   Gilbert Gottlieb, “Normally Occurring Environmental and Behavioral Influences on Gene Activity: From Central Dogma to Probabilistic Epigenesis,” Psychological Review 105, no. 3 (1995): 792–802.

22.   K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, vol. 3 (July 1993): 363–406. See also John A. Sloboda, Jane W. Davidson, Michael J. A. Howe, and Derek G. Moore, “The Role of Practice in the Development of Performing Musicians,” British Journal of Psychology 87 (May 1996): 287–309.

23.   Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice,” 397.

24.   Ellen Winner, Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 3.

25.   On the career of Cézanne, see Alex Danchev, Cézanne: A Life (New York: Random House, 2012), 106, 110, 116; Lawrence Gowing, Cézanne: The Early Years (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 110.

26.   La Voz de Galicia, February 21, 1895, quoted in John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881–1906 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 55.

27.   Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 67.

28.   David W. Galenson, Old Masters and Young Geniuses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 24.

29.   Ibid., 23.

30.   Danchev, Cézanne, 12.

31.   “‘The Father of Us All,’” Artsy, February 6, 2014, https://www.artsy.net/article/matthew-the-father-of-us-all.

32.   Brooke N. MacNamara, David Z. Hambrick, and Frederick L. Oswald, “Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-analysis,” Psychological Science 8 (July 2014): 1608–18.

33.   Condensation of email of August 4, 2019, to which Mr. Chen appended the following: “P.S. I read this to my (Chinese) mother, and she doesn’t agree with the 20% to 80% argument. She thinks that work is above everything, 80% work 20% luck/opportunity. Tiger mom mentality, right? It’s interesting how different cultures/upbringing can influence one’s opinion over these issues.”

34.   On the development of a standardized IQ test, see Simonton, “Talent and Its Development,” 440–48; Darrin McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 178–85.

35.   Deborah Solomon, “The Science of Second-Guessing,” New York Times, December 12, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/the-science-of-secondguessing.html.

36.   Martin André Rosanoff, “Edison in His Laboratory,” Harper’s Magazine (September 1932), https://harpers.org/archive/1932/09/edison-in-his-laboratory/.

37.   Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 56–57.

38.   Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. IQ and similar tests can continue to be used, however, if they are a predictor of job performance and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, nationality, or gender.

39.   William E. Sedlacek, Beyond the Big Test: Noncognitive Assessment in Higher Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), 61–63.

40.   Catherine Rampell, “SAT Scores and Family Income,” New York Times, August 27, 2009, https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-income/; Zachary Goldfarb, “These Four Charts Show How the SAT Favors Rich, Educated Families,” Washington Post, March 5, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/03/05/these-four-charts-show-how-the-sat-favors-the-rich-educated-families/; Sedlacek, Beyond the Big Test, 68.

41.   Aamer Madhani, “University of Chicago Becomes the First Elite College to Make SAT, ACT Optional for Applicants,” USA Today, June 14, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/06/14/university-chicago-sat-act-optional/701153002/.

42.   Anemona Hartocollis, “University of California Is Sued over Use of SAT and ACT,” New York Times, December 10, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/us/sat-act-uc-lawsuit.html.

43.   See, e.g., Lenora Chu, Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 252; Sedlacek, Beyond the Big Test, 60.

44.   Caitlin Macy, “AP Tests Are Still a Great American Equalizer,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ap-tests-are-still-a-great-american-equalizer-11550854920.

45.   See, e.g., Caroline Goldenberg, “School Removes AP Courses for Incoming Freshmen,” Horace Mann Record, June 5, 2018, https://record.horacemann.org/2078/uncategorized/school-removes-ap-courses-for-incoming-freshman-class/.

46.   Adam Grant, “What Straight-A Students Get Wrong,” New York Times, December 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/college-gpa-career-success.html.

47.   Tom Clynes, “How to Raise a Genius,” Nature (September 7, 2016), https://www.nature.com/news/how-to-raise-a-genius-lessons-from-a-45-year-study-of-super-smart-children-1.20537.

48.   As summarized in Nancy Andreasen, The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius (New York: Dana Foundation, 2005), 10–13. See also Barbara Burks, Dortha Jensen, and Lewis Terman, Genetic Studies of Genius, vol. 3: The Promise of Youth: Follow-Up Studies of a Thousand Gifted Students (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1930).

49.   Marjorie Garber, “Our Genius Problem,” The Atlantic (December 2002), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/12/our-genius-problem/308435/.

50.   Malcolm Jones, “How Darwin and Lincoln Shaped Us,” Newsweek (June 28, 2008), https://www.newsweek.com/how-darwin-and-lincoln-shaped-us-91091.

51.   Thomas Montalbo, “Churchill: A Study in Oratory: Seven Lessons in Speechmaking from One of the Greatest Orators of All Time,” International Churchill Society, https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-069/churchill-a-study-in-oratory/.

52.   Ann Hulbert, Off the Charts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), 56. Andrew Robinson, “Is High Intelligence Necessary to be a Genius?,” Psychology Today (January 2, 2011), https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sudden-genius/201101/is-high-intelligence-necessary-be-genius.

53.   J. K. Rowling, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination (New York: Little, Brown, 2008), 23.

54.   Walter Isaacson, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 48.

55.   Duncan Clark, Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 44.

56.   Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 18–19.

57.   Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: An Intimate Portrait (London: W. H. Allen, 1948), 36–39. See also Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 18–19; Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 33.

58.   Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983), esp. chap. 4.

59.   Rowling, Very Good Lives, 11–23.

60.   Alison Flood, “JK Rowling’s Writing Advice: Be a Gryffindor,” Guardian, January 8, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2019/jan/08/jk-rowlings-writing-advice-be-a-gryffindor.

61.   Some psychologists have done just that. See Robert Sternberg, Juan-Luis Castejon, M. Prieto, et al., “Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test in Three International Samples: An Empirical Test of the Triarchic Theory of Intelligence,” European Journal of Psychological Assessment 17, no. 1 (2001): 1–16.

62.   Abraham J. Tannenbaum, “The IQ Controversy and the Gifted,” in Intellectual Talent, edited by Camilla Benbow and David Lubinsky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 70–74; Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 235. See also Robert Sternberg, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

63.   Quoted in Casey Miller and Keivan Stassun, “A Test That Fails,” Nature 510 (2014): 303−4, https://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7504-303a. See also Robert J. Sternberg and Wendy M. Williams, “Does the Graduate Record Exam Predict Meaningful Success and Graduate Training of Psychologists? A Case Study,” American Psychologist 52, no. 6 (June 1997): 630–41.

64.   William Sedlacek, email to the author, October 2, 2019.

65.   See George Anders, “You Can Start Anywhere,” in Anders, You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education (New York: Little, Brown, 2017), esp. 58.

66.   Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown, 2008), 80–84.

67.   Billy Witz, Jennifer Medina, and Tim Arango, “Bribes and Big-Time Sports: U.S.C. Finds Itself, Once Again, Facing Scandal,” New York Times, March 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/us/usc-college-cheating-scandal-bribes.html.

68.   Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz, “In College Admissions Scandal, Families from China Paid the Most,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biggest-clients-in-the-college-admissions-scandal-were-from-china-11556301872.

69.   John Bacon and Joey Garrison, “Ex−Yale Coach Pleads Guilty for Soliciting Almost $1 Million in Bribes in College Admissions Scandal,” USA Today, March 28, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/28/rudy-meredith-ex-yale-coach-expected-plead-guilty-college-admissions-scam/3296720002/; Melissa Korn, “How to Fix College Admissions,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-fix-college-admissions-11575042980.

70.   Long attributed to Einstein, but see “Everybody Is a Genius. But If You Judge a Fish by Its Ability to Climb a Tree, It Will Live Its Whole Life Believing That It Is Stupid,” Quote Investigator, April 6, 2013, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/06/fish-climb/.

Chapter 2: Genius and Gender

1.     Catherine Nichols, “Homme de Plume: What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male Name,” Jezebel, August 4, 2015, https://jezebel.com/homme-de-plume-what-i-learned-sending-my-novel-out-und-1720637627.

2.     See, e.g., “Employers’ Replies to Racial Names,” National Bureau of Economic Research, https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html.

3.     See, e.g., “Publishing Industry is Overwhelmingly White and Female, US Study Finds,” Guardian, January 27, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/27/us-study-finds-publishing-is-overwhelmingly-white-and-female.

4.     Sheryl Sandberg, “Women at Work: Speaking While Female,” New York Times, January 12, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/opinion/sunday/speaking-while-female.html.

5.     Christopher F. Karpowitz, Tali Mendelberg, and Lee Shaker, “Gender Inequality in Deliberative Participation,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 3 (August 2012): 533−47, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c0ef/981e1191a7ff3ca6a63f205aef12f64 d2f4e.pdf?_ga=2.81127703.1000116753.15841352521227194247.1574373344.

6.     Catherine Hill, Christianne Corbett, and Andresse St. Rose, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, AAUW, February 2010, https://www.aauw.org/aauw_check/pdf_download/show_pdf.php?file=why-so-few-research.

7.     Suzanne Choney, “Why Do Girls Lose Interest in STEM? New Research Has Some Answers—and What We Can Do About It,” Microsoft Stories, March 13, 2018, https://news.microsoft.com/features/why-do-girls-lose-interest-in-stem-new-research-has-some-answers-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/.

8.     Dean Keith Simonton, Greatness: Who Makes History and Why (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 33–34.

9.     Ibid., 37.

10.   Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Fountain Press, 2012 [1929]), 24.

11.   Ibid., 48.

12.   Ibid., 56.

13.   Quoted in George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, with His Letters and Journals, and His Life, vol. 2, edited by Thomas Moore (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1830–31), 275.

14.   Sean Smith, J. K. Rowling: A Biography: The Genius Behind Harry Potter (London: Michael O’Mara Books, 2001), 132.

15.   Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 53–54.

16.   Ibid., 56.

17.   Ibid., 35.

18.   Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, vol. 2, 399.

19.   Quoted in Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 246.

20.   Charles Darwin, “This Is the Question,” in The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809−1882, edited by Nora Barlow (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 195–96.

21.   Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (London: McGraw-Hill, 2012 [1964]), 77.

22.   Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 6th ed., vol. 3, translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, 1909), Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40868/40868-h/40868-h.html, 158.

23.   Arthur Schopenhauer, The Essays of Schopenhauer, edited by Juliet Sutherland, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11945/11945-h/11945-h.htm#link2H_4_0009.

24.   Quoted in Darrin McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 161.

25.   Emma Brockes, “Return of the Time Lord,” Guardian, September 27, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/sep/27/scienceandnature.highereducationprofile.

26.   Suzanne Goldenberg, “Why Women Are Poor at Science, by Harvard President,” Guardian, January 18, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/18/educationsgendergap.genderissues.

27.   Alexander Moszkowski, Conversations with Einstein, translated by Henry L. Brose (New York: Horizon Press, 1970), 79.

28.   Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art, Past and Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 231; Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” 1971, http://davidrifkind.org/fiu/library_files/Linda%20Nochlin%20%20Why%20have%20there%20been%20no%20Great%20 Women%20Artists.pdf.

29.   Peter Saenger, “The Triumph of Women Artists,” Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-triumph-of-women-artists-1542816015.

30.   Anna Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur: Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1908), 308–9.

31.   Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge, Capitalism in America: A History (New York: Random House, 2018), 363.

32.   Quoted in Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton (New York: Mariner Books, 2014), 444.

33.   Celestine Bohlen, “Breaking the Cycles That Keep Women Out of Tech-Related Professions,” New York Times, November 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/world/europe/women-in-stem.html?searchResultPosition=9.

34.   This and the Mendelssohn quote are drawn from Craig Wright, Listening to Music, 7th ed. (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2017), 252–53.

35.   Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), 44.

36.   Alexandra Popoff, The Wives: The Women Behind Russia’s Literary Giants (New York: Pegasus, 2012), 68.

37.   “Hatshepsut,” Western Civilization, ER Services, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory/chapter/hatshepsut/.

38.   On the sculptures of Hatshepsut and their histories in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, see “Large Kneeling Statue of Hatshepsut, ca. 1479−1458 B.C.,” https://www.met museum.org/art/collection/search/544449 and especially “Sphinx of Hatshepsut,” https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/31.3.166/.

39.   For an overview of Hildegard of Bingen, see Barbara Newman’s introduction to her Saint Hildegard of Bingen: Symphonia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988) and Mathew Fox, Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times (Vancouver: Namaste, 2012). For sample writings, see Sabina Flanagan, Secrets of God: Writings of Hildegard of Bingen (Boston: Shambhala, 1996). For samples of her letters, see Matthew Fox, ed., Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Works with Letters and Songs (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co, 1987).

40.   One example is the painting Lot and his Daughters, formerly attributed to Bernardo Cavallino, in the Toledo Museum of Art. See Josef Grabski, “On Seicento Painting in Naples: Some Observations on Bernardo Cavallino, Artemisia Gentileschi and Others,” Artibus et Historiae 6, no. 11 (1985): 23–63. See also Sarah Cascone, “Sotheby’s Offers Lost Artemisia Gentileschi Masterpiece,” Artnet News, June 10, 2014, https://news.artnet.com/market/sothebys-offers-lost-artemisia-gentileschi-masterpiece-37273.

41.   On the trial, see Tracy Marks, “Artemesia: The Rape and the Trial,” http://www.webwinds.com/artemisia/trial.htm.

42.   On Ada Lovelace, see, e.g., Betty A. Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age (Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, UK: Strawberry Press, 1998) and William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine: A Novel (New York: Bantam Books, 1991). A good synopsis of Lovelace as computer visionary is given in Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How A Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 7–33.

43.   See Ruth Levin Sime, Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/lisemeitner.htm?noredirect=on.

44.   Adam Parfrey and Cletus Nelson, Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind the Big Eyes (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2014).

45.   Ariane Hegewisch and Emma Williams-Baron, “The Gender Wage Gap: 2017 Earnings Differences by Race and Ethnicity,” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, March 7, 2018, https://iwpr.org/publications/gender-wage-gap-2017-race-ethnicity/.

46.   Rachel Bachman, “Women’s Team Sues U.S. Soccer,” Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-womens-soccer-team-alleges-gender-discrimination-11552059299.

47.   Gené Teare, “In 2017, Only 17% of Startups Have a Female Founder,” TC, April 19, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/19/in-2017-only-17-of-startups-have-a-female-founder/; Valentina Zarya, “Female Founders Got only 2% of Venture Capital in 2017,” Fortune (January 31, 2018), https://fortune.com/2018/01/31/female-founders-venture-capital-2017/.

48.   Adnisha Padnani, “How an Obits Project on Overlooked Women Was Born,” New York Times, March 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/insider/overlooked-obituary.html.

49.   Mary Ann Sieghart, “Why Are Even Women Biased Against Women?,” BBC Radio 4, February 4, 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09pl66d. See also Caroline Heldman, Meredith Conroy, and Alissa R. Ackerman, Sex and Gender in the 2016 Presidential Election (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2018).

50.   Adrian Hoffmann and Jochen Musch, “Prejudice Against Women Leaders: Insights from an Indirect Questioning Approach,” Sex Roles 80, nos. 11–12 (June 2019): 681–92, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-018-0969-6.

51.   Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York: Bantam Books, 2013).

52.   Hill et al., Why So Few?, 74.

53.   Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, John F. Dovidio, Victoria L. Brescoll, et al., “Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, October 9, 2012, https://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.

54.   Banaji and Greenwald, Blind Spot, 115.

55.   Brigid Schulte, “A Woman’s Greatest Enemy? A Lack of Time to Herself,” Guardian, July 21, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/21/woman-greatest-enemy-lack-of-time-themselves.

56.   Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “Google, Tell Me. Is My Son a Genius?,” New York Times, January 18, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/google-tell-me-is-my-son-a-genius.html.

57.   Simonton, Greatness, 37.

Chapter 3: Avoid the Prodigy Bubble

1.     See also Melissa Eddy, “A Musical Prodigy? Sure, but Don’t Call Her ‘a New Mozart,’” New York Times, June 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/world/europe/alma-deutscher-prodigy-mozart.html.

2.     “British Child Prodigy’s Cinderella Opera Thrills Vienna,” BBC News, December 30, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38467218.

3.     Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, translated by Eric Blom, Peter Branscombe, and Jeremy Noble (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 9.

4.     Mozart had two sons who more than dabbled in music: Carl Thomas (1784–1858), who trained to be a musician but ended up a civil servant in Milan, and Franz Xaver (1791–1844), who earned his living as a composer, piano instructor, and occasional public performer. Neither left progeny.

5.     Erich Schenk, “Mozarts Salzburger Vorfahren,” Mozart-Jahrbuch 3 (1929): 81–93; Erich Schenk, Mozart and His Times, edited and translated by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Knopf, 1959), 7–8; Erich Valentin, “Die Familie der Frau Mozart geb. Pertl,” in Valentin, “Madame Mutter”: Anna Maria Walburga Mozart (1720–1778) (Augsburg, Germany: Die Gesellschaft, 1991).

6.     Deutsch, Mozart, 445.

7.     Ibid., 27.

8.     “Prodigy,” The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991).

9.     Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, Netflix, September 2019, episode 1.

10.   Yo-Yo Ma, conversation with the author, Tanglewood, MA, August 14, 2011.

11.   Dean Keith Simonton, Kathleen A. Taylor, and Vincent Cassandro, “The Creative Genius of William Shakespeare: Histiometric Analyses of His Plays and Sonnets,” in Genius and the Mind: Studies of Creativity and Temperament, edited by Andrew Steptoe (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 180.

12.   Deutsch, Mozart, 360.

13.   Cliff Eisen, New Mozart Documents: A Supplement to O. E. Deutsch’s Documentary Biography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 14.

14.   Alissa Quart, Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (New York: Penguin, 2006), 77; My Kid Could Paint That, Sony Pictures Classic, 2007.

15.   Deutsch, Mozart, 494.

16.   Marin Alsop, conversation with the author, New Haven, CT, May 22, 2017.

17.   Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (New York: Random House, 2016), 151.

18.   Quoted in Helia Phoenix, Lady Gaga: Just Dance: The Biography (London: Orion House, 2010), 44–45.

19.   Quoted in Dean Keith Simonton, Greatness: Who Makes History and Why (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 243.

20.   Ellen Winner, Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 10; Alissa Quart, Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 204–5; Ann Hulbert, Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), 283, 291.

21.   Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 177–209.

22.   Leopold, letter to Wolfgang, February 12, 1778, in The Letters of Mozart and His Family, edited by Emily Anderson (London: Macmillan, 1985), 478.

23.   Leopold, letter to Wolfgang, December 18, 1777, in ibid., 423.

24.   Wolfgang Mozart, letter to Leopold, July 21, 1778, in ibid., 587.

25.   Liz Schumer, “Why Mentoring Matters and How to Get Started,” New York Times, September 30, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/smarter-living/why-mentoring-matters-how-to-get-started.html.

26.   Quoted in John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881–1906 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 45.

27.   Douglas Stone, class presentation, Exploring the Nature of Genius course, Yale University, February 2, 2014.

28.   The results of the initial study, which could not be duplicated, were published in Frances H. Rauscher, Gordon L. Shaw, and Catherine N. Ky, “Music and Spatial Task Performance,” Nature 365, no. 611 (October 14, 1993). The expansion “Makes you smarter” was introduced by music critic Alex Ross in “Listening to Prozac . . . Er, Mozart,” New York Times, August 28, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/28/arts/classical-view-listening-to-prozac-er-mozart.html.

29.   Tamar Levin, “No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund,” New York Times, October 23, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/education/24baby.html.

30.   Winner, Gifted Children, 280–81.

31.   Hulbert, Off the Charts, 291. On the “regrets of the prodigy,” see Quart, Hothouse Kids, 210.

Chapter 4: Imagine the World as Does a Child

1.     The description of the night comes from Mary Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland, with Letters . . . (London: T. Hookham and C. and J. Ollier, 1817), https://archive.org/details/sixweekhistoryof00 shelrich/page/98/mode/2up, 99–100. The identification of the day is given in Fiona Sampson, In Search of Mary Shelley (New York: Pegasus, 2018), 124.

2.     On Frankenstein and popular culture, see Frankenstein: How a Monster Became an Icon, edited by Signey Perkowitz and Eddy von Mueller (New York: Pegasus, 2018).

3.     See, e.g., Kathryn Harkup, Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

4.     Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, edited by David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 84.

5.     The introduction is reproduced at Frankenstein, Romantic Circles, https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html.

6.     For the publication history and reception of Frankenstein, see Harkup, Making the Monster, 253–55.

7.     “Harry Potter and Me,” BBC Christmas Special, British Version, December 28, 2001, transcribed by “Marvelous Marvolo” and Jimmi Thøgersen, http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2001/1201-bbc-hpandme.htm.

8.     Ibid.

9.     See, e.g., Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, Picasso: Maker and Destroyer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 379.

10.   Quoted in Ann Hulburt, Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), 260.

11.   Quoted in Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 145.

12.   Natasha Staller, “Early Picasso and the Origins of Cubism,” Arts Magazine 61 (1986): 80–90; Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein on Picasso, edited by Edward Burns (New York: Liveright, 1970).

13.   As told to Françoise Gilot, in Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990 [1964]), 113.

14.   Quoted in Max Wertheimer, Productive Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 213.

15.   Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, translated and edited by Paul Schlipp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1979), 6–7.

16.   Ibid., 49; Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 26; Peter A. Bucky, The Private Albert Einstein (Kansas City, MO: Universal Press, 1992), 26.

17.   Quoted in Isaacson, Einstein, 196.

18.   J. Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, edited by Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 190.

19.   Justin Gammill, “10 ACTUAL Quotes from Albert Einstein,” October 22, 2015, I Heart Intelligence, https://iheartintelligence.com/2015/10/22/quotes-from-albert-einstein/.

20.   Albert Einstein, letter to Otto Juliusburger, September 29, 1942, Albert Einstein Archives, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, folder 38, document 238.

21.   J. Randy Taraborelli, Michael Jackson: The Magic, the Madness, the Whole Story, 1958–2009 (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009), 201.

22.   Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/130291-the-secret-of-genius-is-to-carry-the-spirit-of.

23.   Dann Hazel and Josh Fippen, A Walt Disney World Resort Outing: The Only Vacation Planning Guide Exclusively for Gay and Lesbian Travelers (San Jose: Writers Club Press, 2002), 211.

24.   “The Birth of a Mouse,” referencing Walt Disney’s essay “What Mickey Means to Me,” Walt Disney Family Museum, November 18, 2012, https://www.waltdisney.org/blog/birth-mouse.

25.   Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, translated by Eric Blom, Peter Branscombe, and Jeremy Noble (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 462.

26.   Mozart, letter to Maria Anna Thekla Mozart, November 5, 1777, in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Letters of Mozart and His Family, edited by Emily Anderson (London: Macmillan, 1985), 358.

27.   M. J. Coren, “John Cleese—How to Be Creative,” Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/176474304.

28.   Frida Kahlo, The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait (New York: Abrams, 2005), 245–47.

29.   Deutsch, Mozart, 493.

30.   Letter of January 15, 1787, in Mozart, The Letters of Mozart and His Family, 904.

31.   Jeff Bezos, First Mover: Jeff Bezos in His Own Words, edited by Helena Hunt (Chicago: Agate Publishing, 2018), 93.

32.   Amihud Gilead, “Neoteny and the Playground of Pure Possibilities,” International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 5, no. 2 (February 2015): 30−39, http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_5_No_2_February_2015/4.pdf.

33.   Stephen Jay Gould, “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse,” https://faculty.uca.edu/benw/biol4415/papers/Mickey.pdf.

34.   George Sylvester Viereck, “What Life Means to Einstein,” Saturday Evening Post (October 26, 1929), http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satevepost/einstein.pdf, 117.

35.   Author’s translation from Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne (Paris: FB Editions, 2014 [1863]), 13.

Chapter 5: Develop a Lust for Learning

1.     Frank A. Mumby and R. S. Rait, The Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2006), 69–72.

2.     “Queen Elizabeth I of England,” Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature, http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/elizlet1544.htm.

3.     Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 182.

4.     William Camden, The Historie of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England (London: Benjamin Fisher, 1630), 6.

5.     Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 332–35. See Folger Library, Washington, D.C., V.a.321, fol. 36, as well as Modern History Sourcebook: Queen Elizabeth I of England (b. 1533, r. 1558–1603); Selected Writing and Speeches, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/elizabeth1.asp.

6.     Susan Engel, The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 17 and chap. 4.

7.     Kenneth Clark, “The Renaissance,” in Civilisation: A Personal View, 1969, http://www.historyaccess.com/therenaissanceby.html.

8.     Drawn from Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus, fol. 611, quoted in Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 16.

9.     Fritjof Capra, The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (New York: Random House, 2007), 2.

10.   Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, edited and translated by Alan Tyson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), 85.

11.   A list of confirmed left-handed luminaries, and some supposed, is given in Dean Keith Simonton, Greatness: Who Makes History and Why (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 22–24.

12.   Sherwin B. Nuland, Leonardo da Vinci: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2000), 17.

13.   Quoted in ibid., 18.

14.   Amelia Noor, Chew Chee, and Asina Ahmed, “Is There a Gay Advantage in Creativity?” The International Journal of Psychological Studies 5, no. 2 (2013), ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijps/article/view/24643.

15.   Giorgio Vasari, “Life of Leonardo da Vinci,” in Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, translated by Lulia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991), 284, 294, 298.

16.   Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 397.

17.   Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, edited by Edward MacCurdy (New York: George Braziller, 1939), 166.

18.   J. B. Bellhouse and F. H. Bellhouse, “Mechanism of Closure of the Aortic Valve,” Nature 217 (1968), https://www.nature.com/articles/217086b0, 86–87.

19.   Alastair Sooke, “Leonardo da Vinci—The Anatomist,” The Culture Show at Edinburgh, BBC, December 31, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J6MdN_fucUu&t=9s.

20.   Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci, 412.

21.   “Blurring the Lines,” National Geographic (May 2019): 68–69.

22.   Quoted in Marilyn Johnson, “A Life in Books,” Life (September 1997): 47.

23.   Ibid., 53.

24.   Ibid., 60.

25.   Oprah Winfrey, Own It: Oprah Winfrey in Her Own Words, edited by Anjali Becker and Jeanne Engelmann (Chicago: Agate, 2017), 77.

26.   Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings, edited by L. Jesse Lemisch (New York: Penguin, 2014), 15.

27.   Richard Bell, “The Genius of Benjamin Franklin,” lecture, Northwestern University Law School, Chicago, September 28, 2019.

28.   Franklin, Autobiography, 18.

29.   Quoted in Bill Gates, Impatient Optimist: Bill Gates in His Own Words, edited by Lisa Rogak (Chicago: Agate, 2012), 107.

30.   Franklin, Autobiography, 112.

31.   Most of the primary source documents are given in J. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941), 49 ff.

32.   The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, March 28, 1747, https://franklinpapers.org/framedVolumes.jsp, 3, 115.

33.   Ibid., December 25, 1750, https://franklinpapers.org/framed Volumes.jsp, 4, 82–83.

34.   Peter Dray, Stealing God’s Thunder (New York: Random House, 2005), 97.

35.   Franklin, letter to Jonathan Shipley, February 24, 1786, in Franklin, Autobiography, 290.

36.   Nikola Tesla, My Inventions: An Autobiography, edited by David Major (San Bernardino, CA: Philovox, 2013), 15.

37.   Extrapolating from what Tesla is reading in a similarly staged photo of him taken earlier in 1899 in his lab at 46–48 Houston Street in lower Manhattan.

38.   W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 191.

39.   Ibid., 282.

40.   Both quotes are from Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 33.

41.   shazmosushi, “Elon Musk Profiled: Bloomberg Risk Takers,” January 3, 2013, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTJt547--AM, at 4:02.

42.   Ibid., at 17:00.

43.   Engel, The Hungry Mind, 33, 38.

44.   Mary-Catherine McClain and Steven Pfeiffer, “Identification of Gifted Students in the United States Today: A Look at State Definitions, Policies, and Practices,” Journal of Applied School Psychology 28, no. 1 (2012): 59–88, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ956579.

45.   “Eleanor Roosevelt: Curiosity Is the Greatest Gift,” Big Think, December 23, 2014, quoting Today’s Health (October 1966), https://bigthink.com/words-of-wisdom/eleanor-roosevelt-curiosity-is-the-greatest-gift.

46.   Scott Kaufman, “Schools Are Missing What Matters About Learning,” The Atlantic (July 24, 2017), https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/the-underrated-gift-of-curiosity/534573/.

47.   Henry Blodget, “I Asked Jeff Bezos the Tough Questions—No Profits, the Book Controversies, the Phone Flop—and He Showed Why Amazon Is Such a Huge Success,” Business Insider, December 13, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-jeff-bezos-on-profits-failure-succession-big-bets-2014-12.

48.   See, e.g., Engel, The Hungry Mind, 17–18; Amihud Gilead, “Neoteny and the Playground of Pure Possibilities,” International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 5, no. 2 (February 2015): 30−33, http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_5_No_2_February_2015/4.pdf; and Cameron J. Camp, James R. Rodrigue, and Kenneth R. Olson, “Curiosity in Young, Middle-Aged, and Older Adults,” Educational Gerontology 10, no. 5 (1984): 387–400, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0380127840100504?journalCode=uedg20.

49.   Albert Einstein, letter to Cal Seelig, March 11, 1952, quoted in Einstein, The New Quotable Einstein, edited by Alice Calaprice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 14.

50.   Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited and translated by Paul Schlipp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1979), 9.

51.   Quoted in Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 18.

52.   Max Talmey, The Relativity Theory Simplified and the Formative Period of Its Inventor (New York: Falcon Press, 1932), 164.

53.   Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, 17.

54.   Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, edited by Cal Seelig (New York: Random House, 1982), 63.

55.   I am indebted to Latinist Tim Robinson for helping me correctly craft this Latin phrase.

56.   “Self-education Is the Only Kind of Education There Is,” Quote Investigator, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/07/07/self-education/.

Chapter 6: Find Your Missing Piece

1.     Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo, Cuesmes, July 1880, http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/8/133.htm.

2.     Alan C. Elms, “Apocryphal Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Most Famous Quotations and Their Actual Sources,” in Annual of Psychoanalysis 29 (2001): 83−104, https://elms.faculty.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/98/2014/07/20011Apocryphal-Freud-July-17-2000.pdf.

3.     Jon Interviews, “Gabe Polsky Talks About ‘In Search of Greatness,’” October 26, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP8baSEK7HY, at 14:16.

4.     Jean F. Mercier, “Shel Silverstein,” Publishers Weekly (February 24, 1975), http://shelsilverstein.tripod.com/ShelPW.html.

5.     Andrew Robinson, Sudden Genius?: The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 164.

6.     Marie Curie, “Autobiographical Notes,” in Curie, Pierre Curie, translated by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg (New York: Dover, 2012 [1923]), 84.

7.     Ibid., 92.

8.     Eve Curie, Madame Curie: A Biography by Eve Curie, translated by Vincent Sheean (New York: Dover, 2001 [1937]), 157.

9.     This and the following quote are drawn from Marie Curie, “Autobiographical Notes,” 92.

10.   Eve Curie, Madame Curie, 174.

11.   Curie, “Autobiographical Notes,” 92.

12.   https://www.quotetab.com/quote/by-frida-kahlo/passion-is-the-bridge-that-takes-you-from-pain-to-change#GOQJ7pxSyy EPUTYw.97. I have been unable to identify the original source.

13.   John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (New York: H. Holt, 1873), chap. 5, paraphrased in Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss (New York: Hachette, 2008), 74.

14.   Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, 1909), vol. 1, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38427/38427-h/38427-h.html#pglicense, 240.

15.   Harriet Reisen, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 216.

16.   Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, pt. 2, chap. 27, http://www.literaturepage.com/read/littlewomen-296.html.

17.   Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: Women at Work (New York: Knopf, 2019), 52.

18.   John Maynard Keynes, “Newton, the Man,” July 1946, http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html.

19.   Anecdotes of this sort, coming from Newton’s manservant Humphrey Newton, are preserved in Cambridge, King’s College Library, Keynes MS 135, and redacted at “The Newton Project,” http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00033.

20.   See “Newton Beats Einstein in Polls of Scientists and Public,” The Royal Society, November 23, 2005, https://royalsociety.org/news/2012/newton-einstein/.

21.   “Newton’s Dark Secrets,” Nova, PBS, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdmhPfGo3fE&t=105s.

22.   John Henry, “Newton, Matter, and Magic,” in Let Newton Be!: A New Perspective on his Life and Works, edited by John Fauvel, Raymond Flood, Michael Shortland, and Robin Wilson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988), 142.

23.   Jan Golinski, “The Secret Life of an Alchemist,” in Let Newton Be, 147–67.

24.   Isaac Newton, letter to John Locke, July 7, 1692, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 3, edited by H. W. Turnbull (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 215.

25.   See Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 223–32.

26.   As paraphrased in James Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York: Random House, 2003), 190.

27.   Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, edited by Nora Barlow (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 53.

28.   Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 102.

29.   Darwin, Autobiography, 53.

30.   Browne, Charles Darwin, 88–116.

31.   American Museum of Natural History, Twitter, February 12, 2018, https://twitter.com/AMNH/status/963159916792963073.

32.   Darwin, Autobiography, 115.

33.   Abigail Elise, “Orson Welles Quotes: 10 of the Filmmaker’s Funniest and Best Sayings,” International Business Times, May 6, 2015, https://www.ibtimes.com/orson-welles-quotes-10-film makers-funniest-best-sayings-1910921.

34.   Harper’s Magazine (September 1932), cited in Thomas Alva Edison, The Quotable Edison, edited by Michele Albion (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 82.

35.   Randall Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World (New York: Random House, 2007), 66.

36.   Ibid., 229. See also “Edison at 75 Still a Two-Shift Man,” New York Times, February 12, 1922, https://www.nytimes.com/1922/02/12/archives/edison-at-75-still-a-twoshift-man-submits-to-birthday-questionnaire.html.

37.   “Mr. Edison’s Use of Electricity,” New York Tribune, September 28, 1878, Thomas A. Edison Papers, Rutgers University, http://edison.rutgers.edu/digital.htm, SB032142a.

38.   Ladies’ Home Journal (April 1898), quoted in Edison, The Quotable Edison, 101.

39.   “I Have Gotten a Lot of Results. I Know of Several Thousand Things that Won’t Work,” Quote Investigator, July 31, 2012, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/31/edison-lot-results/.

40.   Jim Clash, “Elon Musk Interview,” AskMen, 2014, https://www.askmen.com/entertainment/right-stuff/elon-musk-interview-4.html.

41.   Dana Gioia, “Work, for the Night Is Coming,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 1994, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-01-23-bk-14382-story.html.

Chapter 7: Leverage Your Difference

1.     A recently discovered letter from a provincial French doctor, Félix Rey, reveals how much of his ear van Gogh cut off. The discovery is discussed in Bernadette Murphy, Van Gogh’s Ear (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), chap. 14.

2.     Plato discussed four different types of madness in Phaedrus (c. 360 B.C.), translated by Benjamin Jowett, The Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html.

3.     Aristotle, Problems: Books 32–38, translated by W. S. Hett and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), problem 30.1.

4.     John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44172/absalom-and-achitophel.

5.     Edgar Allan Poe, “Eleonora,” quoted in Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (New York: Random House, 2016), 36.

6.     “Quotes from Alice in Wonderland—by Lewis Caroll,” Book Edition, January 31, 2013, https://booksedition.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/quotes-from-alice-in-wonderland-by-lewis-caroll/.

7.     “Live at the Roxy,” HBO (1978), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTRtH1uJh0g.

8.     Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius, 3rd ed. (London: Walter Scott, 1895), 66–99.

9.     Kay R. Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), esp. chap. 3, “Could It Be Madness—This?” See also Nancy C. Andreasen, “Creativity and Mental Illness: Prevalence Rates in Writers and Their First-Degree Relatives,” American Journal of Psychiatry 144 (1987): 1288–92, as well as Andreasen’s The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius (New York: Dana Press, 2005), esp. chap. 4, “Genius and Insanity.”

10.   Kay Redfield Jamison, “Mood Disorders and Patterns of Creativity in British Writers and Artists,” Psychiatry 52, no. 2 (1989): 125–34; Jamison, Touched with Fire, 72–73.

11.   François Martin Mai, “Illness and Creativity,” in Mai, Diagnosing Genius: The Life and Death of Beethoven (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007), 187; Andrew Robinson, Sudden Genius?: The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 58–61; Jamison, Touched with Fire, 58–75.

12.   Quoted on the back cover of Christopher Zara, Tortured Artists: From Picasso and Monroe to Warhol and Winehouse, the Twisted Secrets of the World’s Most Creative Minds (Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2012).

13.   Roger Dobson, “Creative Minds: The Links Between Mental Illness and Creativity,” LewRockwell.com, May 22, 2009, https://www.lewrockwell.com/2009/05/roger-dobson/creative-minds-the-links-between-mentalillness-andcreativity/.

14.   M. Schneider, “Great Minds in Economics: An Interview with John Nash,” Yale Economic Review 4, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 26−31, http://www.markschneideresi.com/articles/Nash_Interview.pdf.

15.   Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), back cover.

16.   See, e.g., Anna Greuner, “Vincent van Gogh’s Yellow Vision,” British Journal of General Practice 63, no. 612 (July 2013): 370–71, https://bjgp.org/content/63/612/370.

17.   Derek Fell, Van Gogh’s Women: Vincent’s Love Affairs and Journey into Madness (New York: Da Capo Press, 2004), 242–43, 248.

18.   Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo, January 28, 1889, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let743/letter.html.

19.   See Alastair Sooke, “The Mystery of Van Gogh’s Madness,” BBC, July 25, 2016, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag MBRQLhgFE.

20.   See, e.g., the middle of the letter to Theo of January 28, 1886, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let555/letter.html.

21.   See, e.g., Marije Vellekoop, Van Gogh at Work (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Nina Siegal, “Van Gogh’s True Palette Revealed,” New York Times, April 30, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/arts/30iht-vangogh30.html.

22.   Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo, July 1, 1882, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let241/letter.html.

23.   Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo, July 6, 1882, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let244/letter.html.

24.   Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo, July 22, 1883, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let364/letter.html.

25.   Gordon Claridge, “Creativity and Madness: Clues from Modern Psychiatric Diagnosis,” in Genius and the Mind, edited by Andrew Steptoe (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 238–40.

26.   Quoted in Thomas C. Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 48.

27.   Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963), 79.

28.   Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind, 75.

29.   Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing, edited by Michèle Barrett (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 58–60.

30.   The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1925−30, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1981), 111.

31.   The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4: 1931−35, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1982), 161.

32.   Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 205.

33.   Ibid., 57, 191.

34.   Ibid., 20.

35.   Natalie Frank, “Does Yayoi Kusama Have a Mental Disorder?,” Quora, January 29, 2016, https://www.quora.com/Does-Yayoi-Kusama-have-a-mental-disorder.

36.   Kusama, Infinity Net, 66.

37.   Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo, July 8 or 9, 1888, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let637. Woolf: Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 287. Kusama: Natalie Frank, “Does Yayoi Kusama Have a Mental Disorder?” Picasso: quoted in Jack Flam, Matisse and Picasso (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2003), 34; Sexton: Kaufman and Gregoire, Wired to Create, 150. Churchill: quoted in his 1921 essay “Painting as a Pastime.” Graham: quoted in her Blood Memory: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1991). Lowell: Patricia Bosworth, “A Poet’s Pathologies: Inside Robert Lowell’s Restless Mind,” New York Times, March 1, 2017. Close: Society for Neuroscience, “My Life as a Rolling Neurological Clinic,” Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society, New Orleans, October 17, 2012, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWadil0W5GU, at 11:35. Winehouse: interview with Spin (2007), quoted in Zara, Tortured Artists, 200.

38.   Ludwig van Beethoven, “Heiligenstadt Testament,” October 6, 1802, in Maynard Solomon, Beethoven, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Schirmer Books, 1998), 152; see also 144 for a facsimile of the document.

39.   Author’s translation from Paul Scudo, “Une Sonate de Beethoven,” Revue des Deux Mondes, new series 15, no. 8 (1850): 94.

40.   Mai, Diagnosing Genius; D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb, “Beethoven,” in The Key to Genius: Manic-Depression and the Creative Life (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), 59–92; Solomon, Beethoven, see index under “mood swings” and “alcohol excesses”; Leon Plantinga, author of Beethoven’s Concertos: History, Style, Performance (1999), conversations with the author, March 7, 2017.

41.   Beethoven, letter to Franz Wegeler, June 29, 1801, reproduced in Ludwig van Beethoven, Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations, edited and translated by Michael Hamburger (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 24.

42.   Solomon, Beethoven, 158.

43.   A point emphasized to me by the Beethoven scholar Leon Plantinga in a personal conversation, December 11, 2019.

44.   Solomon, Beethoven, 161.

45.   I owe my awareness of this issue to the kindness of Professor Caroline Robertson of Dartmouth College.

46.   Caroline Robertson, “Creativity in the Brain: The Neurobiology of Autism and Prosopagnosia,” lecture, Yale University, March 4, 2015.

47.   Close, “My Life as a Rolling Neurological Clinic,” at 46:00. See also Eric Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 131.

48.   Close, “My Life as a Rolling Neurological Clinic,” at 28:20.

49.   For an overview of the question of autistic savants, see Joseph Straus, “Idiots Savants, Retarded Savants, Talented Aments, Mono-Savants, Autistic Savants, Just Plain Savants, People with Savant Syndrome, and Autistic People Who Are Good at Things: A View from Disability Studies,” in Disability Studies Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2014), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3407/3640.

50.   Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 142. See also Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York: Vintage, 1995), 197–206; Kandel, The Disordered Mind, 152; Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2012), 492–94.

51.   Hans Asperger, “‘Autistic Psychopathy’ in Childhood,” in Autism and Asperger Syndrome, edited by Ute Firth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 37–92. On this topic generally, see Ioan James, Asperger’s Syndrome and High Achievement: Some Very Remarkable People (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2006), and Michael Fitzgerald, Autism and Creativity: Is There a Link Between Autism in Men and Exceptional Ability? (London: Routledge, 2004).

52.   Many Things, Robin Williams: Live on Broadway, HBO, 2002, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS376sohiXc.

53.   James Lipton, interview with Robin Williams, Inside the Actors Studio: 2001, www.dailymotion.com/video/x64ojf8.

54.   Zoë Kessler, “Robin Williams’ Death Shocking? Yes and No,” PsychCentral, August 28, 2014, https://blogs.psychcentral.com/adhd-zoe/2014/08/robin-williams-death-shocking-yes-and-no/.

55.   Dave Itzkoff, Robin (New York: Henry Holt, 2018), 41.

56.   See, e.g., johanna-khristina, “Celebrities with a History of ADHD or ADD,” IMDb, March 27, 2012, https://www.imdb.com/list/ls004079795/; Kessler, “Robin Williams’ Death Shocking?”

57.   Leonard Mlodinow, “In Praise of A.D.H.D,” New York Times, March 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/opinion/sunday/praise-adhd-attention-hyperactivity.html; Scott Kaufman, “The Creative Gifts of ADHD,” Scientific American (October 21, 2014), blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2014/10/21/the-creative-gifts-of-adhd.

58.   A. Golimstok, J. I. Rojas, M. Romano, et al., “Previous Adult Attention-Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder Symptoms and Risk of Dementia with Lewy Bodies: A Case-Control Study,” European Journal of Neurology 18, no. 1 (January 2011): 78–84, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20491888. See also Susan Schneider Williams, “The Terrorist Inside My Husband’s Brain,” Neurology 87 (2016): 1308–11, https://demystifyingmedicine.od.nih.gov/DM19/m04d30/reading02.pdf.

59.   Jamison, Touched with Fire, 43.

60.   Lisa Powell, “10 Things You Should Know About Jonathan Winters, the Area’s Beloved Comic Genius,” Springfield News-Sun, November 10, 2018, https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/local/things-you-should-know-about-jonathan-winters-the-area-beloved-comedic-genius/Dp5hazcCY9z2sBpVDfaQGI/.

61.   Quoted in Dick Cavett, “Falling Stars,” in Time: Robin Williams (November 2014): 28–30.

62.   Robin Williams: Live on Broadway, 2002, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS376sohiXc.

63.   YouTube Movies, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, HBO, January 20, 2019, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xrZBgP6NZo, at 1:08 and 1:53.

64.   “The Hawking Paradox,” Horizon, BBC, 2005, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x226awj, at 10:35.

65.   Simon Baron-Cohen, quoted in Lizzie Buchen, “Scientists and Autism: When Geeks Meet,” Nature (November 2, 2011), https://www.nature.com/news/2011/111102/full/479025a.html; Judith Gould, quoted in Vanessa Thorpe, “Was Autism the Secret of Warhol’s Art?,” Guardian, March 13, 1999, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/mar/14/vanessathorpe.theobserver.

66.   This was the question asked by the Scottish psychiatrist J. D. Laing. See Bob Mullan, Mad to Be Normal: Conversations with J. D. Laing (London: Free Association Books, 1995).

67.   Martin Luther King, Jr., “1966 Ware Lecture: Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution,” speech delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly, Hollywood, Florida, May 18, 1966, https://www.uua.org/ga/past/1966/ware.

68.   Motoko Rich, “Yayoi Kusama, Queen of Polka Dots, Opens Museum in Tokyo,” New York Times, September 26, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/arts/design/yayoi-kusama-queen-of-polka-dots-museum-tokyo.html?mcubz=3&_r=0.

69.   Itzkoff, Robin, 221–22.

70.   Lewina O. Lee, Peter James, Emily S. Zevon, et al., “Optimism Is Associated with Exceptional Longevity in 2 Epidemiologic Cohorts of Men and Women,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116, no. 37 (August 26, 2019): 18357−62, https://www.pnas.org/content/116/37/18357.

71.   “New Evidence That Optimists Live Longer,” Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, August 27, 2019, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/new-evidence-that-optimists-live-longer/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Gazette%2020190830(2)%20(1).

72.   Catherine Clifford, “This Favorite Saying of Mark Zuckerberg Reveals the Way the Facebook Billionaire Thinks About Life,” CNBC Make It, November 30, 2017, https://cnbc/207/11/30/why-facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-thinks-the-optimists-are-successful.html.

Chapter 8: Rebels, Misfits, and Troublemakers

1.     John Waller, Einstein’s Luck: The Truth Behind Some of the Greatest Scientific Discoveries (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 161.

2.     David Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 259.

3.     Dennis Overbye, “Peering into Light’s Graveyard: The First Image of a Black Hole,” New York Times, April 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/black-hole-picture.html.

4.     Jonathan Swift, Essay on the Fates of Clergymen, Forbes Quotes, https://www.forbes.com/quotes/5566/.

5.     Recent research on this point is summarized in Jennifer S. Mueller, Shimul Melwani, and Jack A. Goncalo, “The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire but Reject Creative Ideas,” Psychological Science 23, no. 1 (November 2011): 13–17, https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1457 &context=articles.

6.     Erik L. Wesby and V. L. Dawson, “Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classroom?,” Creativity Research Journal 8, no. 1 (1995): 1–10, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15326934 crj0801_1.

7.     Amanda Ripley, “Gifted and Talented and Complicated,” New York Times, January 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/books/review/off-the-charts-ann-hulbert.html.

8.     Wootton, Galileo, 218.

9.     Ibid., 145–47.

10.   Ibid., 222–23.

11.   Printed with English translations in Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2017), 115–22.

12.   Ibid., 104.

13.   On Luther’s escape from Augsburg and Worms, see ibid., 231–36.

14.   Ibid., 113.

15.   Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 32, edited by George W. Forell (Philadelphia and St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1957), 113.

16.   On Darwin and the subversion of God, see Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 324–27.

17.   Quoted in Walter Isaacson, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 527.

18.   Steve Jobs, I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words, edited by George Beahm (Chicago: Agate, 2012), 75.

19.   The Art Channel, Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, pt. 2, directed by Ric Burns, PBS, 2006, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r47Nk4o08pI&t=5904s.

20.   Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 2014), xxiv.

21.   Ibid., xiii.

22.   Quoted in Cameron M. Ford and Dennis A. Gioia, eds., Creative Action in Organizations: Ivory Tower Visions and Real World Voices (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 162.

23.   Ryan Riddle, “Steve Jobs and NeXT: You’ve Got to Be Willing to Crash and Burn,” Zurb, February 10, 2012, https://zurb.com/blog/steve-jobs-and-next-you-ve-got-to-be-will.

24.   A biography of Harriet Tubman, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, was published by Sarah Hopkins Bradford as early as 1869. A recent scholarly biography is Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero (New York: Random House, 2004).

25.   The obituary is printed in Becket Adams, “103 Years Later, Harriet Tubman Gets Her Due from the New York Times,” Washington Examiner (April 20, 2016), https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/103-years-later-harriet-tubman-gets-her-due-from-the-new-york-times.

26.   See Jennifer Schuessler, Binyamin Appelbaum, and Wesley Morris, “Tubman’s In. Jackson’s Out. What’s It Mean?,” New York Times, April 20, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/arts/design/tubmans-in-jacksons-out-whats-it-mean.html?mtrref=query.nytimes.com.

27.   Will Ellsworth-Jones, Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 14–16; Banksy, Wall and Piece (London: Random House, 2005), 178–79.

28.   Hermione Sylvester and Ashleigh Kane, “Five of Banksy’s Most Infamous Pranks,” Dazed, October 9, 2018, https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/41743/1/banksy-girl-with-balloon-painting-pranks-sotherbys-london.

29.   Christina Burrus, “The Life of Frida Kahlo,” in Frida Kahlo, edited by Emma Dexter and Tanya Barson (London: Tate, 2005), 200–201.

30.   Andrea Kettenmann, Kahlo (Cologne: Taschen, 2016), 85.

31.   Christina Burrus, Frida Kahlo: I Paint My Reality (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 206.

32.   Frida Kahlo, Pocket Frida Kahlo Wisdom (London: Hardie Grant, 2018), 78.

33.   Nikki Martinez, “90 Frida Kahlo Quotes for Strength and Inspiration,” Everyday Power, https://everydaypower.com/frida-kahlo-quotes/.

34.   Oprah Winfrey, Own It: Oprah Winfrey in Her Own Words, edited by Anjali Becker and Jeanne Engelmann (Chicago: Agate, 2017), 35.

35.   Randall Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World (New York: Random House, 2007), 28.

36.   “Edison’s New Phonograph,” Scientific American (October 29, 1887), 273; reproduced in Thomas Edison, The Quotable Edison, edited by Michele Wehrwein Albion (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011), 7.

37.   Rich Winley, “Entrepreneurs: 5 Things We Can Learn from Elon Musk,” Forbes (October 8, 2015), https://www.forbes.com/sites/richwinley/2015/10/08/entrepreneurs-5-things-we-can-learn-from-elon-musk/#24b3688c4098.

38.   Jeff Bezos, “Read Jeff Bezos’s 2018 Letter to Amazon Shareholders,” Entrepreneur (April 11, 2019), https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/332101.

39.   Jobs, I, Steve, 63.

40.   J. K. Rowling, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 9.

41.   Ibid., 32, 37.

42.   Sean Smith, J. K. Rowling: A Biography: The Genius Behind Harry Potter (London: Michael O’Mara Books, 2001), 122.

43.   Alex Carter, “17 Famous Authors and Their Rejections,” Mental Floss, May 16, 2017, http://mentalfloss.com/article/91169/16-famous-authors-and-their-rejections.

44.   Testimony of fellow student Victor Hageman as recorded in Louis Pierard, La Vie tragique de Vincent van Gogh (Paris: Correa & Cie, 1939), 155–59, http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/data/letters/16/etc-458a.htm.

45.   See, e.g., Andrea Petersen, “The Overprotected American Child,” Wall Street Journal, June 2–3, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-overprotected-american-child-1527865038.

46.   Among college students surveyed by the American College Health Association, 21.6% reported that they had been diagnosed with or treated for anxiety problems during the previous year (2017), up from 10.4% in a 2008 survey. Ibid.

47.   Christopher Ingraham, “There Has Never Been a Safer Time to Be a Kid in America,” Washington Post, April 14, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/14/theres-never-been-a-safer-time-to-be-a-kid-in-america/; “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980–2008,” U.S. Department of Justice, November 2011, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf; Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, “Schools Take on Helicopter Parenting with Free-Range Program Taken from ‘World’s Worst Mom,’” Rockland/Westchester Journal News, September 4, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/allthemoms/2018/09/04/schools-adopt-let-grow-free-range-program-combat-helicopter-parenting/1191482002/.

48.   Libby Copeland, “The Criminalization of Parenthood,” New York Times, August 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/books/review/small-animals-kim-brooks.html.

49.   Nim Tottenham, Mor Shapiro, Jessica Flannery, et al., “Parental Presence Switches Avoidance to Attraction Learning in Children,” Nature Human Behaviour 3, no. 7 (2019): 1070−77.

50.   See Hanna Rosin, “The Overprotected Kid,” The Atlantic (April 2014), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/.

Chapter 9: Be the Fox

1.     Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 2, edited by Arthur Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 1842), 3.

2.     Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting, translated by John Francis Rigaud (London: George Bell, 2005 [1887]), 10.

3.     Albert Einstein, letter to David Hilbert, November 12, 1915, as quoted in Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 217.

4.     Carl Swanson and Katie Van Syckle, “Lady Gaga: The Young Artist Award Is the Most Meaningful of Her Life,” New York (October 20, 2015), http://www.vulture.com/2015/10/read-lady-gagas-speech-about-art.html.

5.     From an interview in Entertainment Weekly quoted in Helia Phoenix, Lady Gaga: Just Dance: The Biography (London: Orion, 2010), 19.

6.     Kevin Zimmerman, “Lady Gaga Delivers Dynamic Dance-Pop,” BMI, December 10, 2008, https://www.bmi.com/news/entry/lady_gaga_delivers_dynamic_dance_pop.

7.     Jessica Iredale, “Lady Gaga: ‘I’m Every Icon,’” WWD, July 28, 2013, https://wwd.com/eye/other/lady-gaga-im-every-icon-7068388/.

8.     Benjamin Franklin, “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania,” September 13, 1749, reprinted in Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, 404, https://franklinpapers.org/framedVolumes.jsp. What follows is drawn from this source, 401–17. See also Franklin’s earlier broadside “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge,” May 14, 1743.

9.     C. Custer, “Jack Ma: ‘What I Told My Son About Education,’” Tech in Asia, May 13, 2015, https://www.techinasia.com/jack-ma-what-told-son-education.

10.   Abby Jackson, “Cuban: Don’t Go to School for Finance—Liberal Arts Is the Future,” Business Insider, February 17, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-cuban-liberal-arts-is-the-future-2017-2.

11.   Rebecca Mead, “All About the Hamiltons,” The New Yorker (February 9, 2015), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/hamiltons.

12.   Todd Haselton, “Here’s Jeff Bezos’s Annual Shareholder Letter,” CNBC, April 11, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/jeff-bezos-annual-shareholder-letter.html.

13.   Interview with Tim Berners-Lee, Academy of Achievement, June 22, 2007, quoted in Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 408.

14.   Isaacson, Einstein, 67.

15.   From Nabokov’s 1974 novel Look at the Harlequins!, in “Genius: Seeing Things That Others Don’t See. Or Rather the Invisible Links Between Things,” Quote Investigator, May 11, 2018, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/05/11/on-genius/.

16.   Gary Wolf, “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing,” Wired (February 1, 1996), https://www.wired.com/1996/02/jobs-2/.

17.   Matt Rosoff, “The Only Reason the Mac Looks like It Does,” Business Insider, March 8, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.sg/robert-palladino-calligraphy-class-inspired-steve-jobs-2016-3/.

18.   Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 64–65.

19.   Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, XXII, translated by S. H. Butcher, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-h/1974-h.htm.

20.   Quoted in David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (New York: Random House, 2019), 103.

21.   See, e.g., Leah Barbour, “MSU Research: Effective Arts Integration Improves Test Scores,” Mississippi State Newsroom, 2013, https://www.newsarchive.msstate.edu/newsroom/article/2013/10/msu-research-effective-arts-integration-improves-test-scores; Brian Kisida and Daniel H. Bowen, “New Evidence of the Benefits of Arts Education,” Brookings, February 12, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2019/02/12/new-evidence-of-the-benefits-of-arts-education/; and Tom Jacobs, “New Evidence of Mental Benefits from Music Training,” Pacific Standard, June 14, 2017, https://psmag.com/social-justice/new-evidence-brain-benefits-music-training-83761.

22.   Samuel G. B. Johnson and Stefan Steinerberger, “Intuitions About Mathematical Beauty: A Case Study in the Aesthetic Experience of Ideas,” Cognition 189 (August 2019): 242–59, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31015078.

23.   Barry Parker, Einstein: The Passions of a Scientist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 13.

24.   For a complete treatment of the subject, see Wright, “Mozart and Math,” available at the author’s website.

25.   Friedrich Schlichtegroll, Necrolog auf das Jahr 1791, in Franz Xaver Niemetschek, Vie de W. A. Mozart, edited and translated by Georges Favier (Paris: CIERCE, 1976), 126, surely reporting information acquired from Nannerl.

26.   Peter Bucky, The Private Albert Einstein (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 1992), 156.

27.   Donald W. MacKinnon, “Creativity: A Multi-faceted Phenomenon,” paper presented at Gustavus Adolphus College, 1970, https://webspace.ringling.edu/~ccjones/curricula/01-02/sophcd/readings/creativity.html.

28.   Jack Flam, Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2018), 33–39.

29.   Ibid., 34.

30.   “Copyright, Permissions, and Fair Use in the Visual Arts Communities: An Issues Report,” Center for Media and Social Impact, February 2015, https://cmsimpact.org/resource/copyright-permissions-fair-use-visual-arts-communities-issues-report/; “Fair Use,” in Copyright & Fair Use, Stanford University Libraries, 2019, https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/.

31.   On the state of thinking regarding human evolution prior to Darwin, see in particular Janet Browne, Darwin: Voyaging (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), chap. 16.

32.   On this point, see Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From (New York: Riverhead, 2010), 80–82.

33.   Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, edited by Nora Barlow (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 98.

34.   As posited in Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London: Taylor and Francis, 1859), introduction.

35.   Browne, Darwin, 227.

36.   Among many treatments of this topic, see “Thomas Edison: ‘The Wizard of Menlo Park,’” chap. 3 in Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and The Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2003).

37.   Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), 208–11.

38.   David Robson, The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 75.

39.   Donald W. MacKinnon, “Creativity: A Multi-faceted Phenomenon,” paper presented at Gustavus Augustus College, 1970, https://webspace.ringling.edu/~ccjones/curricula/01-02/sophcd/readings/creativity.html.

40.   Quoted in Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (Mattituck, NY: Amereon House, 1981), 268.

41.   Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 216–20.

42.   Research summarized in Epstein, Range, 107–9.

43.   For this and the following statement, see Robert Root-Bernstein, Lindsay Allen, Leighanna Beach, et al., “Arts Foster Scientific Success: Avocations of Nobel, National Academy, Royal Society, and Sigma Xi Members,” Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology 1, no. 2 (2008): 51–63, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247857346_Arts_Foster_Scientific_Success_Avocations_of_Nobel_National_Academy_Royal_Society_and_Sigma_Xi_Members; and Robert S. Root-Bernstein, Maurine Bernstein, and Helen Garnier, “Correlations Between Avocations, Scientific Style, Work Habits, and Professional Impact of Scientists,” Creativity Research Journal 8, no. 2 (1995): 115–37, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15326934crj0802_2.

44.   Patricia Cohen, “A Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding,” New York Times, February 21, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/business/a-rising-call-to-promote-stem-education-and-cut-liberal-arts-funding.html. See also Adam Harris, “The Liberal Arts May Not Survive the 21st Century,” The Atlantic (December 13, 2018), https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/12/the-liberal-arts-may-not-survive-the-21st-century/577876/; and “New Rules for Student Loans: Matching a Career to Debt Repayment,” LendKey, September 1, 2015, https://www.lendkey.com/blog/paying-for-school/new-rules-for-student-loans-matching-a-career-to-debt-repayment/.

45.   Frank Bruni, “Aristotle’s Wrongful Death,” New York Times, May 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/opinion/sunday/college-majors-liberal-arts.html.

46.   Scott Jaschik, “Obama vs. Art History,” Inside Higher Ed, January 31, 2014, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/31/obama-becomes-latest-politician-criticize-liberal-arts-discipline.

47.   Tad Friend, “Why Ageism Never Gets Old,” The New Yorker (November 20, 2017), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/why-ageism-never-gets-old.

48.   Alina Tugent, “Endless School,” New York Times, October 13, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/education/learning/60-year-curriculum-higher-education.html; author’s conversation with Christopher Wright, director of strategic partnerships, 2U, December 17, 2019.

49.   Steve Jobs, I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words, edited by George Beahm (Agate: Chicago, 2011), 73.

50.   Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown, 1982), 69.

Chapter 10: Think Opposite

1.     “NASA Announces Launch Date and Milestones for SpaceX Flight,” December 9, 2011, https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/dec/HQ_11-413_SpaceX_ISS_Flight.html.

2.     Mariella Moon, “SpaceX Is Saving a Ton of Money by Re-using Falcon 9 Rockets,” Engadget, April 6, 2017, https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/06/spacex-is-saving-a-ton-of-money-by-re-using-falcon-9-rockets/.

3.     Quoted in Elon Musk, Rocket Man: Elon Musk in His Own Words, edited by Jessica Easto (Chicago: Agate, 2017), 16.

4.     For a discussion of left-handed persons and creativity, see Dean Keith Simonton, Greatness: Who Makes History and Why (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 20–24.

5.     I am indebted to the late David Rosand for introducing me to the mirror images present in many of Leonardo’s drawings. See his Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Representation and Expression (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

6.     Bronwyn Hemus, “Understanding the Essentials of Writing a Murder Mystery,” Standout Books, May 5, 2014, https://www.standoutbooks.com/essentials-writing-murder-mystery/.

7.     Bruce Hale, “Writing Tip: Plotting Backwards,” Booker’s Blog, March 24, 2012, https://talltalestogo.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/writing_tip_plotting_backwards/.

8.     Kip Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 147.

9.     Quoted in David M. Harrison, “Complementarity and the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” UPSCALE, October 7, 2002, https://www.scribd.com/document/166550158/Physics-Complementarity-and-Copenhagen-Interpretation-of-Quantum-Mechanics.

10.   Albert Rothenberg, Creativity and Madness: New Findings and Old Stereotypes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 14.

11.   Author’s translation from Albert Einstein, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 7: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918−1921, edited by Michael Janssen, Robert Schulmann, József Illy, et al., document 31: “Fundamental Ideas and Methods of the Theory of Relativity, Presented in Their Development,” II: “The Theory of General Relativity,” https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol7-doc/293, 245.

12.   Albert Rothenberg, Flight from Wonder: An Investigation of Scientific Creativity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 28–29.

13.   Cade Metz, “Google Claims a Quantum Breakthrough That Could Change Computing,” New York Times, October 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/technology/quantum-computing-google.html.

14.   Elon Musk, “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (Just Between You and Me),” Tesla, August 2, 2006, https:/www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-just-between-you-and-me.

15.   Franklin Foer, “Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan,” The Atlantic (November 2019), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/what-jeff-bezos-wants/598363/.

16.   Jeff Bezos, First Mover: Jeff Bezos in His Own Words, edited by Helena Hunt (Chicago: Agate, 2018), 95.

17.   Quoted in Foer, “Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan.”

18.   Rothenberg, Creativity and Madness, 25.

19.   Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream,” “Great Speeches of the Twentieth Century,” Guardian, April 27, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/apr/28/greatspeeches.

20.   Bradley J. Adame, “Training in the Mitigation of Anchoring Bias: A Test of the Consider-the-Opposite Strategy,” Learning and Motivation 53 (February 2016): 36–48, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0023969015000739?via%3Dihub.

Chapter 11: Get Lucky

1.     First published in Harper’s Magazine (December 1904): 10; reprinted in John Cooley, ed., How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson and Other Tales of Rebellious Girls and Daring Young Women (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 209.

2.     “The Harder I Practice, the Luckier I Get,” Quote Investigator, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/07/14/luck/. I owe my knowledge of this quote to the kindness of Clark Baxter.

3.     Frances Wood, “Why Does China Love Shakespeare?,” Guardian, June 28, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jun/28/china-shakespeare-wen-jiabao-visit.

4.     Quoted in Noah Charney, The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World’s Most Famous Painting (Columbia, SC: ARCA Publications, 2011).

5.     Evan Andrews, “The Heist That Made the Mona Lisa Famous,” History, November 30, 2018, https://www.history.com/news/the-heist-that-made-the-mona-lisa-famous.

6.     Charney, The Thefts of the Mona Lisa, 74.

7.     Quoted in the introduction to James D. Watson and Francis Crick, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” Nature 171, no. 4356 (April 25, 1953): 737−38, in The Francis Crick Papers, U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/sc/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101584582X381-doc.

8.     Reprinted with facsimile in James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, edited by Gunther S. Stent (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 237–41.

9.     On Pauling’s error, see Linus Pauling, “The Molecular Basis of Biological Specificity,” reproduced in ibid., 152.

10.   Ibid., 105; Robert Olby, The Path to the Double Helix: The Discovery of DNA (New York: Dover, 1994), 402–3.

11.   Watson, The Double Helix, 14.

12.   “Statutes of the Nobel Foundation,” The Nobel Prize, https://www.nobelprize.org/about/statutes-of-the-nobel-foundation/.

13.   For an update on the odds of winning the Nobel for CRISPR, see Amy Dockser Marcus, “Science Prizes Add Intrigue to the Race for the Nobel,” Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-prizes-add-intrigue-to-the-race-for-the-nobel-1527870861.

14.   Author’s translation from Louis Pasteur, inaugural address, Faculty of Sciences, University of Lille, December 7, 1854, Gallica Bibliothèque Numérique, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Louis_Pasteur_Universit%C3%A9_de_Lille_1854-1857_dans_les_champs_de_l%27observation_le_hasard_ne_favorise_que_les_esprits_pr%C3%A9par%C3%A9s.pdf.

15.   John Waller, Einstein’s Luck: The Truth Behind the Greatest Scientific Discoveries (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 247.

16.   Upon his appointment as prime minister, May 10, 1940, in Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1: The Gathering Storm (1948), quoted in “Summer 1940: Churchill’s Finest Hour,” International Churchill Society, https://winstonchurchill.org/the-life-of-churchill/war-leader/summer-1940/.

17.   Waller, Einstein’s Luck, 249.

18.   Kevin Brown, Penicillin Man: Alexander Fleming and the Antibiotic Revolution (London: Sutton, 2005), 102.

19.   Ibid., 120.

20.   Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg: In His Own Words, edited by George Beahm (Chicago: Agate, 2018), 1.

21.   Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (New York: Random House, 2010), 45.

22.   Katharine A. Kaplan, “Facemash Creator Survives Ad Board,” Harvard Crimson, November 19, 2003, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-survives-ad-board-the/.

23.   Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires, 105.

24.   Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (New York: Random House, 2019), 54; David Enrich, “Spend Some Time with the Winklevii,” New York Times, May 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/books/review/ben-mezrich-bitcoin-billionaires.html?searchResult Position=5.

25.   Farhad Manjoo, “How Mark Zuckerberg Became Too Big to Fail,” New York Times, November 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/technology/mark-zuckerberg-facebook.html.

26.   Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires, 108.

27.   Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg, 46.

28.   Oprah Winfrey, Own It: Oprah Winfrey in Her Own Words, edited by Anjali Becker and Jeanne Engelmann (Chicago: Agate, 2017), 7.

29.   Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 77.

30.   Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo, January 12–16, 1886, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let552/letter.html.

31.   Both quotes in Paris: The Luminous Years: Towards the Making of the Modern, written, produced, and directed by Perry Miller Adato, PBS, 2010, at 0:40 and 1:10.

32.   Eric Weiner, The Genius of Geography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 167.

33.   Quoted in Dan Hofstadter, “‘The Europeans’ Review: Engines of Progress,” Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-europeans-review-engines-of-progress-11571409900.

34.   James Wood, Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources (London: Wame, 1893), 120.

35.   Richard Florida and Karen M. King, “Rise of the Global Startup City: The Geography of Venture Capital Investment in Cities and Metros Across the Globe,” Martin Prosperity Institute, January 26, 2016, http://martinprosperity.org/content/rise-of-the-global-start up-city/.

Chapter 12: Move Fast and Break Things

1.     Quoted in Mary Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 2018), 475.

2.     Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Random House, 1982), 12.

3.     Author’s translation and paraphrase of the original French. See also Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journals, edited and translated by Robert Baldick (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1962), 100.

4.     Oprah Winfrey, Own It: Oprah Winfrey in Her Own Words, edited by Anjali Becker and Jeanne Engelmann (Chicago: Agate, 2017), 65.

5.     Quoted in Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Tesla’s Elon Musk May Have Boldest Pay Plan in Corporate History,” New York Times, January 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/business/dealbook/tesla-elon-musk-pay.html/.

6.     David Kiley, “Former Employees Talk About What Makes Elon Musk Tick,” Forbes (July 14, 2016), https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkiley5/2016/07/14/former-employees-talk-about-what-makes-elon-musk-tick/#a48d8e94514e; “What Is It Like to Work with/for Elon Musk?,” Quora, https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-with-for-Elon-Musk.

7.     Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg: In His Own Words, edited by George Beahm (Chicago: Agate, 2018), 189.

8.     Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper, 1962), chap. 11.

9.     Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge, Capitalism in America: A History (New York: Random House, 2018), 420–21.

10.   Zaphrin Lasker, “Steve Jobs: Create. Disrupt. Destroy,” Forbes (June 14, 2011), https://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2011/06/14/steve-jobs-create-disrupt-destroy/#6276e77f531c.

11.   Joe Nocera, “Apple’s Culture of Secrecy,” New York Times, July 26, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/business/26nocera.html.

12.   Quoted in Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 124.

13.   Dylan Love, “16 Examples of Steve Jobs Being a Huge Jerk,” Business Insider, October 25, 2011, https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10#everything-youve-ever-done-in-your-life-is-shit-5.

14.   Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 122–23.

15.   See, e.g., the story of Steve Jobs and freshly squeezed orange juice in Nick Bilton, “What Steve Jobs Taught Me About Being a Son and a Father,” New York Times, August 7, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/fashion/mens-style/what-steve-jobs-taught-me-about-being-a-son-and-a-father.html.

16.   This and the following quote are from Nellie Bowles, “In ‘Small Fry,’ Steve Jobs Comes Across as a Jerk. His Daughter Forgives Him. Should We?,” New York Times, August 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/books/steve-jobs-lisa-brennan-jobs-small-fry.html.

17.   Quoted in Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 32.

18.   Quoted in ibid., 119.

19.   Kevin Lynch, Steve Jobs: A Biographical Portrait (London: White Lion, 2018), 73.

20.   “On Thomas Edison and Beatrix Potter,” Washington Times, April 7, 2007, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/apr/7/20070407-095754-2338r/.

21.   “Thomas A. Edison,” The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times, July 25, 1888, http://edison.rutgers.edu/digital/files/fullsize/fp/fp0285.jpg. See also Randall Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World (New York: Random House, 2007), 15–16.

22.   Neil Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 60.

23.   Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park, 174.

24.   Much of the information is drawn from Michael Daly, Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison (New York: Grove Press, 2013), chap. 26.

25.   James Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York: Random House, 2003), 169–70.

26.   The relationship between the color spectrum and the harmonic series in music is a good example. See Penelope Gouk, “The Harmonic Roots of Newtonian Science,” in Let Newton Be!: A New Perspective on his Life and Works, edited by John Fauvel, Raymond Flood, Michael Shortland, and Robin Wilson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988), 101–26.

27.   Sheldon Lee Glashow, “The Errors and Animadversions of Honest Isaac Newton,” Contributions to Science 4, no. 1 (2008): 105–10.

28.   Quoted in ibid., 105.

29.   Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1998), 196.

30.   Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 174–75.

31.   Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown, 1982), 9.

32.   Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park, 81.

33.   Quoted in Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (New York: Random House, 2016), 122.

34.   Ludwig van Beethoven, letter to Franz Wegeler, June 29, 1801, in Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations, edited and translated by Michael Hamburger (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960), 25.

35.   Thomas Alva Edison, The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison, edited by Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Greenwood, 1968), 110.

36.   Sam Bush, “Faulkner as a Father: Do Great Novelists Make Bad Parents?,” Mockingbird, July 31, 2013, https://www.mbird.com/2013/07/faulkner-as-a-father-do-great-novelists-make-bad-parents/.

37.   Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, translated by Eric Blom, Peter Branscombe, and Jeremy Noble (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 423.

38.   Maria Anna Mozart, letter to Friedrich Schlichtegroll, 1800, translated from Mozart-Jahrbuch (Salzburg: Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, 1995), 164.

39.   Quoted in Dave Itzkoff, Robin (New York: Henry Holt, 2018), 354.

40.   Keith Caulfield, “Michael Jackson Sales, Streaming Decline After ‘Leaving Neverland’ Broadcast,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 8, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/michael-jacksons-sales-streaming-decline-leaving-neverland-1193509.

41.   Emma Goldberg, “Do Works by Men Implicated by #MeToo Belong in the Classroom?,” New York Times, October 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/us/metoo-schools.html.

42.   Farah Nayeri, “Is It Time Gauguin Got Canceled?,” New York Times, November 18, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/arts/design/gauguin-national-gallery-london.html.

43.   Robin Pogrebin and Jennifer Schuessler, “Chuck Close Is Accused of Harassment. Should His Artwork Carry an Asterisk?,” New York Times, January 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/arts/design/chuck-close-exhibit-harassment-accusations.html.

44.   Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Viking, 1965), 11.

45.   Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 234.

46.   Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 77.

47.   Ibid., 326.

48.   Author’s translation from Pierre Cabanne, quoting Marie-Thérèse Walter, in “Picasso et les joies de la paternité,” L’Oeil: Revue d’Art 226 (May 1974): 7.

49.   Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, 42.

50.   Huffington, Picasso, 345.

51.   Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, 77.

52.   Henry Blodget, “Mark Zuckerberg on Innovation,” Business Insider, October 1, 2009, https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-innovation-2009-10.

53.   Brainyquote, https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/margaret_atwood. The quote appears to be a compilation of phrases taken from Maddie Crum, “A Conversation with Margaret Atwood About Climate Change, Social Media and World of Warcraft,” Huffpost, November 12, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/margaret-atwood-interview_n_6141840.

54.   See Sam Schechner and Mark Secada, “You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-give-apps-sensitive-personal-information-then-they-tell-face book-11550851636.

55.   Sandy Parakilas, “We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself,” New York Times, November 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/facebook-regulation-incentive.html?ref=todayspaper.

56.   Ibid.

57.   Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, “Disinformation and ‘Fake News’: Final Report,” House of Commons, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1791/1791.pdf; and Graham Kates, “Facebook ‘Misled’ Parliament on Data Misuse, U.K. Committee Says,” CBS News, February 17, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-misled-parliament-on-data-misuse-u-k-committee-says/.

58.   Discussions of Zuckerberg’s obsession with computer code as the solution to all of Facebook’s problems can be found in Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (New York: Random House, 2019), 64–65, 159, 193. See also Shoshona Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 480–88.

59.   Nicholas Carlson, “‘Embarrassing and Damaging’ Zuckerberg IMs Confirmed by Zuckerberg, The New Yorker,” Business Insider, September 13, 2010, https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuckerberg-ims-confirmed-by-zuckerberg-the-new-yorker-2010-9.

60.   Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964), 402.

Chapter 13: Now Relax

1.     Jean Kinney, “Grant Wood: He Got His Best Ideas While Milking a Cow,” New York Times, June 2, 1974, https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/02/archives/grantwood-he-got-his-best-ideas-while-milking-a-cow-grant-wood-he.html.

2.     Amir Muzur, Edward F. Pace-Schott, and J. Allan Hobson, “The Prefrontal Cortex in Sleep,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6, no. 11 (November 2002): 475–81, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11012150_The_prefrontal_cortex_in_sleep; Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (New York: Scribner, 2017), 195.

3.     Walker, Why We Sleep, chap. 11.

4.     Matthew P. Walker, Conor Liston, J. Allan Hobson, and Robert Stickgold, “Cognitive Flexibility Across the Sleep-Wake Cycle: REM-Sleep Enhancement of Anagram Problem Solving,” Brain Research 14, no. 3 (November 2002): 317–24, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12421655.

5.     Robert Stickgold and Erin Wamsley, “Memory, Sleep, and Dreaming: Experiencing Consolidation,” Journal of Sleep Research 6, no. 1 (March 1, 2011): 97–108, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3079906/.

6.     Walker, Why We Sleep, 219.

7.     Tori DeAngelis, “The Dream Canvas: Are Dreams a Muse to the Creative?,” Monitor on Psychology 34, no. 10 (November 2003): 44, https://www.apa.org/monitor/nov03/canvas.

8.     Igor Stravinsky, Dialogues and a Diary, edited by Robert Craft (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 70.

9.     Jay Cridlin, “Fifty Years Ago, the Rolling Stones’ Song ‘Satisfaction’ Was Born in Clearwater,” Tampa Bay Times, May 3, 2015, https://www.tampabay.com/things-to-do/music/50-years-ago-the-rolling-stones-song-satisfaction-was-born-in-clearwater/2227921/.

10.   The concert/interview is available at “Paul McCartney Singing Yesterday at the Library of Congress,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieu_5o1LiQQ.

11.   Walker, Why We Sleep, 202.

12.   Quoted in Elliot S. Valenstein, The War of the Soups and the Sparks: The Discovery of Neurotransmitters and the Dispute over How Nerves Communicate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 58.

13.   Leon Watters, quoted in Walter Isaacson, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 436.

14.   In 2017, Kip Thorne won the Nobel Prize in Physics, in part for having proved, as part of the LIGO project, Einstein’s theory about collapsing black holes to be correct. I don’t know how Professor Thorne sleeps, but in an email to me he reminded me of a passage in his 2014 book The Science of Interstellar (p. 9), in which he says “my best thinking was in the dead of night. The next morning I would write up my thoughts in a several-paged memo with diagrams and pictures.”

15.   Jacquelyn Smith, “72% of People Get Their Best Ideas in the Shower—Here’s Why,” Business Insider, January 14, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/why-people-get-their-best-ideas-in-the-shower-2016-1.

16.   Walker, Why We Sleep, 208, 223.

17.   A. R. Braun, T. J. Balkin, N. J. Wesenten, et al., “Regional Cerebral Blood Flow Throughout the Sleep-Wake Cycle. An H2(15)O PET Study,” Brain 120, no. 7 (July 1997): 1173–97, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9236630.

18.   Quoted in Jagdish Mehra, Einstein, Hilbert, and the Theory of Gravitation (Boston: Reidel, 1974), 76.

19.   Barry Parker, Einstein: The Passions of a Scientist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 30.

20.   Quoted in Gerald Whitrow, Einstein: The Man and His Achievement (New York: Dover Publications, 1967), 21.

21.   David Hindley, “Running: An Aid to the Creative Process,” Guardian, October 30, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-running-blog/2014/oct/30/running-writers-block-creative-process.

22.   Among these are Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwarz, “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 40, no. 4 (2014): 1142–52, https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xlm-a0036577.pdf; Lorenza S. Colzato, Ayca Szapora, Justine N. Pannekoek, and Bernhard Hommel, “The Impact of Physical Exercise on Convergent and Divergent Thinking,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2 (December 2013), https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00824; and Prabha Siddarth, Alison C. Burggren, Harris A. Eyre, et al., “Sedentary Behavior Associated with Reduced Medial Temporal Lobe Thickness in Middle-Aged and Older Adults,” PLOS ONE (April 12, 2018), http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0195549.

23.   Eric Weiner, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 21.

24.   Ibid., 21.

25.   Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, Netflix, 2019, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80184771?source=35.

26.   Henry David Thoreau, journal, August 19, 1851, in The Portable Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer, https://www.penguin.com/ajax/books/excerpt/9780143106500.

27.   Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: Women at Work (New York: Random House, 2019), 52.

28.   Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 40.

29.   W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 50–51.

30.   Nikola Tesla, My Inventions, edited by David Major (Middletown, DE: Philovox, 2016), 35. The original German of the poem has been translated by the author.

31.   Carlson, Tesla, 404.

32.   Rebecca Mead, “All About the Hamiltons,” The New Yorker (February 9, 2015), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/hamiltons.

33.   Ludwig van Beethoven, letter to Tobias Haslinger, September 10, 1821, in Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations, edited and translated by Michael Hamburger (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 174–75. The autograph letter is preserved in the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, and the canon carries the Kinsky number WoO 182.

34.   Danille Taylor-Guthrie, ed., Conversations with Toni Morrison (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 43.

35.   Francis Mason, ed., I Remember Balanchine: Recollections of the Ballet Master by Those Who Knew Him (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 418.

Chapter 14: Time to Concentrate!

1.     David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 370, quoted and condensed in Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), 217–18.

2.     Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 109–10.

3.     Fritjof Capra, The Science of Leonardo (New York: Random House, 2007), 30.

4.     Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991), 290.

5.     Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: An Intimate Portrait (London: W. H. Allen, 1948), 79.

6.     Quoted in Barry Parker, Einstein: The Passions of a Scientist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 137.

7.     Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 161.

8.     Albert Einstein, The Complete Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 1, xxii, quoted in ibid., 24.

9.     Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 454.

10.   Author’s translation from Joseph Heinze Eibl, “Ein Brief Mozarts über seine Schaffensweise?,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 35 (1980): 586.

11.   Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 1 (September 1799): 854–56. This account of Constanze Mozart was repeated by her in Salzburg in 1829; see Vincent and Mary Novello, A Mozart Pilgrimage: Being the Travel Diaries of Vincent & Mary Novello in the Year 1829, edited by Nerina Medici di Marignano and Rosemary Hughes (London: Novello, 1955), 112.

12.   Humphrey Newton, letter to John Conduitt, January 17, 1728, The Newton Project, http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00033.

13.   Let Newton Be!: A New Perspective on his Life and Works, edited by John Fauvel, Raymond Flood, Michael Shortland, and Robin Wilson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988), 15.

14.   Jerry Hanken, “Shulman Wins, but Hess Wows,” Chess Life (June 2008): 16, 20.

15.   For a discussion of memory for chess and memory in general, see William G. Chase and Herbert A. Simon, “The Mind’s Eye in Chess,” in Visual Information Processing: Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Carnegie Psychology Symposium on Cognition, edited by William G. Chase (New York: Academic Press, 1972). For related studies by Simon, Chase, and others, see David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess (New York: Random House, 2006), 303–4.

16.   David Rosand, Meyer Shapiro Professor of Art History, Columbia University, presentation in the Yale “genius course,” January 29, 2009.

17.   Howard Gardiner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 148, 157.

18.   Elyse Graham, Joyce scholar and professor of modern literature at Stony Brook University, conversation with the author, August 1, 2010.

19.   Bloomberg, “Elon Musk: How I Became the Real ‘Iron Man,’” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh45igK4Esw, at 3:50.

20.   Alan D. Baddeley, Human Memory, 2nd ed. (East Essex, UK: Psychology Press, 1997), 24.

21.   Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 1550 edition, quoted in Capra, The Science of Leonardo, 25.

22.   Rosand, presentation in the Yale “genius course,” January 29, 2009.

23.   Heidi Godman, “Regular Exercise Changes the Brain to Improve Memory, Thinking Skills,” Harvard Health Publishing, April 9, 2018, https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/regular-exercise-changes-brain-improve-memory-thinking-skills-201404097110.

24.   Capra, The Science of Leonardo, 20.

25.   “The Hawking Paradox,” Horizon, BBC, 2005, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x226awj, at 3:00.

26.   Dennis Overbye, “Stephen Hawking Taught Us a Lot About How to Live,” New York Times, March 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/science/stephen-hawking-life.html.

27.   Niall Firth, “Stephen Hawking: I Didn’t Learn to Read Until I Was Eight and I Was a Lazy Student,” Daily Mail, October 23, 2010, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1322807/Stephen-Hawking-I-didnt-learn-read-8-lazy-student.html.

28.   Kitty Ferguson, email communication with the author, April 18, 2018.

29.   “The Hawking Paradox,” at 9:00.

30.   Hawking, directed by Stephen Finnigan, 2013, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi8jMRMsEJo, at 49:00.

31.   Kitty Ferguson, quoted in Kristine Larsen, Stephen Hawking: A Biography (New York: Greenwood, 2005), 87.

32.   Hawking, at 49:30.

33.   Much of the material in this and the next paragraph was drawn from Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (New York: Random House, 2013); and Currey, Daily Rituals: Women at Work (New York: Random House, 2019). For specific individuals, consult the indices of each.

34.   Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, 64.

35.   Ibid., 110.

36.   Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 14, 237.

37.   Isaacson, Einstein, 424.

38.   Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977), quoted in Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, 104.

39.   John Updike, interview with the Academy of Achievement, June 12, 2004, quoted in Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, 196.