Creative Insights

She doesn’t define creativity by output.
She tracks it back to your neurons.
Baroness Susan Greenfield is a neuroscientist who studies creativity as a side effect of neural plasticity, emotion, and change.
To her, your brain is not a thing — it's a process.
In this piece, we explore why understanding your brain’s inner weather might be the most radical creative tool you didn’t know you had.

They didn’t follow rules.
They rewrote what a magazine could be.
Underground mags from the 60s and 70s used chaos as fuel for creativity.
They experimented with layout, language, and purpose.
They were loud, political, strange — and unforgettable.

Sayonara Seventy Nine selects 7 standout titles that shaped counterculture through design and disruption.
These weren’t just publications.
They were creative acts of resistance.

Many still value the “thing” more than the “idea.” But everything—from axes to ladders to fashion—was first imagined before it was ever made. In this week’s Sunday Blooming Reading, Blithe Ernst reminds us that ideas are the real origin story behind everything tangible. A playful meditation on imagination, animals, and the unseen beginnings of everything we hold in our hands. First the idea. Then the world.

Improvisation is brilliant—when it’s the last resort. In this Sunday Blooming Reading, Blithe Ernst unpacks the myth of improvisation as a creative method. While being able to improvise is a gift, relying on it as your only tool is reckless. True creativity is not about waiting for inspiration to strike, but about training, weaving, building. Improvisation can save the day—but it should never be the plan.

What happens when you reach for the “wrong” tool, wear the “wrong” thing, or say the “wrong” words? You open doors. In this Sunday Blooming Reading, Blithe Ernst explores the power of the inadequate as a creative disruptor. It doesn’t guarantee brilliance, but it pulls us off the beaten path—and into the unknown, where originality hides. Adequacy maintains. Inadequacy invites novelty. And novelty is half of creativity.