Creative Synthesis

Beyond the gifted label.

What Does It All Mean?

Bright and creative young people can easily find themselves standing on an existential precipice, asking important questions that have no simple answers. Such questioning can be triggered by something as normal as a baseball game. Read More

One Can Be OK with That

Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll: "The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.” Well, there you go then.

Cool! Someone else who has

Cool! Someone else who has read this really amazing book. It has been turned into an anime series, but even the people who have seen the anime series haven't read the books.

I always thought the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was funny in that it sort of turns a teenage mindset around on its head. Like, I'm 20 years old, I read the book when I was in my teens and saw the anime series even sooner than that, and I think I can relate in a way to what's going inside her head. Haruhi thinks to herself "I'm not really all that special" even though she actually is, she's the god of the universe! But, how would any of us know that we actually are not the god of the universe? I suppose we are the god of our own universes. But the book likes to tell the story from the point of view of everyone else as if she were, and that's what makes the story so...interesting.

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Lisa Rivero is the author of The Smart Teens' Guide to Living with Intensity and other education and parenting books, and she teaches college-level creative thinking, humanities, and writing at Milwaukee School of Engineering.

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