Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Robert Lowell said that Bob Dylan wasn’t a poet because he “leaned on the crutch of his guitar”. The Nobel committee clearly disagree – they awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Indeed, Dylan has leaned on poetry more than any other musician, before or since.

The human mind: It’s the best drama machine around. It’s portable. It runs day and night. It requires only imagination to operate. It cranks out some of the best stories around. Just feed it a few tidbits of hearsay, half-truths, some emotional charge, some childhood memories (the more traumatic, the better), and voilà...

Denis Villeneuve’s alien movie Arrival, which has just reached cinemas, is the latest in a long sci-fi tradition of “first contact” narratives.

New statistical analysis identifies Christopher Marlowe as a likely coauthor of all three of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays.

A long time ago, a girl named Li-Li got married and went to live with her husband and mother-in-law. In a very short time, Li-Li found that she couldn't get along with her mother-in-law at all.

For the last 30 years or so the rise of creative writing programmes in universities has been met with seemingly unending howls of derision from all quarters.

Leonard Cohen has died, and the lights have gone out all around the world. His death shouldn’t have come as any surprise: as he wrote to his muse Marianne, just weeks ago,

As a researcher who investigates some of the potential side effects of humor, I spend a fair bit of time verifying the funniness of the jokes, photos and videos we present to participants in our studies.

After years of sales growth, major publishers reported a fall in their e-book sales for the first time this year, introducing new doubts about the potential of e-books in the publishing industry.

As the new NBA season begins, the Golden State Warriors find themselves in an unfamiliar role: villain.

If you’re reading this in a comfortable chair, surrounded by tasteful soft furnishings and perhaps even a candle or two, that sense of cosiness you’re feeling might just be hygge.

Truly creative people are more interested in the process of creating than its side effects. They do not create in order to get something else. The joy of creating is reward enough in itself. Awards and accolades are not the goal; they are the byproducts of the goal.

There’s been a great deal of excitement over Bob Dylan winning the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s rare for artists who have achieved widespread, mainstream popularity to win.

While meditations, exercise, and vacations all have the potential to reduce negative stress, if your relationships are lousy or you hate your work or your creativity is being stifled, you will remain stressed out. Your life choices, positive and negative, determine your wellbeing...

In New York I am going to have late-afternoon tea with a rather unusual artist. She works in a bank on Wall Street, but one day she had a dream: she had to go to...

Have you noticed that many children’s tales end with a victory of the heart? The hero, after following a tortuous path of struggles, dreams and hopes, always manages to fulfill their heart’s desire, while sometimes discovering it at the same time....

More than two million viewers watched some of the Thursday night NFL football game on Twitter each of the last three weeks, and several million more used it to watch the first presidential debate.

From stadiums to galleries, the new frontier for today’s mega pop star is high art. Mass popularity has its charms – sales, world tours, legions of followers – but the legacy-conferring power of art is now the ultimate sign of one’s status within Western culture.

Something happened the other day that highlighted why we do what we do, and why I love helping ordinary people find the extraordinary humor and playfulness in every day life. We've been traveling around the northeast for the past three weeks and one thing the northeast has is -- tolls. Now I can imagine that being a toll-taker takes its toll. Same old same old...

Historians don’t like simple stories. Tales of the past that contain facile explanations or glib conclusions never seem to satisfy

A new study offers some of the most conclusive evidence to date that intelligence is linked to chess skill—a hotly debated issue in psychology. The results refute the idea that expertise is based solely on intensive training.

With the release of a new film about Edward Snowden, the man who revealed secret documents detailing a massive U.S. government spying program, the debate about his character continues.

A new fabric harvests energy from both sunshine and motion at the same time.