Joshua wolf shenk biography of albert

  • Joshua Wolf Shenk, an author and essayist, has a provocative response to this idea: all these lone geniuses were just the more well-known halves.
  • Drawing on a wealth of his own research and the work of other Lincoln scholars, Shenk reveals how the sixteenth president harnessed his depression to fuel.
  • Drawing on seven years of his own research and the work of other esteemed Lincoln scholars, Shenk reveals how the sixteenth president harnessed depression.

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    Lincoln's Great Depression

    Politics

    Abraham Lincoln fought clinical depression all his life, and if he were alive today, his condition would be treated as a "character issue"—that is, as a political liability. His condition was indeed a character issue: it gave him the tools to save the nation

    By Joshua Wolf Shenk

    When Abraham Lincoln came to the stage of the state Republican convention in Decatur, Illinois, the crowd roared in approval. Men threw hats and canes into the air, shaking the hall so much that the awning over the stage collapsed; according to an early account, "the roof was literally cheered off the building." Fifty-one years old, Lincoln was at the peak of his political career, with momentum that would soon sweep him to the nomination of the national party and then to the White House.

    Yet to the convention audience Lincoln didn't seem euphoric, or triumphant, or even pleased. On the contrary, said a man named Johnson, observing from the conventio

  • joshua wolf shenk biography of albert

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    A friend recently posted a video on Facebook, a news story from ABC&#;s Nightline about Tripod, the social media company I helped build in Williamstown MA from The video sparked a wave of reactions in me: nostalgia for those past days, pride in the accomplishments of the friends I&#;ve kept up with, regret for losing touch with others, and bafflement that I would choose to wear flannel and overalls to show off our company to the world. (Perhaps my favorite moment in watching the video was discovering that we&#;d been interviewed by Deborah Amos, NPR&#;s Middle East reporter, who has subsequently become a respected friend.)

    I&#;m not proud of all of the emotions that I experienced traveling 17 years into the past. Seeing Bo Peabody, our co-founder and CEO, skateboard into the office and declare that we sold &#;eyeballs&#; gave me a wash of anger, envy and frustration that characterized much of my time at the company. Bo playing CEO &#; something he did splendidly &#; was often i

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    Is the lone genius a total myth?

    The conventional view of history is filled with lone geniuses: dock and women who, through talent and inspiration, achieved feats no one else had before. Pablo Picasso. Vincent van Gogh. Albert Einstein. Emily Dickinson.

    Joshua Wolf Shenk, an author and essayist, has a provokativ response to this idea: all these lone geniuses were just the more well-known halves of collaborative duos. In his new book Powers of Two, he argues that the real driver of human creativity isn't the lone genius, but the partnership.

    This can take all sorts of forms. There are the obvious partnerships — like Orville and Wilbur Wright, or Marie and Pierre Curie, or John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

    But there are other cases where collaboration more subtly powered success. Picasso was driven to his heights of creativity through a friendly rivalry with Matisse. Van Gogh once told his brother Theo, when discussing his paintings, that "you will have been as much t