CRUNCH - All things crunched.

The olympics may have been over and China may have been beaten to the number 2 by the US who have more golds, silver and bronze than China. While most of the world recalls the Olympics as China vs US, there seems to be another battle for gold. The stage is the publishing industry and the athletes are the 'tiger mom' vs 'western mom'. Welcome to mother vs mother the quest towards defining the the ideal mother. Only a few in this world may have more than one mother to refer when they direct their thoughts backwards but universally everyone is familiar with the concept of motherhood...so who is the ideal mother, this topic has fueled several raging debates and hair raising discussions. over the years, the publishers, authors, columnists, bloggers and even mother have preferred certain categorizations. these classifications are meant to restore legitimacy to each approach, but happens when the options stack up in a contest. Imagine an online store with options like Asian...

“…the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.” Literature is the original “inter-net,” woven of a web of allusions, references, and citations that link different works together into an endless rabbit hole of discovery. Case in point: Last week’s wonderful field guide to creativity, Dancing About Architecture , mentioned in passing an intriguing old book originally published by James Webb Young in 1939 — A Technique for Producing Ideas ( public library ), which I promptly hunted down and which will be the best $5 you spend this year, or the most justified trip to your public library. Young — an ad man by trade but, as we’ll see, a voraciously curious and cross-disciplinary thinker at heart — lays out with striking lucidity and clarity the five essential steps for a productive creative process, touching on a number of elements corroborated by modern science and thinki...