David Crystal, in English as a Global Language, observed something that should have been unremarkable but wasn’t: “English is news. The language continues to make news daily in many countries.” He wrote that in the late 1990s, when the Globe and Mail was still running headlines like “English is the global language” as though the fact itself required periodic confirmation. What Crystal noticed was the gap between English as an assumed universal and English as something that bi

In 2022, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert released Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film that won seven Academy Awards and quietly introduced millions of viewers to one of the most useful cognitive frameworks I have encountered in two decades of designing creative thinking activities. The mechanic is called verse-jumping. To access the skills of an alternate version of yourself in a parallel universe, you must perform an action in your current reality that has the lowest

A unique linguistic experiment built on lexical shifts. Every letter of a text is sorted into one of two groups, vowels or consonants, and each group rotates independently along its own positions. Spaces, punctuation, capitalization and word lengths never move, so the structure of the text stays exactly as it was. Only the material inside that structure is displaced. Familiar words dissolve, and sometimes a fragment of another language, a half-forgotten word or a stray lexica

Somewhere in your home there is an object that has outlived its original purpose but not yet accepted the fact. It is not broken enough to justify throwing away, not useful enough to justify keeping, and it has been sitting in a drawer, on a shelf, or in a box labelled "miscellaneous" for long enough that it has started to feel like a permanent resident rather than a problem to solve. You have walked past it several hundred times. Each time, you have thought: I should probabl

New research in cognitive science suggests that the brain represents complexity as a single unified quantity across all sensory domains - and what that means for how we teach, practise, and understand creative thinking. A paper published in Nature Human Behaviour earlier this month by Tal Boger and Chaz Firestone at Johns Hopkins University makes a claim that, on the surface, sounds almost too tidy to be true: complexity is a unified cognitive kind. Across eleven experiments