Navigating a Me Versus We World — My daughter’s favorite show is a Japanese anime series about an unassuming middle school boy with incredible psychic powers. This character, nicknamed Mob, has been raised to believe that even though his spoon-bending gifts are unique, they aren’t special. Being athletic, getting good grades, and being popular is more highly…

Try Drawing Your Worries Away — I use my pen like a fidget spinner. I ink the sides of my shoes, the crook of my hand, junk mail, and old business cards. At restaurants I draw on the paper napkins. Sometimes it’s out of boredom. Mostly it’s nerves or anxiety. …

God, Michelangelo and Old Testament Babes Had Abnormally Enlarged Glands — No one loved my goiter, not even me. Despite its crabby persona and ample protrusion, I didn’t notice it for years. People never said, “Nice goiter.” I wasn’t lucky enough to have it pointed out to me on national TV like the anchorwomen in Florida whose hawkeyed viewers emailed her…

If the World’s Greatest Artist Had to Fake It, Then Maybe You Should, Too. — By his death in 1564, Michelangelo Buonarotti was known as the greatest living artist of his time. Just one look at masterworks like the statue of David, the Pieta, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and it’s hard not to argue that he may, in fact, be the greatest…

Clothes were supposed to be streamlined in the future. But somehow it all went wrong. — I grew up in the 1970s on the promise of a space-age future — reminded of it on the nightly news with every NASA launch. We didn’t have Dial-a Meal, like the Jetsons, but we did have TV dinners. The food was not delicious, but it all cooked inside one…

When You Bite the Master, He Might Bite Back — Third graders are on the cusp of dawning realism, a stage of artistic development where they want the drawings they make and the images they see to look lifelike. This may explain why five seconds into my Cubist art lesson, eight-year-old Miss Arty Pants hates Picasso. I’m already struggling to…

Art advocates and educators work endlessly to prove the arts deserve more time and attention on the educational stage. In our efforts to do so, we tend to cite evidence and arguments that fail to convince those responsible for funding the arts. Sure, art boosts civic engagement, aids in social-emotional…

How Prussian Blue is Poised to Save Your Life Around 1706, in what is arguably one of the most prolific scientific accidents of all time, a color maker working in a Berlin lab ran out of his normal potash (water-soluble potassium salts commonly used as a base) and borrowed some from the alchemist who ran the lab. The colorist…

Art as the Antidote for Fear It’s impressive to look at something so simple and tidy as a Mondrian painting and realize that inside its unassuming blocks of color lies a profound sense of hope for the future. Around 1914, Mondrian returned to his native Holland to visit his sick father when the First World War broke out. Unable to leave, Mondrian instead began the slow and steady work of abstracting his already Cubist style. Influenced by Picasso, Kandinsky, and other artists from the time he’d spent in…