Mud · Molly Mielke

Molly's mud

Last updated January 28th, 2022

What's this? I'm fascinated by the metaphorical mud from which my creativity and taste in ideas has formed — like a lotus flower (on the good days). Below are collections of ideas and people that I've learned from.

Creativity

Mindstorms by Seymour A Papert (book)
Ways of Seeing by John Berger (show + book)
Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens by K. C. Cole (book)‍
A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young (book)
Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull (book)
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp (book)
The Pedagogy of Play by Vesna Krstich (book)
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (book)
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (book)
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler (book)
Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch (book)
The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander (book)
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (book)
The Paris Review Interviews I by Philip Gourevitch (magazine + podcast)
Secrets of the Creative Brain by Nancy C. Andreasen (article)‍
The Gap by Ira Glass (talk)
To Tell A Story by John Berger and Susan Sontag (talk)
‍The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett (album + story)

Tech, loosely

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop (book)
Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal (book)
The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner (book)
The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin (book)
Plans and Situated Actions by Lucy Suchman (book)
What Dormouse Said by John Markoff (book)
How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand (book)
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch (book)
Halt and Catch Fire by Christopher Cantwell (show)
Inventing on Principle by Bret Victor (talk)
When We Build by Wilson Miner (talk)
For more links on the history of tech, check out my computing history hub

Storytelling

Three-act narrative structure (framework)
Why I Write by Joan Didion & George Orwell (essays)
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (book)
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (book)
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (book)
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (book)
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf (book)
Ishmeal by Daniel Quinn (book)
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (book)
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (book)
The Good Father by Noah Hawley (book)
On Love by Alain de Botton (book)
On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt (book)
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (book)
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (book)
Educated by Tara Westover (book)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (book)
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (book)
The Girls by Emma Cline (book)
The Likeness by Tana French (book)
Tintin: The Calculus Affair by Hergé (comic)
Ribbonfarm (blog)
RadioLab (podcast)
Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson (film)
Good Will Hunting by Gus Van Sant (film)
The Florida Project by Sean Baker (film)
In the Mood For Love by Wong Kar-wai (film)
The Graduate by Mike Nichols (film)
‍The Motorcycle Diaries by Walter Salles (film)
‍Faces Places by Agnes Varda (film)
‍Hyper Reality by Keiichi Matsuda (short film)

Molly's mud

Last updated January 28th, 2022

Curious for more? Further playlists of ideas can be found on my are.na ↗