The word “creativity” has magic appeal. Don’t we all admire creative people? Don’t we all secretly want to be at least somewhat creative ourselves? Isn’t creativity one of our species’ most distinctive attributes? Having worked much on metaphor [1] and a bit on blending theory/conceptual integration theory [2], I plead guilty to a scholarly as well as a personal interest in the concept. That said, I have always been somewhat suspicious of the possibility of making nontrivial academic claims about it. After all, searching for patterns in what, by definition, pertains to the very breaking of patterns cannot but be a contradiction in terms. So it was with some reservations that I began reading The Cult of Creativity—although the book’s title should have been a clue that Franklin is not an unconditional promoter of the concept either. Indeed, to forestall possible misconceptions about its contents,...

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