In this edition of How to Save the World With Good Thoughts: Pretty:Darn:Swell, and Jonathan Lethem.

If you’re an artist or like art that makes you think of The Emperor of Ice Cream and dressers made of deal, check out Pretty:Darn:Swell. Artists featured on the site are selling high-quality prints of their work and donating $5 of the sale to their favorite charities like BARC, Angel Flight New England, and United Way.

This project sounds similar to Jonathan Lethem’s Promiscuous Materials Project. For $1 on the author’s website filmmakers, musicians, dramatists, and illustrators are purchasing the rights to one of Lethem’s short stories for adaptation. Lethem supports artistic sharing, the ecstasy of influence, lifting verses, riffs, scenes, and samples; He understands the benefits of outright theft, and we have to agree. Art would not exist without cooperative collaboration, from The Iliad to Tarantino, sharing makes the world a better place.