The coffeehouse, as author Steven Johnson has told us in his influential writings on “where ideas come from,” is the arena where the modern world was born. These buzzy gathering places, Johnson writes, “fertilized countless Enlightenment-era innovations; everything from the science of electricity, to the insurance industry, to democracy itself.” New ideas, he argues, arise out of “the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space.”
