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Curate's Egg
Parts of Malcolm Gladwell's current best-seller, Outliers, are excellent. There's a chapter on Korean Airlines crashes that is what we read Gladwell for: fascinating new explanations of cultural phenomena. (It is at best tangentially related to the book's theme.) Also good stuff about the specific background (Jewish, garment trades) that produced lawyers for the Wall Street takeover madness, a nonastrological explanation of why successful hockey players are born in the early months of the year, and the toxic culture the Scots-Irish borderlands exported to America's South (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bradhicks also has a fascinating post on that; memo to self: read Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer).
There's also the Important Theme. Malcolm Gladwell Talks about a Lot of Cool Shit would not hit the top of the charts, so the book reveals that Hard Work and Good Luck and Cultural Factors influence success. There's a dead straw man here, and the knife through where its heart would be has Gladwell's fingerprints on it. No!!!!! Success is not entirely a matter of genes!!!!! It's a shortish book anyway, and without the equine necroflagellation it would be even shorter.
And can't anybody here play this game? The discussion of Elementary Algebra should have been vetted by someone who remembers it. "The program asks the user to punch in a set of coordinates and then draws a line from those coordinates on the screen" To where? Doesn't say, though the picture indicates it's the origin. The whole thing is explained abysmally, and in the interests of consistency it includes a possessive its with an apostrophe in it.
bradhicks also has a fascinating post on that; memo to self: read Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer).There's also the Important Theme. Malcolm Gladwell Talks about a Lot of Cool Shit would not hit the top of the charts, so the book reveals that Hard Work and Good Luck and Cultural Factors influence success. There's a dead straw man here, and the knife through where its heart would be has Gladwell's fingerprints on it. No!!!!! Success is not entirely a matter of genes!!!!! It's a shortish book anyway, and without the equine necroflagellation it would be even shorter.
And can't anybody here play this game? The discussion of Elementary Algebra should have been vetted by someone who remembers it. "The program asks the user to punch in a set of coordinates and then draws a line from those coordinates on the screen" To where? Doesn't say, though the picture indicates it's the origin. The whole thing is explained abysmally, and in the interests of consistency it includes a possessive its with an apostrophe in it.