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Matthew Eilar1 Comment

Life is sucking hard (It’s certainly sucking) (You’re welcome, John).

1. Saffron

Did you know that it takes a field of crocuses the size of a football field to grow a pound of saffron? Or that 16th century German merchants could be executed for selling fake saffron? Read all about the world’s most valuable spice here.

2. Building a luxury sports car is actually quite involved.

3. Sage Stossel is quite funny.

4. Wired is stupid

This article, making the argument that “making learning cool could reform education,” is one of the stupidest things I have ever read. I’m really disappointed in the quality of Wired‘s offerings of late (I should note that I’m not a subscriber, so I’m getting exactly what I deserve). I don’t know if I’m just remembering it wrong, or if the magazine has actually changed for the worse, but now it seems to be filled with rewritten product press releases, and stupid, conventional wisdom articles with back-patting, self-congratulatory “geek” humor.

First of all, the phrasing of their argument doesn’t make any sense; it ends up saying nothing. You know what would also reform education? If every kid got better grades! or if all teachers were better! or if all schools taught kids more effectively! Why don’t we try those “reforms”?

But taking the argument on face value, it’s still bullshit. I am extremely lucky to have attended an exclusive prep school. That was an environment where everybody went to college. Good colleges, too. And let me tell you, even in Arcadia there was only a cursory correlation between intelligence and popularity. There was an inverse relationship between popularity and grade performance. Nobody was more despised than the brown-nosing fucks that pulled straight A’s*. I will note that those people were generally girls. Hey, that’s an idea! Let’s raise school performance by only requiring education for females.

*I will admit that there was one boy that was extremely popular and also had fantastic grades. But he was inhumanly beautiful and likely a benevolent demigod.

A couple of pieces by Gladwell

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My first exposure to Malcolm Gladwell came through a  New York Times Magazine (or something) profile. I remember they used a line I liked: they described him as ,”a young person’s conception of what an old person thinks a young person looks like”. It goes without saying that Gladwell pushes all of my intellectual buttons as if he owned them: I’m a big fan of counterintuitive narratives (and when I’m not a fan of them, I enjoy getting steamed up in defending the conventional wisdom), I think that he has an unusual talent for drawing connections between hard data and numbers and the human emotions that bring those numbers to life. It took me a little while to really get into his stories- I have a tendancy to resist exploring things that seem like they were created for me- but I enjoy them very much. Here’s a couple that I read recently:

“The Courthouse Ring”– This was a little hard for me to read. It’s a pretty brutal takedown of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” relating it to the race-accomodationists in the South at the time that the book was published. I still don’t know if I agree with his condemnation of the book. I don’t know if it’s right to judge people on an absolute scale of prejudice. Is it enough to be merely ahead of one’s time? Actually, now that I’m thinking of race, Gladwell’s 1996 piece, “Black Like Them” is one of my favorite essays on the subject.

“Smaller“- Malcom Gladwell on diapers. Mucho fun.