Archive for the ‘new_yorker’ tag
Gladwell on Late Bloomers
Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker: “Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?”
Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, “Citizen Kane,” at twenty-five. Herman Melville wrote a book a year through his late twenties, culminating, at age thirty-two, with “Moby-Dick.” Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one. In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the importance of precocity has hardened into an iron law. How old was T. S. Eliot when he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“I grow old . . . I grow old”)? Twenty-three. “Poets peak young,” the creativity researcher James Kaufman maintains. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the author of “Flow,” agrees: “The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the young.” According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, a leading authority on creativity, “Lyric poetry is a domain where talent is discovered early, burns brightly, and then peters out at an early age.”
A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was true.
(Emphasis mine.)
Understanding the Subprime Crisis
A few days back, I asked some of my Twitter friends to share some good resources for understanding the subprime crisis and global credit crunch.
Here are some other links that have caught my eye:
My prediction: deflation will continue through 2008 and 2009. The economy will continue to contract as consumers reduce consumption (and increase saving, which they must do) and businesses scale back operations so they fit the new, lower personal consumption environment. This will be a slow process, though, as the Fed and Treasury have worked mightily to obfuscate prices, and drag out the bubble deflation. Eventually, Helicopter Ben will say enough is enough and start to (finally) mail freshly printed greenbacks to households. Now we will switch from a deflationary environment to an inflationary environment, China will complete it’s transition out of the dollar, and we will get real, honest-to-God 70s style stagflation. And then we will wait for the next Volker.
I suggest reading the whole post.
Considering that Wall Street firms spend all day dealing with the market, they have been slow to understand just how vulnerable they were to it. Companies like Lehman and, earlier, Bear Stearns saw going public as an excuse to take on more risk and act more recklessly, when in fact becoming a public company makes caution more important, since the margin for error is smaller, and the punishment for failure swifter. Now that the government has acted, Wall Street (or what remains of it) may yet be able to regain investors’ confidence. But long-term survival really depends on remembering the fundamental truth about playing with other people’s money: it’s a lot of fun until they suddenly decide to ask for it back.
(Emphasis mine.)
**And on a related note, thanks to newley.com reader Paul D. for pointing out a NY Times article providing the backstory on how “The Giant Pool of Money” came to be.
–> What about you? Got some good links to share? Leave them in the comments or email me (newley AT gmail.com)
Elmore Leonard on Writing — and New Yorker Stories
![Elmore Leonard [image via Salon.com]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3283/2914457896_bfc016ab3c_m.jpg)
A snippet from what Elmore Leonard had to say at the New Yorker festival:
“I don’t write New Yorker stories. I mean, my stories are easy to understand. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
Leonard — aka the Dickens of Detroit — is one of my favorite writers.
Related: his 10 rules for writing. The central guideline: “If it sounds like writing, re-write.”
Tavis Smiley and Obama
I enjoyed this New Yorker Out Loud podcast episode, “The Dissident,” in which Kelefa Sanneh talks about Tavis Smiley and Barack Obama. Sanneh’s New Yorker story, which he discusses in the episode, is called “What He Knows for Sure: Tavis Smiley confronts the Obama candidacy,” and it can be found on the New Yorker site here.