Smooth Pebbles

A highly interesting review of Gladwell's "Outliers"

Micheal Nielsen gets swiftly to a problem many scientists (and not a few writers) have with Gladwell's books -- and highlights their redeeming factors as well:

All three of Malcolm Gladwell's books pose a conundrum for the would-be reviewer. The conundrum is this: while the books have many virtues, none of the books make a watertight argument for their central claims. Many scientists, trained to respect standards of proof above all else, don't like this style. A colleague I greatly respect told me he thought Gladwell's previous book, Blink , was "terrible"; it didn't meet his standards of proof. Judge Richard Posner wrote a scathing review criticizing Blink on the same grounds.

Gladwell's gift as a writer is not for justification and proof of his claims. What Gladwell does have is an extraordinary gift to use stories to explain abstract ideas in a way that is vivid and memorable, a way that brings those abstract ideas quickly to mind at later need. This shamanic gift is dangerous, for if you read his books credulously, it leaves you open to believing ideas that may be false. It%u2019s also incredibly valuable, for what you learn you internalize deeply. In my opinion, this more than makes up for whatever Gladwell's books lack in rigorous justification.

Hat tip: Neuronarrative

Technorati Tags:
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

Papa on work routines

INTERVIEWER Could you say something of this process? When do you work? Do you keep to a strict schedule?

HEMINGWAY
When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and you know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

The Paris Review, Issue 18, 1958

From Daily Routines, a site that describes how "writers, artists and other interesting people organize their days."

You seldom hear Hemingway mentioned anymore, and who ever confesses to loving him? Yet I have always loved -- I can swim in it, rub it on me, immerse my brain in as if it were music or water -- most of this passage from Hemingway's justly famed interview in Paris Review. The second sentence especially is just perfect -- perfect language, and perfectly Hemingway. It's as good as the the first or the last sentence of A Farewell to Arms, which are two of the singingest sentences in print.

The interviewer, btw, is George Plimpton, who gets pie in his face several times during their conversation, which is -- like this very passage -- full of great writing wisdom layered around loads of Heming-hooey.

But really -- "There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write" -- that's music, and I can just about weep reading it.

Technorati Tags:
Ernest Hemingway, George Plimpton, LIterature, Writing

Pebble Collection

A few that rolled away with the tide ...

PsychCentral not impressed with Outliers

Look Who's in the Operating Room

From the Deutches Museum, tractors as core culture

And from Boing Boing, a Studley tool chest. And I was all excited to get my little canvas toolbag yesterday.

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Technorati Tags:
Malcolm Gladwell, Medtronics, Deutsches Museum, Wildlife

Walter Benjamin's Writing Tips

Walter Benjamin is a very interesting writer, with a wild range of work (music, Marx, hashish, much much more), a highly distinctive style and one of those early-20th-century European lives that seems impossibly full of intense cultural force and historical fate; his memoir of his youth, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, is particularly affecting, and painful indeed in light of his mysterious end -- he died at the Spanish-French border trying to escape from the Nazis, possibly from suicide, possibly murdered by Stalinist agents.

courtesy Harvard University Press

A fascinating man, a wonderful writer  -- and to judge from his tips for writing, a person of stupendously rigorous habit. I stumbled across these at Marginal Revolution. I put my favorites in bold and a few comments in brackets. Use with caution.

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.        

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

[In his great Vietnam book Dispatches, Michael Herr says a friend gave him this advice in this form: "Don't piss it all away at cocktail parties." Ernest Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, wrote that one of his all-time low points was reading some freshly completed but not-yet-published short stories out loud to a crowd of socialites, one of whom later (by his account) moved in on him and broke up his marriage.]

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds. 

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.    

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.   

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.   

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.   

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.   [!!!]

IX. Nulla dies sine linea -- but there may well be weeks.   

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.   

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.   

XII. Stages of composition: idea -- style -- writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.   

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/08/walter-benjamin.html

Tags: WalterBenjamin, writing, advice

Nicholson Baker on Wikipedia

Now here's a match-up: the fine-grained, highly particularized, unpredictable, and insatiably curious mind of Nicholson Baker and the many-grained field of knowledge expressed in Wikipedia. In a great reading pleasure, Baker reviews John Broughton's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual in the current issue of the New York Review of Books:

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it's free, and it's fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope," or "turnip," or "Crazy Eddie," or "Bagoas," or "quadratic formula," or "Bristol Beaufighter," or "squeegee," or "Sanford B. Dole," and you'll have knowledge you didn't have before. It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.

This is just Baker's cup of tea.

Where are the 'best science books' of 2007?

Last month, when all the "Best Books of 2007" lists came out, several regulars on a science writers list-serve I'm on expressed chagrin that most of the most prominent lists held few science books. Even defining "science book" broadly, the New York Times Review Notable Books list contained just one science book (How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman) The Amazon Best 100 lists held somewhere between none and five, depending on how you defined science book. (For more on that, see my sieve of their list at bottom.) John Dupius, who keeps the blog Confessions of a Science Librarian, took to task The Atlantic for including no science books on its list.

To be fair, quite a few places (including Amazon) did put out lists of best science books or included some in their general Best OF lists. Dupuis the Science Libraran covers most of them. But the Times and Amazon's neglect was enough to spark disgruntlement on the sci writers listserve. Best Of lists are great fodder for arguments, of course, and part of the ire in the science writers group was, naturally enough, that fewer of our books were on there. Damn! Still, in an age when science drives much of the economy and culture, to say nothing of health, this low representation was discouraging. And science writers naturally aren't eager to entertain the idea that the low science selection was because no one writing about science was writing well.

The solution, we figured, was to put out our own list. That didn't happen, perhaps because we got such a late jump. Mine, however, is below. Comments, alternate nominations, and arguments welcome.

Best Science Books of 2007

(according to David Dobbs)

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman

Weisman takes his stunning essay of a couple years ago -- an imagination of what the world becomes were we humans to suddenly vanish -- and somehow improves upon the original shorter form. An improbable and enthralling accomplishment.

Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson

By general acclaim. Nice to have this bio of Einstein on the same list with a highly different work from Weisman, who got his start imagining Einstein's Dreams.

The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology, by Bernd Heinrich

Heinrich has written one splendid, fascinating book after another. This one adds another dimension as it traces his family and scientific lineage. Charming and utterly absorbing.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer

A fine book, and frighteningly good coming from someone just 26. (He's probably sick of hearing that -- but there are worse problems to have.) We'll see more of Mr. Lehrer.

How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande

Groopman gets a bit less press than his fellow New Yorker doctor-writer colleague Atul Gawande, perhaps because he's been around longer. But in this case I think Groopman's is the stronger of these two very strong books, with more to say about what ails medicine. However. my father, a retired surgeon, found otherwise -- though maybe that's just solidarity with fellow surgeon Gawande.

The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS, by Helen Epstein

I'm relying on informed outside opinion here.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks.

Chance, even simple fairness, would suggest that Sacks would eventually produce a book that is less than fascinating. That day has not yet come. Sacks has been collecting these stories of musical wonders and curiosities for decades, it turns out, and they supply, once again, riveting surprises and conundra from the meeting of brain, culture, and individual sensibility, all filtered by Sacks' unique intelligence and curiosity. A highly companionable read.

That's just eight. I have a haunting feeling I'm leaving something out. Possibly books by friends. Please feel free to draw my attention to oversights.

The (arguably) science books from Amazon's Best 100 Books of 2007:

Some people wouldn't include any of these in a strict definition of science book -- Einstein is a biography, Better and Musicophilia deal with medicine and neurology and music, Weisman is a futuristic riff. I'm more catholic in my definitions: I say let 'em all in.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks.

Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande

"I Am a Strange Loop" (Douglas Hofstadter), which apparently plumbs the roots-of-consciousness question in a way that considers but then sets aside a reductionist scientific approach.

Alex Ross on how the web is good for classical music

Music is alive and well

I long ago grew weary of complaints about the demise of classical music -- a demise based on dropping sales and and market share. Similar complaints had been voiced about tennis, another thing I love. In both cases the hand-wringing about falling ticket or record sales or TV viewers ran on the assumption that the truest measure of a sport's or art's vitality is how many people pay to consumer it. It's silly to feel classical music or tennis are failing because they don't constantly grow or attract as many spectators as pop music or baseball. Complaining about the lack of popularity is all the sillier if you've taken pains to associate your "product" with BMWs and expensive clothes; those who aim at the $100K+ demographic and should not wonder why they've failed to draw the masses.

A splendid antidote to this negativity (I mean the negativity of those I'm complaining about, not my own) is the writing of Alex Ross, the New Yorker's classical music critic, who grows better by the year, and who this month brought out two nice offerings: a great piece in the New Yorker about how the web is good for classical music and a new book that is drawing rave reviews, and which I plan to have in hand shortly.

The New Yorker piece is nicely contrarian: Ross argues that the web, which many handwringers say is destroying classical music by building a more distracted populace, has invigorated discussion of classical music. His book, The Rest is Noise, is about 20th century music -- a subject about which Ross writes beautifully.

Ross also has a nice web site, also titled The Rest is Noise. It's as fresh, funny, and unpretentiously intelligent (or intelligently unpretentious?), as is his criticism. The best way to appreciate him is to check out these links. If you'd rather have it on greater authority, there's always the Times review.