The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on November 29, 2011, 12:07:19 am ---Malcolm Gladwell had a piece a couple of months ago about how genius is rarely all about one person coming up with some great invention in isolation. The central anecdote was about how IBM developers in a lab setting came up with some great ideas for computers but didn't know how to produce and market them effectively to the masses, and Jobs took those ideas and turned them into consumer-product gold.
I smell a book in the works. Something about how creative genius doesn't exist in isolation, but relies on building upon other people's ideas.
Too bad Steven Johnson recently published a book about that same idea.
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-Innovation/dp/1594485380/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1
--- End quote ---
I remember that article, and I agree with you about a forthcoming book.
Jeff Wrangler:
I'm really enjoying the Food Issue (November 21). Over dinner last night, I read, "The King's Meal," and I got quite a kick out of Lucy Worsley (who seems to be quite a dish herself) calling David Starkey "a cross owl" in the jacket photos on his books. ;D
Starkey wrote Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne, the best book on Elizabeth I that I've ever read, and conceivably the best book ever on Elizabeth I.
Front-Ranger:
I liked the cover of this week's issue: a man goes into a bookstore, looking for something. The saleslady directs him to a corner where, on an obscure shelf are...some books! Also I liked the poem "Falling for Her" in which the poet writes about her mother.
Now, back to the food issue...
Jeff Wrangler:
For sheer weirdness, I suggest "Higher, Faster, Madder" in the Dec. 19, 26, 2011, issue.
serious crayons:
I went through a big stack of magazines a few weeks ago. I made what is usually a mistake: glanced through the tables of contents of each one before putting it in recycling. I wound up keeping a (much smaller) pile of issues containing stories I'd overlooked or never got around to the first time but which still looked interesting. Normally when I do that, THOSE sit around forever unread. But this time, I opened the magazines to the interesting articles and stacked them that way, opened, on my bedside table. Now, whenever I'm near them with time to read, I grab one of those. I've been reading stuff from as far back as July that I might have missed but am glad I found. Then when I've finished the good pieces, I throw the magazine into the recycling bag.
For example, there was a Nick Paumgarten piece on internet dating, and one by I can't remember who on Han Han, the Chinese superstar novelist. A short essay by Nora Ephron about "almost" becoming an heiress -- great ending, BTW. Something by Malcolm Gladwell, which is weird -- I usually make a point to read Gladwell's pieces (along with David Sedaris, George Saunders and a few others) right when they come out.
And I just finished a fascinating piece -- this is actually from as recently as October -- by Philip Gourevitch about how humanitarian aid, counterintuitively, can actually increase atrocities, how although we all naturally consider those good deeds beyond blame or reproach they actually can wind up aiding genocidaires and dragging out atrocity-filled conflicts -- an outcome predicted, fascinatingly, by Florence Nightingale.
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