"David and Goliath"

[fiefoe]

Malcolm Gladwell always knows how to give one comforting thoughts.

• The Romans even had a special set of tongs made just to remove stones that had been embedded in some poor soldier’s body by a sling.
• The historian Baruch Halpern argues that the sling was of such importance in ancient warfare that the three kinds of warriors balanced one another, like each gesture in the game of rock, paper, scissors. With their long pikes and armor, infantry could stand up to cavalry. Cavalry could, in turn, defeat projectile warriors, because the horses moved too quickly for artillery to take proper aim. And projectile warriors were deadly against infantry, because a big lumbering soldier, weighed down with armor, was a sitting duck for a slinger who was launching projectiles from a hundred yards away.
• Goliath had a serious medical condition. He looks and sounds like someone suffering from what is called acromegaly.
• Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak—along the farthest, most deserted outposts of the railroad—and not where they were strong. Redwood City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one.
• Underdog strategies are hard.
• Their teams are just good enough that they know it could never work. Their players could never be convinced to play that hard.  They were not desperate enough.
• We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.
• The small class is, in other words, potentially as difficult for a teacher to manage as the very large class. In one case, the problem is the number of potential interactions to manage. In the other case, it is the intensity of the potential interactions.
• Citizens of happy countries have higher suicide rates than citizens of unhappy countries, because they look at the smiling faces around them and the contrast is too great.
• What matters, in determining the likelihood of getting a science degree, is not just how smart you are. It’s how smart you feel relative to the other people in your classroom.
• To Glimp’s mind, his job was to find students who were tough enough and had enough achievements outside the classroom to be able to survive the stress of being Very Small Fish in Harvard’s Very Large Pond.
• blessings of the Big Pond are mixed, and it is strange how rarely the Big Pond’s downsides are mentioned.
• The difference between bah and dah is a subtlety in the first 40 milliseconds of the syllable. Human language is based on the assumption that we can pick up that 40-millisecond difference what seems like the kind of obstacle that ought to cripple an underdog’s chances is actually like Alter and Oppenheimer’s Myriad Pro 10 percent gray, 10-point italics font.
• In the 1990s, he headed the prosecution team accusing Microsoft of antitrust violations... he was devastating in the cross-examination of witnesses, because there was no nuance, no subtle evasion, no peculiar and telling choice of words that he would miss—and no stray comment or revealing admission from testimony an hour or a day or a week before that he would not have heard, registered, and remembered.
• If you get As in school, you never need to figure out how to negotiate your way to a passing grade,
• “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
• Tversky was so smart that his fellow psychologists devised the “Tversky Intelligence Test”: The faster you realized Tversky was smarter than you, the smarter you were.
• Civilians from other countries also turned out to be unexpectedly resilient in the face of bombing.
• Too often, we make the same mistake as the British did and jump to the conclusion that there is only one kind of response to something terrible and traumatic. There isn’t. There are two.
• The link between career achievement and childhood bereavement was one of those stray facts that no one knew what to do with.
• “Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions. In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.”
• Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.
• The right question is whether we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma—and the answer is that we plainly do.
• as the English essayist Thomas De Quincey famously put it: “It is, or it is not, according to the nature of men, an advantage to be orphaned at an early age.”
• Freireich leapt up and roared, in the middle of the proceeding, “M. C. Li cured choriocarcinoma!”
• So what we did each day was we dragged out our meetings until people got home from work late in the afternoon. They would form out on the side and it would look like a thousand folks. We weren’t marching but twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen. But the papers were reporting fourteen hundred.” Walker explained, gleefully. “They cannot distinguish even between Negro demonstrators and Negro spectators.”
• King’s response? “Jail helps you to rise above the miasma of everyday life,”
• Longer sentences work on young men.