1451. Flowering cabbage are creepy;
1452. You can have your fortune read using the marks left on your cup by the (coffee) grounds in your Turkish coffee;
1453. You can project movies onto the façade of the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C.;
1454. Time and again a person is reminded that the hardest thing in life is not meeting some challenge but knowing what the challenge is that needs to be met. Challenges have a way of slipping by unnoticed; most lives are the story of a series of unseen challenges;
1455. The debate between conservatives and liberals boils down to which comes first, politics or culture. Conservatives argue that the culture drives our politics, that a politician can do only what the culture allows him to. Liberals argue that government policies shape the culture;
1456. The tomato marmalade and the Ottoman rice at Agora (AgoraDC.net) in D.C. are tasty;
1457. The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are;
1458. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t;
1459. If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the “talented” from the “untalented;” and if you provide the “talented” with a superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date;
1460. Parents with a child born at the end of the calendar year often think about holding their child back before the start of kindergarten: it’s hard for a five-year-old to keep up with a child born many months earlier. But most parents, one suspects, think that whatever disadvantage a younger child faces in kindergarten eventually goes away. But it doesn’t. The small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists. It locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for years;
1461. You should bring sunglasses if you visit South Beach (in Miami). . . . The sun is really bright;
1462. You don’t need to tip in South Beach. The bars and restaurants automatically add gratuity;
1463. Clothing is optional in the “Garden of Eden” on the top floor of “The Bull” (BullKeyWest.com) (in Key West);
1464. (During Fantasy Fest, some) bartenders in Key West don’t mind if you have sex in their bars . . . as long as you don’t bother the other customers;
1465. Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play;
1466. Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder;
1467. The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours;
1468. Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good;
1469. The other interesting thing about that ten thousand hours, of course, is that ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time. It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you’re a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough. In fact, most people can reach that number only if they get into some kind of special program – like a hockey all-star squad – or if they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours;
1470. We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up;
1471. There's an open container law in Key West, but the police look the other way if you have your drink in a plastic cup;
1472. If you like dive bars and/or live music, go to Key West;
1473. In general, the higher your (IQ) score, the more education you’ll get, the more money you’re likely to make, and – believe it or not – the longer you’ll live;
1474. The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’t seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage;
1475. The four socially and personally most important threshold regions on the IQ scale are those that differentiate with high probability between persons who, because of their level of general mental ability, can or cannot attend a regular school (about IQ 50), can or cannot master the traditional subject matter of elementary school (about IQ 75), can or cannot succeed in the academic or college preparatory curriculum through high school (about IQ 105), can or cannot graduate from an accredited four-year college with grades that would qualify for admission to a professional or graduate school (about IQ 115). Beyond this, the IQ level becomes relatively unimportant in terms of ordinary occupational aspirations and criteria of success. That is not to say that there are not real differences between the intellectual capabilities represented by IQs of 115 and 150 or even between IQs of 150 and 180. But IQ differences in this upper part of the scale have far less personal implications than the thresholds just described and are generally of lesser importance for success in the popular sense than are certain traits of personality and character;
1476. Practical intelligence includes things like “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.” It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It’s practical in nature: that is, it’s not knowledge for its own sake. It’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are “orthogonal:” the presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other;
1477. The middle-class parenting style is “concerted cultivation.” It’s an attempt to actively “foster and assess a child’s talents, opinions and skills.” Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of “accomplishment of natural growth.” They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own. One style isn’t morally better than the other. The poorer children are often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middle-class child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to;
1478. Key West has feral chickens;
1479. The restaurant prices in South Beach are actually reasonable. They’re less than what they are in D.C. and you can find a lot of breakfast and lunch items for under $10.00;
1480. The plain truth of the Lewis Terman study is that in the end almost none of the genius children from the lowest social and economic class ended up making a name for themselves. They lacked something that could have been given to them if we’d only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world;
1481. Lewis Terman’s genius study was an investigation into how some children with really high IQs who were born between 1903 and 1917 turned out as adults. And the study found that there was a group of real successes and there was a group of real failures, and that the successes were far more likely to have come from wealthier families. In that sense, the Terman study underscores the argument that what your parents do for a living, and the assumptions that accompany the class your parents belong to, matter;
1482. The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with;
1483. Jewish immigrants were not like the other immigrants who came to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Irish and the Italians were peasants, tenant farmers from the impoverished countryside of Europe. Not so the Jews. For centuries in Europe, they had been forbidden to own land, so they had clustered in cities and towns, taking up urban trades and professions. Seventy percent of the Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island in the thirty years or so before the First World War had some kind of occupational skill;
1484. Autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us. Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful;
1485. Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning;
1486. Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins. The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously “the people of the book.” There is surely something to that. But it wasn’t just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn’t the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street;
1487. A “culture of honor,” it’s a world where a man’s reputation is at the center of his livelihood and self-worth;
1488. In Albion’s Seed, Fischer argues that there were four distinct British migrations to America in its first 150 years: first the Puritans, in the 1630s, who came from East Anglia to Massachusetts; then the Cavaliers and indentured servants, who came from southern England to Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century; then the Quakers, from the North Midlands to the Delaware Valley between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; and finally, the people of the borderlands to the Appalachian interior in the eighteenth century. Fischer argues brilliantly that those four cultures – each profoundly different – characterize those four regions of the United States even to this day;
1489. The triumph of a culture of honor helps to explain why the pattern of criminality in the American South has always been so distinctive. Murder rates are higher there than in the rest of the country. But crimes of property and “stranger” crimes – like muggings – are lower. The homicides in which the South seems to specialize are those in which someone is being killed by someone he (or often she) knows, for reasons both killer and victim understand. The statistics show that the Southerner who can avoid arguments and adultery is as safe as any other American, and probably safer. In the backcountry, violence wasn’t for economic gain. It was personal. You fought over your honor;
1490. The “culture of honor” hypotheses says that it matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. It’s just the beginning, though, because upon closer examination, cultural legacies turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that;
1491. There were clear differences in how the young men responded to being called a bad name. For some, the insult changed their behavior. For some it didn’t. The deciding factor in how they reacted wasn’t how emotionally secure they were, or whether they were intellectuals or jocks, or whether they were physically imposing or not. What matters was where they were from. Most of the young men from the northern part of the United States treated the incident with amusement. They laughed it off. Their handshakes were unchanged. Their levels of cortisol actually went down, as if they were unconsciously trying to defuse their own anger. But the southerners? They were angry. Their cortisol and testosterone jumped;
1492. Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behaviors that we cannot make sense of our world without them;
1493. What you find is that northerners tend to give off displays of anger, up to a certain point, at which point they level off. Southerners are much less likely to be angry early on. But at some point they catch up to the northerners and shoot past them. They are more likely to explode, much more volatile, much more explosive;
1494. In a typical plane crash, the weather is poor – not terrible, necessarily, but bad enough that the pilot feels a little bit more stressed than usual. In an overwhelming number of crashes, the plane is behind schedule, so the pilots are hurrying. In 52 percent of crashes, the pilot at the time of the accident has been awake for twelve hours or more, meaning that he is tired and not thinking sharply. And 44 percent of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they’re not comfortable with each other. Then the errors start – and it’s not just one error. The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One of the pilots does something wrong that by itself is not a problem. Then one of them makes another error on top of that, which combined with the first error still does not amount to catastrophe. But then they make a third error on top of that, and then another and another and another and another, and it is the combination of all those errors that leads to disaster. These seven errors, furthermore, are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill. It’s not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical technical maneuver and fails. The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication. One pilot does something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and the other pilot doesn’t catch the error. A tricky situation needs to be resolved through a complex series of steps – and somehow the pilots fail to coordinate and miss one of them;
1495. That’s what happens when you’re tired. Your decision-making skills erode. You start missing things – things that you would pick up on any other day;
1496. “Mitigated speech” refers to any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigate when we’re being polite, or when we’re ashamed or embarrassed, or when we’re being deferential to authority;
1497. Mitigation explains one of the greatest anomalies of plane crashes. In commercial airlines, captains and first officers split flying duties equally. But historically, crashes have been far more likely to happen when the captain is in the “flying seat.” At first that seems to make no sense, since the captain is almost always the pilot with the most experience. Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up;
1498. Roger Mason, Jr.’s (a guard for the Washington Wizards) favorite restaurant in Charlottesville is the Aberdeen Barn (AberdeenBarn.com). . . . The University of Virginia’s men’s basketball team used to go there for their pregame team meals;
1499. Robbie likes the circus;
1500. Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific;
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