From "Blowing Up," by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, April 22,2002

A few more thoughts on quarterbacks:

There are two separate issues with respect to quarterbacks. The first is whether, historically, NFL teams have done a good job of predicting which college quarterbacks will succeed in the pros. Dave Berri and Rob Simmons' paper in the Journal of Productivity Analysis (that I relied on in the essay "Most Likely to Succeed" in my new book "What The Dog Saw") proves pretty convincingly, I think, that the answer is no. One of the best parts of that paper...

It is always a pleasure to be reviewed by someone as accomplished as Stephen Pinker, even if—in his comments on "What the Dog Saw" (Nov. 15)—he is unhappy with my spelling (rightly!) and with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism. But since football has been on my mind these days, I do...

I've been very pleased with the reaction. I did want to respond, though, to a number of comments that have been made about the parts of the piece dealing with Rick Pitino and college basketball. (Nothing is quite as fun as arguing about sports,)

Since most of the commenters make the same arguments, I'm going to pick a post  by Ben Mathis-Lilley, over at New York magazine's blog. He writes, in part:

The truth is that almost every t

I have just two comments in response.

1. Brooks argues that I "slight the centrality of individual character and individual creativity" by focusing so much on the cultural and contextual determinants of success. Successful people, he says, must begin with two beliefs--"that the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so." I completely

A couple of additional thoughts.

In some of the responses to the piece, I've seen some resistance to the idea that choosing  NFL quarterbacks and choosing public school teachers represent the same category of problem.  There are only a small number of NFL quarterbacks, and we are selecting candidates from a tiny pool of highly elite athletes. By contrast, we need a vast number of public school teachers and we're recruiting from an

I also wanted to announce two of the dates on my book tour.

For those of you in England, I'll be giving two shows at the Lyceum Th

Since writing the piece, I've continued to think a fair amount about this idea of the advantages of disadvantages. If dyslexia can--under certain circumstances--be advantageous, what are other disadvantages that can have the same effect?

In the article, I mention, in passing, the question of class size, and the data on class size is really quite fascinating.  Time and time agai