1. In defense of reading James Joyce.
2. Luxury retailing booms while discount houses suffer.
4. The early history of publishing.
5. Small town pros (very interesting, and it's about sports).
7. New Guardian science blogs.
Assorted links
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Re: small town pros.
Interesting set of ideas but it sounds like we need some good econometrics and more data to tease out the causal relationships.
Re: small town pros
I immediately assumed that the explanation was that you are far more likely to get 10,000 hours of practice at something when you live in a boring place with few distractions.
Excellent tip on the science blogs. They’re going in Netvibes right now.
Andy:
Well, I suspect it’s easier to get into an Ivy League school if you graduate with a 4.0 from a rural school with few superstars than with a 4.0 from Northeastern prep-school territory…
“5. Small town pros (very interesting, and it’s about sports).”
Yeah 10,000 hour of practice and you to can learn to be as tall as Shaquile O’Neal.
The Guardian’s blog lead-in story is headlined “Guardian science blogs: We aim to entertain, enrage and inform”.
So they’re going to bring the same blatant and depressing ideological slant to “science discussion” that they’ve brought to “journalism.” Fantastic.
I am not sure, except in Boston when “Ulysses” was first published in America, why anyone would feel Joyce needed a defense of any kind.
This article reads just like someone who comes running into a dorm room somewhere blaring,”Hey, have you guys ever seen an Ingmar Berman film. Do it now. It’ll blow your mind.”
“Ulysses” is not a lost classic. It’s not even that under-read for a difficult book. People read it all the time. Thousands get together all over the world every year on Blooms Day to read it aloud together. It’s doing just fine.
That is a wonderful account of reading Ulysses.
I am surprised than no one mentioned one psychological benefit of lower competition: athletes from small towns attach more importance to the feeling of being the best in a group — and in small towns this position can be achieved realistically.
A person “addicted” to such feelings will train harder than the big town counterpart, who sooner or later will resign to telling himself “No matter how much I try, there will always be someone better than me” — a defeatist attitude which might have been the best attitude in a big city, but which may hurt one’s potential for excellence.
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