Life isn’t fair. Many of the most coveted spoils–wealth, fame, links on the Web–are concentrated among the few. If such a distribution doesn’t sound like the familiar bell-shaped curve, you’re right.
Along the hilly slopes of the bell curve, most values–the data points that track whatever is being measured–are clustered around the middle. The average value is also the most common value. The points along the far extremes of the curve contribute very little statistically. If 100 random people gather in a room and the world’s tallest man walks in, the average height doesn’t change much. But if Bill Gates walks in, the average net worth rises dramatically. Height follows the bell curve in its distribution. Wealth does not: It follows an asymmetric, L-shaped pattern known as a “power law,” where most values are below average and a few far above. In the realm of the power law, rare and extreme events dominate the action.
For Nassim Taleb, irrepressible quant-jock and the author of “Fooled by Randomness” (2001), the contrast between the two distributions is not an amusing statistical exercise but something more profound: It highlights the fundamental difference between life as we imagine it and life as it really is. In “The Black Swan”–a kind of cri de coeur–Mr. Taleb struggles to free us from our misguided allegiance to the bell-curve mindset and awaken us to the dominance of the power law.
Category: Books
Stewart on Afghan Policy
The international community’s policy in Afghanistan is based on the claim that Afghans are willing partners in the creation of a liberal democratic state. Senator John McCain finished a recent speech on Afghanistan by saying, “Billions of people around the world now embrace the ideals of political, economic and social liberty, conceived in the West, as their own.”
In Afghanistan in January, Tony Blair thanked Afghans by saying “we’re all in this together” and placing them in “the group of people who want to live in peace and harmony with each other, whatever your race or your background or your religion.”
Such language is inaccurate, misleading and dangerous.
Afghans, like Americans, do not want to be abducted and tortured. They want a say in who governs them, and they want to feed their families. But reducing their needs to broad concepts like “human rights,” “democracy” and “development” is unhelpful.
Stewart wrote the excellent: “The Places in Between” on his walk across Afghanistan.
Gibson on Writing a Book
I think it may actually get worse, each time! But I also suspect that that may be a paradoxical indicator of relative emotional health. If you’ve ever met anyone who’s writing a book that he or she is convinced is *very* good indeed, you’ll know what I mean. (Swift reading to his servants may be the perfect case in point.)
By the time I’m three-quarters through the writing of a novel, I’ve necessarily lost anything like perspective, and must rely on feedback from trusted daily readers to know whether or not I’ve completely driven the thing off the road. I suspect that the biggest part of the labor of writing, for me, has always consisted of bludgeoning the editorial super-ego into relative passivity, though no matter how thoroughly I’ve managed to stun it, it still manages to send messages to the effect that the work is really deeply pathetic, hideously flawed, and should be abandoned immediately. I tend to imagine that this is what writer’s block is really about, though in my case it’s remained only partionally symptomatic. I manage to ignore those messages, as painful as I still find them.
Books and the Future of Publishing
Michael Maiello and Michael Noer:
Are books in danger?
The conventional wisdom would say yes. After all, more and more media–the Internet, cable television, satellite radio, videogames–compete for our time. And the Web in particular, with its emphasis on textual snippets, skimming and collaborative creation, seems ill-suited to nurture the sustained, authoritative transmission of complex ideas that has been the historical purview of the printed page.
But surprise–the conventional wisdom is wrong. Our special report on books and the future of publishing is brim-full of reasons to be optimistic. People are reading more, not less. The Internet is fueling literacy. Giving books away online increases off-line readership. New forms of expression–wikis, networked books–are blossoming in a digital hothouse.
Top 10 2006 Books via the NYT Book Review
Fiction & Non-Fiction. The list includes Rory Stewart’s excellent: The Places in Between:
You are the first tourist in Afghanistan,” Stewart, a young Scotsman, was warned by an Afghan official before commencing the journey recounted in this splendid book. “It is mid-winter – there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee.” Stewart, thankfully, did not die, and his report on his adventures – walking across Afghanistan in January of 2002, shortly after the fall of the Taliban – belongs with the masterpieces of the travel genre. Stewart may be foolhardy, but on the page he is a terrific companion: smart, compassionate and human. His book cracks open a fascinating, blasted world miles away from the newspaper headlines.
Five Best Weather Books
1. The Elements Rage by Frank W. Lane (Chilton, 1965).
What interests most people about weather (as opposed to climate–“Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days,” as Mark Twain put it) is its extremes and curious phenomena. Frank Lane clearly had that in mind in the early 1960s when he undertook writing “The Elements Rage.” Even if the science here is out of date, the drama of the stories never grows old. The book offers dozens of extraordinary black-and-white photographs and a fact-packed text, rich in anecdotes on matters well beyond meteorology–earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches, volcanoes. As an inspiration toward appreciating how strange the natural world can be, the book set a standard that others, including myself, have attempted to emulate.
The Prince
When historians search for a paradigmatic figure who embodied America’s old, pre-9/11 relationship with the Arab world, an obvious candidate will be Saudi Arabia’s swaggering ambassador to Washington from 1983 to 2005, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. He was the Gatsby of foreign affairs: entertaining Washington’s elite at his mansion overlooking the Potomac; exchanging secret favors with a string of presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush; lobbying for Saudi weapons purchases so effectively that he trounced even AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby group; operating as a deniable arm of the CIA in covert operations around the world.
Steadman’s “The Joke’s Over”
Perhaps you can picture the work of Roald Dahl without the illustrations of Quentin Blake, or of Charles Dickens without the cartoons of Phiz. In a part of my mind, when reading Anthony Powell, I retain the images of the characters furnished by the imperishable Mark Boxer. Would we really have appreciated Alice in Wonderland without the drawings of Tenniel? However these questions may be decided, it is a certainty that the noir contribution of Ralph Steadman (who also produced a brilliantly illustrated Alice Through the Looking Glass) is as inseparable from the output of Hunter S Thompson as Marks from Spencer, or Engels from Marx.
This is not to say that the two men were exactly made for each other. Starting with their first joint assignment, which was to lampoon the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s magazine in 1970, Steadman was made to appreciate that he was yoked to a volatile and often dangerous manic-depressive. To describe the subsequent partnership as addictive would be disconcertingly accurate, although “disconcerting” would be the weakest way of expressing Steadman’s alarm at the properties of a small yellow pill that his friend so thoughtfully gave him on a later bad trip — if you will excuse the expression — to the America’s Cup in Rhode Island. The ensuing near-death experience is described without either rancour or self-pity, and, indeed, Steadman cannot claim not to have been warned.
BMW Audio Books
Put on your seatbelt and prepare for highs, lows and plenty of twists and turns. BMW, in conjunction with Random House, brings you BMW Audio Books, a unique series of specially-commissioned short stories showcasing the work of some of the finest contemporary writing talent. Each gripping tale is yours to download for free and a new book will be available to download every two weeks. Listen to them on your MP3 player, your laptop or ideally, in the car. So sit back, hit play and enjoy the ride.
The Gladwell Effect
“PEOPLE are experience rich and theory poor,” the writer Malcolm Gladwell said recently. “People who are busy doing things — as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops — don’t have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.”