Tag: Malcolm Gladwell
Stop Donating to Your Elite University
During the peak of the pandemic, John Katzman and I had a standing phone date at 7:30 on Friday mornings. Katzman usually walked along the beach near his house in the Hamptons while we spoke. I’d sit in my office, try to visualize the beauty of Long Island’s southeastern shore, and listen.
Katzman is astonishingly knowledgeable about the American educational system. He founded Princeton Review, the test-prep behemoth, in the early 1980s, and has founded several other start-ups since.
The Joy of Learning to Drive at 37
Thirty-seven, I decided, was old enough. Even here in Britain, that is an advanced age to begin learning to drive, but somehow, I had never gotten around to it. And so I found myself, one morning last fall, trying to master the exact sequence of foot movements required to hit something called “biting point.”
That’s the sensation you feel when the gears connect to the engine—when your left foot, on the clutch, perfectly balances with your right foot, on the
The Things I’m Afraid to Write About
One evening, I sat on the brown-leather couch of a younger man who admired me for my writing, and maybe other things, if the salty text messages were true. He came from a different generation, but I was pleased to discover that he shared many of my unconventional opinions and favorite authors, that taste and perspective weren’t necessarily a matter of the year you were born. Joan Didion, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, though I had more reservations about that last