Regarding the earlier dustup, Gladwell wrote a letter to the editor to which Pinker responded (click through and then scroll down for that). Gladwell then replied to Pinker’s reply. Round 2 goes to Gladwell.

Despite calling him a “minor genius,” Steven Pinker goes after Malcolm Gladwell pretty good. Gladwell responds. I still love Gladwell’s writing, but have grown weary (and wary) of his “tell two interesting stories and then make a huge leap of logic and/or cherry pick evidence to come up with a grand unifying theory” approach.

Chris Anderson says, do something new every three years:

When I was at The Economist, there was a policy to rotate everyone every three years. The idea was that fresh eyes were more important than experience. “Foreign everywhere” was the mantra, and around your second year in Cairo, you could expect to get a call from the editor asking you to consider Mumbai or Sao Paolo—ideally two places you’d never been to and knew nothing about.

He describes believably the feel of each of your three years (exhilaration, competence, cynicism), and ties it nicely into Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to mastery” observation.

Two of my New Yorker heroes, Malcolm Gladwell and Hendrik Hertzberg both recently wrote about fixing public schools, and came to two different conclusions.

Gladwell, in his article Most Likely to Succeed:

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hertzberg, on the other hand, writes in his blog post, Size Matters:

Short of abolishing the whole crazy system of local school boards financed by local property taxes and replacing it with an all-powerful national Ministry of Education financed by the federal income tax, I’ve always believed that the best feasible “educational reform” is, precisely, smaller class sizes.

This is not hard to understand. Every teacher and every student knows that the smaller the class, the better the learning environment. Each kid gets more attention. Discipline and control are far easier to achieve. Disruptive kids have less scope for mischief. Teachers are happier and more likely to stay in the profession.

Hertzberg also notes that his way has the important advantage of being objectively measurable. True, and I do hate to throw money at stuff that isn’t measurable, but in my 16 years of school and however many teachers and professors that is, I only had four great teachers (four!), and it was obvious who they were. The subject and the class size were insignificant factors, they made the material great. Bad teachers, on the other hand, could work one-on-one with the most interesting material on the planet and still suck the life right out of the learning experience.

(To be fair, I probably had as many truly sucky teachers as great ones. The rest were in between, scattered along the curve.)

In short, in my experience a good teacher can overcome a large class size but there’s no redeeming a bad teacher. Teacher quality is everything, and good teachers are rare. If a genie popped out of the lamp and said to me, “you can either bump all teachers up a notch in skill, so sucky to poor, poor to average, average to good, good to great or you can keep the current teacher bell curve but halve all the class sizes, but you can’t have both,” it’s such an easy choice it feels pointless to even frame the hypothetical. Give me better teachers any day of the week, and on Sundays too.

(Besides, you know genies: you say you want to halve class sizes and suddenly half the students in the world are dead or worse, inevitably including your own, and then Rod Serling comes out and says something pithy.)

• Malcolm Gladwell asks: Abolish the NCAA? (then follows up with NCAA Redux).
• Man, the Supertraining table of contents looks fabulous. « via RossTraining forums»
• Also via RT, 660 one-arm push-ups?!?! And he's getting all the way down there. Reminds me of this one-arm rope climb video.

• I had no idea watermelon was so good for you! I just assumed it was mostly sugar and water. Hip-hip-hooray for good sources of Vitamin A.
• A RossTraining thread: when the going gets tough... "I just cut off my mind." He makes it sound so easy!
• A 2001 Malcolm Gladwell piece: Drugstore Athlete.

From the paying through the nose for a whole lotta nuthin' department:

The point was to compare the health of the United States and the United Kingdom. It's an interesting question for a number of reasons, but principally because the United States spends $5274 per person, per year, on health care and the United Kingdom spends $2164, or substantially less than half as much. The question is—what do we get, in terms of health, that for extra $3100 a year?

The one line answer: "The first conclusion is that Americans are really, really sick compared to the British."

I'd say "I could fall over and die from that surprise," but living where I do I just might!

Two things I printed out for bedside reading:

• Richard Dawkins' letter to his (then?) 10-year-old daughter on believing (he's often too atheist for little ol' agnostic me, but is still compelling).
• Malcolm Gladwell on Project Delta and the quest for the perfect cookie.

I think I got both of these from Jason Kottke.