I recently posted several humorous pictures illustrating the risks of assuming that correlation amounts to causation. But now comes along another interesting picture, that practically forces me to abandon scientific rigor and embrace the inevitable conclusion – that chocolate consumption leads to genius:
Is everybody on board with my reasoning?
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One of the more useful phenomena employed in psychological research is what’s known as “priming.” This idea is simple: get a thought into people’s heads, and it lingers, thereby affecting future thoughts. Hold a cup of hot tea while riding an elevator, and the next person you meet might seem to have a warmer personality!…
The key to good policymaking is to understand human nature. Want to increase how much money people save? You better know what they will do if you change the tax code. Want to reduce the threat of terrorism? All the security in the world won’t suffice if you don’t, at the same time, find ways…
Albert Rees was a University of Chicago trained economist who wrote some of the most influential works in the field of labor economics. Despite his Chicago training – Chicago being the epicenter of the idea that humans are guided largely by rational choice – he was well aware of something crucial missing from economic theory:…
Until I moved to North Carolina, it never struck me as odd that people talk about “April showers bring May flowers.” That nice little bit of rhyming doesn’t make sense down here in the south. Which made me think: but what would this phrase look like in different parts of the country? Here are my…
Jon Meacham’s best-selling biography, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, is at best a solid read, presenting the basic facts of Jefferson’s life competently but with little grace and an almost invisible point of view. Perhaps I have been spoiled by Robert Caro’s amazing series of books on Lyndon Johnson, four volumes so far that not only make Johnson come to life (his ruthless genius as well as his fascinating contradictions) but also illuminate a whole era in U.S. history, all the while enveloping readers in gloriously rhythmic paragraphs. It is not fair, perhaps, to compare any biographer to Caro. Meacham’s book, after all, is just a single volume, so it cannot explore Jefferson in the same depth that Caro portrays Johnson. Meacham also had the disadvantage of writing about a man who lived a couple hundred years ago, whereas Caro could interview people who knew the subject of his biography firsthand. In addition, Meacham is a busy man, running a publishing company and appearing on television shows, whereas Caro lives the life of an obsessive, dedicating the better part of his adult life to understanding the ins and outs of Johnson’s life.
Nevertheless, if you are going to write a book about an American president and subtitle it “The Art of Power,” you better expect some Caro comparisons.
As it turns out, however, being compared to Caro is the least of Meacham’s writerly problems. Because there is another great writer that readers won’t be able to ignore when making their way through Meacham’s book. That writer, of course, is Thomas Jefferson.
I’m going to give you a sprinkling of Jefferson’s prose in a bit, and follow-up later this week with several other great Jefferson quotes. But first, a little bit more on Meacham’s book. I was really disappointed, because in Meacham’s hands, Jefferson rarely comes alive on the page. Time passes by and suddenly the reader realizes: “Jefferson just became governor of Virginia? Was that something he was trying to accomplish? Which of the arts of power did he employ to reach that position?” Meacham never provides answers to these kinds of questions.
“If it’s a revolution it can’t be predictable. And if it’s predictable it can’t be a revolution.” -Clay Shirky (Click here to view comments)