Outliers

I've been unusually absent from posting here in the last few days. Part of this is due to packing up and closing out the last few days of school (there will be no more "Six at Eleven" posts until September) and going down to see the Ohio high school championships.

But mostly it's due to a new project I started up. After reading a post by Scott Bush about educating the fan, I decided to start writing a Toledo-area track newsletter. Issue #1 and issue #2 are available.

I've also been reading an actual non-track book, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. It is an utterly fascinating read, and the basic thrust of the book is that the courses of our lives often turn on little things that come our way. He looks at highly successful individuals and groups and explains how hard work alone does not explain how they got there--that all of them have other things going for them. The final chapter is an explanation of how he, whose ancestors included Jamaican slaves, happened to find himself as a professional writer for the New Yorker instead of some laboring schmuck in the Jamaican highlands.