Overheard

“This is actually a question I’m obsessed with: Why don’t people work hard when it’s in their best interest to do so?… The (short) answer is that it’s really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn’t work hard. It’s a form of self-protection… Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don’t study for tests — which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you’re stupid — and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare.” Blink author Malcolm Gladwell

“When I was researching Batman, I saw that other creators were playing him as a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Spock… I wanted to present a new take on Batman, who is without a doubt a mythic figure in our pop-psyche. My Batman is not only totally science fiction, he’s also a very physical superhero: he bleeds, he sweats, he eats… someone with the body of David Beckham, the brain of Tesla, and the wealth of Howard Hughes… pretending to be Nosferatu.” Alternative graphic novelist Paul Pope

“Adam Gopnik just emailed me to tell me that, for some strange reason, a debate that he and I did for the Washington Monthly on the Canadian health care system… has now been resurrected on various blogs… In our debate, Adam vigorously defended the Canadian system, and I attacked it. But wait! That was six years ago! I’ve now changed my mind. I now agree with virtually everything Adam said and disagree with virtually everything I said. In fact, I shudder when I read what I said back then.” Malcolm Gladwell

“It was just too bad they deviated so far from the Invisibles philosophical template in the second and third movies because they blundered helplessly into boring Catholic theology, proving that they hadn’t HAD the ‘contact’ experience that drove The Invisibles, and they wrecked both ‘Reloaded’ and ‘Revolutions’ on the rocks of absolute incomprehension. They should have kept on stealing from me and maybe they would have wound up with something to really be proud of - a movie that could change minds and hearts and worlds.” Writer Grant Morrison, on The Wachowskis Bros.

“The Canadian health-care system is a health-care system for women. The American health-care system is a health-care system that is perfectly situated for men. It’s the male health-care system. This whole debate about what is better, the American system or the Canadian system, is essentially a variant on the gender war.” Blink author Malcolm Gladwell, on healthcare

“But rest assured, with this generation, it’s all just a put-on. Because when a twentysomething uses the language of skepticism, irony, sarcasm and cynicism, he or she may be afraid — but most aren’t genuinely angry. They’re just talking tough… When you read between the lines of this generation, the stinging tone of their cynicism can be stripped away like a protective veneer, a façade, revealing something much more honest, more hopeful.” San Grewal, Toronto Star

“One of the things I always took to be a self-evident truth was that you cannot copy somone else’s success. You figure out how to do it for yourself. And any attempt to walk in somebody else’s shoes, you’re going to end up with a less significant experience. So I have to figure out how to do it for myself.” Harrison Ford, on finding inspiration

“There is definitely a secular bias, because speaking emotionally doesn’t work anymore. There’s a rational, scientific privilege, and all other sorts of language are matters of the heart and don’t have a place.” Munir Jiwa, anthropologist

“A mean pit bull is a dog that has been turned mean, by selective breeding, by being cross-bred with a bigger, human-aggressive breed like German shepherds or Rottweilers, or by being conditioned in such a way that it begins to express hostility to human beings. A pit bull is dangerous to people, then, not to the extent that it expresses its essential pit bullness but to the extent that it deviates from it. A pit-bull ban is a generalization about a generalization about a trait that is not, in fact, general.” Malcolm Gladwell, on what pit bulls can teach us about profiling

“The truth is, most people don’t know the real odds of such an exercise, so they can’t fake data convincingly.’” Mathematician Dr. Theodore P. Hill, on identifying students who faked the results of 200 coin tosses