Something dangerous seems to happen when a person who likes to watch birds decides that they’re a birdwatcher. It’s the difference between doing something and doing some thing—where the latter has a structure to it, a stuffiness, that the former doesn’t. It’s the embrace of a complex of habits and equipment and dispositions and vocabulary, [...]
Adults seem to have this idea that kids rifle through toys because of some problem that kids have, like short attention spans, when really it’s a problem that toys have. Not that they’re poorly made—some of these things are remarkably durable. It’s that a toy never quite measures up to what it was promised to [...]
I’m starting to think that high school was the ideal social environment. Like most high schoolers I had a social network best described as a series of concentric circles, or maybe fuzzy overlapping halos: A group of just enough very close friends to fit around a single table at lunch Another handful of chums who [...]
A few months ago, a friend and I were talking about Sporcle, a popular website with moderately educational fill-in-the-blank quizzes. Their most popular page, for example, asks you to name the fifty United States. And here’s one that asks you to name thirty-two characters from The West Wing. There are many thousands more. My friend [...]
A few days after I loaned the excellent The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth to a friend, I received a note highlighting a sentence that he said contained “a preposterous number” of some of his favorite words: In the ninth century, nomadic Magyar warriors [...]