[b]Malcolm Gladwell
Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade…It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head - even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’re really like to be.[/b]
Let’s pin down a description of great writing.
The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with.
Great, yet another component of dasein.
I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups–and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories. But the simple truth is that if you want to understand … you have to go back to the past … it matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where you great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact.
True. Now, let’s see who can reconfigure it into the most extreme point of view.
No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.
So, we need find only one black God.
Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
Any special few here?
We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.
I know that you have.