Who Were the Sea Peoples?

reading Malcolm Gladwell. There, now you all know: I hope by going public, I can finally put the shame behind me. In any case, the book is Outliers , and it is about what I expected: a very readable but probably overhasty and overgeneralized survey of a bunch of serious research. But this passage definitely caught my attention: "[Practical intelligence] is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It's practical in nature: that is, it's not knowledge for its own sake... And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are 'orthogonal': The presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other." (That last bit is a little sloppy: what he really means to say is that the presence of high analytical intelligence does not imply the pres...

I have been peripherally aware of Malcolm Gladwell for some time now, but have never read him. So I was interested to see that he was having a sort of e-mail interview with Bill Simmons , who, if not a  giant on the intellectual scene, is a very smart man and entertaining writer. "This," I thought, "should be interesting." But then... I found Gladwell discussing the "inefficiency" of US sports institutions as follows: "Here's my point. The sports world 'missed' [Gladwell's college friend] Kingston. He's someone who could have been a world-class athlete but ended up doing something entirely different. [Because, Gladwell tells us, Kingston did not want to go into sports, but into political science.]... "There are huge numbers of people who clearly could play pro sports, but don't want to. (Kingston.) And an even greater number who could, but can't. America has one of the highest incarceration rates in record...