Daylight Savings Time and Super Outliers

Daylight Savings Time and Super Outliers

Last night, I was looking forward to today's blog, but Daylight Savings Time had something else in store for me. With just one hour less of sleep, which we didn't notice yesterday, but were all suffering from this morning, my family and I stumbled around until we finally got out the door.

Oh Daylight Savings Time....Just when I thought I could sit down and blog about super outliers, I couldn't remember my arguments...This went on for most of the week. Daylight Savings Time certainly didn't help, but I soon realized that writing about super outliers was much more difficult than anticipated.

For one, it's really difficult to write about gender and racial barriers and keep it light. Two, it's hard to find empirical data to support access to opportunity. Three, Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers:The Story of Success is not all bad. There are some parts that are helpful for parents. Four, I think that his publishers probably have a lot more power over what he writes about than the public realizes. And finally, Gladwell does raise how racism affects opportunity when he addresses his mother's life in Jamaica.

However, I cannot overlook exclusion when it is disguised as inclusion. His book only gives examples of men outliers, and the inside cover should accurately reflect this. Instead of "The lives of outliers--those people whose achievements fall outside normal experience," it should read, "The lives of outliers--those men..."



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