Strenuously competitive parents may indeed produce high-achieving grownups, but it’s in the nature of things that high-achieving adults are likely to… - Adam Gopnik

Child rearing is an art, and what makes art art is that it is doing several things at once.

In any case, the idea that somehow liberals are responsible for bringing on right-wing authoritarianism is of a piece with the domestic abuser's refrain "Look what you made me do." Or, for that matter, with the idea that antisemitism would not exist if Jews did not provoke their own persecution.

We understand instinctively that being a prodigy wasn’t [Wayne Gretzky’s] platform for a lifetime’s achievement; it marked the possibility of a highly specific, highly term-limited kind of performance.