Good writing does not fail or succeed on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind of writing that you'll find in this book, anyway. It s… - Malcolm Gladwell

Once — and this would have been in the mid 1950s — Weisberg took the train to New York to attend, on a whim,the Science Fiction Writers Convention, where she met a young writer by the name of Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke took a shine to Weisberg, and next time he was in Chicago he called her up. “He was at a pay phone,” Weisberg recalls. “He said, is there anyone in Chicago I should meet. I told him to come over to my house.” Weisberg has a low, raspy voice, baked hard by half a century of nicotine, and she pauses between sentences to give herself the opportunity for a quick puff. Even when she’s not smoking, she pauses anyway, as if to keep in practice for those moments when she is. “I called Bob Hughes. Bob Hughes was one of the people who wrote for my paper.” Pause. “I said, do you know anyone in Chicago interested in talking to Arthur Clarke. He said, yeah, Isaac Asimov is in town. And this guy Robert, Robert — Robert Heinlein. So they all came over and sat in my study.” Pause. “Then they called over to me and they said, Lois...I can’t remember the word they used. They had some word for me. It was something about how I was the kind of person who brings people together.

mathematics as an innate ability. You either have “it” or you don’t. But to Schoenfeld, it’s not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds. Put a bunch of Renees in a classroom, and give them the space and time to explore mathematics for themselves,

When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.