It’s a period piece from six months ago.

I found it in Will Leitch’s review of The Girlfriend Experience.

Andy McKenzie writes about the various people that enjoy destroying arguments by Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks. I read Gladwell for the stories and skip his conclusions.

More on Gladwell’s article:

I played Little League baseball, and one of the coaches in the league told all but two of his players to keep the bat on their shoulder for every single pitch, essentially hoping the pitcher threw four balls before he threw three strikes. Yes, this team won many games by walking players around the bases. But God killed a million kittens in the process. Even if your team had the worst players in the league, would you want to employ this strategy?

Pressure defense works at younger ages (at all ages, on some players) but shouldn’t be used extensively for the same reason we don’t let kids run to first base on a dropped third strike until they’re older, and encourage kids to swing the bat, even if the pitcher stinks. There are bigger goals; preparing players to play in high school and/or college, letting them practice driving to the basket, practice one-on-one defense, help defense, setting screens, etc. This is why the summer camp I coach at enforces a halfcourt man-to-man rule; they want the kids to improve. The acceptability of a strategy that will make you look like a douchebag is inversely proportional to the league’s competitiveness. I make an exception for intramural sports and adult leagues, where douchebaggery is a valued part of the game.

The truth is that smart coaches adapt to any dumb strategy, whether it’s taking every pitch, holding the ball, pressure defense, telling your kids to take a dive in the penalty box, the A-11 offense, double teaming Stephen Curry or any other strategy where you try to hide your weaknesses. Given that the girls here were trying to go to the national tournament, you would expect that another coach would figure out how to beat them, or maybe the national tournament wasn’t that hard to qualify for, or maybe their team was actually better than the article gives them credit for.

That said, I love pressure defense for high school and college teams. I watched a Rick Pitino Louisville team absolutely destroy Stanford in the NCAA Tournament with a press, going up 41-13 in fifteen minutes. I don’t think anyone’s really tried it at the NBA level, both because any point guard can dribble circles around defenders, and because keeping players at a high level of fitness for 82 games, plus playoffs, would be extraordinarily difficult.

Take a look at this article from the NYT. There are hyperlinks all over it, and not just the usual ones linking to related stories at the NYT – they’re links to stories and background from all over the Internet, including Bloomberg.com, the CDC, and others.

I must admit I’m surprised, but this is a good thing for readers; it enhances a reader’s knowledge of the full story, and allows the author to stuff digressions and sources in the links. One advantage of Web/Kindle reading over print is that the Internet allows for placement of footnotes in the actual text, as hyperlinks (you can also do this in a Microsoft Word document, but I haven’t seen many people take advantage of this). David Foster Wallace would have loved it.

I went and saw Karl Rove speak at CMC last semester; one of the things that struck me about his speech was when he described the President’s daily routine. The President’s time is divided into fifteen or thirty minute blocks, each allotted to a specific group, with little time in between for preparation or formality, and the President is expected to be prepared for each group, each question, and debate that might follow. He gave examples – one minute the President might be in a discussion of whether states or the federal government get the rights to sell permission to drill offshore in certain areas, and he’ll need to know the background and make a decision, and the next the President could be consoling the parents of a soldier killed in Iraq, and he’ll have to know their names and details.

Every night, Rove said, the President gets a 200-page “briefing book,” full of twenty different things that the President needs to know about, and he gets about 2 hours to read it before bed, so he’ll be ready for the next day.

Now my schedule isn’t as full as the President’s but I loved the idea and I’ve started to implement my own version. I mix together any and all of the following:

- Reading assignments for class (or SparkNotes summaries)
- Lecture notes from last class
- Lecture notes from classes I took today
- Magazine articles (New Yorker, Atlantic, Economist etc)
- John Mauldin (a well-regarded financial writer)
- Long blog posts (Becker-Posner in particular, Scott Sumner, others on occasion)
- Reading from my shelf

And I try to split it into chunks of less than ten minutes (any more and I start getting restless). I read this in the time after dinner and before bed. Thinking of it as a “briefing book,” that will prepare me for the next day, helps me get through it, and it gives me an idea of how prepared I’m going to be for the next day. Furthermore, the mix of for-pleasure and for-class material is another way to help get through it.