New Yorker: When Effort Trumps Ability
Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the latest New Yorker focuses on how an inferior girls’ basketball team was able to work harder than its more talented counterparts and win. He explains how other underdogs in history were able to triumph using an “insurgent” strategy, but why the conventional route to success is the more well-worn path. From the piece, Gladwell notes how the Davids overcome the Goliaths:
This is the second half of the insurgent’s creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coördination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He couldn’t fight the establishment, because he was the establishment.
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Update, 11:26 p.m. EST: If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing (!), an interesting discussion breaks out around minutes 135-150 and on after that. Did I hear a politician complaining that the demise of local reporting might mean her peers (or her) won’t be investigated and watched? And that she’s worried about that? This could be the last time you hear that said in public. 
In honor of the 135th running of the Kentucky Derby, we are taking nominations for your favorite horse or horses that came close, but never won, the first leg of the