Synopsia Reads: Book Summaries

A deep dive into The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley.

A country can rank second in the world for spending per pupil and watch its fifteen-year-olds come in twenty-sixth in mathematics, seventeenth in science and twelfth in reading among OECD countries: that was where the United States stood in the 2012 PISA. The test, designed by Andreas Schleicher at the OECD, first sat in 2000 in thirty-two countries, with eleven more joining in 2002, then repeated every three years, does not ask what a pupil has retained from a national syllabus but what they can do with information they have never seen, partly through written answers rather than boxes ticked.…

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A deep dive into How Children Succeed by Paul Tough.

For decades, one idea has governed the way children are raised: success was said to depend above all on measurable cognitive skills, IQ, test scores, the number of words heard before the age of three, and so the brain had to be filled as early and as heavily as possible. This cognitive hypothesis runs up against an anomaly. In the United States, the GED allows anyone to earn the equivalent of a high school diploma by open examination. Those who pass it have cognitive abilities comparable to those of ordinary high school graduates, yet their trajectories are those of dropouts: the same annual i…

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A deep dive into Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell.

On 10 July 2015, in Prairie View, Texas, a 28-year-old driver named Sandra Bland changed lanes without signaling. Officer Brian Encinia pulled her over. Three days later she was found dead in her cell in Waller County. Between those two moments there is nothing but a conversation between two people who do not know each other, and which goes wrong. A judge facing a defendant, an investor facing a fund manager, a parent facing a doctor, a police officer facing a driver: each passes judgment on someone they do not know, using faulty instruments of reading. The first failure has a name: the truth-…

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A deep dive into The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

The Struggle has a proper name because it names a precise condition, that of the leader whose venture is collapsing, and that condition can only be described by accumulation. The Struggle is when you wonder why you ever started this company. It is self-doubt turning into self-hatred, loneliness among people you hired yourself, sleepless nights, food that loses its taste, cold sweats, vomiting. It is not failure: it is what causes failure, and it is the ordinary condition of the job, not the symptom of personal incompetence. You do not get out of it by carrying the weight alone: a founder who f…

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A deep dive into Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

There is a place where the hypothesis of total determinism can be put to the test: the place where outward conditions decide everything. The transport arrives, some fifteen hundred people packed into cattle cars; on the platform an officer points a casual index finger to the right or to the left, and nine people out of ten go straight to the crematorium without anyone having understood what the gesture meant. The odds of coming out of that place alive are no better than one in twenty-eight. What remains of a life after everything has been stripped away comes down to three variables: food, slee…

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A deep dive into In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Three sentences, seven words, are enough to answer a question that should never have become difficult. No other animal needs professional help deciding what to eat. Human beings long relied on a food culture, that is, a body of gestures, recipes and prohibitions handed down slowly, which encoded a nutritional wisdom whose mechanism nobody needed to understand. That transmission has broken: the way people eat now changes more than once a generation, so that a cook trained in the Jewish cooking of Eastern Europe can end her life on Crisco and margarine. Wha…

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A deep dive into The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.

Two men with no degrees, no technical training, no connections, no capital and no grants solved, between 1899 and 1903, a problem that had stopped the best-funded project in the country. From 1900 to 1903, materials and round trips to Kitty Hawk included, Wilbur and Orville Wright spent a little under a thousand dollars, drawn from the profits of their Dayton bicycle shop. The aerodrome built by Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian, had cost close to seventy thousand dollars, fifty thousand of it from the War Department, and it nosed into the Potomac twice, the second time on December…

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A deep dive into The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.

Clarissa, thirteen, works on her clarinet in front of the camera of psychologists Gary McPherson and James Renwick. In five minutes and fifty-four seconds she accomplishes what McPherson rates as a month of ordinary practice, a learning speed multiplied by ten. The piece, "Golden Wedding", was played to her the day before by her teacher, barely a minute of it. She plays a few notes, stops dead at the wrong one, goes back, starts again, stops again. On "The Blue Danube" she runs from beginning to end without breaking off or correcting a single note, which McPherson describes as a conveyor belt.…

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A deep dive into Good to Great by Jim Collins.

There are few obstacles to excellence more stubborn than already being good. Great schools are rare because most are decent, great lives rare because most are satisfying enough. Of the 1,435 companies that entered the Fortune 500 over forty years, only eleven fit the following profile: fifteen years of returns at or below the market, a point of transition, then fifteen years at no less than three times the market, regardless of the health of their industry. Their average performance over the fifteen years following the transition reaches 6.9 times the market: a dollar invested in that basket i…

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A deep dive into The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. All three parts of that definition carry equal weight, and none of them says anything about size, sector, or age. SnapTax, the app that files a tax return from a single photograph of a W-2 form, was born inside Intuit, in head-on competition with TurboTax, the company's flagship product; it passed three hundred and fifty thousand downloads within the first three weeks of its national launch in 2011. Material conditions favor this kind of venture: American manufacturing output r…

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