Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
By: David Epstein
Riverhead Books (April 27, 2021)
368 pages

David Epstein’s Range is an argument against increasing specialization. Honestly, I have always agreed with this on some level. For example, I think that little should be taught before high school that is outside of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Don’t misunderstand me. This is not a desire to limit the subjects taught. It is a desire to broaden them. We should be teaching students how to think rather than exactly what they should learn. For instance, teaching economics by reading good economics books and writing critically about the subject. Specialization has its place, of course, in technical endeavors. But this is not always true for direct innovation. For example, an oncologist, a chemist, a biologist, and an immunologist might come up with more original and promising ideas in treating cancer than four oncologists could come up with on their own. Pick a lane, but dabble as you go along. Knowledge and skill have ways of cross-pollinating that are not always immediately obvious.

Two of my favorite quotes:

When he recounts his own education at the University of Chicago, where he was captain of the cross-country team, he raises his voice. “Even the best universities aren’t developing critical intelligence,” he told me. “They aren’t giving students the tools to analyze the modern world, except in their area of specialization. Their education is too narrow.” He does not mean this in the simple sense that every computer science major needs an art history class, but rather that everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.

Biology and English majors did poorly on everything that was not directly related to their field. None of the majors, including psychology, understood social science methods. Science students learned the facts of their specific field without understanding how science should work in order to draw true conclusions. Neuroscience majors did not do particularly well on anything. Business majors performed very poorly across the board, including in economics. Econ majors did the best overall. Economics is a broad field by nature, and econ professors have been shown to apply the reasoning principles they’ve learned to problems outside their area.*

Buy on Amazon.

If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
By: Brenda Ueland
Sublime Books (March 5, 2014)
128 pages

If You Want to Write is a book of artistic encouragement. I found this little volume a delight. Ueland spends half the book encouraging and showing proof that most people are capable of writing beautifully. The key is not to put on a pretense. Just describe things as they are. Bescribe this as YOU see and feel them. (Most professional writers get there with persistence and a bit of luck – if you want to know the truth.) You are capable of so much! Keep going!

Two of my favorite quotes:

Finally I said: “Describe something just as it is. Do not worry if it is angular and clumsy or how it comes out. Just look at something and put down what you see. Remember William Blake who said: ‘Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.’”56 56 The truth, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc., everything is smoothed out to seem plausible,—villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word of it.

So if you want your children to be musicians, then work at music yourself, seriously and with all your intelligence. If you want them to be scholars, study hard yourself. If you want them to be honest, be honest yourself. And so it goes. And that is why I would say to the worn and hectored mothers in the class who longed to write and could find not a minute for it: “If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: ‘Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!’ you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.”

Buy this book.