Henry Oliver
@HenryEOliver
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SECOND ACT. What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success. "Peachy, not preachy." The Common Reader:
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Second Act — my book about how late bloomers flourish and what they can teach us — comes out in the US on September 10.
@tylercowen
called it, “One of the very best books on talent.”
If you want to understand late bloomers, pre-order now!
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Modern reading habits in a single bestseller bookshelf. Almost entirely books that “unfold the lie” or promise structure, solutions, or serenity.
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Last night I started Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and it seems unlikely that I will be able to do anything else until I finish it.
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@nabeelqu
So true. I literally used to say that to clients. I was the consultant and the sales guy I worked with told clients "an expert is anyone from out of town" and most of the time a big part of what they wanted was for me to be more blunt than they could be.
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Barack Obama: “the most important stuff I’ve learned, I’ve learned from novels.”
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I'm delighted to say that I've been awarded a second Emergent Ventures grant, to write a book about reading great literature.
My working title is: The Common Reader's Quest
Here are some early thoughts🧵
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This article about late bloomers by David Brooks is *superb*
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My dad started telling me the word had gone to hell again yesterday so I showed him some graphs from
@OurWorldInData
and he did in fact stop and see things a little differently.
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Five ways to talent spot late bloomers
1. Look for people who have been successful in the past.
2. Look for people with secret lives.
3. Look for the people who don't fit in.
4. Look for loners and those who are happy to change their context.
5. Put up a beacon.
🧵
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So much of the FTX story and commentary is just happening straight on Twitter. It’s remarkable timing for the blue tick citizen journalist debate.
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Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life
Now available for pre-order! Arrives 9 May.
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Lovely account of Pemberton, a late bloomer
The story of Coca-Cola and cocaine is fascinating.
The 1880s formula had the drug. And even though it’s been removed, Coca-Cola is one of the only companies in the world that can legally trade the coca leaf.
I wrote more here:
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How many people in the Tory party have realised that Liz Truss was right?
I argue in
@TheCriticMag
that Liz Truss will eventually become a Barry Goldwater figure— the wrong person with the right message.
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The British Museum keeps closing galleries at short notice due to staff shortages. You might not think it’s a big deal but this is a global museum denying access to international treasures. They wouldn’t tell me their plan to fix the problem either.
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@HadleyFreeman
Anne Boleyn video diary would be amazing. “It’s just so crazy to look back and be like, how did we get here?”
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People mocked Elon for saying he wanted to solve free speech when he bought Twitter.
But J.K. Rowling’s resistance to Scotland’s insane new laws is only possible on Twitter.
For resisting government when it polices speech, then, yeah, Twitter is a solution.
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To display collections for the public to see?
We want to change that. We want to do better. And we invite you to help us get there.
Tell us: what's the point of museums?
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Tolkien’s academic colleagues bought The Hobbit in order to tease him about it, or in case it was worth money one day, like Alice in Wonderland.
There were reports, however, that the Regius Professor of History, was actually seen reading the book.
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British patients are already using Singaporean telemedicine. We should allow Singaporean doctors to write them prescriptions. Excellent article by
@MaxThilo1
, who actually went to Singapore to see the system first hand.
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Please don’t. Writing is not a hack. Grammar is logic. Sentences make sense of thought. The euphony of prose is a harmony of sound and sense, not some trick of pattern making. You won’t find this in the King James Bible or Shakespeare or bestselling thrillers.
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I wrote about Frank Lloyd Wright and late bloomers in
@ftweekend
We think of late bloomers starting late. Wright offers a new paradigm. He bloomed twice, early and late
(with thanks to
@mattvella
's enthusiasm and
@griseldamb
for her attentive editing)
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I might just abandon everything and read Our Mutual Friend.
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@tylercowen
A good example from C17th.
Walter Raleigh wrote the first part of History of the World in the Tower of London, but abandoned it when he couldn't find out what happened in a fight below his cell window, a fight which he had observed.
We don't know if this story is true...
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@zenahitz
@mattyglesias
Isn’t he making the narrower claim that humanities must be more interested in eg the aesthetic greatness of Shakespeare than any radical theory you can attach to Shakespeare? Like, a Harold Bloom kind of position saying “these texts are great, they are the best of our
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“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
George Eliot
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A few reasons why the Prince Harry revelations probably aren't that damaging...
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There was a time in 1853-54 when the following works were in progress or being published:—
Madame Bovary
Bartleby the Scrivener
Bleak House
J.S. Mill’s Autobiography
Walden
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When my kids ask why we have education I say that you have to spend your whole life with your own mind—better make sure it’s an interesting place to be.
@IvanaDGreco
@CRPakaluk
That whole discourse about “wasted” education bothers me. I see well meaning women try to insist that their degrees have obvious day to day value for them as SAHMs and it’s just like… maybe somewhat but also you don’t even have to go there
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In the trenches of the First World War, future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan read the Iliad.
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Many Benthamites were revealed to have been involved in the speculations and pocket-lining of the 1825 financial crisis, which damaged their reputation for high-mindedness and ethical thinking.
But that wasn't the end of Bentham, or utilitarianism.
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Met someone at a party who started a comic book company in his forties with no previous experience. Late bloomers are everywhere. You could be one too…
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Why do I write the Common Reader?
I was asked this question in an interview the other day, and gave rather a weak answer. Let me expand.
tl;dr. Most of us die without writing a great novel, but we can all read Anna Karenina.
📚
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Re-posting because it really really is time you all stopped ignoring Harriet Taylor
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Not only did UPenn tell Karikó she wasn’t faculty quality, they laughed when she told them about her job in the private sector because the company didn’t then have a website.
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, Penn’s historic mRNA vaccine research team, win 2023
@NobelPrize
in Medicine
#nobelprize
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"The overall chance of dying during the study period was 9 per cent higher among those who were night people than in morning people."
.
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Discussion of Twitter’s failings isn’t talking about links enough.
If links were prioritised, more people would spend more time here. I know I would.
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1. It's boring. There's so much stuff that's just dull. The ratio of outrage to pedestrian makes the overall impact much lower.
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So, if you want to break the doom loop, take the Jane Austen cure. Turn off Netflix. Put down your phone. Ignore politics for a while. Quiet the negative contagion.
Read a good book. You’ll feel better.
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I keep hearing from readers who are reading Mill’s Autobiography after reading my essays. Make sure you read it if you haven’t. A remarkable book about the art of living.
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I’m in the job market and looking for somewhere that needs:
a researcher
who knows chatGPT
and is a proficient writer
I just wrote a book about talent. My background covers branding, marketing, research and strategy, politics, writing.
DM if you know of anything!
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This is great and makes the important point that less is more. The short stories of Borges and Kafka have more imaginative potential in a few pages than some novelists manage in a few volumes.
Today I decided to write about entertainment franchises instead of economics.
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Launch day for Second Act and it’s only £16.65 on Amazon!
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Three things stood out to me in 'The Inklings' by Humphrey Carpenter.
1. Tolkien’s marriage was in a difficult patch when he became friends with Lewis, and he felt that Lewis compensated for his loneliness at home.
2. None of the Inklings was called away to war work of any
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Why does HMRC send me letters in the post? Why can’t I just email the person who wrote me the letter? Why do we still believe this is an easy country to set up a business in?
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Stop telling people Milton isn’t for everyone. He’s for everyone who knows what poetry is. Education does not include the *shrugging off* of John Milton.
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Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. To believe anything else, you have to piece together speculations, coded interpretations of the sonnets, and contorted explanations of the timeline. You have to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
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Six weeks until Second Act is out.
Helen Lewis called it smart and insightful. Ian Leslie said compelling and persuasive. It’s one of the books Tyler Cowen is most looking forward to reading in 2024.
If you want to be a late bloomer, pre-order today!
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A reader asked me,
"What about the people who never found their calling, are not successful in traditional or frankly any terms, and haven’t had the opportunity to be truly good at anything?"
My answer below.
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@ByrneHobart
Too many cultural products like Game of Thrones make it look cool and people take it seriously — we need more capitalist fiction!
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Is it just me, or has no-one yet written a literary essay discussing Paul Graham as a writer: genre, style, syntax etc?
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Not only is Second Act available in the US (on kindle)—it’s the top new release in Entrepreneurship! 🥳
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EV allowed me to quit my job and write my book!
More wonderful things: if you haven't heard of it, Emergent Ventures is a marvellous program for (mostly rather small) grants:
AFAICS it's making the world just *better*, in all sorts of ways, enabling many people with unique interests and visions to
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@Scholars_Stage
Richard Evan has a good new book about this and the Nazis. Modern politics seems to have been part of what changed his ming. (More generally, Carlyle's idea is a little distorted by opponents: )
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@ESYudkowsky
Lots of great essayists went to traditional grammar schools where composition exercises were required.
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Nikola Tesla could recite the whole of Goethe's Faust.
It was while walking in the park and reciting a passage of that poem that he got the inspiration to make the induction motor work.
"Watch me!" he told his friend after reciting the verses, "watch me reverse it!"
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I couldn’t have asked for a better review than the one I got from
@arbesman
in the Wall Street Journal today
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I spoke to Tyler Cowen about John Stuart Mill, including where Mill remains relevant, how to read Mill properly, why Mill isn’t so influential today, whether Mill was a coherent thinker, why you should read Mill’s Bentham and Coleridge, and more.
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How to have good taste, temporarily unpaywalled
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When did you last hear heads of gvt funded bodies talking like this!
🧪🚀 NEW FILM from Works in Progress 📈🔬
A conversation with the leaders of ARIA, Britain's £800m effort to build a new DARPA or Bell Labs, which launched yesterday.
Feat
@ilangur
,
@matthewclifford
,
@bswud
and
@salonium
.
WATCH:
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Sydney and others are beginning to show us that the two cultures is still real and those who have some degree of overlap will perhaps have an advantage.
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Seneca's advice for late bloomers...
“What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
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I want you all to know that Shakespeare was a bestseller. He was hot. We have Harry Potter; they had Romeo and Juliet.
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As Alex Tabarrok said. if soap was invented today it would win a Nobel Prize.
My latest Man Made Wonders column. How Soap Helped Civilisation to Survive.
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@Craig_Simpson_
They wouldn’t be editing Wodehouse if he wasn’t still in copyright nearly fifty years after he died.
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Keeping good company!
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If you’re worried about the decline of the humanities, read a book.
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Man Made Wonders is my regular column for The Critic about the under appreciated infrastructure that makes modern life so astonishing and convenient.
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Borges gets more real every day.
I love the future: ChatGPT gave me the title and author name of a useful document for further reading, and when I Googled it Gemini told me it doesn't exist, but also outlined what it might say if it does.
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Some friends are embarrassed they haven't read my book. I immediately say, "Don't worry! Why would you read it?"
It's lovely when people do read it, but I feel zero offence if they don't. Same for my blog.
Why should friends and family share obsessions?
Among authors it is accepted none of your friends or family will actually read your book, and not to take it personally. This made sense to me, and so I was prepared. A few people close to me, though, have unexpectedly told me they read Troubled. Still, a good idea never to ask.
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In the nineteenth century, working men with little formal education read Dickens, Darwin, and John Stuart Mill.*
Today, university graduates read James Clear, James O’Brien, and Jordan Peterson.
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Sex, madness, and death. Elizabeth Jenkins' overlooked masterpiece.
It’s seventy years since the publication of “The Tortoise and the Hare”
Why is Elizabeth Jenkins still so over looked?
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