Being wrong puts off neither prophets nor their followers. The term “cognitive dissonance,” coined by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the nineteen-fifties, described an imbalance between conviction and information. He had been studying a cult led by Dorothy Martin, a Chicago housewife who promised that, in December of 1954, an alien spaceship would arrive, followed … Read more
Aside from these two wildly different literary eminences, Maclean cared little for Dartmouth and escaped it as often as he could to go back to the Montana woods. By then, he had been not just playing but working in those woods for many years, beginning at fourteen, when he took a job in the logging … Read more
“Don’t mention the word ‘liberalism,’ ” the talk-show host says to the guy who’s written a book on it. “Liberalism,” he explains, might mean Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to his suspicious audience, alienating more people than it invites. Talk instead about “liberal democracy,” a more expansive term that includes John McCain and Ronald Reagan. When … Read more
On any day of the week, you might find Scooter Braun working his magic in a pair of vintage Reeboks. He has a love of superior kicks, and was among the high-profile investors in StockX, the “stock market for sneakers.” He’s now forty-two, but some of us can still picture him in 2006, a college … Read more
