Your Sunday Salvage Report

The odd story of a dead cruise ship.

Commentary Literary

Commentary, the greatest magazine in the world, now has a literary blog.

NY Times Magazine: What If The Secret To Success Is Failure?

The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained as we sat in his office last fall, is character — those essential traits of mind and habit that were drilled into him at boarding school in England and that also have deep roots in American history. “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.”

Read the entire article here.

Is Everything We Know about the Universe Wrong?

The implications of such a discovery are so mind boggling, however, that these same scientists immediately requested that other labs around the world try to replicate the experiment. Something must have been wrong to account for a result that, if we know anything about the universe, is impossible.

And that’s the problem. It has to be impossible because, if not, everything we know about the universe is wrong.

Read the rest of Charles Krauthammer here.

Quick Tip: Moneyball

If you haven't seen the new film, "Moneyball," do.

Highly recommended.

First Paragraph

In the summer of 1944, the year before the year I fell in love, I hitchhiked from Pennsylvania to Seattle by way of Chicago and Yellowstone National Park; from Seattle down the coast to San Francisco; and from there by way of Barstow and Needles via boxcar, thumb, and bus through the Southwest back home to the old farm, three months later. I started out with twenty dollars in my pocket and a piece of advice, cryptic I'd say, from my old man: "Don't let anybody take you for a punk." I didn't know what he meant. I was seventeen: wise, brown, ugly, shy, poetical; a bold, stupid, sun-dazzled kid, out to see the country before giving his life in the war against Japan. A kind of hero, by God! Terrified but willing.

- From The Journey Home by Edward Abbey

Folk Tale

Alan Rickman reading "The Lion, the Hare, and the Hyena."

Reverse Evolution

People have told Jack Horner he’s crazy before, but he has always turned out to be right. In 1982, on the strength of seven years of undergraduate study, a stint in the Marines, and a gig as a paleontology researcher at Princeton, Horner got a job at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. He was hired as a curator but soon told his bosses that he wanted to teach paleontology. “They said it wasn’t going to happen,” Horner recalls. Four years and a MacArthur genius grant later, “they told me to do whatever I wanted to.” Horner, 65, continues to work at the museum, now filled with his discoveries. He still doesn’t have a college degree.

Click here to read the Wired article about the man who wants to turn a chicken into a dinosaur.

Miscellaneous and Fast

Nicole Gelinas on Steve Jobs, capitalist.
Long suspected, now confirmed: Lawrence O'Donnell is a dolt.
Marlon Brando receives Academy Award from space alien.
Berlusconi and Putin: I've love to be a fly on the wall at that meeting.
The Kingston Trio with "M.T.A."

Quote of the Day

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow