Kathryn Schulz

As usual, three means more than three.

THING: Eat Your Words: Anthony Bourdain on Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz. Anthony Bourdain, host of the Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (first four seasons currently streaming on Netflix), is notorious for challenging his own strong opinions. In this interview he discusses the value he’s gained from his willingness to be wrong, whether by traveling the world or preparing for fatherhood, and what doing it wrong can teach us:

There’s enormous respect and a romanticized reverence for what’s considered the “right” way—meaning, the classic way—and I think most chefs feel powerfully that one should know that before moving on. Like, “I’ve researched this, this is the way they were making it in 1700, goddamn it, and that’s the way it should be made.” Or: “This is the way they make laksa in Kuching and Borneo; that stuff I just had on Ninth Avenue is definitely not the same; ergo it’s wrong.” But, you know, what does “real” or “authentic” mean? The history of food is the history of migrating ingredients and occupation and foreign influences and accommodation.

Somebody who’d be very interesting to speak to on this is Grant Achatz [one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy]. Here’s a guy who’s been trained in the classics, who knows the quote-unquote “right” away to do everything, but made a very deliberate decision to subvert it all. I think that’s admirable. We need people like that. We would never have had Jimi Hendrix if he’d stuck to the right way to play guitar.

THING: Wooden and Love by Joe Posnanski. John Wooden, the most successful coach in major American sports, died this week at 99. Though he once won 10 college hoops national titles in 12 years, he was even more beloved away from the game. Wooden famously wrote a love letter to his wife every month after she passed 15 years ago, his former players talk about him as if he’s their own grandfather (mixed with Moses or Ben Franklin), and his thoughts on life have become a rolling motivational quip factory over time. Posnanski looks through the lens of Wooden’s coaching style at the Pyramid of Success, a fifteen-block pile of Wooden aphorisms that appears to be a stack of pure cheese at first glance, and finds nothing short of a life plan.

THING: Clay Shirky: What I Read from the Atlantic Wire. Clay Shirky, described by WIRED editor-in-chief Chris Anderson as “a prominent thinker on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies,” details his reading priorities as part of a great series on media consumption by people you’ve heard of.

THING: Great African Singularities by Appfrica. Appfrica, a Ugandan software company, shows how African presence, language accommodations, and representation are alarmingly absent from otherwise globally focused pages by tech giants like Yahoo!, Google, Apple, Facebook, and more. Blogger Jonathan Gosier sees one solution:

The business world (and in this case tech companies) needs to be constantly reminded that they need you with cold hard facts. There are no other arguments. Show them the numbers, the patents, the inventions, the talent, the enthusiasm, the courage…the success stories. Don’t open your mouth to tell anyone anything or ask them for anything ever again…show them.