Word: geniuses
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...game clock and waited. And waited. With five minutes left, Fischer suddenly strode onstage and, with a series of blindingly quick moves, hammered Reshevsky into defeat. Two days later, Fischer quit the tournament and abandoned competitive chess for two years. Which raises the question, Why is the gift of genius so often given to people too stupid to know what to do with...
...seems to be in the nature of genius to zero in on its purpose. In the 1790s a young French boy named Jean-Francois Champollion, the son of a bookseller, became obsessed with ancient languages--not only Latin and Greek but also Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Chaldean. According to The Linguist and the Emperor (Ballantine; 271 pages), by Daniel Meyerson, Champollion was a dreamy, solitary kid who mouthed off in class, but as a schoolboy, he assembled a 2,000-page dictionary of Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language. Luckily for him, French soldiers in Egypt soon discovered the Rosetta stone...
Champollion and Fischer were lucky: they were heroes in their time. Deprived of the spotlight, genius can grow up twisted and strange. David Hahn was the child of divorced, clueless parents living in a David Lynch--perfect Michigan suburb in the mid-1990s. A loner and a compulsive tinkerer, Hahn somehow got it into his head in high school to build a nuclear reactor in his mom's potting shed, and damn if he didn't come close. In The Radioactive Boy Scout (Random House; 209 pages), Ken Silverstein describes how Hahn extracted radioactive elements from household objects--americium from...
...arrogance,” her assertiveness “bossiness.” One article called her “a steely-eyed, tart-tongued control-freak executive brought low by hubris.” Another described her as “an uppity, pain-in-the-neck genius.” A letter to the editor in USA Today summed up this attitude perfectly: “It is that smug, arrogant, ‘I’m-above-all-of-you’ attitude that would make a jail sentence all the sweeter for us, the little...
...CHUNG: First off, I’m a bit dismayed that as a fellow admirer of cinema, you’re not “big on Charlie Kaufman.” The man’s an unequivocal genius and the fact that his scripts have attracted the attention of such brand names as Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep (in a supporting role, no less), makes his work all the more admirable. I defy you to name another working screenwriter who has invented a film premise as consistently innovative as Being John Malkovich, a screenplay as audacious...