David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

experienced options trader when in fact he was not. Most of us would have foundered in that situation. We aren’t used to playing ...

LaGuardia? More important, most of us wouldn’t have jumped in that cab, because we would have worried about the potential social ...

was selling aluminum siding. His mother thought that he would be lucky to end up a truck driver. He had been kicked out of schoo ...

Because we’re so accustomed to the downside. It doesn’t faze us. I’ve thought about it many times, I really have, because it def ...

was a really good trader, and it turns out that learning how to deal with the possibility of failure is really good preparation ...

2 To make sure he was measuring intelligence and not something else, Frederick also correlated CRT scores with other factors. “A ...

3 When Blankenhorn took the stand in January of 2010, the case was called Perry v. Schwarzenegger; it became Hollingsworth v. Pe ...

6 Dyslexia, it should be pointed out, affects only reading. Cohn’s facility with numbers was unaffected. The one person who beli ...

not the word, I’m looking it up wrong, that’s two hours for three days in a row,” he said. He’s a busy man. That’s unlikely to h ...

Chapter Five ...

Emil “Jay” Freireich “How Jay did it, I don’t know.” ...

1. When Jay Freireich was very young, his father died suddenly. The Freireichs were Hungarian immigrants who were running a rest ...

sweatshop, sewing brims on hats. She made two cents a hat. She didn’t speak much English. “She had to work eighteen hours a day, ...

convenience. He couldn’t take care of his son by himself, and she didn’t have anybody. He was a really bitter, shriveled guy. So ...

to his sister. She was more disciplinarian than friend. He didn’t like his stepfather. In any case, the marriage didn’t last. He ...

like that,” he said. “She never talked about my father. I have no idea whether he was nice to her or mean. I never heard a word. ...

raised him. What was her name? He stopped short—a rare pause for him. “I don’t know,” he said. “It will pop into my head, I’m su ...

again six months later, and again after that, and every time, he would recall dates and names and facts with clocklike precision ...

2. In the years leading up to the Second World War, the British government was worried. If, in the event of war, the German Air ...

to attract the beast of prey.” He predicted that the city would be so helpless in the face of attack that between three and four ...