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

Acknowledgments David and Goliath has benefited greatly from the wisdom and generosity of many others: my parents; my agent, Tin ...

Sarah Lyall, Jacob Weisberg, the Lyntons, Terry Martin, Tali Farhadian, Emily Hunt, and Robert McCrum. Special thanks to my fact ...

Notes ...

Introduction: Goliath The scholarly literature on the battle between David and Goliath is extensive. Here is one source: John A. ...

(Military Matters, Book I): Recruits are to be taught the art of throwing stones both with the hand and sling. The inhabitants o ...

enemy. Stones kill without mangling the body, and the contusion is mortal without loss of blood. It is universally known the anc ...

Elah Battle and the Duel of David with Goliath: Between History and Artistic Theological Historiography” appears in Homeland and ...

that an impact energy of 72 joules is sufficient to perforate (but not exit) a cranium when it is impacted on the parietal porti ...

joules, respectively. Hirsch presented his analysis at a scientific meeting. In an e-mail to me, he added: A day after the lectu ...

tables. Robert Dohrenwend’s article “The Sling: Forgotten Firepower of Antiquity” (Journal of Asian Martial Arts 11, no. 2 [2002 ...

Indiana State Medical Association 53 (1960): 1313–16, and then by David Rabin and Pauline Rabin in a letter to the New England J ...

to follow the young David as he circled him. The stone entered Goliath’s cranial vault through a markedly thinned frontal bone, ...

Vladimir Berginer and Chaim Cohen, “The Nature of Goliath’s Visual Disorder and the Actual Role of His Personal Bodyguard,” Anci ...

Chapter One: Vivek Ranadivé Ivan Arreguín-Toft’s book about underdog winners is How the Weak Win Wars (Cambridge University Pres ...

2008). ...

Chapter Two: Teresa DeBrito Perhaps the best-known study of the effects of class reduction was the Project STAR (Student-Teacher ...

billions of dollars on class-size reduction did so, in large part, because of the results of STAR. But STAR was far from perfect ...

experiments that are “unblinded” are considered dubious. For a cogent critique of STAR, see Eric Hanushek, “Some Findings from a ...

discussion of class size, see Eric Hanushek, The Evidence on Class Size (University of Rochester Press, 1998); Eric Hanushek and ...

Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 38 (August 2010): 107. Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant discu ...