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

ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth. It’s difficult at both ends of the spectrum. There’s ...

doctor and built a thriving medical practice. His father had produced three sons who were fulfilled and motivated and who had ac ...

4. The man from Hollywood is not the first person to have had this revelation. It is something, I think, that most of us underst ...

a working single parent, trying to pay your rent and feed and clothe your family and manage a long and difficult commute to a ph ...

Money makes parenting easier until a certain point—when it stops making much of a difference. What is that point? The scholars w ...

year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns” sets in. If your family makes seventy-five thousand and yo ...

But that curve tells only part of the story, doesn’t it? Because when the income of parents gets high enough, then parenting sta ...

very wealthy. The psychologist James Grubman uses the wonderful expression “immigrants to wealth” to describe first- generation ...

themselves and realize that they never have to work hard, be independent, or learn the meaning of money? That’s why so many cult ...

one of the most difficult things for immigrants to wealth, because they don’t know what to say when having the excuse of ‘We can ...

happen. “No we won’t” get a pony requires a conversation, and the honesty and skill to explain that what is possible is not alwa ...

the driveway, a private jet, and a house in Beverly Hills the size of an airplane hangar. The man from Hollywood had too much mo ...

That’s what is called an inverted-U curve. Inverted-U curves are hard to understand. They almost never fail to take us by surpri ...

Which brings us back to the puzzle of class size: What if the relationship between the number of children in a classroom and aca ...

What if it’s this? ...

The principal of Shepaug Valley Middle School is a woman named Teresa DeBrito. In her five-year tenure at the school, she has wa ...

the whole grade coming up from elementary school,” she said. She was dreading it: “We’re going to struggle.” ...

5. Inverted-U curves have three parts, and each part follows a different logic.^3 There’s the left side, where doing more or hav ...

example, has historically had quite large elementary school classes. The country’s educational system uses the “Maimonides Rule, ...

students is a lot for any teacher to handle. Israel is on the left side of the inverted-U curve. Now think back to Connecticut. ...