Read It: "Late Bloomers"

I enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's latest piece, an article about the connections between artists and age. Gladwell's main focus is on Ben Fountain, who quit practicing law in 1988 to become a writer and didn't publish his first celebrated piece until 2006.

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth...Yes, there was Orson Welles, peaking as a director at twenty-five. But then there was Alfred Hitchcock, who made “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief,” “The Trouble with Harry,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho”—one of the greatest runs by a director in history—between his fifty-fourth and sixty-first birthdays. Mark Twain published “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at forty-nine. Daniel Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe” at fifty-eight.

The article also gave me a reason to not feel so discouraged after people ask me about the progress of my thesis work.