{"id":107258,"date":"2017-02-01T09:22:08","date_gmt":"2017-02-01T14:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=107258"},"modified":"2017-02-01T10:27:01","modified_gmt":"2017-02-01T15:27:01","slug":"is-it-luck-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/01\/is-it-luck-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Is It Luck? and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_107259\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/1023px-au_bac.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-107259\" class=\"wp-image-107259\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/1023px-au_bac.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"724\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/1023px-au_bac.jpg 784w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/1023px-au_bac-300x217.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/1023px-au_bac-768x556.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-107259\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Albert Guillaume, <i>Au Bac<\/i>, 1898.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Americans are a lottery-playing people, a day-trading people, a people who in the summer of 2013 sent a song called \u201cGet Lucky\u201d soaring to the top of the charts. And yet we\u2019re famously predisposed to underestimate the role of luck in our lives\u2014as anyone who recalls Obama\u2019s \u201cyou didn\u2019t build that\u201d brouhaha will know. We walk around in a dumb haze of self-determinism. In a new interview, the economist Robert H. Frank offers a useful corrective to those who would argue that success is merely the result of hard work: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/nautil.us\/issue\/44\/luck\/ingenious-robert-h-frank\" target=\"_blank\">I prefer just to look at how people naturally construct their life histories<\/a>. We assemble narratives about ourselves routinely and the elements that go into those are the things that we can retrieve most comfortably from memory \u2026 When you\u2019re riding a bike into a headwind you\u2019re keenly aware of that. Every 100 yards you travel, you wish that wind would go away. You\u2019re battling against it, it\u2019s at the front of your mind. Then the course changes direction; you\u2019ve got the wind at your back. What a great feeling that is for about twenty seconds, and then it\u2019s completely out of your mind. You\u2019re not even aware that the wind is at your back. You\u2019re not having to battle any enemies in that sense and so it\u2019s out of your mind. So when you think back to your career, what do you remember? You remember the headwinds you faced. You don\u2019t remember all the tailwinds that were pushing you along. So there\u2019s just these natural asymmetries that lead people to either ignore the role of luck entirely or overstate it to a considerable degree.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>In a new book, the art historian Joseph Leo\u00a0Koerner argues that Hieronymus Bosch was really painting from life\u2014it\u2019s just that \u201ceveryday life was bound inextricably to what seems its polar opposite: an art of the bizarre, the monstrous, the uncanny.\u201d\u00a0Reviewing Koerner\u2019s argument, Alexandra Harris writes: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2017\/feb\/01\/bosch-bruegel-joseph-leo-koerner\" target=\"_blank\">To make us feel the overwhelming fertility of the world, holding us on the vertiginous brink of mesmerized attraction and repulsion, Bosch has to paint the \u2018enemy territory\u2019 that is everyday life<\/a> \u2026 Koerner leads us carefully towards\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/b\/ba\/Garden_delights.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><em>The Garden of Earthly Delights<\/em><\/a>, intent both on preparing us for the horror and on deepening our experience of it. In their closed state, the grisaille shutters bear the translucent sphere of a half-made universe, quiet and yet brewing, heavy with giant husks and seedpods, \u2018at once fecund and already decaying.\u2019 The doors of the world part to reveal what Koerner calls \u2018psychology in painted form.\u2019 There in the middle is the eye of the owl, one of Bosch\u2019s figures for himself, an emblem of the devil, yet all-seeing, like the eye of God.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>James Gleick looks back at the career of Hugo Gernsback, who published a series of pulp magazines in the 1920s that literally gave science fiction its name: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2017\/01\/31\/hugo-gernsback-making-of-future-man\/\" target=\"_blank\">He declared, and believed, that science fiction would be the true literature of the future. For him, imagination and prophecy were one and the same<\/a>. If he could imagine a future of marvels and wonders, they were sure to arrive sooner or later. He broadcast his visions on WRNY, and the\u00a0<em>New York Times\u00a0<\/em>considered him an authority. \u2018Science will find ways to transmit tons of coal by radio, facilitate foot traffic by electrically-propelled roller skates, save electric current by cold light and grow and harvest crops electrically, according to a forecast of the next fifty years made by Hugo Gernsback,\u2019 the paper reported in 1926. \u2018We may soon expect fantastic towers piercing the sky and giving off weird purple glows when energized.\u2019 Antigravity. Floating cities. Flying men with power rays. He promised all these in the pages of\u00a0<em>Science and Invention<\/em>.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Advice for artists from Ralph Steadman, who says, Fuck it, skip the pencil, skip the drafts, just take out the heavy artillery and see what happens on the page: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/culture\/art-and-design\/ralph-steadman-with-gonzo-you-don-t-cover-the-story-you-become-the-story-1.2944772\" target=\"_blank\">People used to say, \u2018Don\u2019t you make a mistake?\u2019 But there\u2019s no such thing as a mistake, only an opportunity to do something else, change, adapt it as you go along<\/a>. I\u2019ve just been doing a drawing of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/search\/search-7.1213540?tag_person=Willie%20Nelson&amp;article=true\" target=\"_blank\">Willie Nelson<\/a>\u00a0for someone, and I was showing it to someone and the ink was still wet, and it dribbled down the drawing. But it\u2019s okay: I\u2019ll pull it round somehow. I don\u2019t like the second guess. I like taking the bull by the horns and going with it. Straight in there. Things happen, accidents happen, interesting things happen when you start drawing straight away into the white surface. One thing I love doing is slapping paint straight away on to a brand new piece of paper. There\u2019s a great joy in that. Taking it from there. A lot of that goes on in the drawings. I\u2019m not very fond of pencil.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>In which Inigo Thomas introduces a British audience to Ann Coulter, whose inflammatory blend of bigotry, punditry, and F-list comedy routines Americans know all too well: \u201c \u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/blog\/2017\/01\/27\/inigo-thomas\/ann-coulters-intricately-knit-conspiracy\/\" target=\"_blank\">What pisses me off is when they don\u2019t get the punch line,\u2019 Coulter has said of her audiences<\/a>. The reactionary tone of so much American political humor is a strangely neglected subject: it\u2019s become axiomatic that if you want to see your opponent trashed then you set out to see them laughed at, and that if you\u2019re going to be a tribune of the people you\u2019d better have the viciousness of the stand-up comedian. Coulter knows that \u2026 I was for a time Coulter\u2019s editor at\u00a0<em>George\u00a0<\/em>magazine in the late 1990s, although attempts at editing were met with suspicions you were trying to censor her. Somewhere in my files I have a sheet of thumbnail photos of Coulter posing with a pistol.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: learning to reckon with luck; revisiting the Garden of Earthly Delights; the father of sci-fi; and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[14463,35,412,1465,1694,12459,27033,17364,27031,15712,12515,27030,200,13072,12807],"class_list":["post-107258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-ann-coulter","tag-art","tag-comedy","tag-drawing","tag-economics","tag-hieronymus-bosch","tag-hugo-gernsback","tag-james-gleick","tag-joseph-lee-koerner","tag-luck","tag-ralph-steadman","tag-robert-h-frank","tag-science-fiction","tag-success","tag-work"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Headwinds and Tailwinds: Why We Underestimate the Role of Luck<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In today\u2019s arts and culture news roundup: learning to reckon with luck; revisiting the Garden of Earthly Delights; the father of sci-fi; and more.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/01\/is-it-luck-and-other-news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is It Luck? and Other News by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 1, 2017 \u2013 In today\u2019s roundup: learning to reckon with luck; revisiting the Garden of Earthly Delights; the father of sci-fi; and more.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/01\/is-it-luck-and-other-news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-02-01T14:22:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-02-01T15:27:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/1023px-au_bac.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"784\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"568\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/01\/is-it-luck-and-other-news\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/01\/is-it-luck-and-other-news\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Dan Piepenbring\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6b16ca558fc538230f135c3220dfd3c8\"},\"headline\":\"Is It Luck? and Other News\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-02-01T14:22:08+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-02-01T15:27:01+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/01\/is-it-luck-and-other-news\/\"},\"wordCount\":995,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/01\/is-it-luck-and-other-news\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/1023px-au_bac.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Ann Coulter\",\"art\",\"comedy\",\"drawing\",\"economics\",\"hieronymus bosch\",\"Hugo Gernsback\",\"James Gleick\",\"Joseph Lee Koerner\",\"luck\",\"Ralph Steadman\",\"Robert H. 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