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I mentioned this earlier but here is the full story. Some years ago, I heard John Fontanella, author of The Physics of Basketball, interviewed on NPR and he said something which blew my mind. So I picked up the phone and called him. “Professor, I heard you say you shoot with your middle and ring finger leaving the ball last,” I said. “Did I hear you correctly?” “Yes,” he answered. “That is correct.” “But I was taught to shoot with my index finger being the last finger to leave the ball. I wasn’t even aware you could shoot that way.” “Well, I started shooting that way back in college,” he answered. “During my freshman year, I hurt my index finger and I experimented a bit and found I could shoot better releasing off my middle and ring fingers. So that is how I shot from then on.” I paused a moment, digesting his words. Fontanella’s book was groundbreaking and I had a great deal of respect for him. The fact that one year he had led the country with a free-throw average of 92.2% (in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics) added credibility as well. Might this be the missing link to the secret of shooting? “Well,” I said. “It is disheartening to think for 49 years; I have been shooting the ball the wrong way.” I will never forget Fontanella’s reply. “It is not the way you were shooting was wrong. It is just shooting that way is not very biomechanically friendly.”
Straight Shooter
Bob Fisher
Steve Hosea burned into my mind that the most important part of the medical history isn’t the medical history. It’s the social history.” Charity had taken away other lessons from Dr. Hosea. The simplest explanation is usually the best. If the patient turns up with two separate symptoms—say, a fever and a rash—the cause is more likely than not a single underlying disease. If there is the faintest possibility of a catastrophic disease, you should treat it as being a lot more likely than it seems. If your differential diagnosis leads to a list of ten possibilities, for instance, and the tenth and least likely thing on the list is Ebola, you should treat the patient as if she has Ebola, because the consequences of not doing so can be calamitous. When something doesn’t quite seem right about your diagnosis, respect the feeling, even if you can’t quite put your finger on why the diagnosis might be wrong. A lot of people had died because doctors had allowed their minds to come to rest before they should. A doctor needed to be a detective for the patient: that was Dr. Hosea’s big message.
The Premonition
Michael Lewis
There was a certain inevitability to the darkness that existed between the two superpowers in the years immediately after World War II—two essentially isolationist countries propelled involuntarily to great power status, with vastly differing political and economic systems, each with its own historical strain of paranoia and each now living in a nuclear world. But no small additional part of the tension was the fact that the Soviet leader was Stalin, and he made everything in the Cold War seem infinitely more dangerous and more threatening, so marginal was his innate humanity, and so cruel a man was he. What he ran was a terror machine. It did not matter if you had committed a crime; a suitable crime could always be found for you. It did not matter if you were a completely loyal Communist and a completely faithful Stalinist, a true believer in the cult of his personality. Someone was always listening, ready to betray you, if only to save himself. It was government run by fear and, finally, madness. In the late 1930s, with a Slavophobic Hitler on the rise, Stalin had purged and virtually destroyed the officer corps and leadership of the Red Army, getting rid of 3 of 5 marshals, 15 of 16 army commanders, 60 of 67 corps commanders, 136 of 199 division commanders. Essentially he stripped his country’s defenses and prepared the way for the German invasion to come in 1941. His crimes against his own people were so great as to be essentially beyond measurement. How many people had actually died? Was it a few million, 10 million, perhaps even 40 million? “He was one of those rare terrible dogmatists capable of destroying nine tenths of the human race to ‘make happy’ the one tenth,” wrote Milovan Djilas, the former Communist vice president of Yugoslavia, and heir apparent to Tito, who broke with the Communists, spent time in prison, and eventually wrote one of the most penetrating early insider portraits of Stalin. Djilas saw him as the greatest criminal of all time: “Every crime was possible to Stalin for there was not one he had not committed. Whatever standards we use to take his measure…to him will fall the glory the greatest criminal in history. For in him were joined the criminal senselessness of a Caligula with the refinement of a Borgia and the brutality of a Tsar Ivan the Terrible.”
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
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