Gladwell in Action: Outliers. The Story of Success

The author Malcolm Gladwell defines an outlier as “something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body.”  In his book of essays he focuses on the secrets of success for outliers.  Based on his vignettes, Gladwell implicitly defines success as wealth and/or celebrity.  The underlying message of Gladwell’s book is that no matter how smart, talented or athletically gifted you might be, your chances of breakout success will ultimately depend on an ineffable mix of family support, mentorship, cultural and societal environment factors and outright luck.  Gladwell profiles hockey players, techno wizards such as Bill Gates, lawyers, businessmen and the Beatles.

As a starting point, Gladwell posits that 10,000 hours of practice are required to hone expertise to an outlier level.  The Beatles reached this cutoff through hours of performing in the seedy strip clubs of Hamburg, Germany at the start of their career.  When they returned to England, they had gained the confidence and experience to burst onto the international stage.  Gladwell refers to Hamburg as the “crucible” of the Beatles’ success.

Over the last decade singing competitions have become a staple of network TV.  I decided to investigate whether Gladwell’s principles would apply in this age of social media and instant stardom.  The singing competition show The Voice became my test crucible.  The format consists of an initial round of blind auditions, in which four judges sit with their backs to the singers and turn their chairs if they like what they hear.  If multiple judges turn their chairs, the singers select one as their coach.  As the show progresses, singers are eliminated based on an audience vote until a winner is crowned midst floods of fluttering confetti.   

Could instant stardom circumvent the 10,000 hour rule and would this instant stardom prove durable, propelling the winners to a halftime Super Bowl performance, to struts along a Red Carpet, a People Magazine cover, a Wikipedia profile, celebrity endorsements of perfume, shoes, a couch or absorbent underwear? 

  1.  What Gladwell missed:  For performing artists, outlier looks matter, but either end of the spectrum works fine.

In Gladwell’s world, looks don’t matter.  Money talks.   We don’t care what Bill Gates looks like; lawyers work behind the scenes.  J. P. Morgan, an outlier in the  the industrial revolution was disfigured by an enormous, bulbous nose due to the skin disease rhinophyma.  Nobody cared.

Singing competitions add the variable of the visual to the analysis of success.  Carrie Underwood, the season 5 winner of the related show American Idol, is perhaps the most celebrated winner.  She dabbled in music during high school, but there was no Hamburgian-like testing ground, no singing in front of hostile or raucous crowds, no 10,000 hours.  She walked onto the stage and let it rip

How much of Carrie Underwood’s success is related to va-va-va-voom good looks, skimpy outfits and amiable stage presence.  (She bizarrely admitted that she had a third nipple on her stomach and could cluck like a chicken.)  Would the Beatles have enjoyed the same level of swooning success if (let’s face it) the butt ugly Ringo Starr was the lead singer and cute-as-a-button Paul McCartney was the drummer relegated to the back row?  How much did their cheeky press conferences contribute to their success?

An unlikely physical appearance can also work to a performer’s advantage.  The Italian version of the voice featured a fully-habited nun (Christina Scuccia) singing a spritely version of Alicia Keys’ song, No One, with a phalanx of sister nuns bebopping along backstage. 

The audience, who saw the singer before the judges, went wild.  There was a collective jaw drop as judges turned their chairs to see a dancing nun wearing sensible shoes, her silver cross bouncing along her chest.  Yes, she had a fine voice, but so did a lot of plain looking contestants.  The nun became a fan favorite mostly because she was a nun, going on to sing such against-type stunt songs as “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and “Like a Virgin.” She won.

  •  What Gladwell got right:   Success requires ancillary skills beyond the core singing talent – among them fierce ambition, stage presence, networking skills and the luck of mentorship.   

Tracking the careers of the winners suggests that Gladwell is correct.  The instant fame  of The Voice is not durable, with few going on to any more than modest success.  Sister Cristina ultimately left her monastery to pursue her singling career.  As of 2022, she was reported to be working as a waitress in Spain.

The Voice has been criticized for their failure to produce a breakout star.  Carson Daly, the host of The Voice, offers a more modest definition of success than Gladwell – success is anyone who can make a living doing what they love to do. 

  •  Another thing that Gladwell got right:  The biases in The Voice voting process skew the critical ingredient of timing.     

Gladwell cites optimal timing as a key factor for success, as illustrated by junior hockey leagues in Canada.  Young players are slotted into different leagues based on a January 1st age cut-off, giving those born in early January an up to 11-month head start in skills and development.  It is startling to see that the majority of players in each of the Canadian elite junior leagues have birthdays in January and February.  This age bias trickles into the pro ranks. 

I see the same factors at play in The Voice, not in the age of the contestant, but in the biased timing of voting.  During the live performances, viewers are invited to vote at any time during the show.  Therefore, those who perform first enjoy a longer voting window. 

The highly touted “Instant Save” presents a more troubling bias.  The two lowest vote getters from the previous show each perform one last song.  The vote between the two of them is only open for five minutes.  As the credits runs, the host Carson Daly, announces in his most solemn voice, “And America saves…”  America, my ass.  This scheme effectively disenfranchises those in Mountain and Pacific time zones since the show is tape-delayed by two hours.  The voting window closes before they can watch the show. 

The producers blithely note that viewers can still vote, but they are voting blind – an interesting voting strategy that, sadly, may be common in this country.  It is not surprising that country western singers, well represented in the Eastern time zone, are the most frequent winners of the Voice.  Gladwell notes that a receptive environment is critical for outlier success.  The Voice’s voting practice skews this environment.

Though not directly related to Gladwell’s thesis, there are other troubling features.  The Voice website invites “America” to vote more than once, up to ten times per email address.  The “one person/one vote” bedrock of our democracy, beaming brightly to the rest of the world, does not apply to The Voice.   Another quibble is a subtle form of bribery.  If you vote using The Voice official app, you will get an extra treat from the Peacock Streaming service.

  • Gladwell is right again:  Where would we be without friends and family?  (But this is a no-brainer.)

Another Gladwellian theme is the grassroots support of family, friends and local mentors.  During the blind auditions, the camera pans offstage to a collection of family and friends who breathlessly anticipate a chair turn, followed by screaming, clapping, hugging and kissing the affable host Carson Daly.   In their brief bios and interviews, the contestants tearfully describe their roots in music and their families’ support. 

  • Gladwell continues to be right, this time with a final flourish.

Gladwell provides unexpected insights into the secrets of success but the evolution from obscurity to the bright lights of celebrity and fortune is the most compelling part of the book.  I am more interested in the teenaged Bill Gates sneaking off at night to access the University of Washington computers.  I wish I had seen the Beatles live in the 1960s, but even better, I wish that I had seen them in Hamburg as they were accumulating their hours.  I hope (but no guarantee) that I would have appreciated their blossoming greatness. 

Raw talent is the most charming aspect of The Voice.   Contestants stumble onto the stage looking like they have wandered in off the street, their contestant numbers slapped haphazardly on their chests.  The microphone shakes, their voice quavers as they confess that this is their first live performance.    

As the show progresses the performances become polished and over rehearsed.  Contestants get makeovers, style advisors weigh in.  For her blind audition, a frumpy but spirited Susan Boyle clumped onto the stage wearing an ill-fitting shift dress with no discernible waist.  Her frizzy hair had an every-which-way part.  She fumbled when asked the simple question of the name of her village.  She seemed simple to the point of cognitive pathology.  The audience and judges began to smirk.  And then she sang a stunning rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” to wild cheers and excitement from the audience and embarrassed appreciation from the judges.  By her next performance she had undergone a total make-over – sleek dyed hair, plucked eyebrows, sequined evening gown.  The inspiring innocence of her first performance had evaporated.

Charm wears off quickly.  My interest peters out. 

However, I highly recommend any of the following blind auditions for an inspirational start to the day.  Watch as the jaded and dismissive looks of judges turn to amazement when unpolished talent turns incandescent.

Susan Boyle:  I Dreamed a Dream

Danyl Johnson:   A Little Help from My Friends

Sister Cristina Scuccia:  No One

Chirstopher Maloney:  The Rose

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Podcast: Gladwell in Action: Outliers – The Story of Success

Taking Gladwell’s recipe for success and applying to the modern age of social media and instant fame.

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Gladwell in Action. Part 1. The Tipping Point

This essay is part of a series applying the principles outlined in Malcolm Gladwell’s essay collections.  The Tipping Point examines the mysterious emergence of “social epidemics,” ranging from crime waves to fashion trends.  As noted in the introduction, “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”  The following discussion applies the social epidemic principles to the persistent rumor (at least one would hope) that Russian Empress, Catherine the Great, had sex with horses. 

I first heard this rumor in 1971, as a newly arrived freshman from an all girls’ high school.  I stood timidly in my college cafeteria wondering where I might sit among this melee of strangers and further wondering where I might fit into this Southern California college. 

****

The dark wood paneling of the enormous dining hall extends up to the vaulted ceiling.  Students’ voices echo excitedly as they greet each other and sit in clumps of roommates, classmates, teammates, fraternities or sororities.  I draw in my breath and sit at a random table of five, nerve-wracking enough, but better than forlornly sitting by myself hoping that someone might like the look of me and join me.  The three guys are all vintage 1970 college students with long unkempt hair, white T-shirts and faded and patched blue jeans.  I am pleased to see that I blend well with the two other girls at the table, wearing low hip hugger jeans, a thick leather belt with a huge brass buckle that pinches when I lean over, well-tended long hair, and an embroidered Mexican wedding shirt. 

The five students glance at me quickly and continue talking.  One of the guys says, “Hey, did you hear about Catherine the Great?”  I have a vague awareness of the Russian Empress but know nothing specific.  “Did you know that she used to have sex with horses?” 

Another guy chips in, “She died when a horse crushed her.” 

The sexual content of this conversation is uncharted territory.  What am I supposed to do with this information?  How can I add to this discussion?  Is this what college is going to be like? 

Thankfully, it turns out that Catherine the Great’s sex life is a conversation killer.  Perhaps we all take a few seconds to privately contemplate the provocative logistics of the scenario, but the conversation promptly moves on to something as mundane as the poor quality of cafeteria food.  I never speak of this again, merely snug the nugget in the back of my mind. 

******

Forty years later, I was reading a book titled Paris in Love, a collection of diary entries by the romance novelist Eloisa James, who wrote about the cultural challenges for her family during a sabbatical year in Paris in 2009.   In the midst of very homey entries, she notices her husband is reading a biography of Catherine the Great, and comments, “His book also didn’t seem like much fun, especially after I inquired about the one thing that I knew about Catherine – to wit, her purported erotic encounters with equines.”

I was stunned.  What I had heard at the cafeteria was not a local rumor concocted by a bored student in a Russian history class, but a rumor that had been circulating internationally for a good 250 years.  I then casually asked my husband Nick what he knew about Catherine the Great, and Boom! there it was again.  When I discretely questioned my peers a good fifty percent knew all about Mr. Ed.  And just as it was in the college cafeteria, once you drop the horse bomb, you have to move on to something else.  Coincidentally, I had just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.  Applying Gladwell’s principles on rumor propagation to  Catherine the Great emerged as an interesting exercise.

Gladwell points out that rumors address a number of social needs, including confronting fears or trying to make sense out of a confusing situation.  Workplace rumors about rightsizing, downsizing or total collapse fall into this category.  These types of rumor may be based on a misinterpretation or embellishment of facts.  And then there are rumors that are based on deliberate misinformation, perhaps from a disgruntled employee, a romantic or political rival or jealous competitor.  In the case of Catherine the Great, let’s hope we’re dealing with deliberate misinformation, but then from who?  There was no shortage of political rivals – Polish nobility, for example, many of whom were understandably disenchanted as Catherine slowly divvied up their country.  However, I think that a romantic rival is the best bet for the initial propagator.

Step One:  Rumor Initiation

Catherine, a minor German princess, was plucked from obscurity at age 14 to marry Grand Duke Peter, the grandson of Peter the Great and heir to the throne.  Upon arrival in Russia, she was immediately repulsed by her fiancé, whose genetic ugliness was further accentuated by a recent bout of small pox. 

According to Catherine’s sympathetic biographer, Robert Massie, the wedding was certainly loveless and possibly never consummated. Grand Duke Peter then took a mistress, Elizaveta Vorontsova, promising that she would become empress after he divorced Catherine.  However, Peter’s drunken, abusive and childish behavior – he loved to play with toy soldiers marching across his bed – alienated the nobility.  He was forced to abdicate, and shortly after that he was murdered, though Massie states that it is unclear whether Catherine specifically ordered the killing.  Mistress Elizaveta subsequently married a mere colonel, and spent the next 30 years of her life in bitterness and ill health. 

Downsized Elizaveta gets my vote for the romantic rival starting the rumor.

Step Two:  The Law of the Few

Gladwell outlines three basic components of propagation – the law of the few, the power of context, and the stickiness factor.  The law of the few describes how a rumor travels.  The context and stickiness describe the content of the rumor, how believable it is. 

Gladwell identifies three categories of the “few,” i.e., mavens, connectors and salesmen.  Mavens are information brokers, who have their ear to the ground for all the latest trends and gossip.  The information is then passed to a connector, who is one of those people who seems to know everybody through multiple different walks of life.  Salesmen are the persuaders, the type of charismatic people that the average person just wants to believe.  In this digital age mavens, connectors and salesmen can be collectively categorized as “influencers.” 

In Catherine the Great’s vast court, it is easy to imagine that political intrigue and multiple agendas could produce a percolating network willing to spread a rumor to sabotage the interloping Empress.   

Step Three:  The Power of Context

While Catherine the Great’s rumor might have gone viral within the Russian court, there must have been something about it that prompted the rumor to spread beyond the court, beyond Russia itself, making the leap to Western Europe and beyond.  Here is where the power of context comes in.  According to Gladwell, context is “sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.”  Basically, our environment primes us to accept or reject a rumor.  As much as Catherine tried to modernize Russia along the model of Western Europe, her country was still the menacing and mysterious country right across the border. 

Catherine wanted Russia to be considered among the enlightened European countries, but she couldn’t overcome the barriers of culture and geography.  The “otherness” of Russia and the fear it inspired created a receptive environment for the rumor. 

Europe was primed and ready to believe the worst about Catherine.

Step Four:  Durabilty of Context

Gladwell notes that rumors tend to be ephemeral, petering out after the truth is revealed, or the context changes or people just lose interest.  However, the 250 year duration of  rumor might set a record, perhaps because the context has not changed.  Russia is still the feared country.  When I first heard the story in 1971, Russia was the unpredictable giant, a vodka-soaked country, speaking a mysterious guttural and spitty language that has a chronic shortage of vowels and oversupply of “v’s.”  It was the brutish and boorish country of Stalin, followed by Nikita Khrushchev, who distinguished himself by taking his shoe off at a UN meeting and banging it on the table to make a point.  Now we are treated to visions of a shirtless Putin riding a horse.  The context persists.

As a country, we are still ready to believe anything about those crazy Ruskies.  

Step Five:  Stickiness Factor

Stickiness refers to how the original rumor may be modified and embellished to make it more memorable.  The starting point of the rumor might have been a mean-spirited comment by mistress Elizaveta saying something along the lines of, “That Catherine, she’s in love with horses, she has a whole stable of them, never rides side saddle like all ladies should, and have you noticed that all of her favorites come from the army’s Horse Guards, plus she kind of looks like a horse.  I’m surprised she doesn’t whinny at night, if you know what I mean.”  At this early stage, the comment still contains a kernel of truth. Catherine had a consuming love for horses.  This fact is not disputed. 

In the next step, the rumor is “leveled” by deleting all the details for understanding the true meaning of the story – basically the bitter musing of a deposed mistress – and then exaggerating other details to add some juice, i.e. sex.  Gladwell notes that distortion of facts is universal in the spread of rumors. 

Horses scare me, but I recognize they can prompt intense emotional attachments among their owners.  Yes, horses can be beautiful.  And compelling.  And provocative.  Now I envision it.  It was those dark eyes and shimmering muscles that sharpened the rumor to its salacious level while still retaining a tiny kernel of  believability.  The horse is the perfect animal.  No other barnyard animal could have sustained the rumor across continents and centuries.  The stickiness is not about Catherine or her romantic or political rivals. 

The stickiness, the believability, is all about the horse, of course. 

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You Tube Skills Week: Juggling

YouTube Skills Week:  Juggling

Juggling seemed like an achievable parlor trick as part of my YouTube skills week. I have reveled in the success of my other trick, a loud, piercing whistle with my thumb and index finger placed on my tongue, enough to call a cab or find my husband who has vanished into the depths of Costco.   The reaction is one of envy, “Boy I wish I could do that.”  Juggling would expand my repertoire.  After a quick demo I might hand juggling balls to my awestruck audience, tell them it is easy and then watch in mock astonishment when, flummoxed, they hand the balls back to me with a dispirited shake of the head. 

Hand-eye coordination must be the bedrock of juggling and I have great confidence that I have the necessary skills.  Any of my success in athletics is based on my hand-eye coordination.  I am a notoriously slow-moving object, but I can step up and fire a blazing tennis forehand down the line or cross court.  In baseball, I can go with the pitch and hit to the opposite field.  And I will seize any opportunity to relive a glorious save in my brief human target career as a hockey goalie on a senior women’s team.  My opponent wound up at the point and let fly a fierce slap shot.  My left hand shot up and I felt the stinging snap of the puck in the glove.  Players on both sides stopped play and tapped the ice in recognition.   A tour-de-force of hand eye coordination. 

Despite my impressive credentials, previous YouTube Skills exercises have taught me the importance of managing expectations.  I do not aspire to be a circus performer, an entertainer on cruise ships or at the local county fair, and I do not anticipate juggling flaming torches or machetes. 

My only goal is to complete a single flash, juggling jargon for a simple three ball exchange. 

Really how hard can juggling be?

There is no shortage of juggling tutorials on YouTube.  I pick Josh Horton, a professional juggler who has won nine gold medals, has 16 Guiness records and endorses his own line of juggling balls – small millet-filled balls that snug into your palm and don’t bounce when you drop them. Tennis balls are not recommended for this reason.  The ball needs to make a comforting thud when it hits the ground. 

I start by throwing a single ball from one hand to another, my feet one yard apart, my shoulders squared up, my elbows at 90 degrees, my hands at my waist.  No problem.  The degree of difficulty rises when I move to two balls.  My hand-eye coordination may be excellent for a single moving ball, but falters at two balls.  Josh explains that you cannot look at an individual ball.  You must stare straight ahead and use your peripheral vision to get a sense of the movement.      

Muscle memory emerges as a critical skill.  The timing and the ball throw must be exquisitely consistent.  With enough practice, muscle memory must lock in and it all comes together in a grateful AHA! moment.

This moment remains elusive. 

My ongoing failure gives me time to ponder the evolution of hand-eye coordination.  Is this one of the skills that has propelled primates to the top of the heap, and specifically humans to world domination?  Forget about juggling, hand-eye coordination is required for the simplest task, reaching for that raspberry that has rolled off my toast and fallen to the floor, as is its custom, with the associated threat of being smooshed into a stubborn red stain on the wooden floor.   This task is a mastery of coordination, not only the hand-eye part, but the tactile input of feeling the delicate raspberry with my nifty opposable thumb.

Hand-eye coordination hinges on how visual information is presented to the brain for interpretation.  In vertebrates, the optic nerve from each eye crisscrosses the midline in a structure at the base of the skull called the optic chiasm, so most of the input from the left visual field, for example, tracks to the right side of the brain. 

In primates and other predators, the eyes are frontward facing creating overlapping visual fields.  In contrast, prey animals, such as rabbits, have eyes situated on the sides of their head.  They rely more on their peripheral vision to scout for predators.  Their fields of vision don’t overlap to the same extent as humans. 

The big innovation in primates is the organization of the optic chiasm.  A greater proportion of visual nerve fibers stay on the same side and do not cross the midline.  Therefore, each side of the brain receives input from both eyes at the same time.  This arrangement results in greater depth perception, binocular vision, and vital hand-eye coordination. 

Picking up a raspberry can be done at leisure, but juggling is a time-critical task.  Simultaneous input from both visual fields is a critical time-saver.  For example, the visual input doesn’t have to undergo another neural connection to the other side of the brain.  The practical consequence is not only speed but a reduction in the number of neurons needed, and thus the size of the brain.  Matz Larsson, a Swedish researcher, estimates that without this economical architecture, the human brain would have to be 12 miles wide.  (Yes, I checked this statistic several times.  Larsson’s article is dense and tough reading, but the statistic is based on the brain size if each neuron were connected to all other neurons, as might be the case in a very simple brain with a limited number of neurons.  So clearly this statistic is provided for dramatic effect, but you see the point.  The human brain is a model of speed and efficiency.)

I practice juggling every day, hopeful that muscle memory will be seared into my brain.  Wayward balls keep thunking at my feet or I fling them off sideways.  However, at my watershed senior age of 70, I am newly comfortable in admitting that I lack the commitment to be a juggler.  

It’s not going to happen. 

But this exercise in futility does have its charms.  I think of Ooga Magook, our common early hominid ancestor, who realizes that he is a skosh more agile than his peers.  He can climb up and down trees with ease, he throws his spear with great accuracy.  He doesn’t realize that he has been blessed with the mutation for rogue neurons that have established a more efficient pathway, that he is the unexpected recipient of superior hand-eye coordination.  Ooga is a popular mate and sires dozens of children, who do the same over thousands of generations.  Once again, I am in awe of the grinding elegance of evolution down to the smallest detail, and I am grateful that my brain is not twelve miles wide. 

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Podcast: You Tube Skills Week: Juggling

How hard can juggling be for someone with enviable hand-eye coordination?

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Podcast: You Tube Skills Week: Cake Decorating

An attempt to learn how to decorate a cake based on a You Tube video.

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YouTube Skills Week: Cake Decorating

Cake decorating seemed like an easy choice in my quest to sample a new skill each day.  My goal was not anything as elaborate as a wedding cake, rather a simple cake that didn’t feature my signature sloping, delaminated layers and disjointed frosting that looked more like road rash than a sleek and smooth layer.    

As I scrolled through candidate You Tube videos, I decided the vast expanse of a cake top was too intimidating.  Cupcakes seemed a wiser choice.  If one cupcake crapped out, I could reup with the next one.  I impulsively ordered a 64-piece decorating kit from Amazon.  (The great joy of a new project is dropping money on the appropriate tools.)

My second executive decision was to buy a tub of frosting instead of making my own.  The vast array of premade frostings in baking aisle suggested mine was the popular choice, even though the videos advised that frosting should include the mystery ingredient “meringue powder” to make something called “Royal Icing.”  Amazon sells meringue powder but I had already placed my order for the toolkit and was hesitant to increase my carbon delivery footprint with a second order.  The buttercream frosting was shelved next to other decorating items in the baking aisle, including a small, disconcerting bag of “candy eyeballs.”  I thought what the hell, maybe I will make a kitty cat cupcake.  I threw the eyeballs into my cart. 

I chose the YouTube video ”Wedding Cupcakes Aren’t Hard to Decorate.  I’ll Show You How,” by ZiBakerIz. 

My mentor-of-the-day didn’t say the process was easy, rather that it wasn’t hard, which I interpreted as managing expectations.  No problem, my expectations were already modest, hoping for something that didn’t look like a hack job, perhaps a collection of demur roses. A multi-petalled zinnia was a stretch goal.  As instructed, I loaded the pasty bags with the frankly disgusting frosting. (Sugar, palm oil and fructose corn syrup were the primary ingredients.)  A few drops of red food coloring turned my buttercream to a flowery hue.    

The video suggested that I practice my skill on a piece of parchment paper, which I miraculously found nestled in the back of my pantry.  The general gist was straightforward.  Different tips produce different effects.  The piping requires a deft touch for each petal, a small squirt with the nozzle down and then a quick lift of the bag, quickly moving on to the next petal as you rotate the cupcake in your hand.  The tips all have different numbers, for example, tip 102 is recommended for zinnias but my kit did not identify the tips by number.  ZiBakerIz zipped through a whole series of flowers – zinnias, hibiscus, roses – with practiced ease.  My efforts fell far short of my humble expectations, but I blame my frosting.  It refused to hold its shape and I couldn’t snap off the frosting to move from one petal to the next.  I managed to get lucky with one rose.

I could have experimented with Royal Icing or different piping tips, but I got waylaid with flu-like symptoms related to a COVID booster shot.  I cocooned on the TV room couch.  My general strategy for outlasting minor illnesses is to find a nonviolent, entertaining TV show requiring only a smidge of concentration.  I highly recommend The Great British Bake-Off to fill this important niche.  Ten bakers, all with predictably crooked teeth, are asked to make bizarre cookies, cakes, custards or other novelty items.  Each week one of the bakers get booted.  Contestants are routinely asked to include visual illusions that go well beyond a prosaic piped flower.  One contestant got high marks for a cookie that looked like a hamburger, complete with cheese oozing out the bun, another made a cookie that looked like a yo-yo.  Each episode has a showstopper segment requiring, for example, a multicomponent tea party scene, or a bust, which produced a serviceable Marie Antoinette with cotton candy hair.

As a roused myself from the couch, I thought about the role of visual illusion in food and promptly (and gratefully) fell into the rabbit hole of “neurogastronomy.”  The terminology gets tricky as “taste” refers only to the input from tastebuds (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami) as opposed to the broader concept of “flavor,” referring to the multi-sensory food experience, most predominantly the interplay between taste and smell.  Eighty percent of what we perceive as flavor comes from olfactory input, which can be subdivided as coming from outside the body (orthonasal, e.g., home cooking), transitioning to the smell coming from within the mouth as the food is chewed (retronasal, e.g. mouth odor).  Multisensory flavor is a quintessentially human experience, rivaled only by sex.

Charles Spence, well represented on YouTube videos, is most famous for his research on the impact of sound on flavor perception.  His experiment on potato chips demonstrated that subjects eating identical Pringle chips rated their freshness differently based on the sound of their crunch.  Some chefs have taken these multisensory concepts to a gimmicky extreme, providing seafood diners with headphones piping in the sound of lapping waves and squawking seagulls.   

Spence emphasizes that laboratory research cannot measure the critical impact of atmosphere, mood and expectation on the dining experience.  All three factors run high at a wedding reception when the cake is ushered into the hushed dining room.  The guests, well liquored up, gasp at the artistry and engineering involved in creating a multi-tiered wedding cake with a cascading garland of confectionary flowers.  My little experiment in cake decorating on a piece of parchment paper was wholly devoid of atmosphere and suffused with dashed expectations.  I was disappointed in my artistic skills and frustrated by flaccid frosting that refused to hold its shape. 

A wedding cake, stored in a refrigerator, has no odor wafting through the room.  Therefore, smell, over one half of our flavor perception, has no role.  Sound may have some background input with clinking of glasses, background buzz of conversation and laughter.  I posit that the visual must be the predominant sensory foreplay of the cake reveal.  However, at some point I also contend that the visual loses its tether to the flavor.  This gulf widens as the cake becomes more theatrical, reaching its maximum in the wedding cake for Melania and the former, twice-impeached president.  The 200-pound object with 3,000 icing roses was not edible due to the wiring required to defy gravity.  It was a stunt cake.  

Where is the synergistic balance between visual artistry and the flavor experience? 

The judges on the Great British Bake-Off do not consider this aspect of  neurogastronomy.  The creations are judged separately on presentation and then flavor, and not how the visual (or the attendant tense atmosphere of an elimination challenge) might enhance or detract from the flavor.  In one episode, the contestants were challenged to create a cake that looked like their home.  One baker duplicated his apartment building.  The judges praised the illusion and gave a nod to his piping and coloring skills.  The baker described tender moments together with his beloved nan, peering out the second-floor window.  This homey atmosphere was short-lived.  With one slice of the knife, the home fell into rubble, as if it had succumbed to a terrorist attack.    

In his many YouTube videos, Charles Spence does not comment on the impact of the visual after that first fateful slice. I also wonder about cookies with the faithful visual illusion of a favorite cartoon character.  How does a child feel about biting the head off of Bert or Ernie?  One Easter my grandmother served an anatomically correct baby lamb cake, sitting on a bed of green piped grass, its coat carefully textured to look like fluffy wool.  The lamb had a bow around its neck, suggesting this was a pet, not a random barnyard animal headed to the butcher.  Its candy eyeballs and pursed pink lips created an atmosphere of curiosity and hope.    

Relatives around the table collectively admired the artistry.  My grandmother then gave me the dubious honor of making the first cut.  I was conflicted.  Should I start boldly and just decapitate the creature or move rearward for a disemboweling slice.  Maybe I could disguise the death scene by making a horizontal slice along the back so that the lamb still looked intact from the front.  Other family members had the same reaction and the uneaten lamb ended up in our freezer.  There it remained, still cheerfully sitting on its bed of grass, its beseeching eyeballs meeting my gaze as I reached for the neighboring carton of ice cream. 

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You Tube Skills Week: Bread Making

This fanagram is the second in a series about “YouTube Skills Week,” where I attempt to learn a new skill each day based on a YouTube video.  The first focused on taxidermy.   

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You Tube Skills Week: Bread Making

The second item on my You Tube Skills week, following taxidermy, is baking bread, which I have never attempted.  I inherited a fear of yeast from my mother who found it odd that you deliberately add a fungus to your food, when other evidence of fungus – a fuzzy rainbow smear on sour cream – is damning evidence of a careless housewife.  She had the same cautious attitude toward gelatin.  How could an innocuous white powder trick liquid into congealing?  I had overcome my gelatin intimidation by exactly following the directions on the package of Knox unflavored gelatin.  I have freed myself from the tyranny of a recipe, winging it with fruit desserts.  Time to spend quality time with yeast.  

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I  know nothing about the energetic skill of kneading so I home in “no knead” bread-making videos.  My first video shows a pair of hands going through the steps with the recipe scrolling beneath.  There is no voice or face.  The arms and wrists in the video are hairy, feral and unappetizing, so I move on.  I don’t need a face, but I do want the reassurance of a voice to walk me through the steps.  I find Deondra, a woman with clean fingernails and a welcoming Southern drawl.   She never shows her face.  When she bends to slide the bread into the oven her stringy hair falls forward, carrying with it the disconcerting threat of a wayward strand of hair embedded in the dough. 

I am clearly spending too much quality time with YouTube videos, so I tie my hair back and press ahead.   The recipe is pathetically simple, involving three cups of flour, 2 cups of warm water and a scant one quarter teaspoon of yeast.  Deondra, my peppy mentor, apparently wants to engage all senses and encourages me to smell the dough.  The minimal odor I detect is a bit queefy, but I am probably biased – my olfactory familiarity with yeast is limited to vaginal infections.  The tiny dough smidge I sample is tasteless, so different from cookie batter, worth the risk of salmonella and half the point of making cookies.  How can this sticky dough sprinkled with a miniscule amount of yeast be transformed into the fragrance and delight of homemade bread?  It feels like alchemy.

I set the dough aside to rise and devote the three hour wait time to a rumination on the role that bread has played in our stunning evolution.  The cultivation of wheat and grain is closely tied to the transition from nomadic hunter-gathers to farmers in fixed communal societies.  I pause to consider the sturdy shoulders I stand on, those of our ancient hominid relatives who somehow figured out that wheat is edible. The bristly stalk is not inviting compared to luscious, sensual low-handing fruit that begs to be eaten.  Somebody, somewhere –  and bread simultaneously evolved in multiple societies across the world – figured out the trick of separating the the wheat from the chaff.  And then of course the fermentation.   Together, a triumph of determined craft and human ingenuity.  And then, with the new-found powers of speech, some distant hero passed the recipe to the next generation.  Thank you, thank you, thank you. 

Bread, both symbolically and literally, is embedded into the history and literature of all cultures.   I recall this ambitious couplet from the Bible:   

Give us this day our daily bread, and … deliver us from evil.

As one of the cheapest foods, bread became the nutritious mainstay of the poor.  I have a distinct memory of a passage from The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.   In the depths of the depression, the impoverished Joad family migrates west in a futile search for jobs.  Ma announces, with quiet dread, that they are about to run out of flour and are facing starvation.  When I read this as a preteen, my only knowledge of flour was as an ingredient of cookies baked as a treat.  I remember thinking “what the hell does she need flour for?”  Fortunately, I kept my ignorant thoughts to myself.   I was dangerously close to Marie Antoinette’s famously flippant comment to the starving peasants.  “Let them eat cake.” 

My dough has risen.  I realize that basic chemistry burbles beneath, that the yeast is digesting sugars and releasing carbon dioxide that is trapped in the dough, but I am still impressed that the tiny amount of yeast can essentially lift a mountain of dough, doubling its size.  As instructed by Deondra I have preheated an empty Dutch oven pot for 35 minutes at 450 degrees.  Now I put the ball of dough onto parchment paper and insert into the pot and then into the oven.  In a high-pitched voice, Deondra reminds me several times that the pot is hot, which makes me question the smarts of her anticipated audience.  The bread will cook for 35 minutes and then another 15 with the lid off. 

More time to ruminate.  The price of bread has served as a prominent signpost of economic stability, reflected in bread-related synonyms – the single word bread or dough standing in for money, breadwinner as the wage-earner, rolling in the dough an idiom for wealth.  The expense of flour and bread has been credited with fomenting revolutions, including Marie Antoinette’s French Revolution and more recently the Arab Spring.  (The price of gas has now replaced the price of bread as a key economic indicator, the rising price inescapably emblazoned at every gas station.)

I remove my bread, again heeding the advice to wear oven mitts.  My loaf is beautiful, miraculous, historic.  Deondra tells me to tap the bread with a knife to appreciate the slightly hollow sound.  I listen to the comforting crunch as my serrated knife saws though the bread, liberating a suffusing aroma, unchanged for thousands of years, the aroma that greets travelers returning home, the aroma that invites friends and strangers to sit at the table to break bread. 

I stand in bewildered and grateful awe, my humble loaf in cupped hands. 

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Podcast: You Tube Skills Week: Bread-Making

The second in a series of a week devoted to learning a new skill each day, based on a YouTube video.

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You Tube Skills Week: Taxidermy

An unexpected change in summer vacation plans left me with a solo week of unstructured time.  Although I have become quite skilled in puttering and frittering, I didn’t want to fall into the abyss of bad TV, cheap novels and cookie dough.  I committed myself to a week of purpose and accomplishment.  YouTube tutorials would provide my structure.  I vowed to learn a new skill each day. 

I sought nominations from family and friends.  My five-year-old grandson suggested I learn how to climb a tree.  YouTube is well stocked with tutorials on tree climbing, offering such practical advice as “check the rope before you start climbing.”  While tempting, I have recognized that the full flower of my nimble childhood has long since wilted.  Any activity involving gravity now requires a well-appointed and manned safety net.   I decided to focus my attention on activities that could draw on my transferable skills.  Possibilities included juggling (good hand/eye coordination), cake decorating (fond of chocolate), crossword construction (I do New York Times crossword every morning) and taxidermy.

A tutorial on taxidermy could revive my dormant dissection and autopsy skills honed as a pathologist.  Additionally, we spend our summers in the hunting environment of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where houses are adorned with mounted fish and deer.  I didn’t want to deal with slimy fish, and a deer was too big.  Mice are abundantly available in our house – the snap of a mousetrap is a familiar sound – but they are too small.  A squirrel or a chipmunk emerged as the target size.  Nicely taxidermied, they could make a cute addition to the fireplace mantle.  

“How to Taxidermy a “Squirrel”  popped up on YouTube, featuring three cheerful millennials working with road-killed squirrels.  The prospect of scavenging roadkill was not personally appealing and would not be a good look for our new neighbors.  I happily embraced the traditional gender roles of hunter-gatherers.  I asked my husband Nick to forage me a specimen.  His first target was the chipmunk trapped in our garage.  He hoisted the pellet gun and fired away, leaving the walls pock-marked but no chipmunk.  Chastened by his failure, he stopped to chat with the neighbor as he walked the dog.  Russ asked about his plans for the beautiful day.  Nick could have said that he was going fishing, an entirely reasonable and appropriate plan, but instead he chose to mention that I was in the midst of my YouTube Skills week and was planning to study cake decorating and taxidermy.  What a stroke of luck.  The neighbor said a squirrel raiding his bird seed had just that morning succumbed to acute lead poisoning, i.e., he’d shot him.  Nick returned home, triumphant as he handed me a large black squirrel in a plastic bag. 

I delved into the world of taxidermy and learned that this art has been simplified over recent decades.  Traditional taxidermy required elaborate wiring using native bones to create poses.  Plastic molds of squirrels are now available – running up or down a tree, eating a nut, and a pouncing pose with the squirrel standing on its hind legs.  The skinned hide can be fitted over the mold and discreetly sewn up along its belly.  Accurate plastic eyes in different sizes are an important accessory.   Note:  squirrels have an oval pupil. 

Many YouTube videos detail the process of skinning the animal.  Some specifically focus on taxidermy, others target hunters who plan to eat the squirrel.  Regardless, with a few deft cuts you can essentially turn the squirrel’s skin inside out – at least you can on YouTube.  My initial efforts were frankly hack jobs.  I trolled through other tutorials and came to the reluctant (but convenient) conclusion that I did not have the right equipment. My husband’s fishing filet knife was too big, the regular scissors were too big, the fingernail scissors too small.  A scalpel would have helped.  I had not appreciated the several week process of tanning the hide, which would require a $100+ investment for a kit from Amazon. 

Apparently, taxidermy is not suitable for the casual hobbyist.  However, my squirrel deserved better than a routine disposal in the garbage bin.  I wanted a positive learning experience, not discovering what I was no good at.  I refocused my efforts on gut dissection.  Guts hold no interest for the taxidermist or hunter.  They are nothing more than disposable byproduct or inedible offal.  For a pathologist, guts are the meat and potatoes of autopsies and surgical biopsies.    

I carefully opened up the squirrel’s rib cage and abdomen.  I was stunned.  My squirrel had the most lovely and dainty organs.  The central heart, surrounded by two frothy and pink lungs, the large liver overlapping the stomach (incidentally stuffed with digested bird seed), the slinky intestinal coils and the paired kidneys.  I even found two adorable testicles tucked away in the groin.  To my jaded pathology eyes, these organs were fresh and innocent, untouched by disease.  The lungs were not streaked with sooty pollution, the human equivalent of an ashtray, the liver was smooth and glistening, not studded with cirrhosis as I have seen so many times. 

The array of the organs was identical to a human, a miniaturized version of my own.  An anatomy professor once told me that he found entrails boring as they were the same across all mammals.  His interest was translating the alignment of bones and muscles to their function.  The consistency of the guts was the reason I found them fascinating.  With a few tweaks here and there, this design has been conserved throughout all mammals, bypassing natural selection.  It was perfect the way it was. 

As a thought exercise, imagine an intelligent designer tasked with developing mammals’ engine room.  (This is just a hypothetical and convenient thought exercise.  There is no such thing as an intelligent designer.  Just go with the concept for a moment.)  The designer thinks “I need a pump filled with blood and then a way to exchange gases.”  She notices how the successive branching of limbs and leaves expand the surface area for gas exchange.  Inspired, she applies the same principle to the lungs, creating air fills sac with small blebs.  These are the alveoli.  Processing food and waste was the next challenge.  She designs the liver and kidneys to serve as filters and garbage disposal, the stomach and intestine absorb food.  Her plan works perfectly.    

I imagine the designer handing over blueprint to the captain of evolution and saying, “Go to town.  Unleash your imagination.  You can change the skeleton and musculature to fit all niches, longer legs for the springers, short legs to the diggers, sharp nails for climbing, strong flat teeth for chewing herbivores, sharp teeth for the carnivores. Play with sight, smell and hearing.  But don’t touch the guts.  I have nailed the entrails.  Even better my design is scalable.  You can make the heart or anything else big enough for a whale, or tiny for a mouse.  My job is done.  Grind away, evolution, take it from here.  There’s no rush.  Take all the time you need.”

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