Stan Hieronymus

‘Drinking games’ in The New Yorker

The current (February 15 & 22) of The New Yorker magazine includes an article by Malcom Gladwell called “Drinking Games” that tackles a bit of drinking and culture. Unfortunately it’s not one the magazine chose to make free online, but you can read the abstract here.

Hey, it’s The New Yorker and Gladwell, so ideas all over the place. Two to consider:

  • Gladwell writes : “When confronted with the rowdy youth in the bar, we are happy to raise his drinking age, to tax his beer, to punish him if he drives under the influence, and to push him into treatment if his habit becomes an addiction. But we are reluctant to provide him with a positive and constructive example of how to drink.”
  • He also writes: “Put a stressed-out drinker in front of an exciting football game and he’ll forget his troubles. But put him in a quiet bar somewhere, all by himself and he’ll grow mare anxious. Alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental field of vision.” This is called “alcohol myopia,” and you can read more about it here.

    • Reading Gladwell it is always good to remember something Steve Pinker wrote in reviewing What the Dog Saw, a collection of Gladwell pieces.

    The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures.

    More than anything the article raises questions I wish more people thought about.

     

     

    Innovation, corporate style

    Four Innovation Lessons from Anheuser-Busch.
    (Thanks to Lager Heads for the, well, heads up).

    It’s popular to write that [fill in the name of a large brewing company] could replicate any beer in the world if it really wanted to. But could it? Would its corporate culture let it?

    Think of any innovative beer you cherish popular beer of the moment (amended 2.13.2010 to make the conversation about beer rather than marketing terms) — last weekend it might have been Pliny The Younger, this weekend Red Poppy 2010. Think these beers are a result of a “team” getting together, a bunch of test batches, focus groups, middle managers and upper managers signing off on everything?

    Or one person, could be a single crazy and could be a few like-minded we-work-together collaborators, saying screwitthiswillbegreat?

     

     

    When American hops sucked . . .

    The United States became a net exporter of hops in the 1870s, so somebody must have liked varieties grown in America. In fact, exactly 100 years ago the U.S. exported 10.5 million pounds of hops and imported 3.2 million. Eighty percent of the exports went to England, while almost all the imports came from Germany and Austria-Hungary (thus Bohemia, where Saaz hops were grown).

    Yet consider this from article in The Edinburgh Review from 1862, only a few years before the U.S. began exporting more hops than it imported:

    “American hops may also be dismissed in a few words. Like American grapes, they derive a course, rank flavour and smell from the soil in which they grow, which no management, however careful, has hitherto succeeded in neutralising. There is little chance in their competing in our market with European growth, except in season of scarcity and of unusually high prices.”

    Think how you’d feel if you were a grower and read that at Rate Hops or Hop Advocate?