My generation, the children of West Indian immigrants, didn’t learn to look kindly on imperfection, even when it was all we had. My mother’s mother trained perfectionism into her children by scrunching up inattentively ironed shirts and requiring the poor unfortunates to iron them again. My mother once punished me for not starting a summer […]
Error by anecdote
Maybe you’ve heard this one: How many legs does a spider have? Eight? Do you really know? I mean have you counted them? In 300 B.C. Aristotle said that spiders had six legs and was classified as an insect. All the world believed him, until finally in the 1400s somebody actually counted and saw they […]
