Chris langan 1 vs 100

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CHAPTER THREE

The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1

"KNOWLEDGE OF A BOY'S IQ IS OF

LITTLE HELP IF yc)u ARE FACED WITH

A FORMFUL OF CLEVER BOYS."

1.

In the fifth episode of the 2008 season, the American tele- vision quiz show I vs. loo had as its special guest a man named Christopher Langan.

The television show l vs. loo is one of many that sprang up in the wake of the phenomenal success of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It features a permanent gallery of one hundred ordinary people who serve as what is called the "mob." Each week they match wits with a special invited guest. At stake is a million dollars. The guest has to be smart enough to answer more questions correctly than his or her one hundred adversaries-and by that standard, few have ever seemed as superbly qualified as Christopher Langan.

"Tonight the mob takes on their fiercest competition yet," the voice-over began. "Meet Chris Langan, who many

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call the smartest man in America." The camera did a slow pan of a stocky, muscular man in his fifties. "The aver- age person has an IQ of one hundred," the voice-over continued. "Einstein one fifty. Chris has an IQ of one ninety-five. He's currently wrapping his big brain around a theory of the universe. But will his king-size cranium be enough to take down the mob for one million dollars? Find out right now on One versus One Hundred."

Out strode Langan onto the stage amid wild applause. "You don't think you need to have a high intellect to

do well on One versus One Hundred, do you?" the show's host, Bob Sager, asked him. Sager looked at Langan oddly, as if he were some kind of laboratory specimen.

"Actually, I think it could be a hindrance," Langan replied. He had a deep, certain voice. "To have a high IQ, you tend to specialize, think deep thoughts. You avoid trivia. But now that I see these people" -he glanced at the mob, the amusement in his eyes betraying just how ridiculous he found the proceedings- "I think I'll do okay."

Over the past decade, Chris Langan has achieved a strange kind of fame. He has become the public face of genius in American life, a celebrity outlier. He gets invited on news shows and profiled in magazines, and he has been the subject of a documentary by the filmmaker Errol Mor- ris, all because of a brain that appears to defy description.

The television news show 20/20 once hired a neuro- psychologist to give Langan an IQ test, and Langan's score was literally off the charts-too high to be accurately measured. Another time, Langan took an IQ test specially designed for people too smart for ordinary IQ tests. He

THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART I

got all the questions right except one.'' He was speaking at six months of age. When he was three, he would listen to the radio on Sundays as the announcer read the comics aloud, and he would follow along on his own until he had taught himself to read. At five, he began questioning his grandfather about the existence of God-and remembers being disappointed in the answers he got.

In school, Langan could walk into a test in a foreign- language class, not having studied at all,. and if there were two or three minutes before the instructor arrived, he could skim through the textbook and ace the test. In . his early teenage years, while working as a farmhand, he started to read widely in the area of theoretical physics. At sixteen, he made his way through Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's famously abstruse masterpiece Principia Mathematica. He got a perfect score ·on his SAT, even though he fell asleep at one point during the test.

"He did math for an hour," his brother Mark says of Langan's summer routine in high school. "Then he did French for an hour. Then he studied Russian. Then he would read philosophy. He did that religiously, every day."

Another of his brothers, Jeff, says, "You know, when Christopher was fourteen or fifteen, he would draw things just as a joke, and it would be like a photograph. When he was fifteen, he could match Jimi Hendrix lick for lick on a guitar. Boom. Boom. Boom. Half the time, Christopher didn't attend school at all. He would just show up for tests

:.

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and there was nothing they could do about it. To us, it was hilarious. He could brief a semester's worth of textbooks in two days, and take care of whatever he had to take care of, and then get back to whatever he was doing in the first place."'' ·

On the set of 1 vs. 100, Langan was poised and confi- dent. His voice was deep. His eyes were small and fiercely bright. He did not circle about topics, searching for the right phrase, or double back to restate a previous sentence.

* To get a sense of what Chris Langan must hive been like growing up, consider the following description of a child named "L," who had an IQ in the same 200 range as Langan's. It's from a study by Leta Stetter Hollingworth, who was one of the first psychologists to study exceptionally gifted children. As the description makes obvious, an IQ of 200 is really, really high: "Young L's erudition was astonishing. His passion for scholarly accuracy and thoroughness set a high stand- ard for accomplishment. He was relatively large, robust and impres- sive, and was fondly dubbed 'Professor.' His attitudes and abilities were appreciated by both pupils and teachers. He was often allowed to lecture (for as long as an hour) on some special topic, such as the history of timepieces, ancient theories of engine construction, math- ematics, and history. He constructed out of odds and ends (typewriter ribbon spools, for example) a homemade clock of the pendular type to illustrate some of the principles of chronometry, and this clock was set up before the class during the enrichment unit on 'Time and Time Keeping' to demonstrate some of the principles of chronometry. His notebooks were marvels of scholarly exposition.

"Being discontented with what he considered the inadequate treatment of land travel in a class unit on 'Transportation,' he agreed that time was too limited to do justice to everything. But he insisted that 'at least they should have covered ancient theory.' As an extra and voluntary project, 'he brought in elaborate drawings and accounts of the ancient theories of engines, locomotives etc.' ... He was at that time ro years of age."

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THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART I

For that matter, he did not say um, or ah, or use any form of conversational mitigation: his sentences came marching out, one after another, polished and crisp, like soldiers on a parade ground. Every question Saget threw at him, he tossed aside, as if it were a triviality. When his winnings reached $150,000, he appeared to make a mental calcula- tion that the risks of losing everything were at that point greater than the potential benefits of staying in. Abruptly, he stopped. "I'll take the cash," he said. He shook Saget's hand firmly and was finished- exiting on top as, we like to think, geniuses invariably do.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2

''AFTER PROTRACTED NEGOTIATIONS,

IT WAS AGREED THAT ROBERT WOULD BE

PUT ON PROBATION."

1.

Chris Langan's mother was from San Francisco and was estranged from her family. She had four sons, each with a different father. Chris was the eldest. His father disap- peared b_efore Chris was born; he was said to have died in Mexico. His mother's second husband was murdered. Her third committed suicide. Her fourth was a failed journal- ist named Jack Langan.

"To this day I haven't met anybody who was as poor when they were kids as our family was," Chris Langan says. "We didn't have a pair of matched socks. Our shoes had holes in them. Our pants had holes in them. We only had one set of clothes. I remember my brothers and I going into the bathroom and using the bathtub to wash our only set of clothes and we were bare-assed naked when we were doing that because we didn't have anything to wear.''

Jack Langan would go on drinking sprees and disappear.

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He would lock the kitchen cabinets so the boys couldn't get to the food. He used a bullwhip to keep the boys in line. He would get jobs and then lose them, moving the family on to the next town. One summer the family lived on an Indian reservation in a teepee, subsisting on government- surplus peanut butter and cornmeal. For a time, they lived in Virginia City, Nevada. "There was only one law offi- cer in town, and when the Hell's Angels came to town, he would crouch down in the back of his office," Mark Langan remembers. "There was a bar there, I'll always remember. It was called the Bucket of Blood Saloon."

When the boys were in grade school, the family moved to Bozeman, Montana. One of Chris's brothers spent time in a foster home. Another was sent to reform school.

"I don't think the school ever understood just how gifted Christopher was," his brother Jeff says. "He sure as hell didn't play it up. This was Bozeman. It wasn't like it is today. It was a small hick town when we were growing up. We weren't treated well there. They'd just decided that my family was a bunch of deadbeats." To stick up for himself and his brothers, Chris started to lift weights. One.day, when Chris was fourteen, Jack Langan got rough with the boys, as he sometimes did, and Chris knocked him out cold. Jack left, never to return. Upon graduation from high school, Chris was offered two full scholarships, one to Reed College in Oregon and the other to the Univer- sity of Chicago. He chose Reed.

"It was a huge mistake," Chris recalls. "I had a real case of culture shock. I was a crew-cut kid who had been working as a ranch hand in the summers in Montana, and there I was, with a whole bunch of long-haired city

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kids, most of them from New York. And these kids had a whole different style than I was used to. I couldn't get a word in edgewise at class. They were very inquisitive. Asking questions all the time. I was crammed into a dorm room. There were four of us, and the other three guys had a whole different other lifestyle. They were smoking pot. They would bring their girlfriends into the room. I had never smoked pot before. So basically I took to hiding in the library."

He continued: "Then I lost that scholarship .... My mother was supposed to fill out a parents' financial state- ment for the renewal of that scholarship. She neglected to do so. She was confused by the requirements or whatever. At some point, it came to my attention that my scholar- ship had not been renewed. So I went to the office to ask why, and they told me, Well, no one sent us the financial statement, and we allocated all the scholarship money and it's all gone, so I'm afraid that you don't have a scholar- ship here ,anymore. That was the style of the place. They simply didn't care. They didn't give a shit about their stu- dents. There was no counseling, no mentoring, nothing."

Chris left Reed before the final set of exams, leaving him with a row of Fs on his transcript. In the first semes- ter, he had earned As. He went back to Bozeman and worked in construction and as a forest services firefighter for a year and a half. Then he enrolled at Montana State University.

"I was taking math and philosophy classes," he recalled. "And then in the winter quarter, I was living thirteen miles out of town, out on Beach Hill Road, and the transmis- sion fell out of my car. My brothers had used it when I was

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gone that summer. They were working for the railroad and had driven it on the railroad tracks. I didn't have the money to repair it. So I went to my adviser and the dean in sequence and said, I have a problem. The transmission fell out of my car, and you have me in a seven-thirty a.m. and eight-thirty a.m. class. If you could please just transfer me to the afternoon sections of these classes, I would appreci- ate it because of this car problem. There was a neighbor who was a rancher who was going to take me in at eleven o'clock. My adviser was this cowboy-looking guy with a handlebar mustache, dressed in a tweed jacket. He said, 'Well, son, after looking at your transcript at Reed Col- lege, I see that you have yet to learn that everyone has to make sacrifices to get an education. Request denied.' So then I went to the dean. Same treatment.''

His voice grew tight. He was describing things that had happened more than thirty years ago, but the mem- ory still made him angry. "At that point I realized, here I was, knocking myself out to make the money to make my way back to school, and it's the middle of the Montana winter. I am willing to hitchhike into town every day, do whatever I had to do, just to get into school and back, and they are unwilling to do anything for me. So bananas. And that was the point I decided I could do without the higher-education system. Even if I couldn't do without it, it was sufficiently repugnant to me that I wouldn't do it anymore. So I dropped out of college, simple as that."

Chris Langan's experiences at Reed and Montana State represented a turning point in his life. As a child, he had dreamt of becoming an academic. He should have gotten a PhD; universities are institutions structured, in large part,

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for people with his kind of deep intellectual interests and curiosity. "Once he got into the university environment, I thought he would prosper, I really did," his brother Mark says. "I thought he would somehow find a niche. It made absolutely no sense to me when he left that."

Without a degree, Langan floundered. He worked in construction. One frigid winter he worked on a clam boat on Long Island. He took factory jobs and minor civil ser- vice positions and eventually became a bouncer in a bar on Long Island, which was his principal occupation for much of his adult years. Through it all, he continued to read deeply in philosophy, mathematics, and physics as he worked on a sprawling treatise he calls the "CTMU" -the "Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe.'' But without academic credentials, he despairs of ever getting published

in a scholarly journal. "I am a guy who has a year and a half of college," he

says, with a shrug. "And at some point this will come to the attention of the editor, as he is going to take the paper and send ,it off to the referees, and these referees are going to try and look me up, and they are not going to find me. And they are going to say, This guy has a year and a half of college. How can he know what he's talking about?"

I tis a heartbreaking story. At one point I asked Langan- hypothetically-whether he would take a job at Harvard University were it offered to him. "Well, that's a difficult question," he replied. "Obviously, as a full professor at Harvard I would count. My ideas would have weight and I could use my position, my affiliation at Harvard, to pro- mote my ideas. An institution like that is a great source of intellectual energy, and if I were at a place like that, I could

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absorb the vibration in the air." It was suddenly clear how lonely his life has been. Here he was, a man with an insa- tiable appetite for learning, forced for most of his adult life to live in intellectual isolation. "I even noticed that kind of intellectual energy in the year and a half I was in college," he said, almost wistfully. "Ideas are in the air constantly. It's such a stimulating place to be.

"On the other hand," he went on, "Harvard is basically a glorified corporation, operating with a profit incentive. That's what makes it tick. It has an endowment in the bil- lions of dollars. The people running it are not necessarily searching for truth and knowledge. They want to be big shots, and when you accept a paycheck from these people, it is going to come down to what you want to do and what you feel is right versus what the man says you can do to receive another paycheck. When you're there, they got a thumb right on you. They are out to make sure you don't step out of line."

2.

What does the story of Chris Langan tell us? His explana- tions, as heartbreaking as they are, are also a little strange. His mother forgets to sign his financial aid form and-just like that-no scholarship. He tries to move from a morn- ing to an afternoon class, something students do every day, and gets stopped cold. And why were Langan's teach- ers at Reed and Montana State so indifferent to his plight? Teachers typically delight in minds as brilliant as his. Langan talks about dealing with Reed and Montana State as if they were some kind of vast and unyielding govern-

THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART 2

ment bureaucracy. But colleges, particularly small liberal arts colleges like Reed, tend not to be rigid bureaucracies. Making allowances in the name of helping someone stay in school is what professors do all the time.

Even in his discussion of Harvard, it's as if Langan has no conception of the culture and particulars of the institu- tion he's talking about. When you accept a paycheck from these people, it is going to come down to what you want to do and what you feel is right versus what .the man says you can do to receive another paycheck. What? One of the main reasons college professors accept a lower paycheck than they could get in private industry is that university life gives them the freedom to do what they want to do and what they feel is right. Langan has Harvard backwards.

When Langan told me his life story, I couldn't help thin_king of the life of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who famously headed the American effort to develop the nuclear bomb during World War II. Oppenheimer, by all accounts, was a child with a mind very much like Chris Langan''s. His parents considered him a genius. One of his teachers recalled that "he received every new idea as perfectly beautiful." He was doing lab experiments by the third grade and studying physics and chemistry by the fifth grade. When he was nine, he once told one of his cousins, "Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer

you in Greek." Oppenheimer went to Harvard and then on to Cam-

bridge University to pursue a doctorate in physics. There, Oppenheimer, who struggled with depression his entire life, grew despondent. His gift was for theoretical physics, and his tutor, a man named Patrick Blackett (who would

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win a Nobel Prize in 1948), was forcing him to attend to the minutiae of experimental physics, which he hated. He grew more and more emotionally unstable, and then, in an act so strange that to this day no one has properly made sense of it, Oppenheimer took some chemicals from the laboratory and tried to poison his tutor.

Blackett, luckily, found out that something was amiss. The university was informed. Oppenheimer was called on the carpet. And what happened next is every bit as unbe- lievable as the crime itself. Here is how the incident is described in American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's biography of Oppenheimer: "After protracted negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be put on pro- bation and have regular sessions with a prominent Harley Street psychiatrist in London."

On probation? Here we have two very brilliant young students, each of

whom runs into a problem that imperils his college career. Langan's mother has missed a deadline for his financial aid. Oppenheimer has tried to poison his tutor. To continue on, they are required to plead their cases to authority. And what happens? Langan gets his scholarship taken away, and Oppenheimer gets sent to a psychiatrist. Oppenheimer and Langan might both be geniuses, but in other ways, they could not be more different.

The story of Oppenheimer's appointment to be scien- tific director of the Manhattan Project twenty years later is perhaps an even better example of this difference. The gen- eral in charge of the Manhattan Project was Leslie Groves, and he scoured the country, trying to find the right person to lead the atomic-bomb effort. Oppenheimer, by rights,

THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART 2

was a long shot. He was just thirty-eight, and junior to many of the people whom he would have to manage. He was a theorist, and this was a job that called for experi- menters and engineers. His political affiliations were dodgy: he had all kinds of friends who were Communists. Perhaps more striking, he had never had any administrative experi- ence. "He was a very impractical fellow," one of Oppen- heimer's friends later said. "He walked about with scuffed shoes and a funny hat, and, more important, he didn't know anything about equipment." As one Berkeley s.cien- tist put it, more succinctly: "He couldn't run a hamburger stand."

Oh, and by the way, in graduate school he tried to kill his tutor. This was the resume of the man who was trying out for what might be said to be-without exaggeration- one.of the most important jobs of the twentieth century. And what happened? The same thing that happened twenty years earlier at Cambridge: he got the rest of the world to see things his way.

He~e are Bird and Sherwin again: "Oppenheimer under- stood that Groves guarded the entrance to the Manhattan Project, and he therefore turned on all his charm and bril- liance. It was an irresistible pedormance." Groves was smit- ten. "'He's a genius,' Groves later told a reporter. 'A real genius.'" Groves was an engineer by training with a gradu- ate degree from MIT, and Oppenheimer's great insight was to appeal to that side of Groves. Bird and Sherwin go on: "Oppenheimer was the first scientist Groves had met on his tour [of potential candidates] who grasped that build- ing an atomic bomb required finding practical solutions to a variety of cross-disciplinary problems .... [Groves]

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found himself nodding in agreement when Oppenheimer pitched the notion of a central laboratory devoted to this purpose, where, as he later testified, 'we could begin to come to grips with chemical, metallurgical, engineering and ord- nance problems that had so far received no consideration.'"

Would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at Reed? Would he have been unable to convince his professors to move his classes to the afternoon? Of course not. And that's not because he was smarter than Chris Langan. It's because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.

"They required that everyone take introductory cal- culus," Langan said of his brief stay at Montana State. "And I happened to get a guy who taught it in a very dry, very trivial way. I didn't understand why he was teach- ing it this way. So I asked him questions. I actually had to chase him down to his office. I asked him, 'Why are you teaching this way? Why do you consider this practice to be relevant to calculus?' And this guy, this tall, lanky guy, always had sweat stains under his arms, he turned and looked at me and said, 'You know, there is something you should probably get straight. Some people just don't have the intellectual firepower to be mathematicians.'"

There they are, the professor and the prodigy, and what the prodigy clearly wants is to be engaged, at long last, with a mind that loves mathematics as much as he does. But he fails. In fact-and this is the most heartbreaking part of all-he manages to have an entire conversation with his calculus professor without ever communicating the one fact most likely to appeal to a calculus professor.

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The professor never realizes that Chris Langan is good at

calculus.

3.

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psy- chologist Robert Sternberg calls "practical intelligence.'' To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect." It is pro- cedural: it is about knowing how to do something with- out necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It's practical in nature: that is, it's not knowledge for its own sake. It's knowledge that helps you read situa- tions correctly and get what you want. And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are "orthogonal": the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other. You can have lots of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence, or lots of practical intelligence and not much analytical intelligence, or-as in the lucky case of someone like Robert Oppenheimer-you can have lots

of both. So where does something like practical intelligence

come from? We know where analytical intelligence comes from. It's something, at least in part, that's in your genes. Chris Langan started talking at six months. He taught

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himself to read at three years of age. He was born smart. IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability.''· But social savvy is knowledge. It's a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.

Perhaps the best explanation we have of this process comes from the sociologist Annette Lareau, who a few years ago conducted a fascinating study of a group of third grad- ers. She picked both blacks and whites and children from both wealthy homes and poor homes, zeroing in, ultimately, on twelve families. Lareau and her team visited each family at least twenty times, for hours at a stretch. She and her assis- tants told their subjects to treat them like "the family dog," and they followed them to church and to soccer games and to doctor's appointments, with a tape recorder in one hand and a notebook in the other.

You might expect that if you spent such an extended period in twelve different households, what you would gather is twelve different ideas about how to raise children: there would be the strict parents and the lax parents and the hyperinvolved parents and the mellow parents and on and on. What Lareau found, however, is something much different. There were only two parenting "philosophies," and they divided almost perfectly along class lines. The wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way.

The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children's free time, shuttling them from one activity to

''Most estimates put the heritability of IQ at roughly 50 percent.

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the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau fol- lowed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as play- ing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons.

That kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children. Play for them wasn't soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other kids in the neighbor- hood. What a child did was considered by his or her par- ents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential. One girl from a working-class family-Katie Brindle-sang in a choir after school. But she signed up for it herself and walked to choir practice on her own. Lareau writes:

What Mrs. Brindle doesn't do that is routine for middle- class mothers is view her daughter's interest in singing as a signal to look for other ways to help her develop that interest into a formal talent. Similarly Mrs. Brindle does not discuss Katie's interest in drama or express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter's talent. Instead she frames Katie's skills and interests as character traits-singing and acting are part of what makes Katie "Katie." She sees the shows her daughter puts on as "cute" and as a way for Katie to "get attention."

The middle-class parents talked things through with their children, reasoning with them. They didn't just issue commands. They expected their children to talk back to them, to negotiate, to question adults in positions of authority. If their children were doing poorly at school, the

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wealthier parents challenged their teachers. They inter- vened on behalf of their kids. One child Lareau follows just misses qualifying for a gifted program. Her mother arranges for her to be retested privately, petitions the school, and gets her daughter admitted. The poor parents, by contrast, are intimidated by authority. They react pas- sively and stay in the background. Lareau writes of one low-income parent:

At a parent-teacher conference, for example, Ms. McAl- lister (who is a high school graduate) seems subdued. The gregarious and outgoing nature she displays at home is hidden in this setting. She sits hunched over in the chair and she keeps her jacket zipped up. She is very quiet. When the teacher reports that Harold has not been turn- ing in his homework, Ms. McAllister clearly is flabber- gasted, but all she says is, "He did it at home." She does not follow up with the teacher or attempt to intervene on Harold's behalf. In her view, it is up to the teachers to manage her son's education. That is their job, not hers.

Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style "concerted cultivation." It's an attempt to actively "foster and assess a child's talents, opinions and skills." Poor parents tend to fol- low, by contrast, a strategy of "accomplishment of natural growth." They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own.

Lareau stresses that one style isn't morally better than the other. The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of inde- pendence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation

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has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middle- class child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of expe- riences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfort- ably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to. In Lareau's words, the middle-class children learn a sense of ''entitlement."

That word, of course, has negative connotations these days. But Lareau means it in the best sense of the term: "They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable in those settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention .... It was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their prefere]lces." They knew the rules. "Even in fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers apd doctors to adjust procedures to accommo- date their desires."

By contrast, the working-class and poor children were characterized by "an emerging sense of distance, dis- trust, and constraint." They didn't know how to get their way, or how to "customize" -using Lareau's wonderful term -whatever environment they were in, for their best

purposes. In one telling scene, Lareau describes a visit to the doc-

tor by Alex Williams, a nine-year-old boy, and his mother, Christina. The Williamses are wealthy professionals.

"Alex, you should be thinking of questions you might want to ask the doctor," Christina says in the car on the

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way to the doctor's office. "You can ask him anything you want. Don't be shy. You can ask anything."

Alex thinks for a minute, then says, "I have some bumps under my arms from my deodorant." Christina: "Really? You mean from your new deodorant?" Alex: "Yes." Christina: "Well, you should ask the doctor."

Alex's mother, Lareau writes, "is teaching that he has the right to speak up" -that even though he's going to be in a room with an older person and authority figure, it's perfectly all right for him to assert himself. They meet the doctor, a genial man in his early forties. He tells Alex that he is in the ninety-fifth percentile in height. Alex then interrupts:

ALEX: I'm in the what? DocTOR: It means that you're taller than more than

ninety-five out of a hundred young men when they're, uh, ten years old.

ALEX: I'm not ten.

DocTOR: Well, they graphed you at ten. You're-nine years and ten months. They-they usually take the closest year to that graph.

Look at how easily Alex interrupts the doctor- "I'm not ten." That's entitlement: his mother permits that casual incivility because she wants him to learn to assert himself with people in positions of authority.

THE DocToR TURNS TO ALEX: Well, now the most important question. Do you have any questions you

want to ask me befor~ I do your physical?

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ALEX: Um ... only one. I've been getting some bumps on my arms, right around here (indicates underarm).

DOCTOR: Underneath? ALEx:Yeah. DocTOR: Okay. I'll have to take a look at those when I

come in closer to do the checkup. And I'll see what they are and what I can do. Do they hurt or itch?

ALEX: No, they're just there. DocTOR: Okay, I'll take a look at those bumps for you.

This kind of interaction simply doesn't happen with lower-class children, Lareau says. They would be quiet and submissive, with eyes turned away. Alex takes charge of the moment. "In remembering to raise the question he prepared in advance, he gains the doctor's full attention and foc.µses it on an issue of his choosing," Lareau writes.

In so doing, he successfully shifts the balance of power away from the adults and toward himself. The transi- tion goes smoothly. Alex is used to being treated with respect. He is seen as special and as a person worthy of adult attention and interest. These are key characteris- tics of the strategy of concerted cultivation. Alex is not showing off during his checkup. He is behaving much as he does with his parents- he reasons, negotiates, and

jokes with equal ease.

It is important to understand where the particular mastery of that moment comes from. It's not genetic. Alex Williams didn't inherit the skills to interact with author- ity figures from his parents and grandparents the way he inherited the color of his eyes. Nor is it racial: it's not a

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practice specific to either black or white people. As it turns out, Alex Williams is black and Katie Brindle is white. It's a cultural advantage. Alex has those skills because over the course of his young life, his mother and father-in the manner of educated families-have painstakingly taught them to him, nudging and prodding and encouraging and showing him the rules of the game, right down to that lit- tle rehearsal in the car on the way to the doctor's office.

When we talk about the advantages of class, Lareau argues, this is in large part what we mean. Alex Williams is better off than Katie Brindle because he's wealthier and because he goes to a better school, but also because- and perhaps this is even more critical-the sense of entitle- ment that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world.

4.

This is the advantage that Oppenheimer had and that Chris Langan lacked. Oppenheimer was raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan, the son of an art- ist and a successful garment manufacturer. His childhood was the embodiment of concerted cultivation. On weekends, the Oppenheimers would go driving in the countryside in a chauffeur-driven Packard. Summers he would be taken to Europe to see his grandfather. He attended the Ethical Cul- ture School on Central Park West, perhaps the most pro- gressive school in the nation, where, his biographers write, students were "infused with the notion that they were being groomed to reform the world." When his math teacher real- ized he was bored, she sent him off to do independent work.