https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/03/march-1983-cds-launch-in-america/471807/ Skip to content * * Sign in My Account Subscribe [Submit] [ ] Quick Links + Dear Therapist + Crossword Puzzle + Manage Subscription Popular Latest Sections + Politics + Ideas + Photo + Science + Culture + Podcasts + Health + Education + Planet + Technology + Family + Projects + America In Person + Global + Events + Books + Fiction + Newsletter The Atlantic Crossword crossword promo Play Crossword The Print Edition Latest Issue Past Issues Give a Gift * [Submit] Search The Atlantic [ ] Quick Links + Dear Therapist + Crossword Puzzle + Manage Subscription * Popular * Latest * * * Sign In My Account * Subscribe Reporter's Notebook Caroline Mimbs Nyce 11:50 AM / March 2, 2016 When CDs Launched in America mlange_b / Flickr Thirty-three years ago this month, in March 1983, America got its first whirl at the compact disc. CDs first launched in Japan, but they didn't make their way to the States until several months later. (NPR has a helpful timeline of the important dates in compact-disc-tory.) It might seem silly, but, back then, these mirrored plastic orbs represented an incredible technological innovation. Here's a New York Times report from that March: The digital compact disk and player, which is making its debut in retail stores this month, is being likened in the music industry to the advent of stereophonic sound or the long-playing recording. Still, the CD's effect on record makers, manufacturers of audio equipment and - most important - the music-loving consumer will probably be more gradual than were the two previous revolutions, according to analysts. The technological leap is indeed radical. Compact discs are 4 3/4 inches in diameter as opposed to conventional 12-inch long-playing records, and approximately the same thickness. CD's are made principally of clear plastic and aluminum. They are played on one side, yet yield up to 60 minutes of playing time. Sold? Not so fast: Only 75 stores nationwide sold CDs, and you'd have to be willing to shell out the big bucks--about $900 for the Sony and Magnavox players, with disks ranging between $16 and $20. Flash forwarding a decade-and-a-half, here's Ralph Lombreglia in 1998, writing for our early website (Atlantic Unbound) about how much CDs changed the process of making and consuming music: Of all the arts, music has probably been changed the most pervasively by digital technology -- a change heralded by the recording industry's shift in the 1980s from vinyl platters to the compact disc. Most consumers don't associate their CDs with computers, but, of course, the music on those discs is digital data. As such, it shares the great benefits of all digitally encoded information -- it's perfectly reproducible (a copy is identical to the original) and completely editable. Today, especially in pop music, many of the sonorities and instrumental voices originate from within digital equipment, and the layering of the many tracks that make up a performance is entirely computer-based. Nothing lasts forever; the CD would soon gave way to the era of MP3 players and iPods, then to iPhones and Spotify. An early example of that transition comes from Ben Auburn in The Atlantic in 1999: The Beastie Boys released a non-traditional album that allowed buyers to "select any Beastie Boys track (including unreleased and out-of-print material), arrange your selections on two compact discs, and order the resulting set," thus "essentially negating the artist's intent in collecting and sequencing a group of songs." He continues: This process, though, still retains an analog, or rather a solid, portion: ultimately the music you select is burned onto an actual disc, a cover is printed, and the whole package is mailed to you. Until MP3 players (essentially small hard drives onto which you load sound files from your computer) become as prevalent as the Walkman (or the car stereo), this tangible aspect of online music buying will remain. Except for early adopters -- such as college students with fast Net connections and money to spend on the first Walkman-type MP3 devices -- most music buyers, like most book readers, still want something to hold on to, something to prove that they own the songs they've chosen. Most of us are perfectly happy to listen to the radio without taping it for posterity, just as we're perfectly happy to read and then recycle a magazine; but records, like books, remain non-disposable -- they are things to be put on shelves in living rooms, totems that help us define our characters. Only when we're willing to give up the tangible -- perhaps when our data can follow us around as easily and as securely as a book or CD can be stuffed in a briefcase -- will downloadable music eclipse the compact disc. * * * More Notes From The Atlantic * Will the U.S. Pass a Point of No Return? August 13, 2021 * Our Towns: State Programs Are Laboratories for the Nation June 5, 2021 * Does the U.S. Senate Resemble Ancient Rome? June 2, 2021 * What Ancient Rome Tells Us About Today's Senate May 29, 2021 * Dan Frank Was a Gifted and Generous Editor May 25, 2021 * Notes Home Most Popular On The Atlantic * Katie Martin / The Atlantic No, Vaccinated People Are Not 'Just as Likely' to Spread the Coronavirus as Unvaccinated People Craig Spencer This has become a common refrain among the cautious--and it's wrong. For many fully vaccinated Americans, the Delta surge spoiled what should've been a glorious summer. Those who had cast their masks aside months ago were asked to dust them off. Many are still taking no chances. Some have even returned to all the same precautions they took before getting their shots, including avoiding the company of other fully vaccinated people. Among this last group, a common refrain I've heard to justify their renewed vigilance is that "vaccinated people are just as likely to spread the coronavirus." This misunderstanding, born out of confusing statements from public-health authorities and misleading media headlines, is a shame. It is resulting in unnecessary fear among vaccinated people, all the while undermining the public's understanding of the importance--and effectiveness--of getting vaccinated. Continue Reading * PAUL RATJE / AFP / Getty Democrats' Free Pass on Immigration Is Over Caitlin Dickerson As he extends Trump-era policies, President Biden discovers that many voters are no longer willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Throughout the last administration, Department of Homeland Security officials at all levels--from Senate-confirmed power brokers in Washington to rank-and-file agents along the border--often complained that they were facing a double standard: They were doing the same work, using the same methods, as they had under previous presidents, they said, but because their boss was now Donald Trump, the public was quick to assume they were acting out of racism or malice. At times, of course, Trump's policies did break with those of previous administrations, including the zero-tolerance policy that separated thousands of migrant children from their parents. But in many ways, the DHS officials were right: Stories highlighting conditions and practices that predated the Trump presidency by years or even decades suddenly became front-page news. Reporters had doggedly covered those issues for years, but before Trump was inaugurated, their stories rarely generated any lasting national attention. Continue Reading * Craig Golding / Fairfax Media / Getty; Katie Martin / The Atlantic Many Parents Won't Vaccinate Their Kids. Here's Why. Aaron E. Carroll Even parents who are enthusiastic about the vaccines may not want their young children to be first in line. The announcement that the Pfizer vaccine appears to work in children ages 5 to 11 is welcome news for many families across the United States. Parents who expect their children's classrooms to soon be full of vaccinated students shouldn't be overly optimistic, though. Many moms and dads will wait to get their kids immunized, if they do at all--and that includes those who are vaccinated themselves. Although about two-thirds of adults and 83 percent of elderly Americans are fully vaccinated, the percentage of vaccinated adolescents is much lower. The Pfizer vaccine has been authorized for 12-to-17-year-olds since May, but only about half of kids ages 16 and 17 are fully vaccinated. Only 42 percent of those ages 12 to 15 are. Continue Reading * Amazon Studios LuLaRich Reveals a Hole in the American Economy Sophie Gilbert The controversial cult brand LuLaRoe sold a powerful idea: that mothers could succeed as entrepreneurs while spending meaningful time with their kids. People who have heard of LuLaRoe have usually come across it for one of two reasons. Either someone they know has tried to sell them the company's stretchy leggings and fit-and-flare dresses over Facebook, or they've seen some of the gleeful coverage of LuLaRoe's very public disintegration as a brand: the lawsuits, the bankruptcies filed by its sellers, the boxes of apparently moldy clothing shipped to vendors that smelled, in one woman's description, like a "dead fart." (Leggings! Never not controversial!) Much of LuLaRich, a new four-part Amazon series exploring the company's rise and fall, focuses on its alleged mismanagement and manipulative aspects, grouping it with some of the splashier docuseries of years past. No one at LuLaRoe seems to have found themselves getting the area above their groin branded, or poisoning an Oregon salad bar with salmonella. But in one scene, a former LuLaRoe vendor recalls a company meetup where everyone assembled was, like her, wearing brightly patterned leggings and a broad, be-lipsticked smile. "I remember looking around and being like, We all look the same," she tells the camera. "I was like, Oh my God, I'm in a cult." Continue Reading * The Atlantic The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier Daniel Engber Adam Federman A new leaked document is stirring up another frenzy over the pandemic's origins. What does it really tell us? As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations has sustained an atmosphere of profound unease. The latest piece of evidence came out this week in the form of a set of murkily sourced PDFs, with their images a bit askew. The main one purports to be an unfunded research grant proposal from Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit focused on emerging infectious diseases, that was allegedly submitted to DARPA in early 2018 (and subsequently rejected), for a $14.2 million project aimed at "defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses." Released earlier this week by a group of guerrilla lab-leak snoops called DRASTIC, the proposal includes a plan to study potentially dangerous pathogens by generating full-length, infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features that could make coronaviruses better able to infect human cells. (Daszak and EcoHealth did not respond to requests for comment on this story.) Continue Reading * Shannon Lin / The Atlantic Fully Vaccinated Is Suddenly a Much Less Useful Phrase Rachel Gutman With tens of millions of Americans eligible for booster shots, the term could start to lose its meaning. The definition of full vaccination against COVID-19 has, since the winter, been somewhat difficult to nail down. It takes one dose of Johnson & Johnson, but two doses of an mRNA vaccine. The CDC counts you as fully vaccinated as soon as you get your last shot, but tells you that you won't be fully vaccinated until two weeks after that. People have a hard time knowing exactly when it might be safe for them to venture into restaurants, wedding venues, or mask-free offices. Now, in the age of booster shots and breakthrough cases, the phrase has gotten even murkier. Early this morning, the CDC officially backed booster shots for tens of millions of Americans who are six months past their second Pfizer dose: those over 65, those in long-term-care facilities, and all adults who have an underlying medical condition that puts them at high risk of severe COVID-19 or who are at high risk of getting sick from occupational or institutional exposure to the coronavirus. Continue Reading * Jeenah Moon / Reuters The Conservatives Who'd Rather Die Than Not Own the Libs Conor Friedersdorf Rarely has so significant a faction in American politics behaved in a way that so directly claims the life of its own supporters. At Breitbart News, the politics of vaccination have taken a strange turn. A longtime writer at the populist-right website who wants to save his Donald Trump-supporting readers from COVID-19 is speculating that the left has tricked them into rejecting safe and effective vaccines. John Nolte is vaccinated himself and, in an article this week, correctly notes that the shots are "a lifesaver." But every time he touts what he calls the "Trump vaccine," his Twitter feed and comment threads on his articles get flooded with irrational arguments and unfounded assertions from anti-vaxxers, he writes. That's no surprise. The populist-right milieu that Nolte inhabits includes lots of influential voices that spread misinformation about vaccines on Fox News, talk radio, and Facebook. For example, America's most prominent populist commentator, the Fox host Tucker Carlson, has been amplifying Nicki Minaj's thirdhand claim that a vaccine had swollen her cousin's friend's testicles. Continue Reading * Getty; The Atlantic The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left Sally Satel Many psychologists wrongly assumed that coercive attitudes exist only among conservatives. Donald Trump's rise to power generated a flood of media coverage and academic research on authoritarianism--or at least the kind of authoritarianism that exists on the political right. Over the past several years, some researchers have theorized that Trump couldn't have won in 2016 without support from Americans who deplore political compromise and want leaders to rule with a strong hand. Although right-wing authoritarianism is well documented, social psychologists do not all agree that a leftist version even exists. In February 2020, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology held a symposium called "Is Left-Wing Authoritarianism Real? Evidence on Both Sides of the Debate." An ambitious new study on the subject by the Emory University researcher Thomas H. Costello and five colleagues should settle the question. It proposes a rigorous new measure of antidemocratic attitudes on the left. And, by drawing on a survey of 7,258 adults, Costello's team firmly establishes that such attitudes exist on both sides of the American electorate. (One co-author on the paper, I should note, was Costello's adviser, the late Scott Lilienfeld--with whom I wrote a 2013 book and numerous articles.) Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a "preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism." Continue Reading * Cliff Lipson / CBS / Getty The Quietest Emmys Speech Was the Loudest Shirley Li After winning her award, Michaela Coel delivered the rare message meant for those outside the glitzy room in which she stood. When the camera turned to Michaela Coel after she won an Emmy for limited-series writing, she looked overwhelmed. The creator, star, writer, and co-director of I May Destroy You kept her head down, her shoulders slouched. Next to her, Coel's former co-star Cynthia Erivo whispered something into her ear--a pep talk, maybe. But for a few seconds, Coel remained still, as if the weight of her first, historic Emmy win might keep her from going onstage. Luckily, it didn't. Coel gave one of the night's shortest speeches, and perhaps its most revealing. In her remarks, Coel did something unusual: She thought about her audience, tried to reach beyond the other entertainers seated in the room with her. "Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn't comfortable," she said. "I dare you ... Visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success. Do not be afraid to disappear--from it, from us--for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence." She spoke directly to the potential storytellers hoping to one day be onstage. And she didn't just advise them; in a night of pomp and circumstance, she reminded them of the value of quieter triumphs. Continue Reading * The Atlantic Math Is Personal Jessica Nordell How one professor changed the culture of mathematics for his students The mathematician Federico Ardila-Mantilla grew up in Colombia, an indifferent student but gifted in math. He was failing most of his classes at his high school in Bogota when someone suggested he apply to MIT. He had not heard of the school. To his surprise, he got in, and he went on scholarship. Mathematically, he did well. One of his professors--an acid-tongued theoretician known to compare his audience to a herd of cows--routinely tucked "open" math problems into homework assignments, without telling the students. These had never been solved by anyone. Ardila solved one. He went on to receive his bachelor's and Ph.D. in math from MIT. But his academic experience was also one of isolation. Part of it had to do with his own introversion. (An outgoing mathematician, the joke goes, is someone who looks at your shoes when talking to you instead of their own.) Part of it was cultural. As a Latino, he was very much in the minority in the department, and he did not feel comfortable in American mathematical spaces. No one had tried to explicitly exclude him, yet he felt alone. In math, collaborating with others opens up new kinds of learning and thinking. But in his nine years at MIT, Ardila worked with others only twice. Continue Reading More Popular Stories Latest Notes * Will the U.S. Pass a Point of No Return? * Our Towns: State Programs Are Laboratories for the Nation * Does the U.S. Senate Resemble Ancient Rome? * What Ancient Rome Tells Us About Today's Senate * Dan Frank Was a Gifted and Generous Editor More Most Popular On The Atlantic * Katie Martin / The Atlantic No, Vaccinated People Are Not 'Just as Likely' to Spread the Coronavirus as Unvaccinated People Craig Spencer This has become a common refrain among the cautious--and it's wrong. For many fully vaccinated Americans, the Delta surge spoiled what should've been a glorious summer. Those who had cast their masks aside months ago were asked to dust them off. Many are still taking no chances. Some have even returned to all the same precautions they took before getting their shots, including avoiding the company of other fully vaccinated people. Among this last group, a common refrain I've heard to justify their renewed vigilance is that "vaccinated people are just as likely to spread the coronavirus." This misunderstanding, born out of confusing statements from public-health authorities and misleading media headlines, is a shame. It is resulting in unnecessary fear among vaccinated people, all the while undermining the public's understanding of the importance--and effectiveness--of getting vaccinated. Continue Reading * PAUL RATJE / AFP / Getty Democrats' Free Pass on Immigration Is Over Caitlin Dickerson As he extends Trump-era policies, President Biden discovers that many voters are no longer willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Throughout the last administration, Department of Homeland Security officials at all levels--from Senate-confirmed power brokers in Washington to rank-and-file agents along the border--often complained that they were facing a double standard: They were doing the same work, using the same methods, as they had under previous presidents, they said, but because their boss was now Donald Trump, the public was quick to assume they were acting out of racism or malice. At times, of course, Trump's policies did break with those of previous administrations, including the zero-tolerance policy that separated thousands of migrant children from their parents. But in many ways, the DHS officials were right: Stories highlighting conditions and practices that predated the Trump presidency by years or even decades suddenly became front-page news. Reporters had doggedly covered those issues for years, but before Trump was inaugurated, their stories rarely generated any lasting national attention. Continue Reading * Craig Golding / Fairfax Media / Getty; Katie Martin / The Atlantic Many Parents Won't Vaccinate Their Kids. Here's Why. Aaron E. Carroll Even parents who are enthusiastic about the vaccines may not want their young children to be first in line. The announcement that the Pfizer vaccine appears to work in children ages 5 to 11 is welcome news for many families across the United States. Parents who expect their children's classrooms to soon be full of vaccinated students shouldn't be overly optimistic, though. Many moms and dads will wait to get their kids immunized, if they do at all--and that includes those who are vaccinated themselves. Although about two-thirds of adults and 83 percent of elderly Americans are fully vaccinated, the percentage of vaccinated adolescents is much lower. The Pfizer vaccine has been authorized for 12-to-17-year-olds since May, but only about half of kids ages 16 and 17 are fully vaccinated. Only 42 percent of those ages 12 to 15 are. Continue Reading * Amazon Studios LuLaRich Reveals a Hole in the American Economy Sophie Gilbert The controversial cult brand LuLaRoe sold a powerful idea: that mothers could succeed as entrepreneurs while spending meaningful time with their kids. People who have heard of LuLaRoe have usually come across it for one of two reasons. Either someone they know has tried to sell them the company's stretchy leggings and fit-and-flare dresses over Facebook, or they've seen some of the gleeful coverage of LuLaRoe's very public disintegration as a brand: the lawsuits, the bankruptcies filed by its sellers, the boxes of apparently moldy clothing shipped to vendors that smelled, in one woman's description, like a "dead fart." (Leggings! Never not controversial!) Much of LuLaRich, a new four-part Amazon series exploring the company's rise and fall, focuses on its alleged mismanagement and manipulative aspects, grouping it with some of the splashier docuseries of years past. No one at LuLaRoe seems to have found themselves getting the area above their groin branded, or poisoning an Oregon salad bar with salmonella. But in one scene, a former LuLaRoe vendor recalls a company meetup where everyone assembled was, like her, wearing brightly patterned leggings and a broad, be-lipsticked smile. "I remember looking around and being like, We all look the same," she tells the camera. "I was like, Oh my God, I'm in a cult." Continue Reading * The Atlantic The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier Daniel Engber Adam Federman A new leaked document is stirring up another frenzy over the pandemic's origins. What does it really tell us? As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations has sustained an atmosphere of profound unease. The latest piece of evidence came out this week in the form of a set of murkily sourced PDFs, with their images a bit askew. The main one purports to be an unfunded research grant proposal from Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit focused on emerging infectious diseases, that was allegedly submitted to DARPA in early 2018 (and subsequently rejected), for a $14.2 million project aimed at "defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses." Released earlier this week by a group of guerrilla lab-leak snoops called DRASTIC, the proposal includes a plan to study potentially dangerous pathogens by generating full-length, infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features that could make coronaviruses better able to infect human cells. (Daszak and EcoHealth did not respond to requests for comment on this story.) Continue Reading * Shannon Lin / The Atlantic Fully Vaccinated Is Suddenly a Much Less Useful Phrase Rachel Gutman With tens of millions of Americans eligible for booster shots, the term could start to lose its meaning. The definition of full vaccination against COVID-19 has, since the winter, been somewhat difficult to nail down. It takes one dose of Johnson & Johnson, but two doses of an mRNA vaccine. The CDC counts you as fully vaccinated as soon as you get your last shot, but tells you that you won't be fully vaccinated until two weeks after that. People have a hard time knowing exactly when it might be safe for them to venture into restaurants, wedding venues, or mask-free offices. Now, in the age of booster shots and breakthrough cases, the phrase has gotten even murkier. Early this morning, the CDC officially backed booster shots for tens of millions of Americans who are six months past their second Pfizer dose: those over 65, those in long-term-care facilities, and all adults who have an underlying medical condition that puts them at high risk of severe COVID-19 or who are at high risk of getting sick from occupational or institutional exposure to the coronavirus. Continue Reading * Jeenah Moon / Reuters The Conservatives Who'd Rather Die Than Not Own the Libs Conor Friedersdorf Rarely has so significant a faction in American politics behaved in a way that so directly claims the life of its own supporters. At Breitbart News, the politics of vaccination have taken a strange turn. A longtime writer at the populist-right website who wants to save his Donald Trump-supporting readers from COVID-19 is speculating that the left has tricked them into rejecting safe and effective vaccines. John Nolte is vaccinated himself and, in an article this week, correctly notes that the shots are "a lifesaver." But every time he touts what he calls the "Trump vaccine," his Twitter feed and comment threads on his articles get flooded with irrational arguments and unfounded assertions from anti-vaxxers, he writes. That's no surprise. The populist-right milieu that Nolte inhabits includes lots of influential voices that spread misinformation about vaccines on Fox News, talk radio, and Facebook. For example, America's most prominent populist commentator, the Fox host Tucker Carlson, has been amplifying Nicki Minaj's thirdhand claim that a vaccine had swollen her cousin's friend's testicles. Continue Reading * Getty; The Atlantic The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left Sally Satel Many psychologists wrongly assumed that coercive attitudes exist only among conservatives. Donald Trump's rise to power generated a flood of media coverage and academic research on authoritarianism--or at least the kind of authoritarianism that exists on the political right. Over the past several years, some researchers have theorized that Trump couldn't have won in 2016 without support from Americans who deplore political compromise and want leaders to rule with a strong hand. Although right-wing authoritarianism is well documented, social psychologists do not all agree that a leftist version even exists. In February 2020, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology held a symposium called "Is Left-Wing Authoritarianism Real? Evidence on Both Sides of the Debate." An ambitious new study on the subject by the Emory University researcher Thomas H. Costello and five colleagues should settle the question. It proposes a rigorous new measure of antidemocratic attitudes on the left. And, by drawing on a survey of 7,258 adults, Costello's team firmly establishes that such attitudes exist on both sides of the American electorate. (One co-author on the paper, I should note, was Costello's adviser, the late Scott Lilienfeld--with whom I wrote a 2013 book and numerous articles.) Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a "preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism." Continue Reading * Cliff Lipson / CBS / Getty The Quietest Emmys Speech Was the Loudest Shirley Li After winning her award, Michaela Coel delivered the rare message meant for those outside the glitzy room in which she stood. When the camera turned to Michaela Coel after she won an Emmy for limited-series writing, she looked overwhelmed. The creator, star, writer, and co-director of I May Destroy You kept her head down, her shoulders slouched. Next to her, Coel's former co-star Cynthia Erivo whispered something into her ear--a pep talk, maybe. But for a few seconds, Coel remained still, as if the weight of her first, historic Emmy win might keep her from going onstage. Luckily, it didn't. Coel gave one of the night's shortest speeches, and perhaps its most revealing. In her remarks, Coel did something unusual: She thought about her audience, tried to reach beyond the other entertainers seated in the room with her. "Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn't comfortable," she said. "I dare you ... Visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success. Do not be afraid to disappear--from it, from us--for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence." She spoke directly to the potential storytellers hoping to one day be onstage. And she didn't just advise them; in a night of pomp and circumstance, she reminded them of the value of quieter triumphs. Continue Reading * The Atlantic Math Is Personal Jessica Nordell How one professor changed the culture of mathematics for his students The mathematician Federico Ardila-Mantilla grew up in Colombia, an indifferent student but gifted in math. He was failing most of his classes at his high school in Bogota when someone suggested he apply to MIT. He had not heard of the school. To his surprise, he got in, and he went on scholarship. Mathematically, he did well. One of his professors--an acid-tongued theoretician known to compare his audience to a herd of cows--routinely tucked "open" math problems into homework assignments, without telling the students. These had never been solved by anyone. Ardila solved one. He went on to receive his bachelor's and Ph.D. in math from MIT. But his academic experience was also one of isolation. Part of it had to do with his own introversion. (An outgoing mathematician, the joke goes, is someone who looks at your shoes when talking to you instead of their own.) Part of it was cultural. As a Latino, he was very much in the minority in the department, and he did not feel comfortable in American mathematical spaces. No one had tried to explicitly exclude him, yet he felt alone. In math, collaborating with others opens up new kinds of learning and thinking. But in his nine years at MIT, Ardila worked with others only twice. 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