In this competitive era, parents are naturally curious to determine whether their child is destined to freakishly overachieve—or just to stare resentfully at his imported wooden toys. Luckily, the Internet offers various checklists for giftedness. Though most paint a picture of a driven knowledge seeker, one such list, created by The New South Wales Association […]

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Kids of America, beware! The New York Times has just given your parents the okay to ruin your lives. Op-ed writer/sadist David Brooks, summarizing recent research into the genesis of genius, dismisses Mozart’s innate talent and credits his dad, Mr. Mozart Sr., for whipping the lame young composer into a superhuman: What Mozart had, we […]

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Fictional genius kids used to be realistically frumpy for the most part. A Wrinkle in Time’s Meg and Charles Wallace were not fashion plates. When we first meet Esme of J.D. Salinger’s For Esme—With Love and Squalor, she is wet and ratlike. Here, to take another instance, is the original 1976 cover of Very Far […]

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