I’m getting a lot a of book recommendations from podcasts these days. It seems all my favorite non-fiction authors have a podcast: Michael Lewis has the excellent Against the Rules, Malcolm Gladwell has Revisionist History (and he’s even an owner of a podcast company) and Stephen Dubner has Freakonomics Radio. Steve Levitt, Dubner’s academic buddy, recently launched his own podcast - People I Mostly Admire, if you’re curious - and Ken Jennings was a guest on a recent episode. If I had a time machine, I would go back in time 5 years to tell myself that everyone and their aunt has a podcast show now. I wouldn’t believe it and I barely do now. Yet, the heavy hitters above must be on to something.
Ken Jennings is famous for being a champion of the American game show Jeopardy. I’ve never watched Jeopardy - I assume that no one in Europe has - but I was obsequios enough to listen to his interview. It was vaguely compelling to hear how meticulous someone could be about appearing on a television game show. Jennings has intricate knowledge of how the buzzer that contestants use to answer questions works. He has a replica at home that he uses for practice. He applies the same obsessiveness to all aspects of the game.
Jennings turns that overflowing curiosity to parenting and old-wives tales in Because I Said So! The premise is simple. Our parents pass down all kinds of funky facts to us. Don’t give children too much sugar or they become hyper-active! Sitting too close to the television causes myopia! Never run with scissors! It’s essentially a well researched trivia book about child rearing. Jennings digs into the data (research papers, mortality rates and government regulations) and reveals that scissors do cause countless lacerations to children, but sugar doesn’t actually make them go ballistic.
It’s familiar territory for fans of Snopes.com and Mythbusters. Jennings has gathered an impressive collection of claims and evidence. There’s just enough meat on each entry to make this more than a reference book for scientifically inclined parents. Sometimes the full story is even stranger than the claim that it backs. The US army studied how the body emits heat and came to the conclusion that insulating the head was critical. They made recruits stand outside in the cold without hats and noticed that almost all of the heat loss was coming from the head. The catch, of course, is that the research subjects were otherwise properly clothed. With that flawed experiment, a myth was born.