Tag: Lists

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Organized Minds, Glorious Nerds

My grandson is at it again. He’s ticking off African nations — all 54 of them — with the focused serenity of a monk counting prayer beads.

Yesterday it was the counties of Texas. Before that, American presidents in reverse chronological order, which he performed at dinner with the calm confidence of a kid who has seen things. He lives in Washington, D.C., which I suspect is less a geographic choice than a spiritual one: he wants to be near the material.

I recognize him completely. I am him, sixty years earlier, haunting the mailbox in October waiting for the Information Please Almanac to arrive. When it did, I did not read it so much as inhale it — population densities, Olympic records, the gross national products of countries most Americans couldn’t locate on a globe.

Meanwhile, the World Book Encyclopedia sat on the shelf like a cathedral, and I was its most devoted worshipper. Volume P alone — Population, Planets, Presidents, Portugal — could sustain me through a dull February weekend.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who make lists… and those who pretend they don’t.

I come from a proud lineage of list-makers. Not casual, jot-it-on-a-napkin types—but the kind who would alphabetize their anxieties if given a quiet afternoon and a sharpened pencil.

My grandson, at the ripe old age of four, has already joined the guild. He ticks off countries in Africa like a seasoned diplomat, names U.S. states with the confidence of a campaign manager, and is working his way through presidents as if he has a clearance badge to the White House.

The List Gene

I blame genetics. Or perhaps nostalgia.

In my day—back when hair was longer and attention spans were shorter—we didn’t have YouTube serenading us with “Top 50 Rivers of Europe” set to a catchy beat.

We had the annual unveiling of the Information Please Almanac, which arrived with all the fanfare of a new iPhone launch, minus the line outside. And then there was the majestic World Book Encyclopedia—a 26-volume monument to curiosity and back strain.

You didn’t “Google” things. You hunted them. You earned them. You cross-referenced Mongolia like it owed you money—and if you wanted an update, you waited a year and hoped Mongolia hadn’t moved.

Surgical Precision, Trivial Pursuits

There is nothing quite like standing in an operating room, where a vascular surgeon is calmly repairing an aortic aneurysm while casually listing the ten tallest buildings in the world. (“Burj Khalifa, Shanghai Tower… suction please…”)

Meanwhile, a family practice colleague—clearly underutilized—recites the La Marseillaise backwards. Not clinically useful, but impressive enough to make you question your own hobbies.

We were supposed to be saving lives. Instead, we were mentally indexing them.

The Ken Jennings Ideal

And then there is the patron saint of us all: Ken Jennings. Seventy-four consecutive Jeopardy! victories. A human being who appeared to have simply agreed to remember everything, on the off chance someone would someday ask. When Ken Jennings walked onto that stage, he wasn’t showing off. He was reporting for duty.

Every one of us who ever memorized the order of the planets, the presidents, the periodic table, or the airports of Europe by IATA code contains a small Ken Jennings. A tiny, extremely well-organized Ken, sitting in the library of our hippocampus, cross-referencing, updating, waiting for his moment. We are all, in our hearts, training for Jeopardy!.

I suspect this is, at its core, a love of order in a disordered world. The universe tends toward entropy; the list-maker pushes back. You cannot control geopolitics, but you can, by God, know all the landlocked countries of Africa in alphabetical order.

You cannot cure mortality, but you can tell me the ten longest rivers on every continent, and for a moment — just a moment — the world is knowable, mappable, tamed.

The Sports Lists (Where It Gets Serious)

This is where list-making graduates from hobby to religion.

The Mickey Mantle File

Every self-respecting sports fan of a certain vintage has this memorized:

  • 536 home runs
  • 3 MVP awards
  • Triple Crown (1956)
  • Switch-hitter with tape-measure power from both sides
  • Knees held together by willpower and clubhouse tape

We didn’t just admire Mantle—we archived him.

The Los Angeles Lakers Pantheon

You can start an argument at any dinner table with this one:

  • Magic Johnson – ran Showtime like a jazz conductor who never missed a beat
  • Kareem Abdul-Jabbar – the skyhook: medicine’s answer to the unstoppable procedure
  • Kobe Bryant – relentless, surgical, occasionally terrifying
  • Shaquille O’Neal – less a player, more a controlled demolition
  • Jerry West – the logo, before branding departments existed

Ranking them is like choosing your favorite child—except everyone is louder about it.

The Tiger Woods Ledger

This one borders on scripture:

  • 15 major championships
  • The “Tiger Slam” (holding all four majors at once, 2000–2001)
  • Masters wins: 1997, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2019
  • U.S. Opens: 2000, 2002, 2008
  • The Open Championship: 2000, 2005, 2006
  • PGA Championships: 1999, 2000, 2006, 2007

If you play golf, you don’t just watch Tiger—you audit him.

The Modern Evolution: Musical Lists

Today’s children have upgraded tools.

My grandson doesn’t flip through encyclopedias—he watches YouTube videos where animated characters sing the capitals of Europe in a rhythm that gets stuck in your head for three days. I now know more about Slovenia than I ever intended, entirely due to a chorus line of cartoon goats.

It’s hard to compete with that. My generation had mnemonics. His has choreography—and better production values.

Why Lists Matter (or at Least Why We Think They Do)

There’s something deeply satisfying about a list:

  • It imposes order on chaos
  • It gives the illusion of mastery
  • It turns the infinite into something you can check off before dinner

Lists are how we convince ourselves we understand the world. If we can name all 50 states, surely we’ve conquered geography. If we know the presidents in order, history must be under control.

The Family Tradition Continues

And so I watch the next generation.

My grandson, sitting on the floor, confidently announcing: “I know all the countries in Africa.”

I don’t correct him—not because I’m generous, but because he’s usually right. Sudan and South Sudan? That update didn’t make it into my edition of the encyclopedia.

It’s a humbling experience to be outmatched in geopolitical awareness by someone who still needs help tying his shoes.

Final Entry

Somewhere along the way, I traded my encyclopedias for Google and my almanacs for apps. But the instinct remains.

To categorize. To rank. To recall.

And occasionally, to wonder—usually late at night—whether I could still name the ten tallest buildings in the world if someone handed me a scalpel.

Probably not.

But give me a list… and I’ll give it a shot.

A PARTIAL TAXONOMY OF LIST ENTHUSIASTS
1. The Completionist — Cannot rest until every African country, every Texas county, every U.S. president is accounted for. Sleep is optional. Gaps are not.
2. The Performance Lister — Deploys their lists at precisely the right moment. Dinner parties. Operating rooms. Elevators.
3. The Almanac Archaeologist — Keeps a 1965 World Almanac specifically because the 1965 data is still technically accurate for historical purposes.
4. The Trivia Athlete — Trains daily. Has a vision board. Watches Jeopardy! in the way most people watch playoff games.
5. The Backwards Reciter — A rare and specialized subspecies. Requires no further explanation.
6. The YouTube Mnemonist — Has learned 195 countries through earworm. Is unstoppable at parties.

WHAT WE KNOW FOR CERTAIN
1. Lists are not a quirk. They are a calling.
2. The almanac was the internet before the internet, and it had better binding.
3. YouTube trivia songs are a legitimate branch of classical education.
4. Any surgeon who can name the world’s tallest skyscrapers while operating has simply found an efficient use of bandwidth.
5. The Marseillaise backwards is probably not useful. It is nonetheless impressive.
6. A grandson who ticks off countries is not wasting time. He is building a mind.
7. Ken Jennings is proof that there is a God, and that God rewards those who pay attention.

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Transportation as a Gateway to Learning—From Subways to Skies

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Early Fascination as a Pathway to Discovery

Some kids memorize baseball stats. Others can name every dinosaur from Allosaurus to Zuniceratops. I was the kid who memorized the New York City subway map.

Four hundred eighty-six track miles, a tangle of lines more intricate than any anatomy chart, and 472 stations—each with its own personality. I used to sit with that map the way other kids sat with comic books. The G’s lonely green line, the A stretching heroically from Inwood to the ocean breeze of the Rockaways, the way the 4 and 5 shadow each other before peeling off like old friends heading to different boroughs. It wasn’t just a system of rails; it was a world of possibility.

Funny thing is, I now have a grandson with the same spark—except his passion lives on the streets and in the skies. At four, he stands on the curb like a miniature car sommelier, announcing make, model, and year before most adults could even identify the color. He studies maps like treasure charts, and when a plane crosses his field of vision, he looks up as if receiving a transmission from some aeronautical muse. He’s never been to San Diego—but when he finally visits, he’ll find it a transportation playground.

How Transportation Curiosity Shapes Learning

There’s something powerful about that kind of early fascination. People think it’s a hobby. But really, it’s a honing mechanism. When a child becomes obsessed with the mechanics of how things move—cars, buses, trains, planes—they’re not just naming machines. They’re building neural circuitry for attention, pattern recognition, systems thinking. They’re learning to follow a thread from point A to point B, and—without realizing it—training themselves for the long game: the ability to learn deeply, persistently, joyfully.

Transportation has always been more than conveyance. It’s a metaphor for growth. Anything that takes you from one place to another reminds you that there are other places, other ideas, other horizons waiting. Whether it’s a subway snaking under Manhattan or a plane banking over Mission Bay, movement awakens possibility.

The journey itself becomes a teacher.

A Few Stops of NYC Subway Trivia

The New York City subway—my first great teacher—remains a marvel. A few favorite bits of trivia:

  • The A train still holds the title for the longest uninterrupted ride in the system—over 32 miles from tip to sea.
  • Times Square is the busiest station, but the deepest is 191st Street in Washington Heights, sitting 180 feet below ground.
  • The 6 train still makes the elegant “City Hall loop,” passing through a hidden 1904 station closed since 1945.
  • And Fulton Center is one of the few places where more than nine different services intersect, creating a kind of transit symphony.

Maps, tracks, transfers—they were my first textbook.

A Balcony Classroom Awaits

Today, my vantage point is different. From a condo on 6th Avenue beside Balboa Park in San Diego, cars glide past in a steady parade. And every few minutes, a plane descends toward the airport, banking low enough to cast a brief shadow across the street. It’s a living exhibit in motion: automotive, aerial, and constant.

Someday, when my grandson finally visits San Diego, he’ll sit on that balcony for the first time. He’ll watch the cars flow by and begin identifying each one with the effortless precision he’s already mastered. He’ll look skyward and recognize the aircraft type, the engines, maybe even its probable origin and destination.

And from that mosaic of motion, he’ll continue his own journey—moving toward new ideas, new abilities, new horizons.

Because transportation, at its core, is a promise:

that where you begin is never where you have to end.

Sometimes all it takes is a subway map, a passing car, or the shadow of a jet to set a lifelong journey in motion.