Pbs Arthur Quotes

Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card." [Arthur]

When Ben arrived, he was having a bad hair day. He looked like Francine from those Arthur cartoons on PBS, and yet I was still very attracted to him.

One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves. I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford.... I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary.

Take Brooksley Born, former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), who waged an unsuccessful campaign to regulate the multitrillion-dollar derivatives market. Soon after the Clinton administration asked her to take the reins of the CFTC, a regulatory backwater, she became aware of the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market, a rapidly expanding and opaque market, which she attempted to regulate. According to a PBS Frontline special: "Her attempts to regulate derivatives ran into fierce resistance from then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who prevailed upon Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation." Put more directly by New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien, "they ... shut her up and shut her down." Mind you, Born was no dummy. She was the first female president of the Stanford Law Review, the first woman to finish at the top of the class, and an expert in commodities and futures. But because a trio of people who were literally en-titled decided they knew what was best for the market, they dismissed her call for regulation, a dismissal that triggered the financial collapse of 2008. To be fair to Greenspan et al., their resistance was not surprising. According to psychologists Hillel Einhorn and Robin Hogarth, "we [as human beings] are prone to search only for confirming evidence, and ignore disconfirming evidence." In the case of Born, it was the '90s, the markets were doing well, and the country was prospering; it's easy to see why the powerful troika rejected her disconfirming views. Throw in the fact that the disconcerting evidence was coming from a "disconfirming" person (i.e., a woman), and they were even more likely to disregard the data. In the aftermath, Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the SEC, said, "If she just would have gotten to know us... maybe it would have gone a different way."12 Born quotes Michael Greenberg, the director of the CFTC under her, as saying, "They say you weren't a team player, but I never saw them issue you a uniform." We like ideas and people that fit into our world-view, but there is tremendous value in finding room for those that don't. According to Paul Carlile and Clayton Christensen, "It is only when an anomaly is identified—an outcome for which a theory can't account that an opportunity to improve theory occurs."13 One of the ways you'll know you are coming up against an anomaly is if you find yourself annoyed, defensive, even dismissive, of a person, or his idea.