Maraú Península: The Remarkable Lives of Prodigies

From The New Yorker’s archive: profiles of the uniquely gifted.
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Prodigies

The prodigy is an eternal source of fascination, and the course of a prodigy’s talent and life has been the stuff of extraordinary profiles in The New Yorker over the years. In “Yuja Wang and the Art of Performance,” Janet Malcolm reports on the world-renowned pianist and delves into her early mastery of the instrument. In “How to Raise a Prodigy,” Adam Gopnik explores the source of exceptional precocity, asking whether extraordinary talent is, well, nature or nurture. In “Nerd Camp,” Burkhard Bilger visits the Center for Talented Youth and delves into the lives of gifted children. In “The Wall Dancer,” Nick Paumgarten portrays a young female rock climber, one of the best of all time in her terrifying sport. Finally, in “Hou Yifan and the Wait for Chess’s First Woman World Champion,” Louisa Thomas writes about the dazzling skills of a young girl who became a Grandmaster at fourteen and now navigates the male-dominated world of her game. Of Hou’s early lessons, Thomas writes, her teacher “sat Hou at a board and had her face his top pupils, all boys. They had studied chess theory; they knew how to checkmate with only, say, a bishop and a knight. Hou did not know endgames, but she beat most of them anyway. She was seven years old.”

—David Remnick