How To Get Hired

in Washington D.C., the National Symphony Orchestra hired Sylvia Alimena to play the French horn. Would she have been hired before the advent of screens? Of course not. the French horn - like the trombone - is a "male" instrument. More to the point, Alimena is tiny. She's five feet tall. In truth, that's an irrelevant fact. As another prominent horn player says, "Sylvia can blow a house down." But if you were to look at her, you would not be able to hear that power, because what you saw would so contradict what you heard. There is only one way to make a proper snap judgment of Sylvia Alemina, and that's from behind a screen. - Malcolm Gladwell