Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell at PopTech!, October 2008
Born	Malcolm T. Gladwell September 3, 1963 (1963-09-03) (age 47) Fareham, Hampshire, United Kingdom
Occupation	Non-fiction writer, journalist
Nationality	Canadian
Period	1987–present
Notable work(s)	The Tipping Point (2000) Blink (2005) Outliers (2008) What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009)

Malcolm Gladwell (born September 3, 1963) is a writer for The New Yorker and best-selling author^[1] based in New York City. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He is best known for his books The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008), and What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009).

Contents 1 Early life 2 Education 3 Career 4 Works 5 Honors 6 Criticism 7 Bibliography 8 See also 9 References 10 External links

Early life

Gladwell's British father, Graham M. Gladwell, was a civil engineering professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada; his mother, Joyce E. (née Nation), is a Jamaican-born psychotherapist.^[2] Gladwell was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England, but when he was six his family moved to Elmira, Ontario, Canada.^[3] According to research done by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard University, in 2010 for the PBS series Faces of America, Gladwell's family tree includes ancestors of West Indian, English, Irish and Scottish heritage. One of his European ancestors arrived in Jamaica in the mid-17th century and seeded a long line of privileged mixed-race Jamaicans, the Fords. On his father's side, his great-great grandparents, Thomas Adams and Jane Wilson, left England and Ireland to take part in the Castlemaine gold rush in Victoria, Australia in the 1850s.^[2]

Gladwell has said that his mother, who published a book titled Brown Face, Big Master in 1969, is his role model as a writer.^[4].

Education

He graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto's Trinity College in 1984.^[5] During his high school years, Gladwell was an outstanding middle-distance runner and won the 1500 meter Midget Boys title at the 1978 Ontario High School championships in Kingston, Ontario, in a duel with eventual Canadian Open record holder David Reid.^[6] In the summer of 1982, Gladwell interned with the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.^[7]

Career

Gladwell began his career at The American Spectator, a conservative monthly.^[8] He subsequently wrote for Insight on the News, a conservative magazine owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, before joining The Washington Post as a business writer in 1987.^[9] He later served as a science writer and as New York bureau chief for the Post before leaving the paper in 1996. He is currently a staff writer for The New Yorker. His books—The Tipping Point (2000) and Blink (2005)—were international bestsellers. Both works were substantially serialized in The New Yorker. Gladwell received a US$1 million advance for The Tipping Point, which went on to sell over two million copies in the United States.^[10][11] Blink sold equally well.^[10][12] His third book, Outliers: The Story of Success, was released November 18, 2008.^[13] His latest book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, was published on October 20, 2009. What the Dog Saw bundles together his favorite articles from The New Yorker since he joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1996.^[14]

Works

Gladwell's first work, The Tipping Point, discusses the potentially massive implications of small-scale social events, while his second book, Blink, explains how the human subconscious interprets events or cues and how past experiences allow people to make informed decisions very rapidly. Outliers examines how a person's environment, in conjunction with personal drive and motivation, affects his or her possibility and opportunity for success. Gladwell stated,

"The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances." — Malcolm Gladwell^[15]

Honors

In 2005, Time named Malcolm Gladwell one of its 100 most influential people.^[16] In 2007, he received the American Sociological Association's first Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues.^[17] Also in 2007, the University of Waterloo awarded him an honorary degree, Doctor of Letters.^[18][19]

Criticism

Gladwell's books and articles often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences and make frequent and extended use of academic work, particularly in the areas of psychology, and social psychology. Criticism of Gladwell tends to focus on lack of careful rigor, specifically falling prey to a variety of logical fallacies and cognitive biases. Critics charge that his sampling methods have resulted in hasty generalizations and selection biases, as well as a tendency to imply causation between events where only correlation exists.^[20][21][22] One review of Outliers accuses Gladwell of "racist pseudoscience" due to "using his individual case studies as a means to jump to sweeping generalizations on race and class status"^[23], while another review in The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, "impervious to all forms of critical thinking".^[24] Gladwell has also received much criticism for his use of anecdotal evidence and general lack of rigor in his approach.^[25][26]

Maureen Tkacik and Steven Pinker^[27][28] have challenged the integrity of Gladwell's approach. Pinker sums up his take on Gladwell as, "a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning", while accusing Gladwell of, "cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies," in his book Outliers. Referencing a Gladwell reporting mistake Pinker criticizes his lack of expertise:^[27]

“

I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

”

Writers in The Independent have accused Gladwell of posing "obvious" insights.^[29]

The Register has accused Gladwell of making arguments by weak analogy and commented that Gladwell has an "aversion for fact", adding that, "Gladwell has made a career out of handing simple, vacuous truths to people and dressing them up with flowery language and an impressionistic take on the scientific method." An article by Gladwell inaccurately referring to Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds as the "Norwegian hacker Linus Torvald (sic)" was referred to by the group as a typical example of alleged sloppy writing.^[30]

Bibliography

• The Tipping Point (2000)
• Blink (2005)
• Outliers (2008)
• What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009)

See also

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Stephen J. Dubner
• Chris Anderson

References

External links

• Personal website
• Biography and list of articles at The New Yorker
• Book Review in the New York Times
• Book Review in The Nation
• Malcolm Gladwell Interview May 2010

Malcolm Gladwell Books The Tipping Point (2000) · Blink (2005) · Outliers (2008)  · What the Dog Saw (2009)

Persondata
Name	Gladwell, Malcolm
Alternative names
Short description	Journalist and science writer
Date of birth	September 1, 1963
Place of birth	United Kingdom
Date of death
Place of death