| Malcolm Gladwell | |
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Gladwell at PopTech!, October 2008 |
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| Born | Malcolm T. Gladwell September 3, 1963 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, CM (born September 3, 1963) is a Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker.[1] He is currently based in New York City and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has written four books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), and What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), a collection of his journalism. All four books were New York Times Bestsellers.
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 sociology, psychology, and social psychology. Gladwell was appointed to the Order of Canada on June 30, 2011.[2]
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Gladwell was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England to Joyce, Jamaican-born psychotherapist and Graham Gladwell, a British mathematics professor.[3][4] Gladwell has said that his mother is his role model as a writer.[5] When he was six his family moved to Elmira, Ontario, Canada.[3]
Gladwell’s father noted that Malcolm was an unusually single-minded and ambitious boy.[6] When Malcolm was 11, his father, who was a professor[7] of mathematics and engineering at the University of Waterloo, allowed him to wander around the offices at his university, which stoked the boy's interest in reading and libraries.[8] During his high school years, Gladwell was an outstanding middle-distance runner and won the 1500 meter title at the 1978 Ontario High School championships in Kingston, Ontario.[9] In the spring of 1982, Gladwell interned with the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.[10] He graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto's Trinity College in 1984.[11]
Gladwell’s grades weren’t good enough for graduate school (as Gladwell puts it, “college was not an... intellectually fruitful time for me”), so he decided to go into advertising.[8][12] After being rejected by every advertising agency he applied to, he accepted a journalism position at The American Spectator and moved to Indiana.[13] He subsequently wrote for Insight on the News, a conservative magazine owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.[14] In 1987, Gladwell began covering business and science for The Washington Post, where he worked until 1996.[15] In a personal elucidation of the 10,000 hour rule he popularized in Outliers, Gladwell notes, "I was a basket case at the beginning, and I felt like an expert at the end. It took 10 years — exactly that long."[8]
When he started at The New Yorker in 1996 he wanted to "mine current academic research for insights, theories, direction, or inspiration."[6] His first assignment was to write a piece about fashion. Instead of writing about high-class fashion, Gladwell opted to write a piece about a man who manufactured T-shirts, saying “it was much more interesting to write a piece about someone who made a T-shirt for $8 than it was to write about a dress that costs $100,000. I mean, you or I could make a dress for $100,000, but to make a T-shirt for $8 -- that’s much tougher.”[6] Gladwell gained popularity with two New Yorker articles, both written in 1996: "The Tipping Point"[16] and "The Coolhunt"[17][18] These two pieces would become the basis for Gladwell's first book, The Tipping Point, for which he received a $1 million advance.[12][19] He continues to write for The New Yorker. He also serves as a contributing editor for Grantland, a sports journalism website founded by ESPN's Bill Simmons.
Gladwell has written four books. When asked for the process behind his writing, he said "I have two parallel things I'm interested in. One is, I'm interested in collecting interesting stories, and the other is I'm interested in collecting interesting research. What I'm looking for is cases where they overlap."[20] The initial inspiration for his first book, The Tipping Point, came from the sudden drop of crime in New York City.[21] He wanted the book to have a broader appeal than just crime, however, and sought to explain similar phenomena through the lens of epidemiology. While Gladwell was a reporter for The Washington Post, he covered the AIDS epidemic. He began to take note of "how strange epidemics were," saying that epidemiologists have a "strikingly different way of looking at the world."[22] The word "tipping point" comes from the moment in an epidemic when the virus reaches critical mass and begins to spread at a much higher rate.[22]
After the success of The Tipping Point, Gladwell wrote Blink in 2005. The book explains how the human subconscious interprets events or cues and how past experiences can lead people to make informed decisions very rapidly, using examples like the Getty kouros and psychologist John Gottman's research on the likelihood of divorce in married couples. Gladwell’s hair was the inspiration for Blink.[23] He stated that he started to get speeding tickets all the time, an oddity considering that he had never got one before, and that he started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention.[24] In a particular incident, he was accosted by three police officers while walking in downtown Manhattan, because his curly hair matched the profile of a rapist, despite the fact that the suspect looked nothing like him otherwise.[25]
Gladwell’s third book, Outliers, published in 2008, examines how a person's environment, in conjunction with personal drive and motivation, affects his or her possibility and opportunity for success. Gladwell’s original question revolved around lawyers: "We take it for granted that there’s this guy in New York who’s the corporate lawyer, right? I just was curious: Why is it all the same guy?"[8] In another example present in the book, Gladwell noticed that people ascribe Bill Gates’s success to being "really smart" or "really ambitious." He noted that he knew a lot of people who are really smart and really ambitious, but not worth 60 billion dollars. "It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude--and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations."[26]
Gladwell's fourth book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, was published on October 20, 2009.[27] What the Dog Saw bundles together his favorite articles from The New Yorker since he joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1996.[28] The stories share a common theme, namely that Gladwell tries to show us the world through the eyes of others, even if that other happens to be a dog.[29][30]
Gladwell's books—The Tipping Point (2000) and Blink (2005), were international bestsellers. The Tipping Point sold over two million copies in the United States. Blink sold equally well.[12][31]
The Tipping Point was named as one of the best books of the decade by Amazon.com customers, The Onion A.V. Club, The Guardian, and The Times.[32][33][34][35] It was also Barnes and Nobles’s 5th bestselling nonfiction book of the decade.[36] Blink was named to Fast Company’s list of the best business books of 2005.[37] It was also #5 on Amazon users’ favorite books of 2005, named to Christian Science Monitor’s best nonfiction books of 2005, and in the top 50 of Amazon users’ favorite books of the decade.[38][32][39] Outliers was a #1 New York Times Bestseller for 11 straight weeks, and was Time’s #10 nonfiction book of 2008, as well as named to The San Francisco Chronicle’s list of the 50 best nonfiction books of 2008.[40][41][42]
Critical appraisal of Gladwell's work has been mixed. Most praise his gift for compelling writing and clarity of expression while many disagree with his conclusions or question the validity of his methods.
Fortune described The Tipping Point as “a fascinating book that makes you see the world in a different way.”[43][44] The Daily Telegraph called it “a wonderfully offbeat study of that little-understood phenomenon, the social epidemic.”[45] Reviewing Blink, the Baltimore Sun dubbed Gladwell “the most original American [sic] journalist since the young Tom Wolfe.”[46] Farhad Manjoo at Salon described the book as “a real pleasure. As in the best of Gladwell's work, Blink brims with surprising insights about our world and ourselves.”[47] The Economist called Outliers “a compelling read with an important message.”[48] David Leonhardt wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “In the vast world of nonfiction writing, Malcolm Gladwell is as close to a singular talent as exists today” and that Outliers “leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward.”[49] Ian Sample wrote in the Guardian: “Brought together, the pieces form a dazzling record of Gladwell's art. There is depth to his research and clarity in his arguments, but it is the breadth of subjects he applies himself to that is truly impressive.”[50][51]
Criticism of Gladwell tends to focus on the fact that he is a journalist and not an academic, and as a result his work does not meet the standard of academic writing. Critics charge that he sometimes stretches his colorful stories to make them apply to business issues.[52] The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, "impervious to all forms of critical thinking".[53] Gladwell has also received criticism for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions.[54] Maureen Tkacik and Steven Pinker have challenged the integrity of Gladwell's approach.[55][56] Even while praising Gladwell's attractive writing style and content, 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: "I will call this the Igon Value [sic] 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."[55] A writer in The Independent accused Gladwell of posing "obvious" insights.[57] 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."[58] His approach is spoofed in "The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator". [59]
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