Malcolm Gladwell

- "Gladwell is pale skinned but famously Afro-haired."—Tim Adams, The Guardian, November 16, 2008.

- "Gladwell, who is slight of build, with an exuberance of hair and an oddly diffident manner..." Jerry Adler, Newsweek, November 15, 2008.

- "Slender, with elfin cheekbones and a distinctive bloom of spirally brown hair, Gladwell is one of those clever people who actually looks clever."— Lev Grossman, Time Magazine, November 13, 2008.

- "Gladwell was a soft-spoken guy with a cafe-au-lait complexion and a halo of frizzy hair."— Mary Ann Gwinn, The Seattle Times, November 13, 2008.

- "Gladwell is a poufy-haired showman with a knack for explaining anything to everybody, from dog whispering and fads to disposable diapers and snap judgments."—Gregory Kirschling, Entertainment Weekly, November 12, 2008.

- "Beneath the crazy hair, the slobby-chic clothes, and the buzzword-filled vocabulary is an old-fashioned guy who grew up among Mennonites in rural Ontario, didn’t have a TV until he was 23, and still prefers to do most of his research at the NYU library."—Jason Zengerle, New York Magazine, November 9, 2008.  read more »

Remember when Nicholas Carr asked in The Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (Sure you don't: That was way back in July/August and we've all been using Google too much.)

If the planet-devouring search engine is bringing about the dumbening of mankind, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell might just be the last intelligent man, according to New York's profile of him by Jason Zengerle.

Writes Mr. Zengerle in this week's Geek Pop Star:

Beneath the crazy hair, the slobby-chic clothes, and the buzzword-filled vocabulary is an old-fashioned guy who grew up among Mennonites in rural Ontario, didn’t have a TV until he was 23, and still prefers to do most of his research at the NYU library.  read more »

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What better place to track the habits of tastemakers and trendsetters than the West Village, a neighborhood filled with lithe fashionistas and their imitators, big-spending bankers, all sorts of retail, and quaint real estate that is well beyond the price range of average folks.

It's only natural then that a New Yorker scribe who catapulted to fame with a book on the dynamics of trends would choose to live there. And after the book spends 28 weeks on the best-seller lists and you start making the rounds of the business/marketing conference circuit, doing about 25 speaking engagements a year at $40,000 a pop, like Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell, then it's only fitting that you'd buy a second place in the West Village.  read more »

Kudos to Jeff Bercovici from Portfolio's Mixed Media blog for noticing this amusing correction from The New Yorker's end of the year fiction issue, regarding Malcolm Gladwell's Dec. 17 piece "None of the Above":

CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, "None of the Above," Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their 1994 book "The Bell Curve," proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be "sequestered in a 'high-tech' version of an Indian reservation." In fact, Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such "custodialism" and recommended that steps be taken to avert it. We regret the error.

For more on The New Yorker's history with corrections, click here and scroll about halfway down to the second item. 

 

Readers who found Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink stronger on anecdote than analysis will welcome this incisive study by a psychologist whose research provided one of the bases for Mr. Gladwell’s best seller.  read more »

On the red-eye back from California, where I was researched San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's super-secret presidential bid, I came across a passage about Rudy Giuliani in the book Santa stuffed in my stocking, The Tipping Point.

The book discusses how ideas and trends become popular and uses as one example the dramatic crime reduction in New York City. The book's author, Malcolm Gladwell, talks about Rudy Giulaini and the crime fighting strategy of The Broken Windows Theory, which said the first step to restoring safety and social disorder is to physically clean up the neighborhood and tackle quality of life issues, because that'll send a signal to others that law and order are in tact.

Author Malcolm Gladwell writes:

In the 1960s, liberals made a similar kind of argument, but when they talked about the importance of environment they were talking about the importance of environment they were talking about the importance of fundamental social factors: crime, they said, was the result of social injustice, of structural economic inequities, of unemployment, of racism, of decades of institutional and social neglect, so that if you wanted to stop crime you had to undertake some fairly heroic steps. But the Power of Context says that what really mattes is little things. The Power of Context says that the showdown on the subway between Bernie Goetz and those four youths had very little to do, in the end, with the tangled psychological pathology of Goetz, and very little as well to do with the background and poverty of the four youths who accosted him, and everything to do with the message sent by the graffiti on the walls and the disorder at the turnstiles...Giuliani and Bratton - far from being conservatives, as they are commonly identified - actually represent on the question of crime the most extreme liberal position imaginable, a position so extreme the it is almost impossible to accept. How can it be that what was going on n Bernie Goetz's head doesn't matter?

-- Azi Paybarah

Before getting into what’s wrong with Malcolm Gladwell, it helps to talk about what’s been right  read more »

Yesterday, New Yorker technical-generalist Malcolm Gladwell used his blog to launch a full attack on the NCAA, describing the hypocrisy and draconian tactics of the college-sports regulatory body.

Gladwell is nothing if not a quick study. A week before, in writing about former Oklahoma Sooners quarterback Rhett Bomar, he failed to mention the NCAA at all.

Instead, he held up Bomar--who got paid by a booster for a no-show job--as an example of America's dangerous drift toward zero-tolerance disciplinary policies in the schools. "[M]aking a fetish of personal accountability conveniently removes the need for institutional accountability," Gladwell wrote, after describing how Oklahoma was "touchy about its quarterback being 'overpaid.'"

In fact, as anyone reared in a four-down football country knows, what Oklahoma was being touchy about was the violation of the NCAA's rules against pay-for-play, which could have left the school open to serious sanctions. Knowing that the national authorities were likely to suspend Bomar (and lineman J.D. Quinn, who was kicked off for the same infraction, though Gladwell didn't mention it), the university acted first, so as to bring its program back into compliance.

Gladwell's thin-slice analysis of Oklahoma's action addressed none of this context. Instead, after accusing Oklahoma in print of irrationally scapegoating Bomar, he returned to the subject on his blog a few days later, saying he was offering "a few more thoughts" on the case that he had "mentioned, in passing."

In passing? Bomar was the lone specific example of modern zero tolerance in Gladwell's piece. Two of its six paragraphs were devoted to the Oklahoma football case--an early recap, followed by a separate callback.

And what were the few more thoughts Gladwell had come up with after publishing? "Oklahama, under the rules, had to do what they did. By being 'overpaid' Bomar violated the NCAA's rules on amateurism. His infraction is the kind of thing that gets an entire football program put on probation."

Compare the print version: "Even in Oklahoma, people seemed to think that kicking someone off a football team for having cut a few corners on his job made perfect sense."

Gladwell, on the blog, then goes on to raise the question, "[I]sn't this whole controversy more than a little nuts?"

An alternative follow-up question: Doesn't Malcolm Gladwell owe somebody a correction?

If you can get past the teacherly, narcissistic tone, read the ongoing debate between Malcolm Gladwell and the authors of Freakonomics about why the crime rate dropped in the 1990's in major cities (or in New York--that's part of the debate actually).

To get you started: Gladwell buys James Q. Wilson and George Kelling's "broken windows" theory (popularized in the Giuliani administration and, to an extent, by some of Gladwell's early writing at the New Yorker); the Freakonomics guys think Roe v. Wade had a lot to do with it. (Fewer unwanted children = fewer criminals? Something like that.)

Gladwell starts it off here, and gets his response here. And you know, then they keep going back and forth all over the interwebs; find the rest yourselves.

(Via Matrix.)

- Tom McGeveran

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D.  read more »

When supermodel Gisele Bündchen returns from a six-month vacation in her native Brazil, there's a t  read more »

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference , by Malcolm Gladwell.  read more »