Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The

New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of The

Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog

Saw. Prior to joining The New Yorker, he was a

reporter at the Washington Post. Gladwell was

born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He

now lives in New York.

In 2001, Gladwell’s piece on Ron Popeil, “The

Pitchman,” was awarded the National Magazine

Award for Profiles. His 1996 article “The Tipping

Point” popularized the phrase and was expanded

into a book, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things

Can Make a Big Difference,” (2000). His second

book, “Blink,” was published in 2005, and his

third book, “Outliers,” was published in 2008. His

most recent book, “What the Dog Saw: And

Other

Malcolm Gladwell

Other Adventures,” is a collection of essays

from The New Yorker and is a New York Times

bestseller.

Gladwell came to The New Yorker from the

Washington Post, where he started as a staff

writer in 1987, first reporting for the business

section and then on the sciences. In 1993, he

became the newspaper’s New York City bureau

chief. He was a 1995 National Magazine Award

finalist for an article on mammography published

in The New Republic.

What the Dog Saw

What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?

Here is the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the “dog whisperer” who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and “hindsight bias” and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.

Outliers There is a story that is usually told about extremely successful people, a story that focuses on intelligence and ambition. Gladwell argues that the true story of success is very different, and that if we want to understand how some people thrive, we should spend more time looking around them-at such things as their family, their birthplace, or even their birth date. And in revealing that hidden logic, Gladwell presents a fascinating and provocative blueprint for making the most of human potential. In The Tipping Point Gladwell changed the way we understand the world. In Blink he changed the way we think about thinking. In OUTLIERS he transforms the way we understand success.

Blink

In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren’t as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?

In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of “blink”: the election of Warren Harding; “New Coke”; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren’t those who process the most.

The Tipping Point The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

David and Goliath We all know that underdogs can win–that’s what the David versus Goliath legend tells us, and we’ve seen it with our own eyes. Or have we? In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell, with his unparalleled ability to grasp connections others miss, uncovers the hidden rules that shape the balance between the weak and the mighty, the powerful and the dispossessed. Gladwell examines the battlefields of Northern Ireland and Vietnam, takes us into the minds of cancer researchers and civil rights leaders, and digs into the dynamics of successful and unsuccessful classrooms–all in an attempt to demonstrate how fundamentally we misunderstand the true meaning of advantages and disadvantages. When is a traumatic childhood a good thing? When does a disability leave someone better off?

Do you really want your child to go to the best school he or she can get into? Why are the childhoods of people at the top of one profession after another marked by deprivation and struggle? Drawing upon psychology, history, science, business, and politics, David and Goliath is a beautifully written book about the mighty leverage of the unconventional. Millions of readers have been waiting for the next Malcolm Gladwell book. That wait is over.

Malcolm Gladwell was an outstanding

middle-distance runner, wow.

According to Wikileaks he won the 1500

meter title at the 1978 Ontario High School

championships in Kingston, Ontario, in a duel

with eventual Canadian Open record holder

David Reid (the one on the left).

Malcolm Gladwell thinks a lot about running.

He has written about the topic for The New

Yorker, most recently analyzing the will that

drove marathon champion Alberto Salazar to

great heights. He attends marquee running

events to study the finest practitioners.

The effort it takes to run great distances

has always fascinated him.

Q. Why did he start running?

Malcolm Gladwell: My dad was a runner in

high school. Not a serious one, but a good

one. I started running for fun and did very

well in middle school—at a tiny school with

200 kids. It was basically the only sport I

could do. I grew up in rural Ontario, in this

little town outside of Waterloo—and

everyone else played hockey. I was born in

England, and we moved to Canada when I was

6, and believe it or not, when you’re 6 it’s

already too late to start playing hockey. So

I had to do something else.

The author got a vision of writing Outliners…

Malcolm Gladwell: The weird thing in running is how

people keep running faster and faster. Take the

great example of the four-minute mile. One guy

breaks it, then all of a sudden everyone breaks it.

And they break it in such a short period of time that

it can’t be because they were training harder. It’s

purely that it was a psychological barrier and

someone had to show them that they could do it. It’s

the same thing if you’re a runner and you’re around

older runners, you just get the sense of what’s

possible. You have no clue, if you’re by yourself, how

fast you can run. You have no sense of what your

limits are.

Q: How did the author get a vision of writing

Outliners?

MG: The weird thing in running is how people

keep running faster and faster. Take the

great example of the four-minute mile. One

guy breaks it, then all of a sudden everyone

breaks it. And they break it in such a short

period of time that it can’t be because they

were training harder. It’s purely that it was

a psychological barrier and someone had to

show them that they could do it. It’s the

same thing if you’re a runner and you’re

around older runners, you just get the sense

of what’s possible. You have no clue, if

you’re by yourself, how fast you can run.

You have no sense of what your limits are.

Q: In Outliers he talks about the “10,000-Hour

Rule”—that in order to excel in a given

discipline, you needed to practice it for at least

that long. Had he done that as a runner, where

would he be now?

MG: In high school I was a Canadian

champion, but I don’t think that was

sustainable. That was clear to me even then,

when I used to run against Dave Reid, who

was ultimately a 3:37 1500-meter runner,

13:36 5-K guy. I could’ve been a decent club

runner. If I’d killed myself, I could’ve

gotten to 3:50. And maybe run a 1:52 800.

Q:One concept he has written about is “slack”:

the gap between what is possible under

conditions of absolute effort and actual

performance. When we consider the possibility

of a two-hour marathon, is there still slack that

can be made up even at running’s extremes?

MG: In every activity there is a right side to

the curve, where you could’ve done better

but you didn’t know that you could’ve done

better. You thought you were at your limit

but you weren’t. So what we’re constantly

doing is narrowing the distance of what we

think we’re capable of and what we’re

actually capable of. You can’t do that

forever. There is a point where you can’t go

any faster. Over time the returns start to

get smaller and smaller. But I don’t know if

that’s true with world records—Usain Bolt

may be an exception when it comes to the

sprints.

With the two-hour marathon, I don’t know

what that last four-minute increment

represents. If you run a two-hour marathon,

that’s a 28-minute 10-K pace. I mean, it’s

just mind-boggling to think that any human

being could do that. I can’t even fathom what

that means. I wouldn’t be surprised if

someone did it one day. I wouldn’t be

surprised if someone didn’t.

“If my books appear oversimplified, then you shouldn’t

read them.” Malcolm Gladwell’s invitation to avoid reading his

books, made recently in an interview in The Guardian, has a

certain charm. He conveys the impression of a writer who,

aware of critics who accuse him of cherry-picking the results of

complex academic research to support simple-minded stories,

defiantly insists on his right to do something different—to write

in what he has described, in a riposte to one of his critics, as

“the genre of what might be called ‘intellectual adventure

stories.’ ” If his books do not display the intellectual rigor that is

supposed to attach to academic writings, Gladwell seems to be

suggesting, it is because they serve a different purpose.

Interweaving academic research with real-life stories, Gladwell

aims—as he puts in—“to get people to look at the world a little

differently.” Using the power of a storyteller, he is bringing “the

amazing worlds of psychology and sociology to a broader

audience,” an exercise that is capable of producing nothing less

than a shift in the worldview of his readers.

No one can doubt Gladwell’s ability to reach large

audiences. The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers were all

tremendous best-sellers, leading some to conclude that Gladwell

has invented a new genre of popular writing. In David and

Goliath, Gladwell again applies the formula that has been so

successful in the past. Deploying a mixture of affecting

narratives of struggle against the odds with carefully chosen

academic papers, he contends that the powerless are more

powerful than those who appear to wield much of the power in

the world. To many, this may appear counterintuitive, he

suggests; but by marshaling a variety of historical examples

ranging from the American struggle for civil rights to the

Troubles in Northern Ireland, leavened with homely tales of the

trials and triumphs of basketball teams and fortified with forays

into sociology and psychology, Gladwell thinks that he can

persuade the reader to accept the difficult truth that the weak are

not as weak as the reader imagines. If they play their cards right,

they can prevail against the strong. ……Read more

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115467/malcolm-gladwells-david-and-goliath-fairy-tales