Malcolm Gladwell Makes us Smarter
February 5th, 2006A great piece in the NYTBR on Malcolm Gladwell:
“Their success has given Gladwell an active, and extremely lucrative, second career as a public speaker. Much in demand, he is paid in the neighborhood of $40,000 per lecture. He’s also on the recommended reading list at many companies and business schools, and has spoken at West Point and the National Institutes of Health, among many other institutions. Last year, Time magazine named him one of its ‘100 most influential people.’ Fast Company magazine called Gladwell ‘a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud.’ Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter of multiple-thread narrative movies like ‘Traffic’ and ‘Syriana,’ is developing a movie based on ‘Blink.’ That book is also the subject of a clever sendup, ‘Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All,’ by the pseudonymous Noah Tall, which will be out this month.”
Two more items of note:
+ Gladwell has an essay in the current issue of the New Yorker about profiling and how it equates to pit bull banning.
+ There is another “anti-Blink” book out as well called Think: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t Be Made in the Blink of an Eye, which should be an interesting read.
I’m a big fan of Gladwell (which is odd because I don’t read many mainstream texts) because I believe that he makes us smarter. He dumbs down scholarly research so that joe shmoes like me can make sense of it and apply it our lives, which is, of course, why most social scientists do research.