Malcolm Gladwell Interview on Genius, Late Bloomers, Criminal Profiling, Intelligence Failure (2009)

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Malcolm T. Gladwell, CM (born September 3, 1963) is an English-Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has written five books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), a collection of his journalism, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013). The first four books were on The New York Times Best Seller list. 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. Gladwell has written five 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". The initial inspiration for his first book, The Tipping Point, which was published in 2000, came from the sudden drop of crime in New York City. 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." 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. After The Tipping Point, Gladwell published 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. 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. 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. 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?", in reference to the comparable family histories of many early corporate lawyers. In another example given 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." Gladwell's fourth book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, was published on October 20, 2009. What the Dog Saw bundles together Gladwell's favorite articles from The New Yorker since he joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1996. 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. 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. As of November 2008, the two books had sold a combined 4.5 million copies. Gladwell's fifth book, David and Goliath, was released in October 2013 and it examines the struggle of underdogs versus favorites. The book is partially inspired by an article Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker in 2009 entitled "How David Beats Goliath". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_gladwell