Malcolm Gladwell facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Malcolm Gladwell
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Gladwell in 2008
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Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
3 September 1963 Fareham, England
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| Nationality | Canadian |
| Education | University of Toronto (BA) |
| Occupation | Non-fiction writer, journalist, public speaker |
| Years active | 1987–present |
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Notable work
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| Relatives | Colin Powell (distant cousin) |
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell CM (born 3 September 1963) is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has published seven 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; David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013); Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know (2019) and The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (2021). His first five books were on The New York Times Best Seller list. He is also the host of the podcast Revisionist History and co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries.
Gladwell's writings often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences, such as sociology and psychology, and make frequent and extended use of academic work. Gladwell was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2011.
Contents
Early life and education
Gladwell was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England. His mother Joyce (née Nation) Gladwell, is a Jamaican psychotherapist. His father, Graham Gladwell, was a mathematics professor from Kent, England. When he was six his family moved from Southampton to the Mennonite community of Elmira, Ontario, Canada. He has two brothers. Throughout his childhood, Malcolm lived in rural Ontario Mennonite country, where he attended a Mennonite church. Research done by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed that one of Gladwell's maternal ancestors was a Jamaican free woman of colour (mixed black and white) who was a slaveowner. His great-great-great-grandmother was of Igbo ethnicity from Nigeria, West Africa. In the epilogue of his 2008 book Outliers he describes many lucky circumstances that came to his family over the course of several generations, contributing to his path towards success. Gladwell has said that his mother is his role model as a writer.
Gladwell's father noted that Malcolm was an unusually single-minded and ambitious boy. When Malcolm was 11, his father, who was a professor 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. The University of Waterloo granted Gladwell an honorary doctorate in 2007. In the spring of 1982, Gladwell interned with the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in history from Trinity College of the University of Toronto, in 1984.
Career
Gladwell's grades were not high enough for graduate school, so he decided to pursue advertising as a career. After being rejected by every advertising agency he applied to, he accepted a journalism position at conservative magazine The American Spectator and moved to Indiana. He subsequently wrote for Insight on the News, a conservative magazine owned by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. In 1987, Gladwell began covering business and science for The Washington Post, where he worked until 1996. 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."
When Gladwell started at The New Yorker in 1996, he wanted to "mine current academic research for insights, theories, direction, or inspiration". 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: "[I]t 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."
Gladwell gained popularity with two New Yorker articles, both written in 1996: "The Tipping Point" and "The Coolhunt". These two pieces would become the basis for Gladwell's first book, The Tipping Point, for which he received a $1 million advance. He continues to write for The New Yorker. Gladwell also served as a contributing editor for Grantland, a sports journalism website founded by former ESPN columnist Bill Simmons.
In a July 2002 article in The New Yorker, Gladwell introduced the concept of the "talent myth" that companies and organizations, in his view, incorrectly follow. This work examines different managerial and administrative techniques that companies, both winners and losers, have used. He states that the misconception seems to be that management and executives are all too ready to classify employees without ample performance records and thus make hasty decisions. Many companies believe in disproportionately rewarding "stars" over other employees with bonuses and promotions. However, with the quick rise of inexperienced workers with little in-depth performance review, promotions are often incorrectly made, putting employees into positions they should not have and keeping other, more experienced employees from rising. He also points out that under this system, narcissistic personality types are more likely to climb the ladder, since they are more likely to take more credit for achievements and take less blame for failure. He states both that narcissists make the worst managers and that the system of rewarding "stars" eventually worsens a company's position. Gladwell states that the most successful long-term companies are those who reward experience above all else and require greater time for promotions.
Works
With the release of The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War in April 2021, Gladwell has had seven books published. 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 Tipping Point
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 epidemiologists have a "strikingly different way of looking at the world". The term "tipping point" comes from the moment in an epidemic when the virus reaches critical mass and begins to spread at a much higher rate.
Gladwell's theories of crime were heavily influenced by the "broken windows theory" of policing, and Gladwell is credited for packaging and popularizing the theory in a way that was implementable in New York City. Gladwell's theoretical implementation bears a striking resemblance to the "stop-and-frisk" policies of the NYPD. However, in the decade and a half since its publication, The Tipping Point and Gladwell have both come under fire for the tenuous link between "broken windows" and New York City's drop in violent crime. During a 2013 interview with BBC journalist Jon Ronson for The Culture Show, Gladwell admitted that he was "too in love with the broken-windows notion". He went on to say that he was "so enamored by the metaphorical simplicity of that idea that I overstated its importance".
Blink
After The Tipping Point, Gladwell published Blink in 2005. The book explains how the human unconscious interprets events or cues as well as how past experiences can lead people to make informed decisions very rapidly. Gladwell uses 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 once he allowed his hair to get longer, he started to get speeding tickets all the time, an oddity considering that he had never gotten one before and that he started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. .....
Gladwell's The Tipping Point (2000) and Blink (2005) were international bestsellers. The Tipping Point sold more than 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.
Outliers
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?", referring to the fact that "a surprising number of the most powerful and successful corporate lawyers in New York City have almost the exact same biography". 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. "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."
What the Dog Saw
Gladwell's fourth book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, was published in 2009. What the Dog Saw bundles together Gladwell's favourites of his 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.
David and Goliath
Gladwell's fifth book, David and Goliath, was released in October 2013, and examines the struggle of underdogs versus favourites. The book is partially inspired by an article Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker in 2009 entitled "How David Beats Goliath". The book was a bestseller but received mixed reviews.
Talking to Strangers
Gladwell's sixth book, Talking to Strangers, was released September 2019. ..... Gladwell explained what inspired him to write the book as being "struck by how many high profile cases in the news were about the same thing—strangers misunderstanding each other." It challenges the assumptions we are programmed to make when encountering strangers, and the potentially dangerous consequences of misreading people we do not know.
The Bomber Mafia
Gladwell's seventh book, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, was released in April 2021. The book weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.
Podcast
Gladwell is host of the podcast Revisionist History, initially produced through Panoply Media and now through Gladwell's own podcast company. It began in 2016 and has aired seven 10-episode seasons. Each episode begins with an inquiry about a person, event, or idea, and proceeds to question the received wisdom about the subject. Gladwell was recruited to create a podcast by Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of The Slate Group, which also includes the podcast network Panoply Media. In September 2018, Gladwell announced he was co-founding a podcast company, later named Pushkin Industries, with Weisberg. About this decision, Gladwell told the Los Angeles Times: "There is a certain kind of whimsy and emotionality that can only be captured on audio."
He also has a music podcast with Bruce Headlam and Rick Rubin, titled Broken Record where they interview musicians. It has two seasons, 2018–2019 and 2020 with a total of 49 episodes.
Personal life
Gladwell is a Christian. His family attended Above Bar Church in Southampton, UK, and later Gale Presbyterian in Elmira when they moved to Canada. His parents and siblings are part of the Mennonite community in Southwestern Ontario. Gladwell wandered away from his Christian roots when he moved to New York, only to rediscover his faith during the writing of David and Goliath and his encounter with Wilma Derksen regarding the death of her child.
Gladwell was a national class runner and an Ontario High School (Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations – OFSAA) champion. He was among Canada's fastest teenagers at 1500 metres, running 4:14 at the age of 13 and 4:05 when aged 14. At university, Gladwell ran 1500 metres in 3:55. In 2014, at the age of 51, he ran a 4:54 at the Fifth Avenue Mile. At 57 he ran a 5:15 mile.
He had his first child, a daughter, in 2022.
Awards and honours
In 2005, Time named Gladwell one of its 100 most influential people.
In 2007, he received the American Sociological Association's first Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues. The same year, he received an honorary degree from the University of Waterloo.
In 2011, he was named a Member of the Order of Canada, the second highest honour for merit in the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada.
He has received honorary degrees from the University of Waterloo (2007) and the University of Toronto (2011).
See also
In Spanish: Malcolm Gladwell para niños
