Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell (Photo: Marco Grob)

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Special Correspondent: Jason Zengerle
Malcolm Gladwell’s wildly popular theories about modern life have turned his name into an adjective — Gladwellian! But in his new book, David Beats Goliath, he seeks to undercut the cult of success, including his own, by explaining how little control we have over it.
Before his new book about incredibly successful people like Bill Gates and the Beatles and Mozart—the people whom he calls outliers—arrives in bookstores, and Gladwell is insisting that he doesn’t have anything at all in common with his subjects.
Gladwell is offering this modest self-assessment while seated at the kitchen table of the apartment he rents in a stately West Village townhouse. He is a well-known figure around his neighborhood, fond of tapping away on his laptop in coffee shops and cafés. His writer’s life is part anachronistic, part futuristic. A couple of miles north are Gladwell’s editors at The New Yorker, who don’t see him in the office very often—owing to his self-professed “aversion to midtown”—but who grant him a license to write about whatever he chooses and accommodate him with couriers to pick up his fact-checking material.
Not far from The New Yorker are the offices of Little, Brown—the publisher of Gladwell’s two best-selling books, The Tipping Point and Blink—which paid him a rumored $4 million for Outliers. Across the river in New Jersey is the Leigh Bureau, which fields Gladwell’s speaking requests and negotiates his stratospheric fees. (“He was by far the most expensive speaker we ever contracted,” says Charles Cohen, the president of a dental-supply company, whose trade group paid Gladwell $80,000 to address its annual meeting.
“There wasn’t one person afterwards who said he wasn’t worth the money.”) And yet, Gladwell maintains the pose of humble scrivener. He professes discomfort, even a bit of guilt, about the fame and fortune he has attained, and his new book, a more self-consciously serious work than his previous two, is, in some ways, an attempt to address these conflicted feelings.
Of course, no amount of self-deprecation can mask Gladwell’s phenomenal success. Since the 2000 publication of The Tipping Point, he has been less a journalist than, as Fast Company once deemed him, “a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud.” Business executives seek him out for his insights, adoring fans stop him on the street to shake his hand, and other writers strive to emulate the genre he essentially pioneered.
Gladwell’s modesty isn’t entirely a pose. As he’s the first to acknowledge, his writing largely consists of taking the work of academics and translating it in a way that makes it understandable—and entertaining—to a lay audience. Malcolm proclaims to be just a Canadian journalist. He has written five books. All five books were onThe New York Times Best Seller list.
Gladwell's mother is a Jamaican-born psychotherapist. His father is a mathematics professor from Kent, England. During his high school years, Gladwell was an outstanding middle-distance runner and won the 1,500 meter title at the 1978 Ontario High School Championships in Kingston, Ontario. In the spring of 1982, Gladwell interned with the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. He graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto in 1984.
Gladwell's grades were not good enough for graduate school (as Gladwell puts it, "college was not an... intellectually fruitful time for me"), so he decided to go into advertising. After being rejected by every advertising agency he applied to, he accepted a journalism position at The American Spectator and moved to Indiana. He subsequently wrote for Insight on the News, a conservative magazine owned by theRev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.
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 "it 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."
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 book The Tipping Point explains how the human subconscious interprets events or cues and how past experiences can lead people to make informed decisions very rapidly.
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; getting pulled out of airport security lines regularly. 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 fifth book, David and Goliath examines the struggle of underdogs versus favorites. The book is partially inspired by an article Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker entitled How David Beats Goliath.
(Contributing Correspondent: MG Media)

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Farewell to legend singer

  Mr. Bobby Womack, was a excellent singer whom back in the day made music that we all had that special woman/man, that special song to remember that relationship.  Mine was woman got to have it.    I wish I could have interviewed him . One question I would had asked was he possibly kin to my mother. Her family tree has a lot of Frank & Bobby Womack on it, she has a brother named Bob & Frank also.   R.I.P.  uncle 'Bob'

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

connections...


Jun 29 at 9:05 AM

Men Taking Responsilbilty


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