Gladwell: The best of 23 per cent+ Jamaican

MALCOLM GLADWELL has an ability to examine simple trends and spin them together into compelling, explanatory narratives; like in his third book Outliers, which explains how talent and circumstances combine more or less exactly to produce successes.


Sure Gladwell has his critics, including other journalists. But then there's likely a lot more hacks willing to admit a fair amount of respect, mixed with envy and a publishing industry constantly on the look for the next 'Gladwellian' author.

I had my brief fan moment last year, walking past a restaurant in NYC where the writer sat watching the pavement traffic, maybe pondering his next article, but it didn't seem right to interrupt. A few months later I tried to get an interview and with one angle to pitch: that his mother was born in Jamaica and so... but I did get a nice reply from his assistant.

"I'm interested in slightly dumb, obvious questions, right," Gladwell told the Guardian newspaper this week. "I'm not interested in really deeply weird, obscure things. My tastes are not idiosyncratic. What I'm interested in turns out by happy circumstance to be what lots of people are interested in."

His fourth book, What the Dog Saw, a collection of 13 years' writing for the New Yorker magazine has just been published.

Gladwell.com