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Posts tagged as “Malcolm Gladwell”

BOOK REVIEW: Malcolm Gladwell's 'David and Goliath' Champions the Underdog

Malcolm GladwellWhat if we lived in a world where the weak were really strong, and all of our disadvantages could easily become advantages?  In his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, best-selling writer Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers) tells us we’re already living in that kind of world. Even something as debilitating as dyslexia can be an ambitious man’s ticket to success.

“The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed,” says Gary Cohn, a man of humble origins whose bold decisions take him to the top of the U.S. financial industry. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without my dyslexia.”
Gladwell, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has sold a ton of books explaining seemingly counterintuitive and complex arguments about psychology and the social sciences to a mass audience. In David and Goliath his mission is to show us how our thinking about power, influence and success is often misguided and wrong.  “We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is,” Gladwell writes. “When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning?”
As always, Gladwell populates his pages with insights illustrated by one memorable character study and anecdote after another. He can be an efficient and persuasive storyteller, and in this book his cast of “Davids” include French Impressionist painters, undersized basketball players and civil-rights marchers; his “Goliaths” include the French art establishment, basketball traditionalists and segregationist police chiefs.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Film Critic Wesley Morris Joins Sports/Pop Culture Website Grantland

Wesley Morris in 2012 (YouTube)
Wesley Morris, the African-American film critic for the Boston Globe who won a Pulitzer Prize last year, is leaving for Grantland, the ESPN-affiliated sports/pop culture website that specializes in longform journalism, his Globe editor told staffers Thursday night.
“I just didn’t have a reason to say no any longer,” Morris told Journal-isms by telephone on Friday. Morris had already been writing for Grantland, and this presented an opportunity to write about film for the site full-time, he said. Moreover, “I can do my job from anywhere. That’s very appealing.”