Malcolm Gladwell's Blog

Sorry. I can't resist. John Carson, a fellow runner from Canada, unearthed this photo from the archives of the Toronto Star. It's the finals of the 1500 meters at the Ontario 14-year-old championships, many many years ago. The runner on the left is Dave Reid, who was the greatest Canadian miler of his generation. I will only say this: in this particular race, Reid placed second. I "retired" from competitive running a year later, in large part because I realized that the particular...

 On Forbes.com, the drug
industry analyst Avik Roy has written a  comment on my piece "The Treatment"  in last week's New Yorker. A few small
points, in response.

 Roy is of the impression
that that I believe we should abandon rational drug design and, as he puts it,
"go back to the old way of doing things: of throwing mud on a wall and seeing
what sticks."

    I'm not sure where he
gets that idea. "The Treatment" makes it clear  that both strategies—rational drug design and
mass...

I will be doing a short tour of the U.K. next week, speaking on a brand new mystery topic! I'll be in Edinburgh on Sunday May 9th, Oxford on the 10th, Manchester on the 11th and Newcastle on the 12th. Tickets and more information are available at: http://www.malcolmgladwell-live.com/

 

In Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Stephen Pinker responds to my description of him as occupying the  "lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism":

What Malcolm Gladwell calls a "lonely ice floe" is what psychologists call "the mainstream." In a 1997 editorial in the journal Intelligence, 52 signatories wrote, "I.Q. is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes." Similar...

 From "Blowing Up," by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, April 22,2002

 

A few more thoughts on quarterbacks:

 

There are two separate issues with respect to quarterbacks. The first is whether, historically, NFL teams have done a good job of predicting which college quarterbacks will succeed in the pros. Dave Berri and Rob Simmons' paper in the Journal of Productivity Analysis (that I relied on in the essay "Most Likely to Succeed" in my new book "What The Dog Saw") proves pretty convincingly, I think, that the answer is no. One of the best parts of that paper...

Steven Pinker reviewed my new book "What the Dog Saw," in the New York Times Book Review this past Sunday. I sent the following letter to the editor in response:

 

It is always a pleasure to be reviewed by someone as accomplished as Stephen Pinker, even if—in his comments on "What the Dog Saw" (Nov. 15)—he is unhappy with my spelling (rightly!) and with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism. But since football has been on my mind these days, I do...

My latest New Yorker piece, on how David beats Goliath, is here. 

I've been very pleased with the reaction. I did want to respond, though, to a number of comments that have been made about the parts of the piece dealing with Rick Pitino and college basketball. (Nothing is quite as fun as arguing about sports,)

Since most of the commenters make the same arguments, I'm going to pick a post  by Ben Mathis-Lilley, over at New York magazine's blog. He writes, in part:

The truth is that almost every t

David Brooks wrote a very thoughtful column in the New York Times yesterday on "Outliers." Much of what he said was very flattering.

I have just two comments in response.

1. Brooks argues that I "slight the centrality of individual character and individual creativity" by focusing so much on the cultural and contextual determinants of success. Successful people, he says, must begin with two beliefs--"that the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so." I completely

My latest New Yorker piece, "Most Likely to Succeed" is now up.

A couple of additional thoughts.

In some of the responses to the piece, I've seen some resistance to the idea that choosing  NFL quarterbacks and choosing public school teachers represent the same category of problem.  There are only a small number of NFL quarterbacks, and we are selecting candidates from a tiny pool of highly elite athletes. By contrast, we need a vast number of public school teachers and we're recruiting from an