Unamazing insights

Four years ago, we learn from this book’s jack- et, Malcolm Glad- well ‘was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People’.

Four years ago, we learn from this book’s jacket, Malcolm Gladwell ‘was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People’. As Gladwell himself might ask, ‘Is what Time says really significant? And what is significant?’

Gladwell is significant, all right. Not only is he a staff writer on the New Yorker but he wrote the bestsellers Blink and The Tipping Point that made him millions and — here is more significance — put him number one on the New York Times’ bestseller lists. What is Gladwell’s secret? Like many New Yorker writers he gives the impression, usually in great detail and carefully fact-checked, that he really knows. Not only knows, but is going to let you know, too, so smoothly that you will barely need to think. I remember an article in the New Yorker (not by Gladwell) about a cemetery for runaway slaves on New York’s Staten Island in which some poignant forgotten history was unveiled. In a profile of Noam Chomsky, usually unassailable in his genius, he was left for dead as a human being.

But Gladwell doesn’t just know. He also tells us what we think or believe and then tells us how right or wrong we are. Here he is talking about Blink:

There are lots of situations — particularly at times of high pressure and stress — when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world.

And about The Tipping Point:

I’m convinced that ideas and behaviours and new products move through a population very much like a disease does.