1A: Malcolm Gladwell (Sept. 3, 1963--)

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When I did a google search on September 6, 2015 for Malcolm Gladwell, no quotes, I got 870,000 hits. Searching "Malcolm Gladwell," with quotes, yielded 820,000 results.  "Malcolm Gladwell" and writer brought 529,000 hits. "Writer Malcolm Gladwell" 403,000.  In comparison, "President Barak Obama" gets 56.7 million, "Vice President Joe Biden" 7.2 million, "Gov. Jerry Brown" 583,000, and "Mayor Eric Garcetti" 430,000. Then there is the ever-trending upward "Taylor Swift": "230,000,000. None of this might be surprising. Except if we look at the phrase "tipping point." Of the first 12 hits on google, eight are directly related to Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point.  How many copies has The Tipping Point sold? About two million. 

What do all of these numbers mean?  Why did I do it? This is the kind of thing that Gladwell will do in his writing.  He will look at a huge amount of information, and then try to make it understandable for his general readership.

For Gladwell, context is everything. Or most things. Or many things. Some of the time.

   

To learn more about Malcolm Gladwell, go to his website and blog. He is a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers. See his site at The New Yorker. It contains an archive of his articles for the magazine and a video of a talk he gave. Read articles about him The New York Times and  the magazines Esquire  and New York. Watch videos of his 60 Minutes profile on CBS News (Closed Caption), and interviews with Jon Stewart (Closed Caption), and Stephen Colbert (not Closed Caption).

Twitter: Considering Gladwell's article on Twitter, here's some sites you might wish to see. Twitter's home page is here. They have pages on numerous topics, including News,  Government and Nonprofits, and Nonprofits and Foundations.  Twitter, of course, is also in the news. Stories and commentaries about it have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Twitter Top 100 Most Followers. To answer the question, What is a tweet? For an answer see this page. Or go to Twitter's support page.

Let's not forget Instagram and all these other social media sites, including the "Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites." What about this one? Don't forget it. It is the "Top 15 Social Networking Sites You Should Be Using."

Here's some things that you might want to read by and about Gladwell. He has written a disclosure statement, as he calls it, that he has posted on his website.

He also has his critics. That's what happens when you sell, as Gladwell has, 4.5 million copies of his books Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point (keep in mind that the sales figures apply to three of his books; he has written two others), and gets almost $90,000 a speech, (Source: BloombergBusinessweek, Oct. 10, 2013) Some question his opinions and the more problematic because he is so popular. Union College psychology professor Christopher F. Chabris is among them. Read his review of Gladwell's David and Goliath at the Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2013 and his subsequent remarks about Gladwell, "Why Malcolm Gladwell Matters (And Why That's Unfortunate)" at his website, October 4, 2013.

The New Republic published "Malcolm Gladwell gets Defensive with Jon Stewart "Malcolm Gladwell Gets Defensive with Jon Stewart," October 23, 2013. A video (Closed Caption) of the interview also appears on the page.

More recently Gladwell has written about lessons from the response to Hurrican Katrina in The New Yorker. and about the unfair practices of Yale and other elite universities that in Gladwell's words, "have too much money," relative to other colleges and universities.
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