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Who is saying What, Why, When and Where

Headline:

Wise guy

Synopsis:

He's been called a rock star, a shaman and a stud, but the author of 'The Tipping Point' insists he's just a journalist.

Malcolm Gladwell looks like a genius. A youthful 45, with an eclectic, vaguely hipster dress sense, a desk at the offices of The New Yorker (though he prefers to work from his apartment in Manhattan's West Village), and that signature mad scientist afro, he is a cliché of furious intellect. Yet as his latest book – Outliers: The Story of Success – demonstrates, genius is a little more complicated than that.

"Outlier", Gladwell explains, is science-speak for something that lies outside normal experience. "In the summer, in Paris," he writes, "we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be an outlier. In this book I'm interested in people who are outliers – in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August."

Publish date:

15 November 2008

Source:

The Independent

Media:

Access Interview