Malcolm Gladwell: The unheard story of David and Goliath
It’s a classic underdog tale: David, a young shepherd armed only with a sling, beats Goliath, the mighty warrior. The story has transcended its biblical origins to become a common shorthand for unlikely victory. But, asks Malcolm Gladwell, is that really what the David and Goliath story is about?
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ABOUT Malcolm Gladwell
“Malcolm Gladwell searches for the counter-intuitive in what we all take to be the mundane: cookies, sneakers, pasta sauce. A New Yorker staff writer since 1996, he visits obscure laboratories and infomercial set kitchens as often as the hangouts of freelance cool-hunters, a sort of pop-R&D gumshoe and for that has become a star lecturer and best-selling author.
Sparkling with curiosity, undaunted by difficult research (yet an eloquent, accessible writer), his work uncovers truths hidden in strange data. His always-delightful blog tackles topics from serial killers to steroids in sports, while provocative recent work in the New Yorker sheds new light on the Flynn effect, the decades-spanning rise in I.Q. scores.
He has has written four books: ‘The Tipping Point’ which began as a New Yorker piece applies the principles of epidemiology to crime (and sneaker sales), while ‘Blink’ examines the unconscious processes that allow the mind to ‘thin slice’ reality and make decisions in the blink of an eye.
His third book ‘Outliers’ questions the inevitabilities of success and identifies the relation of success to nature versus nurture. The newest work, ‘What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures’ is an anthology of his New Yorker contributions. He says: “There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.”
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