The people behind the Malcolm Gladwell illustrated collection set talk about the process of coming up with ideas on a Design Matters episode.
*My birthday is on May 18.
via Curiosity Counts
Tagged with Malcolm Gladwell …
Food For Thought Links
A strong critique to the “Gladwellian” thought.
Oldish GQ article that scared the crap out of me. It profiles Russian serial killer Alexander Pichushkin.
“I thought it was strange that he only wanted to kill people he knew,” she says, sipping instant coffee. “If he had killed people he didn’t know, in another neighborhood, it wouldn’t have been as bad, but he killed people he knew.” Indeed, the Maniac befriended people so he could kill them. Among his favorite books was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Disturbingly, that last bit makes total sense.
Boston Globe article on the waning of long form content, or as it’s colloquially known, the TLDR(Too Long, Didn’t Read).
There’s a furious adapt-or-die mentality among media organizations. Researchers say we’re becoming a “society of scanners.” They say the Internet is a “link medium.” We find ourselves abandoning stories in mid-sentence. Newspaper executives have embraced a new format known as “charticles,” which are, in the words of the American Journalism Review, “combinations of text, images and graphics that take the place of a full article.” The Orlando Sentinel, for example, now has a front page crammed with graphics, columnist head-shots, bulletins, story keys, headlines, bumpers, tags, indexes, an advertisement — a cartoon! — and lots of pleas to check the Web site.
Malcolm Gladwell’s New Book
Gladwell’s new book, What the Dog Saw, will be released on October 20. It’s a collection of essays he has written for the New Yorker. Kottke did us the favor of making an annotated post of all the linkable articles that will be in the book. Instant bookmark.
The Psychology of Overconfidence
Cocksure: Banks, Battles, and The Psychology of Overconfidence
Gladwell’s latest on the New Yorker. This time on the Wall Street crash and it’s world of cocksure mo’fo’s. Surprisingly, George W Bush wasn’t mentioned in the article. Sample quote ahead:
Most people are inclined to use moral terms to describe overconfidence—terms like “arrogance” or “hubris.” But psychologists tend to regard overconfidence as a state as much as a trait. The British at Gallipoli were victims of a situation that promoted overconfidence. Langer didn’t say that it was only arrogant gamblers who upped their bets in the presence of the schnook. She argues that this is what competition does to all of us; because ability makes a difference in competitions of skill, we make the mistake of thinking that it must also make a difference in competitions of pure chance. Other studies have reached similar conclusions. As novices, we don’t trust our judgment. Then we have some success, and begin to feel a little surer of ourselves. Finally, we get to the top of our game and succumb to the trap of thinking that there’s nothing we can’t master. As we get older and more experienced, we overestimate the accuracy of our judgments, especially when the task before us is difficult and when we’re involved with something of great personal importance. The British were overconfident at Gallipoli not because Gallipoli didn’t matter but, paradoxically, because it did; it was a high-stakes contest, of daunting complexity, and it is often in those circumstances that overconfidence takes root.
Thought Leader Battle Royal – Round 3
In a surprising move, bald marketing guru Seth Godin tagged Anderson, and betrayed his intellectual buddy. The drama ensues.
Conde Nast (publisher of the Wired (Chris’s magazine) and yes, theNew Yorker (Malcolm’s magazine)), is going to go out of business long before you get sick, never mind die. So will newspapers printed on paper. They’re going to disappear before you do. I’m not wishing for this to happen, but by refusing to build new digital assets that matter, traditional publishers are forfeiting their future.
Thought Leader Battle Royal – Round 2
Dear Malcolm, Why so Threatened?
Chris Anderson responds to Gladwell’s critique of Free.
Since journalist Malcolm Gladwell has somewhat parochially decided to make the Future of Paid Journalism the focus of his review of Free (which is, ironically, free on the New Yorker’s website; perhaps this is something Gladwell should take up with David Remnick?), I’ll try to respond in a bit more detail.
Oh, snap!
Thought Leader Battle Royal
Price to Sell: Is Free the Future?
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest New Yorker article takes on Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of Radical Price. As you would assume, Gladwell is very skeptical about the whole idea of “free” as a business model. Here’s Gladwell’s counter argument on Anderson’s idea about journalism turning into an “avocation”:
His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels?
How the Underdog Wins
Malcom Gladwell latest New Yorker article on how the underdog wins. Part of the argument is that when the weak become aware of their weaknesses, they beat the strong. Gladwell uses cases studies in basketball and war strategies to show that with enough effort you can trump ability and overcome “Goliath’s advantage”.
In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”
