Buy the Audiobook Pushkin Audiobook. Also by Malcolm Gladwell. You'll Also Love. Talking to Strangers Malcolm Gladwell Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the 1 New York Times bestseller Outliers , offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers — and why they often go wrong. Read More. During his high school years, Malcolm was an exceptional middle-distance runner. He won the meter title at the Ontario High School 14 year old championships in Kingston, Ontario.
Since his grades were not acceptable to enter a graduate school, Gladwell decided to pursue a career in advertising. However, here too he faced rejection and was not accepted in any advertising agency.
His subjects range from the spectacular failures of the FBI to detect spies within its midst to the gullibility and greed of investors who lost vast fortunes by trusting their money to the fraudster Bernard Madoff. And, using recent research into the concept that crimes are intrinsically linked to the locations they occur in, he suggests new ways of tackling crime prevention.
He even employs the same research to insist that the poet, Sylvia Plath, might not have killed herself had she not been living in a house with a gas cooker. So far, so Gladwellian. For his fans, who are legion, this is familiar territory: an iconoclastic take on the big subjects we think we know about and the even bigger subjects whose complexity is such that we need someone to explain them on our behalf. If there is one arresting concept in the mix it is the truth default theory, a concept formulated by the US academic Timothy Levine, who specialises in deception.
Put simply, it states that our fundamental reaction to the receipt of any kind of new information is to believe it. This, it strikes me, may help explain the state we are in, from post-truth politics to the proliferation of conspiracy theories. It is, though, much more complex than that.
While our instinct to default to truth leaves us open to deception and facilitates fraud on an often grand scale, it also underpins nearly all our initial interactions with others and, as such, enables friendships to form, relationships to start and business to be transacted. Conversation cannot proceed without default to truth.
This is pure Gladwell — although, as his critics will almost certainly point out, it is, in fact, pure Levine. Gladwell was born in Hampshire but grew up in the predominantly Mennonite town of Elmira, Ontario, where his English father worked as a maths professor and his Jamaican-born mother as a child psychotherapist.
His iconoclasm began at 15, when he co-edited a rightwing pamplet influenced by the writings of conservative commentator William F Buckley. One senses that his youthful conservatism and religious upbringing still inform his writing, which, at times, can have an almost preachy tone. Having later honed his style at the New Yorker , Gladwell made his name with The Tipping Point in , gatecrashing the public consciousness with a book that applied the principles of epidemiology to crime.
It announced the arrival of a new kind of millennial thinker effortlessly attuned to the informational thrust of the 21st century, cerebral but not forbiddingly so, heretical but not radical, his sometimes school-teacherly style oddly reassuring in an age in which reassurance was in short supply.
The five books he has published thus far have all been global bestsellers, and he has spawned a genre that might be called brainy populism. Research and writing seem to consume much of his waking life: he lives alone in a downtown New York apartment.
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