HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
•
NOVEMBER 2013
75
HEMISPHERES:
When you first came to
The New Yorker
, you said you wanted to
look to academia for insights. That’s a bold
move when you’re writing for an audience
of millions.
MALCOLMGLADWELL:
You know, when I
was a kid I would go with my professor
dad to his office at the University of
Waterloo, in Ontario, and he would just
let me wander around the library all day.
And from a very early age I got the sense
that that world was incredibly acces-
sible if you wanted to take the time. If
you’re willing to pick up something and
read it, even if it’s in a field that you’ve
never heard of before, with a li le bit
of effort you can master enough of it to
get the point. Now, not always perfectly,
but you can at the very least recognize
what’s interesting about it. And then
my mother [a psychotherapist] always
placed great emphasis on clarity. Both
my mother and father are people who
don’t use extra words. So that was a
big thing; that emphasis on expressing
yourself simply was a big deal when I
was growing up.
HEMISPHERES:
There’s definitely a quality
to the writing of a Malcolm Gladwell piece
that makes complicated and sometimes
dry subjects incredibly accessible.
GLADWELL:
You knowhow you can do
those computer programs where you
runwriting through themand they’ll tell
you the level of complexity? I remember
someone doing this tomy writing, and
it came out at an eighth-grade reading
level. Which I was enormously pleased
with, actually. You don’t need to write
long, elaborate sentences to convey
difficult ideas. Some of my favorite
academic writing is incredibly simple and
elegant. My sentences tend to be much
shorter thanmy peers’ sentences.
HEMISPHERES:
I don’t know which
peers you’re talking about, but your short
sentences carry complex ideas to a huge
audience. So are these the elements that
define “Gladwellian”?
GLADWELL:
I always dispute the term
“Gladwellian.”
HEMISPHERES:
What is it about “Gladwell-
ian” that bothers you?
GLADWELL:
I don’t really see a huge
distinction between the style of my
writing and the style of lots of other
people’s writing. There’s a difference
in the subject ma er, perhaps, but
“Gladwellian” is based on the false
premise that there’s a genre that
can be identified with me, and that’s
not true.
HEMISPHERES:
What genre would that be?
GLADWELL:
Well, it’s sort of idea-driven
narratives, idea-driven nonfiction
narratives. But I would argue that
Michael Lewis does this much be er
than I do. In fact, I spend a lot of time
trying to be more like him. He makes it
look so insanely easy. This is a man who
has wri en bestselling books about
Wall Street. That is so insanely hard to
do—I mean, not just the characters but
the intricacies.
The Big Short
is about
derivatives, for goodness sake. He sold 2
million books about derivatives? That’s
just incredible!
HEMISPHERES:
Your books are worshipped
in the corporate class. Have you been
surprised by the nature of your audience?
GLADWELL:
You’re always surprised
when anyone other than your
mother reads what you write. It was
nerve-wracking the first time around,
but now it’s not. Now I know the
sensibility of my readers. They are
people who are curious, and they don’t
mind having their preconceptions
nudged. I mean, these books are not
radical, right? They say things that
stray sometimes from common sense,
but they’re not out there. I’m not
NoamChomsky—I’m not obliterat-
ing people’s belief systems. But I am
amending them somewhat, and some
people really like that. And I like that.
HEMISPHERES:
Some people have derided
your work as “corporate coaching.” Do you
have an opinion on that?
GLADWELL:
I think that over the
last 20 to 25 years people in business
have become increasingly interested
in searching for insights outside of
business. They’re interested in econom-
ics, sociology, psychology—they’re
constantly mining. They realize that
in order to make it work inside the box
you’ve got to kind of hunt outside. I
know vanishingly li le about business.
But that’s precisely why I think many
people in business are interested:
because they know their world, but
they’re looking outside and they’re say-
ing, “How can I learn more about human
behavior?” or “How can I understand
social trends be er?” I think that’s a
valuable and really important develop-
ment in business, and a big reason why
business culture in this country is so
successful. We’re good at this, you know.
HEMISPHERES:
But this book seems a little
different from the others.
GLADWELL:
Ah, yeah.
HEMISPHERES:
You’d have to strain to
call
Blink
,
Outliers
or
The Tipping Point
dangerous books—particularly now, after
they’ve become required reading for young
MBAs. But with
David and Goliath
, right
off the bat, there’s a subversive element—
you’re revising one of the defining stories of
the Jewish identity.
GLADWELL:
Two things: My editor at
The New Yorker
is always reining me
in. So if I had my way I would make a
lot more mischief than I do. And this
is my fourth book, so I feel I have more
freedom to be a li le more adventurous.
And also I have more confidence that
other people are willing to join me in my
mischief. And there is some mischief in
this book, like my continuing, almost
ridiculous bashing of the Ivy League. I
mean, I don’t know if you went to an Ivy
League school. …
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