There was an in-depth profile about Malcolm Gladwell by Jason Zengerie for New York Magazine:
Gladwell is offering this modest self-assessment while seated at the kitchen table of the apartment he rents in a stately West Village townhouse. He’s wearing jeans and one of those wickable running shirts, which fits snugly over his thin frame. His hazel eyes are red-rimmed. His trademark Afro, which he had cut about a month ago, is at frizz-level yellow. He looks, in short, like a caricature of Malcolm Gladwell. He is a well-known figure around his neighborhood, fond of tapping away on his laptop in coffee shops and cafés. His writer’s life is part anachronistic, part futuristic. His Lexus IS—a car, he concedes, he rarely drives—is parked down the street in the space he pays a small fortune to lease. A couple of miles north in Times Square are Gladwell’s editors at The New Yorker,who don’t see him in the office very often—owing to his self-professed “aversion to midtown”—but who grant him a license to write about whatever he chooses and accommodate him with couriers to pick up his fact-checking materials, lest he be forced to overcome that aversion. Not far from The New Yorker are the offices of Little, Brown—the publisher of Gladwell’s two best-selling books, The Tipping Point and Blink—which paid him a rumored $4 million for Outliers. (“The hardcover ofBlink sold three times what the hardcover of Tipping Point did,” says Geoff Shandler, Little, Brown’s editor-in-chief, “so his audience has grown and grown.”) Across the river in New Jersey is the Leigh Bureau, which fields Gladwell’s speaking requests and negotiates his stratospheric fees. (“He was by far the most expensive speaker we ever contracted,” says Charles Cohen, the president of a dental-supply company, whose trade group paid Gladwell $80,000 to address its annual meeting. “There wasn’t one person afterwards who said he wasn’t worth the money.”) And then, in New York and New Jersey and all over the United States, there are the booksellers, who are hoping that, amid fears of a global recession, Outliers will prompt their customers to do that thing that’s become a rarity these days—plunk down $28—and thus offer a slim reed of hope to the sagging publishing industry. (“I don’t care that it’s Little, Brown’s book,” says one rival publishing executive. “We all desperately need some good news.”)
The AV Club also had an interesting interview with Gladwell recently:
Even though he cut his teeth in newspaper journalism withThe Washington Post, Malcolm Gladwell was surely born to write for The New Yorker, where his nonfiction essays on subjects ranging from Ron Popeil's infomercial empire to computers that analyze pop songs could serve as a model for the house style. His previous books—The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference and Blink: The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking—not only topped the bestseller lists, but also spawned concepts that wormed their way into media discussions of politics, business, sports, and history. His newest book, Outliers: The Story Of Success, examines people who achieve the highest levels of their chosen fields—the Bill Gateses, Wayne Gretzkys, and Nobel Prize winners of the world—and argues that their accomplishments reflect not so much their intrinsic genius as the conditions that happened to govern their lives. As part of our annual Books Issue, Gladwell recently talked with The A.V. Club about social engineering, Barack Obama, and the public appetite for complex explanations.
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