CVK
The New York Times did a long profile of Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker who is best known for his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. His latest work is Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

Gladwell has been enormously successful, and he has pretty much helped create a whole new genre of books–what the article calls “a highly contagious hybrid genre of nonfiction, one that takes a nonthreatening and counterintuitive look at pop culture and the mysteries of the everyday.” But of course with great success comes great hateration. He has been criticized for “lazy thinking” and for essentially cashing in on the work of social scientists by repackaging the same info in a slick, digestible format.

Rachel Donadio wraps up her profile by comparing Gladwell to self-help writers:

Gladwell may be the Dale Carnegie, or perhaps the Norman Vincent Peale, of the iPod generation. But where Carnegie in his 1936 book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” instructed readers how to understand their customers and flatter people into liking them, and Peale in his 1952 “Power of Positive Thinking” offered watered-down Christian palliatives, Gladwell offers optimism through demystification: to understand how things work is to have control over them.

Hmmm… a bit dismissive. Anyway, whether you love him or hate him, he’s had an immense impact on the business world. I was interested to read that he’s researching racial profiling at the moment (Gladwell himself is mixed by the way, English and Jamaican). Hopefully this will the subject of his next book?

Lately he’s been investigating racial profiling. At first, “I had a reasonably benign attitude toward it. I felt that under certain circumstances it was justifiable — like looking for terrorists. But now I think that’s wrong,” he said. “I think it’s never justifiable. And not on ethical grounds but on pragmatic grounds. I just don’t think it works.”