Voting Station

Malcolm Gladwell

Please vote to return to collections.

Author

The Resume

    (September 3, 1963- )
    Born in Fareham, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom
    Wrote 'The Tipping Point' (2000), 'Blink' (2005), 'Outliers' (2008), 'David and Goliath' (2013), and 'Talking to Strangers' (2019)
    Staff writer for The New Yorker
    Hosts the podcast Revisionist History

Why he might be annoying:

    He originally planned a career in advertising, moving on to journalism only after he had been rejected by every ad agency he had applied to.
    Critics accused him of oversimplifying and of preferring anecdotes over research to support his claims.
    He has a running dispute with economist Steven Levitt about whether the drop in New York City's crime rate in the 1990s was the result of applying the 'broken window' theory (which held that adopting a zero tolerance approach to minor crimes like vandalism would lead to a decrease in violent crimes).
    He inspired a trend of parents 'red-shirting' their five-year-old kids: delaying their entrance to kindergarten to try to gain an advantage for them.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He grew up in a Mennonite community in Ontario.
    At 14, he held the Canadian record in his age group for running the fastest mile.
    He considers his mother his role model as a writer.
    The Baltimore Sun called him 'the most original American journalist since the young Tom Wolfe'
    He popularized the '10,000 Hour Rule': acquiring expertise in a skill requires practicing it for that amount of time (which works out to approximately 20 hours a week over ten years).

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 9 Votes: 77.78% Annoying