How much of greatness is nature vs. nurture? Sports Illustrated writer David Epstein challenges Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” rule in a new book about the science of training, The Sports Gene. A lot depends on individual biology, and there are cultural factors, too: “Usain Bolt is a great example. He was 6’4” when he was […]
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Playlist: 5 Pioneering Computer Demos, featuring MIT, Stanford and Xerox
Mark Armstrong is the founder of Longreads and editorial director for Pocket. Last week we lost a pioneer of early computing, Doug Engelbart, and Tom Foremski has an excellent short backstory about the inventor of the mouse. It was Engelbart’s 1968 demo of computer graphical user interfaces that inspired everything we now use today—yet despite his […]
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Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective
Have you ever wondered why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup? Or what Cezanne did before painting his first significant works in his 50s? Have you hungered for the story behind the Veg-O-Matic, star of the frenetic late-night TV ads? Or wanted to know where Led Zeppelin got […]
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Malcolm Gladwell Is #Wrong
A retort to the writer who claims that social media are not effective tools for activism.
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Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the […]
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Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the […]
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Featured Longreader: Caitlin Dewey, producer for Kiplinger. See her story picks from Malcolm Gladwell, Vanity Fair, plus more on her #longreads page.
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Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading. This week: Tim Carmody examines Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Ketchup Conundrum,” which was originally published in The New Yorker’s Food Issue in Sept. 2004: Note: I can’t stand ketchup. Any ketchup. I think it’s disgusting, and always have. I was averse […]
