Writer finds his niche at top of the magazine world
From his desk at The New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell looks out his window to 42nd Street, 16 floors below. His view of Bryant Park is lovely but hardly tranquil. After all, the Times Square district is called the crossroads of the world for a good reason.
Far above the bustling crowd, he obsessively fiddles with the cord of his venetian blinds and mulls over his latest obsession – the alarming fatality rate associated with sports utility vehicles. As his brain turns, it makes connections between S.U.V.s and such seemingly unrelated subjects as presidential motorcades, cell phones, and oversized umbrellas.
He’s not just daydreaming. This little mental rant eventually emerges as Drunk Drivers and Other Dangers,” an edgy and grandiloquent Talk of the Town item in the March 8, 1999 issue of The New Yorker.
It’s a perfect example of the sort of wise, weird and wonderful writing that has helped this 35-year-old writer from Elmira become one of the star staff writers at perhaps the most prestigious magazine in the English-speaking world – and pick up a legion of fans and a million dollar book contract in the bargain.
At The New Yorker, Gladwell is a master at melding argumentation with descriptive narrative reporting. You see it in his long, lyrical pieces on such diverse topics as the weight problems of the Pima Indians (Feb. 2, 1998 issue), a Levi Strauss ad campaign for khaki slacks (July 28, 1997), the differences between racial attitudes experienced by West Indian and African blacks (April 29, 1996), and the strange science behind the Six Degrees of Separation phenomenon (Jan. 11, 1999).
“I think New Yorker readers are sort of early adopters of ideas,” says Gladwell’s editor, Henry Finder. “If epidemiologists have reframed a social problem in some interesting new way, they want to know, and Gladwell is the guy they turn to.”
The current editor of The New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Remnick, says “He has one of the freest minds I’ve ever seen in journalism and he makes use of it in so many fields I’ve lost count: science, marketing, profiles, endless realms.”
Terry Martin, one of his friends from Elmira District Secondary School, says Gladwell likes to entertain many different points of view and perspectives, never tying himself down to a particular issue.
“It gives him a lot more freedom,” Martin says. “Growing up, he always liked the notion of being out of step.”
Of course, Elmira is about as far removed from New York City as you can imagine. In Elmira, every view seems to contain either a church or a red barn and the air can be peppered with the faint, sweet smell of manure. Some of the streets are named for birds (Nighthawk, Cedar Waxwing, Barnswallow) and are posted here and there with hand-lettered signs hawking country crafts (“Quilts First Farm on Right No Sunday Sale”) and strong religious convictions (“Prepare to Meet Thy God!”).
Gladwell’s parents, Graham and Joyce, met at university in England in the mid 1950s. Malcolm, the youngest of their three sons, was born in 1963 in the town of Fareham on the south coast of England.
The family settled in Elmira in 1969 after Graham was offered a position teaching mathematics at the University of Waterloo. Joyce took up practice as a family therapist.
Malcolm’s parents are a prolific couple; his father has written five books on mathematical theory, while his mother, originally from Jamaica, is the author of the autobiography Brown Face, Big Master.
“Elmira was a wonderful place to grow up,” says Gladwell. “It was a little bit sleepy, but it’s a very close-knit, warm, genuine community.”
The fact that the Gladwells were a biracial family didn’t seem to raise a single eyebrow in Elmira.
“Mennonites are very socially progressive in many ways,” says Gladwell. “They’re incredibly open and tolerant of difference. If you’re going to be a biracial couple, it’s about as good a place to be as anywhere.”
In 1984, after Gladwell graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, he accepted an internship at the conservative magazine The American Spectator in Bloomington, Ind., but soon moved on to Washington, D.C. where he landed a job as a reporter at The Washington Post.
After six years, The Post promoted him to be their New York-based northeastern bureau chief, a position he held for three years.
At the Post, he became friends with Remnick, a reporter. In 1992, when Remnick began writing for the New Yorker, he suggested to editor Tina Brown that Gladwell be assigned to write some Comment and Talk of the Town items on a freelance basis. (Remnick succeeded Brown last July.)
In 1996, The New Yorker offered Gladwell a one-year, renewable staff writer contract with the responsibility of delivering 55,000 words (the equivalent of about 12 magazine articles) per year.
Right out of the gate he started impressing the editors by taking a few relatively predictable topics they suggested and steering them in entirely unpredictable directions, as he did in “Conquering the coma” (July 8, 1996), in which he turned an assignment about a tabloidy, high-profile crime victim into a piece about an important issue of medical protocol.
Gladwell also had plenty of his own ideas for stories. “The Dead Zone” (Sept. 29, 1997), his exploration of the long-forgotten yet devastating 1918 worldwide Spanish flu epidemic was one of the best features in the magazine that year and was optioned as a made-for-TV movie.
Another one of Malcolm’s original story ideas was “The Tipping Point,” an exploration of why the crime rate in New York City suddenly plummeted.
Gladwell approached the crime epidemic as if it were a disease epidemic, pointing out that there’s a sort of “tipping point,” a line that’s crossed, in which a problem either spirals out of control or collapses – and with crime, New York had apparently “tipped.”
This idea of looking at social problems the way we look at diseases had so many applications – smoking, teenage pregnancy, drug use – that Gladwell expanded the article into a book.
The Tipping Point was bought by Little, Brown Publishers and is due out this fall. Neither Gladwell nor his agent will confirm how much money Little, Brown paid for the book, but in every version of the story that is recounted in Gladwell’s social circle, he always walks away with well over $1 million.
Gladwell’s personal tipping point at the New Yorker was his article The Coolhunt, a vastly entertaining and informative account of how the fashion industry identifies what kids on the street consider cool from one moment to the next.
The story chronicled the exploits of Reebok’s general-manager, Baysie Wightman, and her cohort DeeDee Gordon, the publisher of a quarterly newsletter that dissects standards of cool in major American cities. Chatty, glamourous DeeDee and lovingly neurotic Baysie were a classic comedy team whose jobs were as fascinating as the women themselves. Gladwell dubbed Baysie and DeeDee “The Lewis and Clark of Cool” and then invented the term “coolhunt” to describe what they did. “The word seemed sort of sufficiently catchy and compelling,” says Gladwell.
The Coolhunt was an enormous success, instantly turning Baysie and DeeDee into minor celebrities and the definitive experts on coolness. Danny DeVito’s production company, Jersey Films, a division of Universal Studios, quickly optioned the story and put a screenwriter to work on the movie script.
“It’s just hilarious,” says Wightman. “He positioned us in such a way that we were irresistible. But I don’t take it serious that I do anything extraordinary. I just see it as like this: if anything, Malcolm is cool.”
DeeDee Gordon readily agrees. “Malcolm is the coolest person in the world!” she exclaims. “He’s really quick, really funny. Hysterical actually, you know. And he loves the fact that he’s from Canada.”
Indeed, Gladwell does still feel a strong affinity for his home and native land and regularly finds clever ways to insert Canadian content into the New Yorker.
When asked about his future, Gladwell shrugs. “I imagine I’ll write more books if this book does well,” he says, “or I’ll just be writing more articles for the next 30 years.”
It doesn’t look like many of those future 30 years will be spent in Canada, but as Gordon noted, Gladwell is still really into being Canadian and has no intention of ever changing his resident alien status.
“For some reason, I’m perfectly happy staying Canadian,” he says. “There’s no advantage to becoming American except that I would have to do jury duty – which is not an advantage at all.”