Thursday, May 21, 2009

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

In the one short week between graduation and the start of California Barbri I tried to cram in as much non-legal reading as possible. I got about halfway through Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Wallace Stegner’s biography of John Wesley Powell-which I am thoroughly enjoying. I read Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress. I also finished Malcolm Gladwell’s new book: Outliers; The Story of Success. I fell in love with Gladwell’s writing when I read The Tipping Point back when I got home from my mission. Blink was possibly even better and so is Outliers. For those Freakonomics fans out there, Gladwell’s books are must reads.

I wish I had more time to get in the details of Outliers. I would especially like to compare Gladwell’s discussion of “the trouble with geniuses” with the mismatch effect, which I worked with as a research assistant for its discoverer a couple of summers ago. But, alas, that will have to wait until I am finished with the Bar. So instead, enjoy one of my favorite Gladwell speeches: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce.


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