gladwell.com

Outliers!

My new book, "Outliers: The Story of Success," is coming out on Tuesday, after long last.  I'm very happy with it, and I think anyone who liked Tipping Point or Blink will like this book too.  I'll be blogging more about it, in the near future.  In the meantime, there is a short Q and A describing the themes of Outliers from my website, here. And you can buy it here.

I also wanted to announce two of the dates on my book tour.

For those of you in England, I'll be giving two shows at the Lyceum Theater in Soho on Monday November 24th. The times are 5:45 and 8:30. Tickets are available here.  There are still some good ones left, but they are going fast, I'm told.

For those of you in Canada, on Monday December 1st, at 5:00, I'll be at Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto, for a conversation with Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Business.  Roger is, I think, one of the finest minds in the business world. This should be fun. Tickets are available here.

The Uses of Adversity

My latest New Yorker article on Sidney Weinberg and the benefits of outsider-ness is now up on my website here:  here

Since writing the piece, I've continued to think a fair amount about this idea of the advantages of disadvantages. If dyslexia can--under certain circumstances--be advantageous, what are other disadvantages that can have the same effect?

In the article, I mention, in passing, the question of class size, and the data on class size is really quite fascinating.  Time and time again studies fail to show any significant advantage to reducing the size of classes--except in the case of very poor children in the very earliest of grades.

This, of course, defies common sense. We know that teacher feedback is a big component in learning. So why wouldn't learning be enhanced by lower teacher: student ratios? One answer might bethat large classes are a disadvantage with advantages: that in coping with the difficulty of competing for teacher attention, kids learn something more important--namely self-reliance. This might also explain why the highest achieving schools--those in places like Japan and Korea--tend to have much larger classes than in the United States.