Tall Tales

A number of people have asked about a story I told at the Moth about my early days in the newspaper business.

     The Moth is a weird and wonderful club in New York City founded a few years ago by George Green, who wanted to recreate the late-night story-telling sessions of his childhood in Georgia. Every few weeks, a bunch of people get together in a dark and boozy room somewhere in Manhattan and try and outdo each other.  I told a Moth story several years ago, and last month it was picked up by the NPR show This American Life. (You can find it  here)

     There is a disclaimer at the end of the This American Life broadcast, to the effect that the Moth is a place where "people come to tell both true stories and occasional tall tales." As I think should be obvious if you listen to it, my story definitely belongs to the "tall tale" category.  I hope you enjoy it.  But please do so with a rather large grain of salt. 

ei

Comments

[Khóa học đào tạo kỹ năng Vip!]

Trường duy nhất đạo tạo kỹ năng đàm phán, kỹ năng tư duy logic, kỹ năng lãnh đạo và vô vàn kỹ năng dành cho Vip khác.

[amosgitai]

Amazing story. Nice to read this post!

[JosieM111]

Malcolm_
You are fabulous and profound.
Loved your Moth story.

Best.
Josie.

[Me]

THE ONLY THINK TO FEAR IS TO SLICE THIS MALCOLM.

[Salmon Sample]

On point, as always, Gladwell.

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[Harshul Pandit]

This is about your book "blink" . I have read it half and appeared in an exam called "UGC-CSIR-NET" here in india. This exam is required to qualify by graduates who are looking for a career in academic as a professor or want to pursue phd in top institutes in INDIA.

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Now I am awaiting for the result of paper-2 and hope to qualify it. But I must say that it was one of my greatest experiences ever in whole life till date. I've gain back my lost confidence.

[Pamski82]

hey i am a big fan of your two books an presented both of them in my university. always terriffic stories. i am always seeking out for new onces.

keep on moving.

[scania]

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[SloeSwede (Mack Lundstrom)]

Mr. Gladwell: I am a fan. I happened upon a post in gladwell.com. But …

"The Moth is a wierd (WEIRD) and wonderful club in New York City founded a few years ago by George Green, who wanted to recreate (RE-CREATE) the late-night story-telling sessions of his childhood in Georgia."

The tipping point of blog credibility is reached when no copy editor reads the material before it's posted.

I'm sitting here awaiting a crunch of last-minute work from students in an online obit- and profile-writing summer course. I've had too much wine, so my normal reluctance to criticize an icon is fuzzed.

I just went ballistic over a post that misspelled navel. Impulse prevailed then. And so it goes.

Keep challenging your readers.

[Adam]

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[opsimath44]

Mr. Gladwell,

Are you going to start a new thread about the ideas factory?

I think the critical link to what Intellectual Ventures is doing is putting people from different disciplines together. A thousand medical doctors with a thousand medical degrees will only look for medical solutions to a problem. Throw in an engineer, and now you're looking at it from a different angle.

This has always been the case, which is why so many significant discoveries have been made by people working outside of their primary field. But in the information age the effect is multiplied because there are so few generalists anymore.

Imagine that knowledge is a light bulb, and expertise is the ray emanating from it. At first, these rays are close together, so the difference between a biologist and a social scientist isn't that far apart. A mechanical engineer and a chemical engineer are still on the same side of the bulb and still going in the same direction. But over time, the rays get further apart.

This leads to specialization and within a particular field we can go deeper and deeper. But at some point, any particular expert looses sight of what his neighbors are doing.

You don't know what you don't know, one might say. So that's where the ideas lab and Intellectual Ventures makes its money. You get an expert in X looking at Y, and he can tell the Y experts what they haven't thought about before.

[Appu]

nice.

also check this: www.superhypersonic.com great site

[Opsimath44]

Weird... I posted something about the Big Idea article and now it's gone...

[opsimath44]

That's three times now: I posted something about the latest New Yorker article ("In The Air"), it's there for about an hour, and then it's deleted. What's up?

[Maloof]

So you lied?

[Bean Jones]

Well, sometimes the best true stories have a liberal sprinkling of fiction.

It was an excellent tale though, no matter how "tall". :-)

[Jennifer Schwartz]

I am attempting to contact Mr. Gladwell about appeaaring on Dan Mulhern's radio Show in Lansing, MI for a show on the topic of "Bias at Work". Please feel free to contact me at 517-281-9213 or at the email address above. Thank you.

[Dante Perez]

Dear Mr Gladwell,

Let me salute you for your wonderful writings. The Moth reminds me of the storytelling place in Paulo Coelho's The Zahir.

All the best.

[H Ahmed]

There doesn't appear to be any other way to contact Malcolm, so I apologise that this comment is out of context.

In his May 12 article, "In The Air", last paragraph, Malcolm writes "...It was a puzzle...Or perhaps someone would find another skeleton that shed light on the mystery..."

Now, according to his January 8 article, "Open Secrets", he explicitly makes the distinction between a puzzle and a mystery, before going on to use them interchangably in the aforementioned quote.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan. The only reason I picked up on this is because I read his articles over and over again during flights (load 2-3 up before plane takes off). Can't wait for the book!

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[Alex]

Will you ever be blogging again?

[Paul Roberto]

They are selling The Tipping Point for pretty cheap on Facebook today (http://apps.new.facebook.com/argashopping/), but after hearing some of these opinions on Gladwell I'm less inclined to buy it.

[Kevin Scott]

Great tale, tall as it may be. Such a rare pleasure to listen to a story told so well.

[Josh Easton]

Malcolm!
Any news on your new book? I'm looking forward to reading it!
Josh.