Ideas

Because you can’t read enough Malcolm Gladwell, even if you don’t agree with what he says:

Part II of Bill Simmons’s ESPN.com interview with MG is here.

Which brings me to my next question: Is it that difficult to coach an NBA team, or is this one of those professions where 95 percent of the people approach it the wrong way? For instance, let’s say Larry Brown called you and said, “I want to change some of my coaching methods, how do you think I can get through to my crappy team?”

What would you tell him? Should NBA coaches be approaching their job from a more intellectual standpoint? Should they be consulting with well-known psychiatrists and sociologists searching for any tidbits that could make their jobs easier?

Read More »More Gladwell on Teaching, Coaching, and GM’ing

This post has nothing to do with law or tech or academia. Via Kottke, and in an interview at ESPN.com (of all places), Malcolm Gladwell has some very wise things to say. This is stuff that doesn’t just apply to sports:

I really love writing, in a totally uncomplicated way. When I was in high school, I ran track and in the beginning I thought of training as a kind of necessary evil on the way to racing. But then, the more I ran, the more I realized that what I loved was running, and it didn’t much matter to me whether it came in the training form or the racing form. I feel the same way about writing. I’m happy writing anywhere and under any circumstances and in fact I’m now to the point where I’m suspicious of people who don’t love what they do in the same way. I was watching golf, before Christmas, and the announcer said of Phil Mickelson that the tournament was the first time he’d picked up a golf club in five weeks. Assuming that’s true, isn’t that profoundly weird? How can you be one of the top two or three golfers of your generation and go five weeks without doing the thing you love? Did Mickelson also not have sex with his wife for five weeks? Did he give up chocolate for five weeks? Is this some weird golfer’s version of Lent that I’m unaware of? They say that Wayne Gretzky, as a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that something he loved so much had to come to end, and I’ve always thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was Gretzky. And surely it’s the explanation as well for why Mickelson will never be Tiger Woods. . . .

Read More »Gladwell Gets Tough

Via kottke.org, here’s a Columbia Journalism Review column that reprints email correspondence between writer Valerie Lawson, author of a richly-researched… Read More »Authors and Attribution