The Top Ten Most Abusively Blurbed AuthorsThe press on Sloane Crosley’s new book deal made us realize there are some names that are just tossed around too frequently in publishing.
ByChris Rovzar
actors
Is Will Smith Really an Outlier?Smith is among the growing number of film-industry rainmakers using an argument from Malcolm Gladwell’s new best seller ‘Outliers’ to explain their massive success
Thin-Slicing Malcolm Gladwell’s CriticsEvery critic wants to be Malcolm Gladwell. We thin-slice his critics into the following categories: Prigs, Wannabes, Accountants, and Haters.
ByMark Byrne
party lines
Patti Smith on Oral Hygiene“I got her confused. I thought she was the one who was married to John McEnroe, but that’s another Patti Smith” — well, Patty Smyth.
ByAlisa Gould-Simon
neighborhood watch
Dwarf Pimp Busted in Bed-StuyThe rides at Coney are reportedly dangerous, Malcolm Gladwell buys up more of the West Village, and a little person gets caught big pimpin’ in Bed-Stuy. Ho-hum, just the start of another week in our daily boroughs report.
in other news
Where Are All Our Lady Gurus?The ‘WSJ’ has compiled a list of the most influential business gurus, and estrogen levels are way down…
neighborhood watch
Malcolm Gladwell: Big Hair, Big Feet, Big Heart?Upper East Side: Malcolm Gladwell revealed his big feet, gesticulated intensely, said people shouldn’t be allowed to say where they went to college, and stole bloggery hearts at the 92nd St. Y the other night. [UES Informer]
Bushwick: Now the hipsters are staging Punk Rock Pillow Fights. Will their crazy, ironic, lo-fi fun ever stop? [Brooklyn Rink via the vaguely anti-Semitic BushwickBK]
East Harlem: A principal at a high school here sent teachers a memo telling them to dumb down their standards for the kids. Uh-huh. [NYDN]
Harlem: Amid its massive, seventeen-acre expansion in the hood’s west side, Columbia says it won’t tear down the Cotton Club on 125th after all. That’s Christian of them. [NYP]
intel
‘It Takes a Special Kind of Man to Want to Stick It in the Girl in the Philip Treacy Lobster Hat’We came across a copy of Simon Doonan’s upcoming book, Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You, and even though it’s not coming out until April, we are going to tell you a little bit about it now, because it is kind of awesome. In it, Doonan interviews the insanely fabulous and the fabulously insane — everyone from Dita Von Teese to Malcolm Gladwell — about their unique personal styles. The book is “intended as a wake-up call to the women of America to eschew the contemporary porno-chic trend and inject a little classy eccentricity into their fashion choices,” Doonan wrote in the Observer last summer, and it’s more a rumination on what glamour is than the style manual the title implies, but if you use it as such, you might be lucky enough to end up like Amy Fine Collins, who says her fashion choices cause her to get lots of attention from “homeless, gay, black street people.” How fun is that? Just don’t try and take them with you to the Waverly Inn.
cultural capital
Malcolm Gladwell, 4-Year-Old Sheriff
So we happened past New Yorker scribe Malcolm Gladwell’s blog today — don’t ask; we have no good excuse — and we were struck by what we found there. It seems Gladwell is in a big ol’ blog fight with professional conservative Steve Sailer, and the argument has driven the extravagantly coiffed author — heretofore known for his incisive journalism, his best-sellers, and, well, his exuberant coif — to adopt another claim to fame. Perhaps, from now on, he will be known as the Internet sheriff who saddled up on his blog and roped one errant hive-mind contributor like a straggling baby calf:
Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that Steve Sailer doesn’t allow readers to comment on his posts. Can you believe that? Here we have the aggrieved Steve Sailer, donning the cloak of victim as he decries my attempt at censorship. Here we have the allies of Steve Sailer, speaking out on behalf of the virutes [sic] of the free exchange of ideas, the importance of confronting one’s critics, the necessity of fighting the good fight in arena of free speech. And all the while their leader is cowering behind the gates of a comment-free blog.
Oh my. Is it possible that in addition to everything else, Steve Sailer is also a chicken?
See? That’s what’s so revolutionary about the Internet: It can turn a dude with a camera phone into a photojournalist, some dorky grad students into billionaires, and, it now seems, Malcolm Gladwell into a 4-year-old.
Imagine My Surprise … [Gladwell.com]
