malcolmgladwell - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Change, and how we get thereRemember Jack Taylor?...

Malcolm Gladwell's Penn State Rabbit Hole Isn't Very DeepMalcolm Gladwell emailed me last Thursday, in response to a blog post I had written about his recent appearance on Bill Simmons’s podcast, in which he dusted off a tired defense of Joe Paterno’s role in the Jerry Sandusky abuse scandal. He offered to send me a copy of his new book, which he said mig...

Malcolm Gladwell Goes On Bill Simmons's Podcast To Dust Off The Oldest, Dumbest Defense Of Joe PaternoThere’s no good reason to consider Malcolm Gladwell a serious writer or thinker anymore, thanks in large part to the things Gladwell continues to write and think. Despite this, he was allowed to write a new book—if you want to know more about it, I suggest clicking on this review in The Atlantic and...

Malcolm Gladwell Goes On Bill Simmons's Podcast, Delivers Sweaty Monologue On Nigerian Basketball Superiority

Malcolm Gladwell appeared on Bill Simmons’s podcast today to advance the claim that Nigerians would be the best possible basketball team composed of members of any one race. He began by arguing that being Nigerian depended on the player’s parents’ country of origin, and then kept building from there...

Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 Hour" Rule Is Essentially Meaningless

In his 2008 book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell culled a memorable and marketable tip from a 1993 study of violinists at a music academy in Berlin. The study’s authors, he said, found that the most talented and accomplished 20-year-old violinists at the school had practiced an ave...

If You Want To Be A Pro Soccer Player, It Helps To Be Born In January

You've probably heard the Malcolm Gladwell spiel about Canadian hockey players—namely, that a massive number of them are born in January. As it turns out, this isn't just a hockey thing. Scraping birthdays from transfermarkt.de, David Bauer has found a very similar effect among professional soccer p...

Trope-Recycling Bill Simmons Has Bill Simmons Syndrome

Bill Simmons this week mused on the fate of Dwight Howard, who appears to be the NBA's equivalent of plutonium: a potential world-beater but perilously radioactive. To characterize the gap between Perceived Dwight Howard and Actual Dwight Howard, the founder of Grantland and ESPN spittling-head did ...