Read an interesting profile of Malcolm Gladwell in the nytimes this weekend. Gladwell, the author of “Blink” and “The Tipping Point”, adds some pretty interesting ancedotes about his writings. I’ve yet to read any of his books but I’ve always enjoyed his material in the New Yorker (which is all archived on gladwell.com). Oddly enough, his dad was a Waterloo prof and he talks about he was politically conservative as a teenager (since there was no way to be radically left of Trudeau). He also mentions how he changes his mind on a lot of things once he has more information on a given topic. That might explain how a former conservative can be found utterting stuff like this:
I hate to be this reductive, but an awful lot of my ideology, it’s just Canadian. Canadians like small, modest things, right? We don’t believe in boasting. We think the world is basically a good place. We’re pretty optimistic. We think we ought to take care of each other, and it so happens that to be a Canadian in America is to seem quite radical.