The Malcolm Gladwell rule: how to succeed while annoying critics

YOU KNOW what you’re getting when you open a book by Malcolm Gladwell. It will centre around a modestly counterintuitive argument: being huge and strong is often a disadvantage, for instance, or talent and genius are overrated. Evidence for this thesis will be broken into around ten chapters, each containing a combination of briskly written reportage, historical anecdote and social science that draws out unexpected connections—between, for example, Lawrence of Arabia and a girls’ basketball team, or a high-achieving school district and the wild-cheetah population. Readers will finish the book feeling better informed about how the world works.