On Wednesday, Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author and staff writer for The New Yorker, visited the University at Buffalo.
Gladwell knows how to capture people's attention. His books have sold nearly 5 million copies, his talks attract thousands and his television appearances reach millions.
But many of his public activities he finds wearing.
He prefers spending most of his day reading and writing, which he attributes to his introversion.
"An introvert is not someone who finds public encounters difficult," he said in an interview with The Spectrum. "An introvert is someone who finds public encounters costly."
At the age of 50, Gladwell is a cultural icon. As someone Time magazine named one of the 100 most influential people, he has taken on a distinctive role in the public sphere. Widely noted for his distinctive appearance - his puffed up hair, his spunky yet cultivated image - Gladwell is even more distinguished in the world of ideas.
His first book, The Tipping Point, focuses on how social trends emanate from unlikely sources - the various ways in which the world does not work as it seems. He uses social theories, sociology, psychology and an array of different kinds of research to explain the intricacies of human behavior and experience through the lens of telling stories about real people and real events.
His most recent book, David and Goliath, uses that same approach to provide an examination of underdogs and adversity - how disadvantages can be advantageous and how obstacles can become opportunities.
He told a group of students on Wednesday afternoon that he likes to write books that "can be read by precocious 12-year-olds." He said the best praise he gets is when parents tell him their children read his books, because it means he may have opened them up to a world - to the power of stories and storytelling.
And this week, Gladwell brought the power of stories to Buffalo as the third speaker of UB's 27th Annual Distinguished Speakers Series. The event included an informal session in the afternoon with students and an address in the evening in Alumni Arena welcome to the general public.
The first thing Gladwell said in his speech Wednesday night was an implication that he may be a Bills fan. He said he grew up not too far from Western New York, in Southern Ontario, and because Canada has no NFL team, Canadians cheer for the team closest to them geographically. If you're from Vancouver, you root for the Seattle Seahawks; if you're from Montreal, you root for the New England Patriots.
"Had I grown up in Montreal instead of Toronto ...Well, those 400 miles would have made so much of a difference in my self-esteem," he said.
By the end of the night, audience members would realize this was an interesting prelude to the subject he would devote the majority of his hour-long speech. The argument in his speech was about another way of looking at and thinking about defeat.
Instead of lingering over his newest work, Gladwell used his speech to tell a story that is not in his book. He noted the story's theme was similar to Chapter 7 of David and Goliath, which details the resistance and opposition of Irish Catholic women to heavily armed British soldiers during the Irish Civil War.
"The question that I explore in that chapter was, what inspired the women to march? What compels underdogs to fight?" he said. "But if I tell you too much about what's in my book, I'll diminish your incentive to read it."
So he told the story of Alva Smith - later Alva Vanderbilt and then Alva Belmont. She was a determined woman living a comfortably affluent life of privilege in the early 20th century before "halfway through her life, she became a radical, a very important radical," Gladwell said. She became a leader in the suffrage movement that won women the right to vote in 1920.
In introducing the story, Gladwell invoked a common explanation for why some people choose to flout authority - the Theory of Deterrence, which says that people make decisions based on costs and benefits. When the benefit of breaking the rules exceeds the costs, people are more likely to engage in that activity.
But Gladwell asserts that this notion doesn't hold as true as the Theory of Legitimacy, which maintains that people obey authority when they are treated with fairness, trust and respect. When people aren't treated accordingly, they'll act out in a way that demands they be treated with legitimacy.
In the United States before 1920, women were not treated as legitimate. They were expected to stay at home and couldn't work or run for public office. And their husbands often committed infidelities, such as Willy Vanderbilt, Alva's first husband.
So Alva, a woman with seemingly everything who is living a cushioned life, decided to rise up and challenge a situation she did not find legitimate. When she moved the suffragette movement's headquarters to New York City and hired a lobbyist to push for the right of women to vote, she showed, as Gladwell said, "if you deny people legitimacy, they will one day, by one means or another, come back and defeat you."
The arena silenced as he said these words, finishing his speech, before he took questions from the audience. People had lots of questions for the writer who has spent his career delving into strategies for how to defeat the world.
And a college campus was an appropriate forum for such a discussion.
In college, Gladwell never took a course in psychology, which is now what he is most interested in. At the University of Toronto, he majored in history. Though he has said college for him was not "an intellectually fruitful time," he emphasized the continuing importance of studying the humanities.
"Being able to think clearly and write clearly and be knowledgeable about the world of ideas and literature," he said, "these are things that are part of what it means to be a human being."
He acknowledged there are two factors relevant to the issue of students today being concerned over studying humanities in the current economy: value and practicality.
"I think there's enormous value in studying the humanities," he said. "It is true that in the modern world it's a less practical degree than it was years ago ... so we just need to be forewarned that you have to be prepared to manage that gap between value and practicality."
He does feel that the case for a humanities degree is much stronger at a public institution. "The cost-benefit makes more sense to me," he said.
And in Chapter 3 of David and Goliath outlines the importance of public institutions - that they give you more freedom to tackle subjects and not get overwhelmed. "Public institutions like this give people the freedom to explore what they want to learn, not just what they can excel in," he said.
Having a background in humanistic learning contributed to Gladwell's ability to understand the world around him and how to present stories as a journalist.
"What is our job as journalists?" he said. "Our job is to translate the world for the public." As a translator, Gladwell is recognized for his distinct writing style noted for its lucid prose, which many find mesmerizing. "A lot of it comes from all the years I spent at a newspaper, because newspapers demand that you be clear, simple, straightforward," he said.
Since he began with The New Yorker in 1996, he has made it an effort to remain a cogent writer. In the informal session, he recognized aspects of the magazine he does not like, such as how long some pieces are and that some writers are "too precious" with their writing, but he also recognized the aspects he cherishes.
"The quality of editing is so extraordinary," he said. "They're very sensitive to the precision of language." Being there has fostered his career well, as he has used precise language to elucidate what he calls "weapons of the spirit" in his writing.
The weapons of the spirit are what his work tries to illuminate, and it is designed to deduce meaning and pinpoint certain counterintuitive connections that help explain how we live and how the world operates.
It is what he, as a journalist, translates to the public.
And on Wednesday night, the university community was able to hear the observations from one of the world's most prominent translators.
email: news@ubspectrum.com
