I became a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan after I finished the first page of the Tipping Point. I have read Blink
and I usually listen to it over and over again on long automobile trips
with my audio copy. Now with the advent of pod-casting I have become a
junkie for anything Gladwell. In fact I would pay good money to hear
him recite the Yellow Pages or Yellow Book.
Recently, I used one of my audible.com credits to download a pod cast of Malcolm Gladwell with Robert Krulwich at the 92nd Street Y. As always he was brilliant. However, in this clip he talked about a town up near Albany NY called Gloversville.
At the beginning of the 20th century Gloversville was the epicenter of you guessed it "gloves". As Gladwell describes, if you were to visit Gloversville in the early 20th century you probably would have found the place quite boring. However, if you really cared about gloves this was the place to be. Here is a quote from one of Gladwell’s writings about Gloversville.
It's hard to imagine anyone caring so deeply about gloves, and had we visited Gloversville in its prime most of us would have found it a narrow and provincial place. But if you truly know gloves and think about them and dream about them and, more important, if you are surrounded every day by a community of people who know and think and dream about gloves, a glove becomes more than a glove.
Does this sound familiar?
