Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My cousin My castaway this week is the writer Malcolm Gladwell. To read his work is to

experience the sense that after years of bumbling about short-sightedly in the human experience

one has suddenly put on a pair of perfectly intellectually focused spectacles

always concise frequently counterintuitive and unexpectedly beguiling.

His work orders the world in such a way as to make previously opaque human behavior into vividly illuminating patterns.

He believes that only by understanding people's backgrounds can we unravel the logic behind

their success.

His own achievements can presumably then be attributed not just to his keen mind and polished prose, but also to the

concerned cultivation of his parents, an English mathematician and a Jamaican psychotherapist.

He says, I am the bird attached to the top of a very large beast pecking away and eating the gnats.

I am someone who draws inspiration from the brilliance of others and repackages it.

I am a populariser, a simplifier and a synthesizer. By your

own admission then Malcolm Gladwell you're interested in things that tend to be considered every day

whether it's sort of mid-price cars or Heinz ketchup or hair dye.

Why is it that you focus your considerable talents on these rather middling subjects?

Well because I'm middling subjects? Well because I'm middling. The things in the middle are the

interesting things. You know I always use the example of cars. I'm a huge car

lover. But a Ferrari is actually at the end of the day not interesting.

Because if I give you a million dollars, you really should make an interesting card.

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