THERE ARE MANY reasons to be impressed by Malcolm Gladwell. He worked for The Washington Post, works for The New Yorker and is, arguably, the most widely-read cultural commentator writing today. His two books, The Tipping Point and Blink have sold more than three million copies worldwide.
Last year, Time magazine named Gladwell one of its 100 most influential people, he reportedly earns US$40,000 for a public lecture, and Leonardo DiCaprio has bought the screen rights to Blink. Little wonder that he's attracted such epithets as the Hindu God of Anecdotes and the cleverest man alive.
As Gladwell descends the staircase of his elegant London hotel, these facts all evaporate in the face of just one thing: his hair. It bobs atop the banisters like a porcupine hopping along on a tight-rope, seconds before he appears. Gladwell doesn't just let his hair down - he lets it sideways, backwards and up, up and away. In certain respects, Gladwell's coiffure is the liveliest thing about him. This isn't to say he's boring - far from it - but whereas his hair seems to be in a state of perpetual alarm, his face is uniformly serene, his voice a gentle undulation. The contrast is mildly disorientating - as if an accountant and a funk-band met at a wig-swapping party and forgot to exchange addresses.
Tucking into tea and tartlets, Gladwell exudes a particularly American brand of cool - no mean feat for someone born in England to Anglo-Jamaican academics, who emigrated to Canada at the age of six and whose formative intellectual influence was the distinctly unhip right-wing commentator William F. Buckley.
His understated dress-code (trainers, jeans, hooded top, smart shirt) is the height of slacker chic, his personality laid-back and laconic. Gladwell proves to be the master of the dead-pan proclamation. Take his job application for right-wing magazine, the American Spectator. Gladwell answered the question: 'Why do you want to work at the American Spectator?' - simply by writing: 'Doesn't everyone want to work at the American Spectator?'
The anecdote is typical Gladwell: he answers difficult questions by posing better ones that investigate what's being asked. Perhaps this is why his preferred job description is 'intellectual adventurer'.
'My books are excursions into the world of ideas to see what we can find,' he says. 'I feel about new ideas the way some people feel about art. It's endlessly fascinating to find a new way to explain something.'