As many, many, many critics have pointed out, Malcolm Gladwell has built a brilliant career—staff writer at the New Yorker, multiple New York Times bestsellers, an ambitious (if embattled) podcast network, a highly lucrative sideline in speaking engagements—out of boiling down the research of social scientists into digestible rules of thumb that usually run counter to conventional wisdom.
When we first launched our Substack, we used our current name but quickly abandoned it, focusing instead on TIG for over a year. In August of last year, we created a new Substack under a different name, only to realize we already had an existing one that readers were discovering.
IT FEELS LIKE it's been a long time since we've been able to find wonderful things to share with you organically. Google feels a bit broken and Instagram, our other source for inspiration, isn't what it used to be.
A few years ago, advertisements for a software service named Monday.com seemed to be suddenly everywhere online. This ubiquity didn’t come cheap. An S.E.C. filing revealed that the product’s developers had spent close to a hundred and thirty million dollars on advertising in 2020 alone, which amounted to roughly eighty per cent of the company’s annual revenue.
