All Intensive Purposes

Bill Simmons interviews Malcolm Gladwell (that's part one; here is part two). I am something of a Simmons fan, if not as rabid as that phrase might connote. Gladwell strikes me as provocative if sometimes misguided. But, hey, that's just a quick take.

Anyway, Gladwell says he's just a product of his environment:

I'm working in a such a supportive and structured environment that I no longer know where my own abilities end and where the beneficial effects of the environment begin. Just think if you were a New Yorker writer, Bill. Suddenly your editors would be asking you to make your stories longer. You spend the summers at a writer's colony in New England, working on a historical novel based loosely on Freud's famous falling-out with Adler. And girls would hit on you in bars because they would think of you as cute in that nerdy, bookish way.