Blink and The Tipping Point

Malcolm Gladwell's books are justifiably praised, but his magazine pieces are his real achievement. Except for the most recent ones, they are all posted on Gladwell's website. His articles cover a broad spectrum of topics, but share one common denominator: Gladwell can make anything interesting. Some of his titles:

Group Think
What does 'Saturday Night Live'
have in common with German philosophy?
Smaller
The disposable diaper and the meaning of progress.
Something Borrowed
Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?
The Picture Problem
Mammography, air power, and the limits of looking.
The Ketchup Conundrum
Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties.
Why has ketchup stayed the same?

The last article was particularly winning, containing this jewel:

The story of World's Best Ketchup cannot properly be told without a man from White Plains, New York, named Howard Moskowitz. Moskowitz is sixty, short and round, with graying hair and huge gold-rimmed glasses. When he talks, he favors the Socratic monologue—a series of questions that he poses to himself, then answers, punctuated by "ahhh" and much vigorous nodding. He is a lineal descendant of the legendary eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi known as the Seer of Lublin. He keeps a parrot. At Harvard, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on psychophysics, and all the rooms on the ground floor of his food-testing and market-research business are named after famous psychophysicists. ("Have you ever heard of the name Rose Marie Pangborn? Ahhh. She was a professor at Davis. Very famous. This is the Pangborn kitchen.")Moskowitz is a man of uncommon exuberance and persuasiveness: if he had been your freshman statistics professor, you would today be a statistician. "My favorite writer? Gibbon," he burst out, when we met not long ago. He had just been holding forth on the subject of sodium solutions. "Right now I'm working my way through the Hales history of the Byzantine Empire. Holy shit! Everything is easy until you get to the Byzantine Empire. It's impossible. One emperor is always killing the others, and everyone has five wives or three husbands. It's very Byzantine."