A Raconteur

I'm in the middle of reading chapter 4, but I felt like I had to blog something before I forgot it.

I just learned that the word raconteur means someone who excels at storytelling and realized that Malcolm Gladwell is a raconteur (if you look at some of his videos you can see that he draws you in with his stories). His examples that I always mention are stories, his topics are always fresh because his stories are always interesting. Even in his book about epidemics, he went from a syphilis epidemic, to a Sesame Street epidemic, and now (where I'm up to) a crime rate epidemic in New York that suddenly and drastically dropped in the mid 1990's (the way epidemics of a disease do). He is redefining what I think of when I see or hear epidemic, since I always thought of it as a sickness that spreads quickly and vastly.

But yes, what I really wanted to share was that Gladwell is a raconteur, since I was trying to figure out what to make of all his examples up until now. In fact, in one of his essays, I remember reading that storytelling is a major category of communication.

Now something about the chapter. This chapter is only part one of the Power of Context, but he also summarizes the other two factors of an epidemic as well to clear things up in case there was any confusion, or if you (I) couldn't put into words what the significances of the three factors of an epidemic were (my favorite of which is the stickiness factor).

I still have a lot of reading left, I might have gone too far with the articles and started the book a little too late.