Tag: malcolm gladwell

How Catfish Hunter paved way for Supermodels

“Lauren [Hutton]: ‘We modeled by the hour before 1974 or 1975…. When the Revlon thing came, suddenly it was no longer about $60 an hour. I was getting $25,000 a day, and that was shocking.’

“Paulina [Porizkova]: ‘How did that happen?’

“Lauren: “I read an article about a sports guy named Catfish Hunter on the bottom right-hand corner of the New York Times front page one day. It said he was going to get a million-dollar contract….

” ‘It took six months to work out a contract [for me] that had never been worked out before, and basically all contracts [after that] were based on that.’

“Paulina: ‘Lauren, I salute you….’ ”

— From an interview in Vogue magazine, cited by Malcolm Gladwell in “Talent Grab” (The New Yorker, Oct. 11, 2010)

It took more than Tweets to challenge segregation

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“One crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter — David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil — was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk late into the night in Blair and McNeil’s room….
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“It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth’s. They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, ‘Are you guys chicken or not?’ Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of coffee because he was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.”
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— Malcolm Gladwell, arguing in The New Yorker (Oct. 4) that the tight bonds typical of the civil rights movement are far more effective at bringing about change than  “the kind of activism associated with social media” such as Twitter and Facebook.