Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell Chapter 1

‘Outliers’

Outlier, noun. out·li·er \-,li(-#)r\ 1 : something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body 2 : a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample 1.

Outlier, noun. out·li·er \-,li(-#)r\ 1 : something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body 2 : a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample 1.

The value of an outlier was that it forced you to look a little harder and dig little deeper than you normally would to make sense of the world.

Outlier, noun. out·li·er \-,li(-#)r\ 1 : something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body 2 : a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample 1.

Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome, in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia.

In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square.

In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square.

In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square.

An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine — Our Lady of Mount Carmine.

They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and named the main street on which it stood Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification.

They built closely clustered two story stone houses, with slate roofs, on narrow streets running up and down the hillside.

Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely-clustered two-story stone houses with red tile roofs.

Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely-clustered two-story stone houses with red tile roofs.

The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment — until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.

Then they ventured west, ending up finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city in Bangor, Pennsylvania.

For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night.

For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night.

For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night.

The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment — until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.

The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment — until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.

The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry.

These were both about the same size as Roseto, and populated with the same kind of hard-working European immigrants.

The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside, connected to Bangor only by a steep, rutted wagon path.

They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and named the main street on which it stood Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification.

In 1896, a dynamic young priest — Father Pasquale de Nisco — took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

Schools, a park, a convent and a cemetery were built.

Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant — given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians, in those years — that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans: if you wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania, in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian spoken, and not just any Italian but the precise southern, Foggian dialect spoken back in the Italian Roseto.

Wolf was skeptical.

This was the 1950's, years before the advent of cholesterol lowering drugs, and aggressive prevention of heart disease.

Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States.

It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease.

They took medical histories, and constructed family genealogies.

They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced.

They went to conferences, where their peers were presenting long rows of data, arrayed in complex charts, and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they talked instead about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to each other on the street and having three generations living under one roof.