My October 2013 Costco Connection came in the mail yesterday.   This is normally not a noteworthy event, but the cover story caught my eye:  “The Thinker: Inside the Mind of Malcolm Gladwell.” The profile of Gladwell is running this month to highlight the fact that his newest book, David and Goliath, is available for sale in Costco warehouses. In light of both recent and long-running conversations on this blog — conversations about the idea of the public intellectual, the reach (or lack thereof) of academic writing, the phenomenon of anti-intellectualism, the disciplinary differences arising from various hierarchies of sources and Read more