For the next few weeks, All About Work will be taking its annual end-of-year holiday break.
The blog has been a very busy place this year; thanks to all the readers and supporters that visited it and participated over the past 12 months. The five most popular posts of 2014 are:
1) A Look at the British Columbia Government’s Ad in the BC Teachers’ Dispute
(On the day that this post was published, the blog got its highest ever number of views for a single day, and the post itself was the 35th most read post on all of WordPress’s blogs.)
2) Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000-Hour Rule” Doesn’t Add Up
(This post was published in November 2012 and is still the blog’s most viewed post ever.)
4) The Coalition of BC Businesses and the BC Teachers’ Federation Court Case
5) More about the Coalition of BC Businesses and the BC Teachers’ Federation Court Case
Whatever winter holiday you celebrate, have a restful and joyful one – and Happy New Year in advance! See you in 2015.
Winter night walk, Edmonton, November 2014. (credit: own photo)
All About Work 
safe holidays and have a great end of 2014
💞✌🎄🎍
Very happy holidays and may the new year be filled of joyful surprises!
Happy New Year – my bad timing to have discovered you (via HeatherBlog) just as you take a holiday! It’ll give me time to catch up though.
Thank you for your post on Malcolm Gladwell. It’s a side of his writing – the plagiarism – that hasn’t attracted much publicity over here in the UK. He’s still the ‘floppy, curly-haired, quirky American intellectual with his finger on the pulse of modern humanity’ over here. A lot of people still feel that they’ve ‘discovered’ him, or that he’s a unique voice, speaking an unusual truth. It’s interesting how we load attributions on individuals. He does write well – lightly but cleverly. It’s sad to read that it’s smoke and mirrors stuff and it’s a great shame to hear that he isn’t giving proper attributions to his source materials. It’s odd too – it wouldn’t harm him to appear well-read. Do you think it’s because his USP is ‘first and prime thinker of unusual thoughts’?
How is he seen in the US? Over here there is an added value to a US academic – we are brought up to believe that modern things are the realm of America. Of course, back in the US he doesn’t have that extra cachet.
Thanks for writing as you do. I’m looking forward to curling up in front of the fire with some of your posts.
Thanks for your kind words. I hope you had some good reading over the holidays! Regarding Gladwell, your description of how he is perceived in the UK is pretty similar to the way he is perceived in North America, with perhaps the exception that he isn’t really considered an academic in North America (more of a synthesizer/popularizer of academic ideas). He’s also a very popular and well-paid speaker at business and corporate events.
Yes, I can imagine him being a popular speaker. He speaks well. Over here his slightly mad curly hair gives him an extra attractive layer of ‘outsider intellectual.’ It’s that The Simpsons thing, isn’t it – to be a character recognisable in silhouette. People imagine his ‘look’ when they read his words.
It’s such a shame that he hasn’t used the communicator skills that he has to communicate, and to be clear that he’s communicating not just his own thoughts, but the thoughts of others too. There’s no shame in being well read.