Malcolm Gladwell (Getty Images)

The New Yorker writer on trends in neuroscience who didn’t get in trouble this year continues to rake in the speaking engagements: Malcolm Gladwell drops by the Tropfest Roughcut Symposium today, a daylong event at which various notables discuss the art of film. Speakers joining Mr. Gladwell include Sofia Coppola’s film editor Sarah Flack and movie star Liev Schreiber (to either or both of whom Mr. Gladwell should talk about adapting some of his well-crafted anecdotes into a movie), as well as film criticism icon Lisa Schwarzbaum ... Meanwhile, the documentary West of Memphis, about the travails of the now-freed West Memphis Three, who spent 18 years in prison on the basis of dubious evidence, has its premiere party on the Upper East Side.

Tropfest, Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 W 65th Street, begins at 10am, tickets and information can be found at tropfest.com/ny; West of Memphis premiere, Upper East Side, invitation only.

Everyone knows the feeling. The New Yorker shows up again and you haven't even finished the issue from last week. Or that #longreads profile that everybody was talking about two weeks ago is only half read and now it's too late to be part of The Conversation (were you ever even part of it?). Cue maniacal laughter.

Hello Nast-e, How You Been? In the "great" tradition of The Devil Wears Prada, Erik Maza reports on yet another bit of roman à clef that has emerged from the former innards of Conde Nast. Okay, so: Karl Taro Greenfeld's forthcoming (and very hyped!)  Triburbia isn't exactly mass-market paperback fodder, but there is a bit about a Conde Nast magazine that "didn’t survive very long in the digital age." The context provided and Maza's guesswork lead him (and us) to believe it's based on one Joanne Lipman of long-deceased Portfolio where Greenfield once worked. Portfolio famously blew a bunch of cash and its failure was like a really highbrow and way more expensive version of any one of Radar's three failures with far less drug use and more Michael Lewis and Felix Salmon. Also, Jeff Bercovici will probably never work at Conde Nast again for the wonderful media reporting he did (on Conde Nast; attaboy!) when he was there. Anyway, Maza hysterically called up Joanne Lipman who didn't comment on the book because she hasn't read it, but more importantly, we now know that Lipman is writing a book about her childhood music teacher instead of a Conde Nast tell-all. [Memo Pad / WWD]

Ghostface Dillah! IAC chairman Barry Diller was on the company's earnings call today when Peter Kafka heard him talking crazy-talk: A print-less Newsweek? Never! But: Not entirely unlikely! [All Things D] 

Nahoo: Welcome back to the media headlines for a day, Jamie Mottram, who previously oversaw Yahoo's whole blog experiment thing, who is now going to USA Today's Sports Media Group. Onward and lateral-ward! [Fishbowl NY]

On The Upside, You Get Marion Berry As Your Mayor: Have you thought about leaving New York City for higher ground lately? Tired of the Gotham grind? Well, D.C. news/gossip/scuttlebutt sheet The Hill has released their 50 Most Beautiful People list for this year, and it's as good a argument against it as anything else, especially if you've vaguely considered moving to D.C. (and let's face it: if you in fact have vaguely considered moving there, you deserve whatever fate awaits you). Also, tawdry mid-summer feature experts that we are, could you pick a worse way to shamelessly paginate, as a deterrent to reading through the entire thing? In D.C., no, because everyone there buys into things like this, as opposed to only a fraction of bored New Yorkers when we do them. [The Hill]

Someone Only She Knows: Remember what Maureen Dowd was like when she was an entirely respectable and hard-nosed reporter, before she pioneered the art of the hard-sell headline (long before The Internet—and TimesSelect—was ever a thing)? Of course you don't, because none of us were alive and if we were we didn't know who Maureen Dowd was yet because she was still an entirely respectable and hard-nosed reporter. Well, now you can relive those glory days. The Awl has a feature on it. [The Awl]

Outliars: Did Malcom Gladwell cause the recession? No, but it's fun to imagine him doing so because he once lectured at Lehman Brothers. Also: Wouldn't he just love  that? In even asking the question, Andrew Sullivan gives Malcolm Gladwell way, way, way too much credit today, while Felix Salmon gives him way too much space to defend himself of this accusation. All of which goes without saying: We all know Jim Cramer caused the recession, anyway. [Andrew Sullivan, Felix Salmon]

And The Pulitzer for Pattinson Service Goes To: The most groundbreaking thing happening in journalism today has to do with Kristen Stewart cheating on Robert Pattinson. This is like Watergate (for our angsty teenage cousin). It's literally inescapable on any social media platform right now. Congratulations, US Weekly, you've officially pushed VICE out of the "obligatory esoteric ASME nomination" position for next year's awards. [US Weekly]

Please remember to send your tips, legal threats, pencil sketches of funny dog breeds, and pro-bono accounting advice right here.

Happy Wednesday.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Will his next article be about the ameliorative effect of a larger apartment?

Most ink-stained wretches in New York make their homes in cramped quarters, but Malcolm Gladwell is an outlier when it comes to journalistic abodes: he now owns not one, but two apartments in his West Village co-op.

Mr. Gladwell, who has lived in the trendy neighborhood for quite some time, has purchased the third-floor of 23 Bank Street, an 1850s townhouse, for $999,000, according to city records. And unless the avid trend-spotter is already jumping on board with Mayor Bloomberg's small apartment push, we assume the guru of clever catch phrases is expanding out from his fourth-floor pad in the same building.

The New Yorker scribe and New York Times bestselling author bought his first apartment in the building for $1.5 million back in 2008. Neither the old nor the new apartment were publicly listed; Mr. Gladwell purchased the second apartment from the estate of his neighbor, Barbara Joyce Michael. Apparently, he didn't want to blink and miss his chance to expand his real estate holdings in the building.

We guess Mr. Gladwell has done well with the speaking fees these last few years, as we doubt his recent compilation of previously published New Yorker essays financed this most recent purchase. Which makes us wonder, is he working on another trendy tome? Maybe it's about the crazy, quirky secrets behind the New York real estate market?

kvelsey@observer.com

ESPN and Grantland have contracted McSweeney's to handle the production and distribution (which, in retrospect, explains why Dave Eggers is a Grantland contributing editor).

As such, the basketball leather-bound books will harbor twee custom moving parts, like posters, a pull-out section, "old-school baseball cards" and mini-booklets. The first volume is available through the McSweeney's store; individual issues cost $19.95 and a year-long subscription (four issues) is $48.

In addition to some of the more memorable Grantland features (Malcolm Gladwell on the NBA lockout and Colson Whitehead on the World Series of Poker, for example), the first volume includes an original column by Mr. Simmons and new fiction from Jess Walter, author of The Financial Lives of Poets.

Grantland Quarterly has always been a part of the ESPN-sponsored website's business plan, according to Mr. Fierman.

"If our site has a problem it's that we move so fast that readers miss stuff," he said. The print journal serves up the site's greatest hits in a medium better suited to long-form journalism. Plus, nostalgia runs rampant among Grantland's roster of magazine writers.

"I miss the feel of print," the former GQ editor told The Observer. "It’s good to be back in it."

Jonas Wood's "Bullets" (2007) (Photo: Anton Kern Gallery)

“Pro sports teams are a lot like works of art," New Yorker scribe Malcolm Gladwell writes in an article on the NBA lockout, published on ESPN’s tony new Grantland.com site.

According to Mr. Gladwell, NBA owners, who are trying to trim player salaries in response to declining profits, are treating their teams like straightforward businesses, ignoring the psychic benefit--surplus pleasure above and beyond simple profits--that they derive from them.

This psychological enjoyment, Mr. Gladwell writes, is the reason why a team like the Warriors, which was valued by Forbes at $363 million, recently sold for $450 million.

The Tipping Point author uses the art world to provide a succinct explanation of of his point:

“The best illustration of psychic benefits is the art market. Art collectors buy paintings for two reasons. They are interested in the painting as an investment... And they are interested in the painting as a painting — as a beautiful object. In a recent paper in Economics Bulletin, the economists Erdal Atukeren and Aylin Seçkin used a variety of clever ways to figure out just how large the second psychic benefit is, and they put it at 28 percent. In other words, if you pay $100 million for a Van Gogh, $28 million of that is for the joy of looking at it every morning."

Art collectors acknowledge that psychic surplus when purchasing artworks, Mr. Gladwell says, while team owners do not. Indeed, art collectors generally deny the investment value of their purchases: pleasure alone is, at least ostensibly, supposed to be the reason for an art purchase.

Mr. Gladwell emphasizes:

"Basketball teams, of course, look like businesses. They have employees and customers and offices and a product, and they tend to be owned, in the manner of most American businesses, by rich white men."

We'll let you decide the degree to which those observations apply to the art world.

Update, 4:00 p.m.: As a colleague notes, the basketball and art worlds have collided frequently over the years. David Hammons made a basketball-hoop sculpture, Jeff Koons suspended basketballs in aquariums in early pieces, Haim Steinbach placed Air Jordans on one of his shelves and Jonas Wood has painted basketball scenes. (An example of the latter is posted above). And in 2009, NBA superstar Shaquille O'Neal curated a show at Chelsea's FLAG Foundation. The exhibition's title was "Size Matters," which is also the name of a combative essay by artist Robert Morris.

This is not a New York Schlub.

On July 5, the New York Yankees were up 6-0 in the bottom of the sixth inning in an away game against the Cleveland Indians. Orlando Cabrera snapped the quiet with a sharp grounder between second and third that looked to be an easy base hit for the home team. The 37-year-old Derek Jeter, in his second game back after more than two weeks on the D.L., grabbed the ball as he spun in one fluid motion, like shine off a diamond, thunder-bolting a cross-field throw to Jorge Posada at first.

Mr. Cabrera was out by an inch.

A few days later, I tuned in comfortably, from a couch in Brooklyn that reclines on both sides, to watch, along with a hefty chunk of the rest of the city, Mr. Jeter chase his 3,000th regular-season career hit in a game against the Tampa Bay Rays. I anticipated a lot and did not expect much. The matchless eggheads in the sporting press had been pooh-poohing much of his performance this season, assuring us that his best days were well behind him (he was running his worst batting average since his rookie season in 1995, for one thing). He should still be thought of as a future Hall of Famer, of course—just, you know, don’t settle in for fireworks.

Then: whack, WHACK, whack, whack, whack! The Yankee captain went 5-for-5 on the day, his second hit—No. 3,000—a cinematic homer into the left-field stands.

I leaned forward on my couch. Right then, I developed a theory that hinged on Mr. Jeter’s run to the hitting milestone: He is the prototypical New York Schlub. He is a man written off in his early middle-age after a youth of accomplishment earned the hard way—through actively being good at things; the defined establishment of his field allows him to coast as he chooses; and he is always dutifully applauded when sparks of the old fire flash.

It has nothing to do with physical appearance or prowess, though few other cities would allow flip-flops, a loose shirt and corduroys in August to count as professional wear as it does here. The New York Schlub is a subspecies—no corpulent dudes couch-surfing their weeknights through TiVoed Family Guy episodes, the detritus of Chipotle takeout sluicing through flesh folds. In New York, a schlub might hit the gym early every morning and spend evenings, after a day of suitably long hours, dutifully poring through Outliers, The Tipping Point and anything else Malcolm Gladwell can write his way. (Mr. Gladwell, in fact, reigns as perhaps the king of the Ur New York Schlubs, now a couple of years past the cut-off date of 45ish. One’s mind, traveling the same gestational lines, trips quickly to other, slightly older writers like Adam Gopnik or David Zinczenko; or saltier heads like Graydon Carter, he of the shorts in the office in the summer; Jon Meacham, with his publishing sinecure punctuated by that earnest forehead furrow on Charlie Rose; and David Brooks, who shows the full career potential of the New York Schlub in every held-together-by-chewing-gum maxim he pens for the World’s Greatest Newspaper about how the young and the affluent, some of them already schlubs, should tender their ambition.)

In New York, a schlub might wear Brooks Brothers and Bexley; or pinstripes and cleats; his wardrobe is, in fact, as immaterial as his physicality. In New York, a schlub gets away with things a woman would never get away with.

“I applaud the schlub!” emailed professional matchmaker Amy Van Doran. “I think it’s great anytime anyone has figured out a way to be successful on their own terms.” She quickly turned to the rub, though, as far as her field goes. “It bums me out that there is a double standard; a female schlub is a slob, and I don’t have any schlubs that are seeking slobs.”

The New York Schlub oils entire industries here. Finance, law, advertising, P.R.—the very designs of their trajectories for success (put in the years, reap the perks) invite schlub life; some, like real estate, require even less time investment. New York magazine six years ago declared Michael Shvo a “real estate mogul” at the age of 32, when he had done little more than slap “lifestyle” on condo marketing materials and pissed off his elders (he has since tellingly disappeared from the propertied scene).

Government? It brims with coasters—that’s kind of the point. Where else would the 33-year-old Joel Rivera, after his initial election at age 22, be able to twiddle his thumbs long enough to become majority leader of the City Council and then take a sweetheart real estate gig on the side? Adam Clayton Powell IV? Same, though a little more in league with other Ur New York Schlubs; ditto, Anthony Weiner, a coaster from his late 20s on the City Council right on through his collapse just past 40. Foodies? Rocco DeSpirito, 44. Tech? Dear god. Media? Entire middle mastheads here teem with the schlubbiest schlubs, bouncing from one title to the other (yeah, I know).

At some point, a guy can just stop trying that hard after he has worked that hard. There are numbers to prove it.

A day after Mr. Jeter’s cynicism-stopping spin move against the Indians, the Pew Center was out with a jobs report that showed men were basically gaining back jobs at a much faster rate than women during the economic recovery.

The report by Rakesh Kochhar, an associate director at Pew, culled statistics since June 2009, when the recession ended (though no one told us). The key finding? “From the end of the recession … through May 2011, men gained 768,000 jobs and lowered their unemployment rate by 1.1 percentage points to 9.5 percent. Women, by contrast, lost just 218,000 jobs during the same period, and their unemployment rate increased by 0.2 percentage points to 8.5 percent.” The kicker: “The recovery from the Great Recession is the first since 1970 in which women have lost jobs even as men have gained them.”

Why can’t New York women who toiled their 20s and early 30s away be New York Schlubs themselves, riding hard-won accomplishments while striving less?

The Pew report punted on a reason for the discrepancies, though floated a few possibilities. There are more men out there applying for jobs. Women just can’t hold jobs as well as men in a variety of fields for a variety of reasons. Men have more flexibility than women in accepting jobs. The suggestions were the usual suspects, set against economic calamity.

Pundits took the report as a chance to pound out the words “hecovery” and “mancession”—as in a “hecovery is under way from the mancession” (we get paid for this). Annie Lowrey broke in a different direction.

In a July 11 column for Slate, the economics writer cited the Pew report, including the important caveat that men suffered more than women during the recession (thus “mancession”). “[T]he picture remains worrying for women, who continue to lose jobs even as the economy slowly, very slowly, gets better.” She then wrote that she hoped for a “shecovery” to accompany the “hecovery” soon. Neologisms abound!

I called Ms. Lowrey in her D.C. office a few days after the column. We talked about the Pew report and its mere theories for why men are coming out of the recession more strongly than women. We also talked about the dearth of data, really, on all this: men, women, hiring, firing, the recession—there has not been an economic calamity remotely comparable to the current one since the 1930s. There are few apples in American history to set against our current bushel.

“What was weird,” Ms. Lowrey said, citing the Pew report, “was not that men were just gaining in sectors where they normally have a lot of jobs, like finance, like construction. They were kind of taking a bigger share of jobs across all sectors; and there’s not a lot to explain that. It seems like employers are just choosing to hire men.”

Ah-hah! And after they do? I called Emily McCombs, the managing editor of xoJane.com, the Jane Pratt vehicle “where,” it explains, “women go when they are being selfish, and where their selfishness is applauded.” What did she think of the Pew report and my theory?

“Gender undoubtedly plays a role in hiring and firing, and what sector you’re likely to be working in in the first place, which is not really a surprise to anyone,” Ms. McCombs said. “Certainly, when you get to a management level you can sort of kick back in that way, and I think it’s pretty well-documented that there are more men on that level than women.”

Get to that level then, men, and quickly. It’s not a bad thing, not at all. It is to be aspired to, something to work toward. Schlub life, with its desultory blips of flair amid a genial coasting, will make you the envy of your pals and your women. Who would not want to be Adam Rapoport or Jay Fielden, their respective 41 years splayed across Times Style profiles that fawned over their natty wardrobes, ambrosial cuisine and desirable real estate? Or any of the duditors, all gelled, French-cuffed and jauntily secure in their jobs?

As for Mr. Jeter, he batted a media-softball-league-worthy .176 in the week after going 5-for-5 against the Rays (he also skipped the All-Star Game, angering fans who voted him in). Does it matter? Nah. He spent the past 15 years killing it. And then he had that salubrious 3,000th. And the Yankees, besides, have settled into that familiar autumnal pennant sprint with Boston—a city that, much like our kind of schlub, continues to trade on its most consequential days, way, way back when: “Take the T to where the Declaration of Independence was first read!”

tacitelli@observer.com  ::  Follow on Twitter @tacitelli

The book's hero, Dave, is a resident of the lusty alternate universe known as the House of Holes, a kind of sex tourism Hogwarts. At one point, Dave invites a woman to watch a dirty movie in the campus's 12-projection theater, the "Porndecahedron." Before long, Mr. Baker writes, "Dave angled out his Malcolm Gladwell."

He continues: "'Ooh, you've got it out again,' she said. 'Can I hold it for a second, just the head of it? Oof.'" Blink, indeed.

The Transom was unable to reach Mr. Gladwell or Mr. Baker for comment. However, the book carries a disclaimer promising that "any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental."

Dan chose the sport arbitrarily; he would have been fine with spending 10,000 hours on just anything. "People who study expertise say no one has done quite what Dan is doing right now," says the St. Petersburg Times story. Here's a handful of other representative sentences, each beginning a new paragraph.

• He has started five novels.

• "Dan's always been an ideas guy," his brother, Matthew McLaughlin, said.

• Dan Googled him.

• Everybody asks him what he shoots for a round. He has no idea.

• Failure?

Is this like that scene in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff holds himself hostage? We give in! Here's your book deal! Just please stop making yourself play golf.

Cory Bortnicker, a writer for the financial site Minyanville and co-creator of the Book Generator, said the idea came up a few months ago, but only took "three days" to actually put together. "I've read most of them," he said of Gladwell's books, "and I'm actually a big fan of his work. I think he's a fun writer. I think it's great anytime someone can bring science to a large audience like that."

The science Gladwell writes about may be a bit dilettantish (hence, The Cheers Effect: How and Why Everybody Knows Your Name) or goofily packaged (Subtitles: How Secondary Titles Inflate a Sense of Importance). But Bortnicker thinks Gladwell himself--even despite the latest fracas over his offbeat claims about Twitter and Egypt--is not the object of the joke, just a penumbra floating around it. "The joke is kind of on all of us, probably Malcolm Gladwell least of all. People buy his books, publishers sell his books, designers design his books." Gladwell just hatches the ideas. Is it too much to hope for, though, that he might someday really write the definitive Nickelodeon study Clarissa: How One Woman Explained It All?

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_