Local Cartoonist Injured by Untenable Malcolm Gladwell Thesis

Northern Virginia cartoonist Richard Thompson, whose strip Cul de Sac now runs daily in the Post (we’re patting ourselves on the back), has a must-read blog where he comments on some of his illustrations that get published. Today he has an interesting post on an illustration that didn’t get published. A little while back, Thompson writes, he was approached by the New Yorker to work something up for a Malcolm Gladwell review of an unnamed book about Goldman Sachs (this one maybe?)(Update: Thompson says that’s the book):

The book dealt with a long-time head of Goldman Sachs who’d grown up poor in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood and started at the firm as an assistant janitor while in his mid-teens. He’d gone on to be a titan of finance, deal-maker & adviser to presidents, and Gladwell’s take was that outsiders can often do things within the system that others can’t, and hence do well. One of his counter-intuitive pieces, and it was interesting.

Well, Wall Street looks different now, and the piece may now be too out-dated to run without a lot of revisions, which is too bad.

You can check out Thompson’s blog to see his now-unlikely-to-run illustration.