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Are You Smart Enough as a Fifth Grader?

Malcolm Gladwell on when genius emerges.

In this week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell tackled genius, boiling the issue down to Picasso vs. Cezanne, concept vs. experiment, prodigy vs. late bloomer. We commonly think of great artists emerging as youngsters, Gladwell writes, despite examples to the contrary: Hitchcock made his best films between the ages 54 and 68; Robert Frost wrote 42 percent of his most anthologized poems after age 50. It all comes down to the way older geniuses work. While prodigies like Picasso begin with a concept they want to execute, late-blooming artists experiment their way to greatness. As Gladwell puts it, “Let’s just be thankful that Cezanne didn’t have a guidance counselor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him to try accounting.”