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Analysis Of The Ketchup Conundrum By Malcolm Gladwell

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In the article “The Ketchup Conundrum” (2004), Malcolm Gladwell, longtime journalist with The New Yorker, justifies that perfection is plural in nature, and in an attempt to find perfection for the general public one will only achieve perfection from the perspective of a paucity of people. Gladwell proves this notion by discussing statistics that show the fault in singular perfection (“...data were a mess-there wasn’t a pattern”) by including proof of discrepancies (“...everyone had a slightly different definition of...perfect...”) through success stories that appear inapplicable to ketchup (“...the rules...which apply to...virtually everything in the super market, don’t apply to ketchup.”), and by leading readers to the discovery that Heinz …show more content…

Gladwell develops this idea that some forms of plagiarism aren’t crimes by using the similarities that occur in music “he sat down at the piano again and played the beginning of both songs, one after the other; sure enough, they sounded strikingly similar... Same sequence,” and proposes that, specifically in the music industry, one cannot place ownership on notes because they are just pitches on a scale that any one can play; however plagiarism exists when a well-known sequence of notes is reproduced and replicated with full knowledge of one’s act of replication. Using examples from many different pop-culture genres (music, theatre), Gladwell provides instances in which plagiarism is overlooked as mere coincidence, as well as instances in which plagiarism results in a destroyed reputation (British playwright Bryony Lavery, Frozen), or loss of employment (Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe) in order to provoke discussion about the severity of plagiarism, and illustrate how ideas become “...part of the archive of human knowledge...and, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they

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