In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece for the magazine about a team of skinny, ill-trained girl basketball players who nonetheless advanced to the California state championship, partly by upending notions of how defense should be played. Underdogs, Gladwell wrote, win far more often than you might think; and they do so particularly when they replace ability with effort and figure out new ways to play the game.

Gladwell has spent the last three years further investigating, and expanding on, these ideas: moving from basketball to warfare, to crime-fighting, to invention. What should the strategy of the weak be when facing the strong? Does being an underdog—whether as a team a country or an individual—help foster creativity? Why should people at the top of their fields quit their jobs and try to reinvent themselves?

Little Brown has just announced that next year it will publish Gladwell’s new book, “David and Goliath,” on, as he says, the “art and science of the underdog.” He sat down with me, and Page-Turner, last week to talk about the book, the Viet Cong, Impressionist painters, and whether his advice about reinvention applies to successful authors, too.