Dzhaughn offers an allusive line of reasoning:

He is a very high achieving Malcolm, and there is Little prospect that he will be Pope, so we need not worry about Gladwell before.

Baez, Collins, Rivers, Blondell, Miro. She was born to a life of privilege.

Anon’s got the serious take:

I’d have to go with Malcolm X, in part because while he’s a household name, I bet very few have actually heard him speak or read his writings directly. Most people know him through popular reputation, which often provides an objectively inaccurate perspective of his beliefs and views.

Joan Didion, on the other hand – most people who know of her have a fairly accurate idea of what she wrote about. She would no doubt have wonderful things to say, and I would love to hear them, but hearing Malcolm X in his own words would be a valuable educational enrichment . . .

David says it in one line:

Hard decision, but I’ll go for Malcolm X, since he had the good sense to avoid the war.

From the other direction, Diana gives this pitch for Joan:

The NYPL has a Malcolm X collection and has just acquired Joan Didion’s papers (the NYT reported this on January 26). It’s this “just acquired” that intrigues me, because if Didion was hoping to read from some of her own notes, she suddenly will have to wait until they’ve been sorted, catalogued, etc.–which could take a while, since her archive spans 240 linear feet of material. This means that she may well have to improvise, which would be fun. Malcolm X, on the other hand, has had ample notice of his papers’ location; he would have no trouble making photocopies, if he wished. There’s nothing wrong with a prepared speech, but I can’t get rid of the yearning for surprise. Therefore I vote for Didion.

But I’m suspicious of arguments based on novelty—it’s all a bit too PNAS for me—so it’s X who advances.

Today’s matchup

I’ll let wikipedia handle this one:

In 1930, Wilder requested [her daughter, Rose Wilder] Lane’s opinion about an autobiographical manuscript she had written about her pioneering childhood. The Great Depression, coupled with the deaths of Wilder’s mother in 1924 and her older sister in 1928, seem to have prompted her to preserve her memories in a life story called Pioneer Girl. She also hoped that her writing would generate some additional income.

The original title of the first of the books was When Grandma Was a Little Girl. On the advice of Lane’s publisher, she greatly expanded the story. As a result of Lane’s publishing connections as a successful writer and after editing by her, Harper & Brothers published Wilder’s book in 1932 as Little House in the Big Woods. After its success, she continued writing.

and

Stigler’s law of eponymy, proposed by University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler in his 1980 publication Stigler’s law of eponymy, states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Examples include Hubble’s law, which was derived by Georges Lemaître two years before Edwin Hubble, the Pythagorean theorem, which was known to Babylonian mathematicians before Pythagoras, and Halley’s Comet, which was observed by astronomers since at least 240 BC (although its official designation is due to the first ever mathematical prediction of such astronomical phenomenon in the sky, not to its discovery). Stigler himself named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of “Stigler’s law” to show that it follows its own decree, though the phenomenon had previously been noted by others.

That’s right. We have one person who got full credit and fame for a collaboration, and someone else who’s (slightly less) famous for an article about people getting credit for other people’s ideas. Fits in well with some of the themes of this blog.

Again, here are the announcement and the rules.