Legal Commentary

Enduring Gladwell?

By Tom Kirkendall

Charlie Rose interviews Malcolm Gladwell in the video below in regard to his new book Outliers, but it does not appear that the Financial Times' Clive Cook will be watching:

Since the first chapter of “Tipping Point” I have been enduring Gladwell out of an increasingly weary sense of professional obligation. This is what they pay me to do, I tell myself. The man has a nose for interesting tales, I grant you, but his unfailing combination of intellectual parasitism, credulity, false modesty, and self-importance repels me. In “Tipping Point”, “Blink” and those of his New Yorker pieces I have read, the formula is always the same: find a scholarly opinion; sanctify said opinion with Gladwellian approval (transforming it from a disputed theory to something “we now know”); season with Madison Avenue terms of art; then deluge with anecdotes of questionable, if any, relevance. And let there be colour. Always, the colour. Please tell me about that man’s wry smile, interesting foreign accent, and cluttered desk (often, as studies show, the sign of a creative mind). I need to know all that.

Full post as published by Houston's Clear Thinkers on December 23, 2008 (boomark / email).