Malcolm Gladwell Explained
"Gladwell's protagonists are generally intelligent but ordinary folks who have imbued their work with a passionate practicality. Their laboratories are courtrooms and high-concept shopping malls, office parks and African villages, but whatever their locale, they are always buried in data, endless stacks and reams and massive videotape libraries full of tens of thousands of hours of footage documenting their findings, their desks buckling under thick piles of 'carefully annotated tracking sheets.' With this abundance of evidence they espouse theories that Gladwell depicts either as regrettably naïve or courageously counterintuitive, depending on whether he is debunking conventional wisdom or advancing a hitherto unknown experimental truth."
Your weekend reading assignment: "Gladwell For Dummies," by Awl pal Moe "Maureen" Tkacik. This piece might have more amusingly been titled "Long," in the Gladwellian manner, but the 3000 words I've read so far are pretty good.
The second Enron article Tkacik references – puzzle vs. enigma was completely nonsensical and the worst article I've ever read in the New Yorker. I appreciate Tkacik's approach, most critics don't get past the first layer "this is frighteningly facile and terrible" repsonse.
It gets past the "facile/terrible" quite nicely and then skips right though the "meta" minefield. Nice piece of work.
What??? This is lucid, well-organized and persuasive prose. I'm shocked that the same writer could post all those barely literate, incoherent and rambling posts.
Are you kidding.
In fairness, there were moments on Jezebel when I feared for Moe's mental health (is that an occupational hazzard of working at Gawker empire?). It's a pleasure to see her doing work like this. More, please.
I think the responsibility falls 50-50: to Gawker Media, for forcing writers to toil under insane conditions, writing flash posts about flash in the pan idiots, and to Gawker readers (like myself) who filled the Colosseum, too overstimulated (not in the good way) to read them properly. I refer specifically to Emily and Dorie, whose work I barely recognize today as the stuff of writers I used to read over there. I never read Jezebel, but I do enjoy what I've read of Moe's work elsewhere since her departure.
But this prose is not lucid or persuasive, or even readable; it's deliberately shitty. Like Pitchfork/late undergrad shitty.
I'm sorry to damn this with my praise, but I l reallllly liked it. Maybe a bit rough going at the beginning, but worth the effort. She has Gladwell's (always disliked him) number, that's for sure! And if you can't appreciate gems like this one:
In searching for an anecdote or image with which to convey the ultra-absorbency of Gladwell's book as compared with that of his soggier-sentenced peers, I found myself remembering a story Gladwell wrote in 2001 about the technology of diapers. In this story, Gladwell reported that "those in the trade" refer to the waste that diapers are engineered to retain as "the insult," and this image seems to me as useful as any for thinking about Gladwell's success. His masterful maneuver was to engineer a style that artfully conceals "the insult," honing it in his articles before finally unleashing it in book form with The Tipping Point.
Well, I'm not sure what you are doing here.
Pot, meet Ketel One.
I'm only halfway through this thing but: Starting out "No matter how well intentioned or intellectually honest their attempts to assess his ideas, the subtext of Gladwell's perceived success, and its implications for their own aspirations in the competitive thought-generation business, obscures their judgment and sinks their morale." Doesn't that include present company? That is to say, doesn't her initial statement about authors intentions re" Gladwell include herself and undermine her piece?
Logical Facility + Opportunistic Exposition=Plasticity of Message.
There. Now we can eat.
Jebus. You really need that many words to say, "They just jellus"?
Sounds good but I'm reserving my Sunday morning reading hour to cover the upcoming (fingers crossed!) hostile email exchange between Cintra Wilson and Abe Sauer.
Pure heaven!
Yeah, what is up with Gladwell's hostility to precedent? Other writers are just straw men to that guy. Some kind of anxiety-of-influence thing, I guess.
I'd actually swerve away from the Gladwell psyche and try to attribute it to changes in the New Yorker house style–a epochal move away from Lawrence Wright and Janet Malcolm toward Gladwell, Orlean, and even Kolbert. At its most reductive: The past requires no acknowledgement; the present is all.
Of course things are messier than that, but, yeah, more or less.
Sound observations, both.
I once had a dream that I was riding on a ferry. Much to my dismay, Jon and Kate Plus 8 got on board (this was before the official breakup and soon after I had first heard of them – so, say, a couple months ago). God, I'm so SICK OF THEM, I grumbled. And then I saw Malcolm Gladwell kneeling in the aisle, interviewing a nondescript woman who was flush with glee at the surprise of riding the ferry with her favorite teevee stars. "Malcolm Galdwell," I said, or something to this effect, "Good God, why are you wasting your time/life/energy reporting on this? What about health care and Iraq?" I felt it was absolutely critical that I convince him not to write about Jon and Kate Plus 8. And I was SO DISAPPOINTED, that he was there, that I was there, that Jon and Kate existed.
13 pages to printer…done! That's my commute tonight. I like it when Mr. Balk assigns homework.
Mo's writing is like a girlfriend I once had: I am really attracted to her and she always gives me a headache.
Someone please, set fire to the author's thesaurus.
Matteo Ricci FTW. It's almost unfair to deploy actual facts against MG.
That excerpt is breathtakingly awful. There's hardly a phrase in it that you couldn't torture yourself with in order to confront the possibility that nothing means anything.