What’s with the New Yorker? Gladwell is such a mediocrity and intellectual lightweight, a good, engaging writer but essentially a hack. His work is more geared to the thoughtless, the quick and easily digested concept. In some ways he’s the opposite of, say, Stephen Johnson, who has some of the same engaging qualities as Gladwell but delivers more substance in the end. I felt cheated for my money after buying Blink and couldn’t finish it either.
I would never mistake Gladwell for a serious thinker, but Outliers, again going by the New York piece is about more than nature vs. nurture. It’s also attacking America’s religion of self-reliance. And that’s no straw-man when you consider Gladwell’s audience (see Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch).
I agree entirely about Gladwell. The Tipping Point was full of sloppy thinking and logical fallacies. He never met a counterintuitive conclusion that he didn’t like. The whole “Late Bloomers” article had me wondering who his editor was.
If you looking for great writing and great thinking in The New Yorker, James Wood and Louis Menand are your best bets.
I came here by way of the comment that you left, with which I couldn’t agree more, on another review. I find Gladwell’s theory utterly useless and lacking foresight — unless you apply it to winery and then be able to pick the best vintage.
[...] Abbeville (via 3quarks) expresses some reservations, not about Gladwell’s conclusion, but about his approach: [Gladwell] is a skilled and entertaining writer, exemplifying the modern New Yorker “house style” for journalism with its combination of solid research, amused detachment, and quirky anecdotes in the Ken Burns mold. Tragically, Gladwell is also often very wrong. His work, famous for its forays into sociology, social psychology, market research, and other trendy disciplines, is a testament to both the exciting possibilities and the intellectual limitations of those fields. His penchant for what might be called pop statistical analysis sometimes leads to elegant, well-supported, and counterintuitive conclusions, but just as often recalls the man who couldn’t possibly have drowned in that river because its average depth was five feet. [...]
Good point – and we certainly don’t deny the power and brilliance of Geoffrey Hill, though we do preserve a certain cautious skepticism whenever poets criticize other poets whose style or subject matter overlaps with their own (cf. much of Eliot’s own criticism). Actually, parts of the “Four Quartets” can be a bit pseudo-mystical for our tastes, too, and they are overshadowed by Eliot’s earlier work, but they also contain passages of lasting relevance and force–e.g. the summing-up of modern man as “Distracted from distraction by distraction.” At any rate, they present a clear obstacle to anyone making the case that Eliot’s lyric gift disappeared entirely after his youth.
That said, we should have written something like, “Few would deny the power, however uneven…” But we’ve never been ones to pass up on a nice rhetorical flourish.
What’s with the New Yorker? Gladwell is such a mediocrity and intellectual lightweight, a good, engaging writer but essentially a hack. His work is more geared to the thoughtless, the quick and easily digested concept. In some ways he’s the opposite of, say, Stephen Johnson, who has some of the same engaging qualities as Gladwell but delivers more substance in the end. I felt cheated for my money after buying Blink and couldn’t finish it either.
I would never mistake Gladwell for a serious thinker, but Outliers, again going by the New York piece is about more than nature vs. nurture. It’s also attacking America’s religion of self-reliance. And that’s no straw-man when you consider Gladwell’s audience (see Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch).
BRAVO!
I agree entirely about Gladwell. The Tipping Point was full of sloppy thinking and logical fallacies. He never met a counterintuitive conclusion that he didn’t like. The whole “Late Bloomers” article had me wondering who his editor was.
If you looking for great writing and great thinking in The New Yorker, James Wood and Louis Menand are your best bets.
–Bob
I came here by way of the comment that you left, with which I couldn’t agree more, on another review. I find Gladwell’s theory utterly useless and lacking foresight — unless you apply it to winery and then be able to pick the best vintage.
[...] Abbeville (via 3quarks) expresses some reservations, not about Gladwell’s conclusion, but about his approach: [Gladwell] is a skilled and entertaining writer, exemplifying the modern New Yorker “house style” for journalism with its combination of solid research, amused detachment, and quirky anecdotes in the Ken Burns mold. Tragically, Gladwell is also often very wrong. His work, famous for its forays into sociology, social psychology, market research, and other trendy disciplines, is a testament to both the exciting possibilities and the intellectual limitations of those fields. His penchant for what might be called pop statistical analysis sometimes leads to elegant, well-supported, and counterintuitive conclusions, but just as often recalls the man who couldn’t possibly have drowned in that river because its average depth was five feet. [...]
Geoffrey Hill denies the power and brilliance of Four Quartets.
Good point – and we certainly don’t deny the power and brilliance of Geoffrey Hill, though we do preserve a certain cautious skepticism whenever poets criticize other poets whose style or subject matter overlaps with their own (cf. much of Eliot’s own criticism). Actually, parts of the “Four Quartets” can be a bit pseudo-mystical for our tastes, too, and they are overshadowed by Eliot’s earlier work, but they also contain passages of lasting relevance and force–e.g. the summing-up of modern man as “Distracted from distraction by distraction.” At any rate, they present a clear obstacle to anyone making the case that Eliot’s lyric gift disappeared entirely after his youth.
That said, we should have written something like, “Few would deny the power, however uneven…” But we’ve never been ones to pass up on a nice rhetorical flourish.