The Cringing Point
(or, “Yeah, but, what about people who play violin for 20,000 hours but still totally suck?”)
Books: The Social Life of Paper : The New Yorker
This is, of course, a difficult conclusion for us to accept.
Aw, yes. So many things are difficult to accept until Malcolm Gladwell explains them to us. Gather round, children, and let Uncle Malky explain why all the adults are wrong and confused. This time. Again.
Jesus.
I rag this very smart and talented man (and Christ knows someone should), but probably not for the obvious reasons.
Yes, I grit my teeth when Gladwell makes a terrific observation, then staples on some random non sequitur of a case study to “prove it,” then lovingly attaches — as my friend T. puts it — “some ridiculous bromide” about What It All Really Means.
What kills me is I agree with basically every brilliant observation the man’s ever made. His instincts are stunningly sharp and zeitgeisty, and you simply can’t dispute his ability to synthesize totally random cultural datapoints. He thinks very very well.
As in the review above, in which Gladwell turns his thoughts about a book (that frankly sounds pretty asi-asi to me) into a terrifically well written summary of some very complicated cultural traffic jams. He’s just so good at that. Seriously.
I guess I wish Gladwell were more of an old-fashioned (albeit lower status) columnist rather than an armchair Everythingologist and professional Serious Issues pundit. Sometimes, it feels like he’s reading the same wikipedia and Google Scholar articles we are, but has simply found a more effective persona for making “reading things” seem like peer-reviewed scholarship.
Put differently, I’ll bet he and I would differ wildly on which of his contributions (let alone paragraphs) will be remembered as the most effective, long-lived, and useful. For myself, I most enjoy the paragraphs where he helps me see well; not the ones where he announces surprising half-facts about how my fucking eye works.
I dunno. Guy’s a million times more intelligent and successful then I’ll ever be. But I kind of hate how he’s seduced a generation of self-satisfied people with bachelor’s degrees into gorging on his horn-rimmed buffet of insouciantly bloggable cocktail party facts. It’s like meth malteds to the thin-boned lads who worship at his probably large Canadian feet.
Smugness is such a hungry, hungry habit, friends, and everybody loves a big ole plate of contradictory. Or do they? Because a recent study shows surprising….
