Malcolm Gladwell’s dumb, dumb world

Andrew Orlowski, who writes for The Register is clearly not impressed by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of populist books about big ideas.

In The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell Orlowski picks apart Gladwell’s style and lack of substance.

Gladwell is a walking Readers Digest 2.0: a compendium of pop science anecdotes which boil down very simply to homespun homilies. Like the Digest, it promises more than it delivers, and like the Digest too, it's reassuringly predictable.

The most famous book Tipping Point, takes an epidemiological view of social trends and throws in a bit of network theory. You won't draw anything more profound from this than "we're all connected" - gee! - and you certainly won't get the drawbacks of epidemiology - much of which is now indistinguishable from junk science.

Orlowski’s criticism is fair. I read parts of Gladwell’s two most famous books, The Tipping Point and Blink, before deciding they are all about what Basil Fawlty charmingly describes as “stating the bleeding obvious”.

Now, at times there is a case for writing the bleeding obvious. What is obvious to me may not be obvious to others.

There is a thing we journalists do when interviewing. We may know the answer to a question, but we want the interview to provide the answer in their own words. This can often provide additional insight. But that's NOT what Gladwell does.