Love and Hate: Malcolm Gladwell

I have never read a Malcolm Gladwell book. That makes me one of maybe six people. Everyone you know has read “Blink” or “The Tipping Point” or “Outliers,” and they think you should read it too. “You gotta read this!” they say, handing you a well-thumbed copy of “What the Dog Saw” in the manner of a Soviet dissident passing on samizdat. Malcolm Gladwell will change your life. He will Make You See Things in a New Way. He will Revolutionize Your Thinking.

This wild popularity has made Malcolm Gladwell a very, very rich man, wealthy enough to have me killed if he wanted. So I have to tread lightly here.

You might ask, Will, how can you judge Malcolm Gladwell? You admit that you haven’t read his books. What gives you the right to condemn him in front of your daily audience of three people?

I need to be more precise. I have never finished a Gladwell book. I started “Blink” and found it so god-awful that I put it down and curled up in a corner to cry. I did the same thing with “Outliers,” albeit in a different corner.

If Gladwell were a Batman supervillain, he would be called The Extrapolator. His M.O. is to take a seemingly random incident and inflate it to galactic proportions. Ever notice that many great Canadian hockey players are born in the first few calendar months? No, of course you haven’t. But Malcolm Gladwell has. Not only did he notice it, he devoted an entire chapter to it in “Outliers,” explaining it as the consequence of Canadiian youth hockey league rules. Or something.

But that's hardly enough extrapolation to satisfy Gladwell. In the Gladwell-verse, a mysterious realm locked beneath his goofy afro, everything is connected to something bigger. The story about the Canadian hockey league is no mere anecdote. It reveals the earth-shaking secret that…wait for it…success is often determined by outside factors!

You OK? I assume you fainted after reading that. It’s understandable. Malcolm Gladwell tends to make people swoon.

You might say, Geez, Will, this sounds a lot more like a hate-hate relationship than a love-hate one. Why don’t we all go grab our torches and pitchforks and meet at Malcolm Gladwell’s front door?

Because, as cognitive scientist and Robert Plant lookalike Steven Pinker has noted, Gladwell is deadly in book form but delightful when it comes to essays. Prevented by the word count from soaring to ridiculous heights of extrapolation, Gladwell drops his irritating tics—the cutesy catchphrases, the sloppy reasoning, the self-empowerment preaching—and gets down to writing.

And he does that quite well. If you don’t believe me, sample his story on espionage. Or try his intriguing comparison of teachers and quarterbacks. Or, staying on the football front, his comparison of football and dogfighting. Or his examination of the full court press in basketball. The fun never stops in a Malcolm Gladwell essay! Well, maybe in the one about dogfighting.

Still, I’ll give the last word to the critics. Sing us home, Craig Brown and Isaac Chotiner!