Perhaps the reason our economy has collapsed is that America’s best thinker is only smart compared to the rest of us dumb Americans? Malcolm Gladwell, a staple for us New Yorker magazine readers and on the business insight bestsellers shelf at airport Borders outlets, gets a thrashing in “The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell; A guru for the brain dead” (from London; apparently folks in the UK aren’t as easily impressed as we are).
6 thoughts on “America’s Best Thinker, trashed”
Comments are closed.
Malcolm Gladwell…not exactly America’s Greatest Thinker; he’s 100% Canadian.
I always thought he was the champ of incoherent, half-baked theses.
Finally, someone agrees!
I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with the author of the article. When I read them, both The Tipping Point and Blink felt like they should have been 10 pages long.
He got trashed by the New York Times also, at least by Kakutani. So it’s not like people here are really into the anecdotal science that much either, except for perhaps cocktail party patter.
When I was done reading Blink!, I felt unsatisfied. I enjoyed the examples for what they themselves were, and not because they helped the author’s idea.
My fiancee felt that way as well. I wanted to know what was so great about that book. Now I know 🙂
Wonderful stuff. People starting to recognize an emperor with no clothes . I’d rather read H. Murakami than Gladwell for insight into the human condition. Murakami gets rig hto the point of why people feel so empty. . I couldn’t even finish Tipping Point ’cause it was just so dumb.