Mo Tkacik tackles the conundrum that is Malcolm Gladwell. 

In that case, perhaps Gladwell’s intellectual compromises are neither commercial nor unintentional but rather a necessary outgrowth of his higher calling: to explore the secret workings of the world and impart the resulting data to its self-appointed stewards, the titans of industry. This conclusion, if true, may resolve many of the most puzzling incongruities riddling Gladwell’s articles: his continued defense of the pharmaceutical industry even as he advocates for single-payer healthcare; his refusal to indict the financial sector’s rigged “star system” as the engine of corruption that it is; the meticulous bleaching of his own prose so that he’s whitewashed out any real context, any framework in which wars and economic collapses can actually be understood as wars and economic collapses rather than simulations or malfunctions; his near total avoidance of academic thought that does not base its findings on things observed in labs (with the exception of Carl Jung, whose legacy he reduces to the popularization of personality tests); his coyness about politics; and most memorably, his irritating, unrelenting readability.

It’s a long and thorough piece that is certainly worth reading if you’ve ever given 15-minutes of your lifetime drunkenly debating the merits of Gladwell just before closing time at a seedy bar.

There was lots of chafing when President Obama decided to keep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — the lone holdover from the Dubya adminstration.  He was a Republican, liberals complained. 

And yet, reading this profile of him in Time, I’m struck by how right the decision was to retain him and propers where they are due, the decision by then-President Bush in 2006 to pluck Robert Gates from Texas A & M  to replace Donald Rumsfeld. 

After a quietly impressive career in government that has spanned more than 30 mostly Republican years, Robert Gates is suddenly seeming almost, well, charismatic. He reeks authority. He is, according to several sources, the most respected voice in National Security Council debates. The President is said to love his unadorned manner. Much of which is attributable to the fact that, in the self-proclaimed twilight of his public career, Gates has emerged as that most exotic of Washington species — the bureaucrat unbound, candid and fearless. He tells members of Congress what he really thinks about their pet programs. He upends Pentagon priorities, demotes the military-industrial hardware pipeline and promotes the immediate needs of the troops on the front line. He fires high-ranking subordinates without muss or controversy — an Air Force secretary and chief of staff who didn’t agree with him on the need to end production of the F-22 aircraft; the commandant of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, who presided over disgraceful conditions; even a well-respected general like David McKiernan, a conventional-warfare specialist unsuited for the asymmetrical struggle in Afghanistan.

Nightline did a piece on the 60th anniversary of Harlequin Books.  But it might just have been an excuse to get Paul Rudd and company to read passages.

Also?  This is what counts for journalism these days, and no this is not a piece from The Onion.  Seth Rogan reads at 3:30 and Paul Rudd shortly follows.  [via Buzzfeed]

I love the thesaurus, perhaps more so than the dictionary.  I have a tattered copy of Roget’s thesaurus held together with a ducktape binding and revamped cardboard covers.  I’ve had it since middleschool and it’s the one book I use on a regular basis.

So one might imagine my excitement at Prospect Magazine’s profile of the man behind the word lists. I never really thought about the man who created the thesaurus, much in the same way there is a story behind the man who created the Oxford English Dictionary.

Peter Mark Roget, the future Linnaus of the English word, began compiling word-lists at the age of eight. Why was he not playing with other children, honing his social skills? The problem was his mother, a widow at 28, who drained her son of sympathy. Catherine Romilly gave birth to a wonderful, handsome, talented boy , but couldn’t let him be himself. Independence, he would write in his Thesaurus under list 744, equals freedom of action, unilaterality; freedom of choice, initiative. But for freedom see also non-liability, disobedience, seclusion and liberation: the way one insists on freedom in the face of opposition.

And I feel compelled to share this passage about the thesaurus, which in many ways is often how I’ve felt about it.

Like a work of art the Thesaurus works on different levels. It helps generate new ideas and captures a hundred tarnished states of being, animate and inanimate, on every page. It’s an essay-writing tool and more. The Lists show exactly how a rich culture benefits from normative language, for if you don’t have the norm, how can you have the (shared) nuance.

It pains me to realize that Dr. Peter Mark Roget led a sad and solitary life and had scantly anything but his famous word lists to keep him comfort.  [via]

Kay Ryan was announced as the 16^th poet laureate of the United States today. Often compared to Emily Dickinson for her semi-reclusive nature and witty skepticism of the outside world, Ryan has been teaching remedial English part-time at the College of Marin in Kentfield, CA for over 30 years. Her introverted nature and accessibility make her an exciting choice for laureate. Ryan, dually skeptical of both writer’s conferences and collaborative work in general, has noted an interest in doing something in celebration of the library (Congress’ or otherwise). “Maybe I’ll issue library cards to everyone,” she quipped.

Part of what makes Ryan’s poetry so accessible is its brevity and meditation on the more common aspects of the human experience. Often utilizing aviary metaphors, the sentiments in Ryan’s poetry are playfully witty and easily relatable. She employs irregular rhyming schemes and a characteristically sparse style.

“An almost empty suitcase, that’s what I want my poems to be, few things,” Ms. Ryan told the NY Times. Here are a choice few of her many poems, which have been published in six collections and boast numerous awards including fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, as well as three Pushcart Prizes.

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And just in case someone were to challenge that fact, the good people at ArtGarfunkel.com have posted a list of every book he read from 1968-2007. I mean, wow. He even has a highlighted favorites list. Click here to see the whole thing.

Author James Frey gives his first interview to Vanity Fair since Oprah tore him a new one on her show after The Smoking Gun dug up the “truth” of his memoir A Million Little Pieces. So yeah, the new issue of Vanity Fair has more going for it that semi-nude Miley Cyrus photos.

Of course he is out to promote his new book, but the mere fact that he picked himself up yet again, well I guess his resiliency is worth applauding.

This isn’t to say that Frey isn’t tough. He was tough enough to kick a five-year drug-and-alcohol addiction. He proved his resilience again by surviving the past two years, after his bad-boy aspirations became too real and bit him on the ass. Oprah, the very arbiter of correct human behavior, destroyed him in public, and the walls came crumbling down around him.

The book world dumped him. Friends deserted him. He was stalked by the tabloids as if he were a Britney Spears–size train wreck. Readers told him they hoped he’d burn in hell, get hit by a bus, get “ass cancer.”

“I was a pariah,” he says today. “I was under no illusion that I was anything but that.” Each morning brought a crash of emotions—rage, bewilderment, panic, and shame—and Frey came close to drinking again. Instead, he did something shocking. He wrote another book—and not a lame apologia/self-justification such as The Fabulist, by Stephen Glass, or Burning Down My Masters’ House, by Jayson Blair.

Bright Shiny Morning is a sprawling, ambitious novel about Los Angeles, written with all the broad-stroke energy that was so irresistible to readers in A Million Little Pieces. By turns satirical, tense, and surprisingly touching, it is a portrait of a city onto which so many millions have projected so many dreams. Frey tells his story using four main narratives: a young, midwestern couple who have come to escape the cruelty and small-mindedness of their families; a Mexican-American housekeeper struggling to find self-worth; a Venice boardwalk drunk attempting to do something heroic; a vain, closeted movie star willing to do anything to get the man he loves. Interwoven with these compelling, cinematic tales is the story of just about everyone else. Compulsively, obsessively, Frey churns out sketch after sketch of L.A.’s every historical moment, every demographic, every institution, every neighborhood, from Skid Row to the Fashion District. He gives us gang members, porn-industry types, Asian sex slaves, artists, art collectors, gossip bloggers. He gives us lists of real L.A. facts and “facts” that are just made-up nonsense. At times, the randomness feels distracting—you wish Frey could rein himself in and return to the central narratives. But when the book works, it achieves the very essence of Los Angeles’s fractured, unpredictable, loopy nature. The stakes couldn’t be higher for him. It will test to what extent the public is willing to read James Frey the writer, and not, as he puts it, “James Frey the asshole.”

Strangely enough it was author Norman Mailer who helped him get back. Fascinating article all around.