http://slyoyster.com

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.

“In his books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell has dissected many inspirational underdog victories, but his own triumph over the opposite sex could well be the most inspirational of all. Since moving to New York in 1996, he’s cast his net wide and deep to amass a staggering tally of conquests. There’s been the poetess, the psychotherapist, the photographer, the filmmaker, the fact checker, the writer at The New Yorker, the bisexual literary siren….”

And they’re attractive women too!, or so claims Sean MacCauley for The Daily Beast.  Anyway.  I’ll save you the time from his annoying look at Malcolm Gladwell the seductor, and let you know that Gladwell gets laid many, many times in all likelihood because he’s a multi-millionaire best-selling author despite looking like Sideshow Bob. 

It probably helps that he’s smart, funny, polite, etc. 

Still, I’m sure there’s plenty of people who want to sleep with him just because.  Myself included?  No, but I had to think about it for a second.  He is Malcolm Gladwell afterall.  There’s no analysis needed to understand that.

No less than Malcolm Gladwell thinks that Wired-editor Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99) is wrong.

Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

I first got a whiff of the new Malcolm Gladwell essay when he engaged in a three part (part one, part two, part three) email exchange with Bill Simmons from ESPN.  Gladwell looks at underdogs and innovation in sports and why the two don’t necessary follow each other, even though they probably should.

Both exchanges are worth reading, if for nothing else than they’re sports food for thought.  The most memorable aspect is Gladwell’s thoughts on sports drafts and his suggestion that there shouldn’t be a draft, but rather college players should go on job interviews with their respective teams.

That suggestion alone, is worth wading through 20,000 words or so.