The takedown begins

• Jason Zengerle probes the cult of Malcolm Gladwell in New York Magazine.

Well, if you're selling books like crazy and pulling down eighty grand per speaking appearance, a little backlash should not surprise anyone.

The bigger criticism of Gladwell is not that he’s unoriginal but that he’s unserious—that he takes substantive academic work and applies it to frivolous things (epidemiology and Hush Puppies, anyone?). While such an approach may endear him to business elites, it often infuriates cultural and political ones. Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, has said, “What Gladwell is marketing is nothing but marketing—the marketer’s view of the world. But that view of the world is, I’m afraid, idiotic.” The judge and legal scholar Richard Posner, in a scathing review of Blink for TNR, complained that it was “written like a book intended for people who do not read books.” Meanwhile, Carlin Romano, the influential literary critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, used his review of Blink to give its author a hazing and an ultimatum: “Gladwell, one fears, has come to his own tipping point, or—to be fuddy-duddy—fork in the road. This way, guru. That way, serious writer.”

Gladwell tends to dismiss this line of attack. (“It was a sending a man to do a boy’s work,” he says of Posner’s review. “The guy’s like this legal Einstein, and he’s slumming it with Blink?”) But when he talks about his previous books, he sometimes sounds as if he agrees with his critics. “When I read Tipping Point now, it does seem more like a product of a lighter time,” he concedes. “I was really interested in marketing at the time, and that’s not that weighty an issue.” Blink, he says, “is very kind of distant. It’s, ‘This is a lot of cool stuff! Do with it as you will!'"

Sooner or later...

• Malcolm Gladwell on creativity in The New Yorker.

...When Cézanne was painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure. (The result is one of that string of masterpieces in the Musée d’Orsay.) When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions—before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.

Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain’s trial-and-error method: “His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.” Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

True or tall tale?

• Malcolm Gladwell's tall tales get punctured by Jack Shafer in Slate.

This is a bit much-ado-about-nothing-ish, but still amusing. Basically, Shafer takes umbrage when Gladwell tells some wild stories about his days as a cub reporter and pointedly doesn't mention that they're not to be taken seriously. Shafer then proceeds to debunk them point by point.

This is basically a 2500+-word deconstruction of a standup routine. Shafer is certainly correct to insist that Gladwell make it clear tongue was planted firmly in cheek, but I'd wager that Gladwell's readership knows when the joke's on them. And I also submit to you as evidence: in the same podcast linked to above, Ira Glass visits an editorial meeting at The Onion. The defense rests.

If the monologue had remained an insider thing, heard mostly by Moth habitués, one could sympathize with Gladwell's position. Nobody but a prig would wag his finger at Gladwell for telling stories wherever he can muster an audience. But by moving his tale from The Moth's clubby confines to the radio show's national audience of 1.7 million, the broadcast on This American Life changed the equation. The blog Jossip accepted the radio riff as nonfiction and published an item titled "Malcolm Gladwell Laughs at Journalism: The Joke Is on Us." Gawker bought the story, too, as did a dozen bloggers and commenters.

Since cock-and-bull about how he behaved at the Washington Post is being taken seriously, worming its way into the record, a detailed debunking is called for if only to explain that newspapers don't tolerate shenanigans like this. So, allow me to volunteer to be the literal-minded plodder who charts the many things in Gladwell's talk that never happened or never happened the way he describes them.

Gladwell's newest

• Malcolm Gladwell details the development of a system to predict box-office hits in The New Yorker.

As is typical with Gladwell, the above summary doesn't do justice to the range of subject areas he can cover in a page without appearing to strain himself. Good stuff, as always.

The most famous dictum about Hollywood belongs to the screenwriter William Goldman. “Nobody knows anything,” Goldman wrote in “Adventures in the Screen Trade” a couple of decades ago. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess.” One of the highest-grossing movies in history, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was offered to every studio in Hollywood, Goldman writes, and every one of them turned it down except Paramount: “Why did Paramount say yes? Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars? . . . Because nobody, nobody—not now, not ever—knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.”

What Goldman was saying was a version of something that has long been argued about art: that there is no way of getting beyond one’s own impressions to arrive at some larger, objective truth. There are no rules to art, only the infinite variety of subjective experience. “Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote. “It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” Hume might as well have said that nobody knows anything.

But Hume had a Scottish counterpart, Lord Kames, and Lord Kames was equally convinced that traits like beauty, sublimity, and grandeur were indeed reducible to a rational system of rules and precepts. He devised principles of congruity, propriety, and perspicuity: an elevated subject, for instance, must be expressed in elevated language; sound and signification should be in concordance; a woman was most attractive when in distress; depicted misfortunes must never occur by chance. He genuinely thought that the superiority of Virgil’s hexameters to Horace’s could be demonstrated with Euclidean precision, and for every Hume, it seems, there has always been a Kames—someone arguing that if nobody knows anything it is only because nobody’s looking hard enough.

Pay attention to that man behind the curtain

• New Yorker editor David Remnick is interviewed in The Guardian.

Remnick pauses for a moment to tell a story about the glorious predictability of journalism. 'There was a wonderful thing Slate did years ago, when it was just getting started, called the Hackathlon. It was Michael Specter, Malcolm Gladwell and I forget who else.' (Specter and Gladwell are both old friends of Remnick's from the Washington Post, and both now colleagues at the New Yorker.) 'Each day there would be an event. You had to write a 500-word lede [an American term for an article's opening paragraph] in the Vanity Fair style to a Richard Gere profile: Ready, begin. Then you had to do an Economist situationer on Tanzania - first 400 words. Then maybe a Rolling Stone lede to a ... you know: Mick Jagger is angry. Period. Paragraph. Very Angry. Period. The limo is late. You know, one of those. And then maybe a New Yorker thing on the history of sand. I don't remember the specifics.'

Remnick leans in with a smile of utter glee, and goes on: 'Specter beat Gladwell. He came from behind, but his lede on the Richard Gere, comparing the colour of his hair to his grey cashmere sweater, was just so brilliant that he overwhelmed him in the Hackathlon. I mean, he could do nothing else in his career and his New York Times obituary would read: "Michael Specter, winner of the 1997 Slate Hackathlon, died today of complications of a hernia operation. He was 98."'

Here's what real criticism looks like

It's always nice to read a well-written book review. Two have caught my eye of late:

• Malcolm Gladwell reviews Charles Tilly's Why? at The New Yorker.

Gladwell returns, this time training his lens on humanity's innate need for justification:

When we say that two parties in a conflict are “talking past each other,” this is what we mean: that both sides have a legitimate attachment to mutually exclusive reasons. Proponents of abortion often rely on a convention (choice) and a technical account (concerning the viability of a fetus in the first trimester). Opponents of abortion turn the fate of each individual fetus into a story: a life created and then abruptly terminated. Is it any surprise that the issue has proved to be so intractable? If you believe that stories are the most appropriate form of reason-giving, then those who use conventions and technical accounts will seem morally indifferent—regardless of whether you agree with them. And, if you believe that a problem is best adjudicated through conventions or technical accounts, it is hard not to look upon storytellers as sensationalistic and intellectually unserious. By Tilly’s logic, abortion proponents who want to engage their critics will have to become better storytellers—and that, according to the relational principles of such reason-giving, may require them to acknowledge an emotional connection between a mother and a fetus.

...Tilly argues that these conflicts are endemic to the legal system. Laws are established in opposition to stories. In a criminal trial, we take a complicated narrative of cause and effect and match it to a simple, impersonal code: first-degree murder, or second-degree murder, or manslaughter. The impersonality of codes is what makes the law fair. But it is also what can make the legal system so painful for victims, who find no room for their voices and their anger and their experiences. Codes punish, but they cannot heal.

• James Wood reviews Frederick Brown's Flaubert: A Biography at The New York Times.

Much of the time Flaubert's influence is too familiar to be visible. We so expect it that we hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert. And after Flaubert, it sometimes seems, this is all you can find.

This really makes me want to read Madame Bovary now. It's been sitting on my shelf for months now, tempting me. That's the great thing about Wood's essays; they charge you up with the appetite for rediscovery. He published a marvelous collection of them in 2000 called The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief; there's a particularly sharp essay on Nikolai Gogol's work which is endemic of his approach on the whole: fond yet unsentimental, practical yet hopeful. He doesn't hold much sympathy, however, for modernists like Toni Morrison or Thomas Pynchon (and he makes a strong argument for it, too), but you can't have everything in life.

Seers and madmen

• Malcolm Gladwell gets profiled by the New York Times.

I admit, it does make me nervous when writers become more famed for their personalities than their work, but hell, if you can get a lucrative side career making $40K per speech and still get to call yourself a writer, then so be it.

• Editorial writers dismiss Islamic-fundamentalist foolishness.

I’m thankful that people now have something more constructive to debate than James Frey. At Slate, ol’ Hitchens lets off a glorious tirade:

I am not asking for the right to slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a "holy" book. But I will not be told I can't eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn books on a regular basis. I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object. It is revolting to me to breathe the same air as wafts from the exhalations of the madrasahs, or the reeking fumes of the suicide-murderers, or the sermons of Billy Graham and Joseph Ratzinger. But these same principles of mine also prevent me from wreaking random violence on the nearest church, or kidnapping a Muslim at random and holding him hostage, or violating diplomatic immunity by attacking the embassy or the envoys of even the most despotic Islamic state, or making a moronic spectacle of myself threatening blood and fire to faraway individuals who may have hurt my feelings. The babyish rumor-fueled tantrums that erupt all the time, especially in the Islamic world, show yet again that faith belongs to the spoiled and selfish childhood of our species.

At Spiegel Online, “Ibn Warraq” takes a stand as well:

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth. Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.

Bad dogs, great works and one brave woman

• Malcolm Gladwell looks at the “pit bull menace” at The New Yorker.

Another excellent piece from Mr. Gladwell, a writer who manages to be consistently insightful and intelligent without condescension or pretense. I’ve not yet read his Blink or The Tipping Point but I’ve been a fan of his New Yorker pieces for years, and a new one is always a high point of the day. Gladwell’s technique is to juxtapose two seemingly incompatible topics -- here, an anti-pit-bull legislation passed in Canada and racial and criminal profiling in New York City -- and hit “puree”. Gladwell asks pointed questions and comes up with equally pointed answers, and never backs down from uncomfortable truths. A very good read, as usual.

• Michael Dirda reviews John Carey’s What Good Are The Arts? at The Washington Post.

An interesting point from Dirda and Carey closes out the piece:

Literature accomplishes so much because it makes us think as well as feel. In his last chapter, Carey proposes that indistinctness -- arising through the use of metaphor and simile -- grants poetry and fiction their particular, elusive richness. We are forced to build up in our minds complicated notions and images: "As the indistinctiveness of a text increases, so the reader's imaginative effort has to intensify." Such effort results in that "personal ownership" of a poem or story that is written art's "unique gift."

I’ve often thought that most of the great works of art tend to have a hole in them, a void where anyone can bring anything they want to the table in terms of interpretation. What separates the wheat from the chaff is the work’s ability to sustain a multitude of interpretations, be it intentional or not. You want your works to have that fluidity, to last, but it only happens some of the time (if you’re lucky enough to have it happen at all).

• As of January 30, freelance reporter Jill Carroll is still alive.

Let's hope this truly brave woman makes it home safely.

Groupthink, dormroom favorites and that pest Darwin

• Michael Young tackles the problem of public intellectuals at Reason.

Despite the needlessly highfalutin’ sound of the phrase “intellectual power cadre,” there’s still something enormously appealing about the idea of a bunch of brainy maniacs getting together, bouncing ideas around and goading each other into great things. A creative comfort zone that’s generated by your peers is incredibly rewarding; I’ve always found it fascinating to trace friendships and relationships between artists, if only to practice armchair psychology in tracing influences and trends.

Granted, groups like this inevitably burn themselves out, or turn against one another, or simply grow apart. But there’s nothing like watching a group of similarly-minded artists getting together and producing great things because of (or, perhaps, in spite of) their influence on one another.

Another excellent piece in this vein is Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece “Group Think”, which examines the clubhouse atmosphere of Saturday Night Live’s heyday in the context of similar group-driven movements throughout history, and comes up with some interesting points along the way:

We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that's not how it works, whether it's television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas. In his book "The Sociology of Philosophies," Randall Collins finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves: the first-century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch'ung, the fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another's spouses.

• Famous people talk about books they loved in college at Slate.

So I’m not famous, but anyway, a book I really loved in college was Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s one of those books that’s next to impossible to summarize, because it covers so many different bases; Hofstadter is a lot like Arthur Koestler in his restless examination of practically anything that crosses his radar. Ostensibly it’s about the process of translating a poem by French writer Clement Marot into simple Yankspeak, but Hofstadter spins this narrative thread off into a thousand different directions; even when he’s totally lost you, you still marvel at the sheer wealth of ideas and the associative web that he weaves.

David Fincher once noted that language was invented so that people could lie to one another; Hofstadter’s ebullient examination of art, language and ideas (and, most movingly, love) strikes far deeper than you ever expect it to, and really gives you a reason to believe. Back in my dormroom days, Thoreau’s Walden provided me a few weeks worth of great head-in-the-clouds idealism, but Le Ton beau de Marot is the one I still find myself sneaking back to.

• D. T. Max places Austen and Darwin in the same sphere at the New York Times Magazine.

Science and art would seem to be strange bedfellows and yet the great artists -- the ones whose work endures -- set out to capture nature’s patterns in their work, most particularly our own. A comment from Christopher Hitchens in the aforementioned Slate piece, regarding George Eliot’s talent “in guessing at the real springs of human motive and in describing the mammalian underlay of social forces,” ties in nicely with this piece, which examines Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the context of evolutionary behavior.

Yeah, it’s probably because there’s a new movie of it out, but still, there are plenty of interesting bits along the way:

It is useful to know a bit about current literary criticism to understand how different the Darwinist approach to literature is. Current literary theory tends to look at a text as the product of particular social conditions or, less often, as a network of references to other texts. (Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, famously observed that there was "nothing outside the text.") It often focuses on how the writer's and the reader's identities - straight, gay, female, male, black, white, colonizer or colonized - shape a particular narrative or its interpretation. Theorists sometimes regard science as simply another form of language or suspect that when scientists claim to speak for nature, they are disguising their own assertion of power. Literary Darwinism breaks with these tendencies. First, its goal is to study literature through biology - not politics or semiotics. Second, it takes as a given not that literature possesses its own truth or many truths but that it derives its truth from laws of nature.