From the author’s perspective, the principal advantage of a long-form magazine article is that, by virtue of the piece’s length and audience, he can shake loose from the strictures of newspaper writing. Rather than religious devotion to the inverted pyramid, through which a busy reader can spend 30 seconds or so divining the basic gist of the story and its importance before allowing his attention to drift elsewhere, the magazine writer can fill his piece with all manner of anecdotes and oddities and random details.
But there are limits, of course. However lively his prose and devoted his readers, an author can’t just jump off on whatever tangent sparks his interest, regardless of its relation to the thesis. A piece on, say, Indian politics need not include a lengthy discourse on penguins. To do so would be to abuse the form and, far more annoyingly, waste his readers’ time.
No author violates this norm more blatantly than Malcolm Gladwell. For some reason, Gladwell kicked off a new piece for The New Yorker with a lengthy meditation on Car & Driver’s attempts to determine the best of three sports cars: the Porsche Cayman, the Lotus Evora, and the Chevy Corvette. As your intuition might have already alerted you, such rankings are inherently subjective, and can vary a great deal depending on which factors (price, style, etc.) of a car’s appeal one wishes to emphasize. This carries on for more than a thousand words before Gladwell devotes a word to the ostensible subject of the article: the lack of precision in college rankings.
He then spends another thousand words or so on colleges, before delving off into another analogy: different nations’ suicide rates. Evidently, there is some imprecision in those rankings as well, owing mainly to inconsistent categorizations of suicide deaths, caused by both deliberate manipulations and vague circumstances. Gladwell then returns to college rankings for a couple of pages, though not without a substantial meander into the world of hospital rankings in the middle. He finished with a flourish, dedicating almost a thousand further words to a century-old ranking of the world’s most civilized regions, compiled by a bunch of northeastern academics. Dead horse: beaten.
Has there ever been a serious article that spends more time talking about something essentially unrelated to its thesis?
Indeed there has. Gladwell’s 2008 piece on the difficulty school systems face in selecting effective teachers set the standard for superfluous and long-winded analogies. Of the article’s five main sections and roughly 6,200 words, three and 3,600, respectively, deal with how hard it is for NFL teams to land a successful quarterback in the draft, and, less prominently, the challenge investment houses have in finding good financial advisors.
This is, needless to say, an unorthodox approach to an educational article. Moreover, teacher selection is an issue with a lot of moving parts and a wealth of relevant research. Six thousand words is far from enough space to offer a comprehensive view of the issue. By cutting that number down by more than half, Gladwell can barely scratch the surface.
And then there’s the 2009 story on brain trauma in the NFL, which seemed to equate football players with fighting dogs. As with the piece on teachers, the issue is important, but the comparison Gladwell employs is the opposite of instructive. The brain trauma article did much to bring the issue to the forefront of the sports world, where it has more or less remained since it was published. However, in the aftermath of the article’s publication, one of the main lines of discussions was whether or not one can fairly weigh the experiences of football players against those of fighting dogs, which is a stupid distraction. All this screams for an editor to inject a bit of common sense and rein him in a tad. [Malcolm, you are aware that dogs are not capable of cognitive thought, correct? Or have you gotten your hands on a new study showing otherwise? Ed.]
All of the b-sides to these comparisons have a surface connection with their respective article’s topic, but one that needs little explanation and that loses force with each new paragraph. I quickly find myself saying, Malcolm, we get it. After thousands of words of analogistic sprawl, I try less to absorb the ostensible point of the story, and direct my mental capacity to cataloguing the dozens of enormous differences that the author glosses over. By then, the only question is, Good God, Malcolm, what the hell are you talking about?
I started to read Blink, which, per Malcolm, is about how “[w]hen you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions.”I jumped to a conclusion pretty quickly and stopped reading after about three pages. Now I realize that was about two and 2/3 pages too much.
I’ve noticed an emerging “Gladwell backlash” trend. What’s up with this? They guy is clearly remarkable. He’s developed a style of journalism – crisp anecdotal writing that popularizes counterintuitive social and hard science theories – that other writers try to emulate and that people identify as “Gladwell-esque.” And he’s become a millionaire at it. I haven’t read enough of his recent stuff to judge if he’s jumped the shark, but I can’t help but think there’s some professional jealousy at work in some of the takedowns I’ve read of him.
I think there’s certainly some jealousy, and it’s not just from other journalists. I’ve seen social scientists say the same thing, with the argument that he almost portrays the stuff he writes about as his own theories, and leaves readers with the idea that he is responsible for the theories he is trumpeting. I think that’s basically bullshit. And it definitely feels like the much of the criticism is the product of his success. But someone with Gladwell’s writing style, which is so conspicuously gimmicky, is always going to have detractors, especially among other writers. The structure of his pieces is so formulaic, it just seems uncreative and sometimes unserious, even if his prose is really good and the topics he addresses interesting.
I’ve read all his books and the majority of his articles. His success ultimately is in his packaging of an idea if not its novelty. A good deal of what he writes either borders on common sense observations or is a compilation of others’ various social theories or research. However, he is particularly adept at weaving together anecdotal stories with broader social theories to create easily digestible concepts. His writing has mainstream appeal but is still thought-provoking enough which is why he is so commercially successful. If theultimate goal of a journalist in his genre is to inform and provoke thought in the masses, he’s a rare superstar. That being said this column’s point is well-taken.