OK, I think I have it in for this guy. Seriously. I need help. A friend brought a copy of Outliers to dinner last night. I mean….what a way to get the conversation off to a rocking start.
And now, via Twitter, I discover that Gladwell is AGAIN STATING THE OBVIOUS, packaging it as a meme, and spitting it out there.
This is unfair of me. I haven’t even read his latest New Yorker piece, however, I see the Gladwell fingerprints all over this one, summarized on BlogHER. And if you read my last post, you’ll know the signs:
- Unrelenting specificity, which is meant to distract you from the fact that the specificity is merely a disguise for an anecdote gussied up for a night on the town
- A meme
- The patently obvious.
So his latest: You aren’t a good teacher just because you have a teacher’s degree. Wow! He should write a book about that!
Thankfully, there’s a useful dissection of the latest meme over on BlogHER, so I’ll leave it to them to go deeper.
Malcolm Gladwell might be reading from the Captain Obvious playbook – but his success so far seems to be based on the fact that what might be patently obvious to you or I isn’t, apparently, obvious at all to the people who have been buying his books.
I can’t help but yawn through a lot of it, but Captain Obvious needs to speak up – because for a lot of people, the obvious really just isn’t.
That said, I don’t spend money on his books myself.
Oh, Dusan. I’m so sorry. It is hard to have a popular writer—and that’s all that Gladwell actually is—spouting nonsense that gets under your skin, all out in the public sphere all the time.
The one that sets me off is John Grey–every time the man opens his mouth I want to slap him.
self help pap for suits in times of failure.
obviously!:)
I’m not sure that Gladwell’s cornered the market on stating the patently obvious. I’ll chime in with Tateru in y own way: “obvious” is not always to most.