Deep Thoughts

De-Meming Malcolm Gladwell 2

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.

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