A hatchet job to begin the week

And the best kind, since it contains links to many other entertaining hatchet jobs (complimentary) on airport phrasemaker Malcolm Gladwell:

The Washington Post: Malcolm Gladwell’s new book rehashes “The Tipping Point”

I wrote a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering for The Washington Post. I concurred with critics at The New York Times and The Atlantic that it’s not a very good book.

But Revenge is not an isolated blunder. This is the eighth of his eight problematic books, as illustrated by critics’ truly damning reviews:

• Outliers: The Nation: “Gladwell for Dummies”, Isaac Chotiner’s The New Republic: “Mister Lucky”, If Books Could Kill podcast, the blogger critique on Gladwell’s “ethnic theory of plane crashes”
• What the Dog Saw: Steven Pinker in The New York Times
• Talking to Strangers: The Atlantic: “Malcolm Gladwell Reaches His Tipping Point”
• The Bomber Mafia: The Baffler: “Narrative Napalm (Malcolm Gladwell’s apologia for American butchery), The New Republic: “Malcolm Gladwell’s Fantasy of War From the Air”

All nonfiction writers can end up writing incorrect or controversial things, but why does every Gladwell book push half-formed and inaccurate theories? For years, my loose feeling about Gladwell was that he writes like someone who doesn’t care about being correct, which is not a way I would describe any other author I’ve encountered. There is something uniquely odd about his work.

Picking on Gladwell, however, is a bit of a cliché, and I am often advised to keep quiet for a wide range of professional reasons. But he’s unstoppable and incorrigible, and I don’t believe he’s harmless. As The New York Times notes, “Business mavens, political leaders and ordinary strivers in both those fields treated [The Tipping Point] like a Bible, mining it for insights on how to make their own products and pitches spread.”

The last point it the really depressing one.