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July162007

Simon Rich and Malcolm Gladwell: "Busted" and...Busted?

Filed under: The Squib Report   Tagged: , ,

Matthew Yglesias calls out Simon Rich on a few points in this week's Shouts:
When I was eighteen and Simon Rich was fifteen we were both in Mr Young's homeroom and he really wasn't the "sitting silently in the corner" type. I distinctly recall him showing off his juggling moves.
Ha! Writers do so love that "shy little me" voice. Still, as commenter ostap points out, "Showing off juggling moves in home room is entirely consistent with sitting in the corner at parties." But what's with that (not Constant) Reader commenter? Sheesh.

Meanwhile, those meanie scientists are after Malcolm Gladwell again. (The subtitle: "Sorry, Malcolm, but the Tipping Point Might Be More Myth Than Math." He's a first-name monolith!) Is it me or do Gladwell's books get treated like original science more than they should be? I regard it as a compliment—Gladwell is so darn good at popularizing, explaining, and repackaging original work mostly done elsewhere that people feel the need to pick apart his theses.

Let's look at one line from the article: "In reality, tipping—experiencing that exponential growth—is very difficult." How this represents a debunking is beyond me. Show me the passage where Gladwell says tipping things is a piece of pie, and you win, Ad Age! (But you can't.) —Martin Schneider

[There's at least one of Gladwell's theses that is surely undebunkable! Also, I liked this comment on the Yglesias post: 'The best part, though, are the key words on the side: 'Children; Teen-agers; Baseball; Erections; Mothers; Concerts; Popularity.' From now on, I'm restricting my reading to only what comes up from a Google Alert on those seven words." —EG]

4 comments

Comments

It doesn't matter to me that Simon Rich wasn't being strictly autobiographical. But the comments on that post are hilarious, as are the keywords that someone mentioned.

zpJuly 19, 2007

But, strangely enough, it does matter to me that Simon Rich graduated college in 07. At least according to Gawker?

I feel that if he's that young, the piece actually ought to be funnier. It's funny for someone older, but the young I hold to higher standards, for some reason . . .

zpJuly 19, 2007

He's really, really young. That said, I got his book Ant Farm, which collects a bunch of pieces like this (most of them have been or will be Shouts, I think), and it was incredibly funny. I just loved it. I wanted not to, what with the recent Harvard graduation, but I did, and I wanted to give it to everyone I know. Check it out sometime—it's a hoot, believe it or not.

EmdashesJuly 19, 2007

To The New Yorker,

Your article on Mort Zuckerman is the most sycophantic slavering I have read in years. I’m not talking about just inside The New Yorker. I mean anywhere.

I’ve read almost every word of The New Yorker since I got my first subscription in 1998, but this article was so bad and so pointless that I am considering canceling the subscription: the choice to publish such pap reflects that poorly and deeply on the whole magazine.

Could you do me a favor and ask Seymour Hersh, Nancy Franklin, Joan Acocella and Louis Menand what they thought of the piece? I can’t imagine any of those writers ever turning out such obscenely self-important celebrity sluttery.

When I say “Fuck you,” I also mean it.

Fuck you Mort.
Fuck you Nick.

Andrew ChoateJuly 31, 2007

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