Fuck you and your pithy social science success, Gladwell!

Does this mean he's going to blog again?

I feel like I'm owed an apology for the hair.

I've always thought he is vaguely full of shit.

Too clever by half Malcolm.

Yes, this raises those questions. I'll leave bafflement and pervertedness to the others.

Gladwell: the Da Vinci Code of a By-Gone Intelligensia.

Don't know why I'm bothering, but Shafer writes:

"The embellishments begin at the top of his monologue when Gladwell calls his Post gig his "first real job" and confides, "I still don't know really how I got hired because I didn't have any newspaper experience. I hadn't even worked for my high-school newspaper.

This is a complete pose. The Post has long hired writers with no daily experience, including Sally Quinn, Nicholas Lemann, Sidney Blumenthal, Marjorie Williams, Steve Coll, Katherine Boo, and many others."

I don't know about the other people cited as examples, but Nicholas Lemann was president of the Harvard Crimson. That may not be professional experience at a daily, but that's a very intense college newspaper experience. Gawker has written about people who have flunked out of Harvard because of the Crimson.

After coming across that example, I stopped reading. Continue with your petty squabbles. As I don't particularly care for either Gladwell or Shafer, for me the stakes are quite low.

What's fun about Gladwell's talk is how he encourages the audience to "look up" the stories he wrote. But then, in an email to Shafer, he writes:

"Anyone who would fact check a tall tale like that either has no sense of humor or is on crack."

See what he did there?

Can't we just agree they are all douches, and get back to Mary Rambin who is aching for our attention?

It's so interesting that the obsessively detail-oriented Gladwell would try to present himself as a nutty gonzo fabulist to ingratiate himself with the Moth crowd. It's so creepy and calculating. "I was just like Jayson Blair, ha ha." It's really one for the couch, no?

Grrr. Vanishing comments -- Gladwell sold a bejillion books, moved from the Post to the Times and made it look easy. Might any of this sturm und drang be simple jealousy? I mean, even before this tempest in a teapot -- folks don't like his hair? What's next, are you going to say his butt is too big?

oh for christ's sake, can we stop with exposing writers as fibbers? who gives a shit?

Any grown man who looks in the mirror every morning, sees hair like Gladwell's and thinks "This is EXACTLY the look I am after. You look GOOD" is clearly not to be trusted on any level.

Uh, spelling, please: "Many of the articles that Gladwell SITES never actually ran in the paper."
That's CITES.

I like playing poker with people who make "blink" decisions. Not taking time to mull important decisions is a very good idea. I always respond to people by email by impulsively writing what comes to mind and hitting send. All of this is very good advice for which Mr. Gladwell deserves a lot of money.

Okay, this is starting to get (vaguely) interesting.

@Malegirdle: I like to be able to separate the routine embellishers from the complete frauds. Maybe it's not such a big deal in this case, but I can't fucking stand the James Freys of the world.

If you make writers your heroes, this is the kind of shit sandwich you will eat for lunch every day for the rest of your life. Writers, like actors, can be summed up with three words: "Look at me! Look at me!"

At one point, I decided to buy up the whole canon of Wired Mag-approved social science titles and read them all. They are all unabashed bullshit on a stick, from the Long Tail to the Happiness Trip and every stinking, blinking cowpie in between.

And if you think I'm Mr. Negative and Mr. Throw-Stones-At-Glass-Houses, I will offer my positive contribution to offset: If you see a thirty-something preppy douchebag committing Idries Shah's Tales of the Dervishes to memory on the subway, that's me. And if you interrupt me, I'd be more than happy to talk!

I will take vulturesaquadron's first paragraph and put it on a brass plaque for my front door, and in my signature file, on my message machine, and make it a forehead tattoo. But I did like blink and long tail before I, obtuse west coaster that I am, got that they were really just personality pieces, my generation's nerdy wanker cfmps (come fuck me prose). Really, you're much better off not knowing anything about the human beings who make stuff you kind of like to watch, listen to, look at, or read. And if a person who thinks of or introduces himself or herself as a "writer" wrote it, it's a self-aggrandizing lie. Hopefully an entertaining or even occasionally enlightening lie, but it's something made of crap nonetheless.