Gladwell being Gladwell, he arrives at his conclusion using thousands of words, large portions of which are devoted to riffs on card games and British invasions of Turkish islands, among other things, but his main point is this:

Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn't know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street's crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological.

Now, I read Gladwell's piece and do think that his argument has some merit. However, I have a fundamental disagreement with something, and it is this: I believe that the psychological roots of the Wall Street crisis, the same roots that Gladwell is saying were the driving force behind everything that went wrong, would not have existed if it were not for the massive cracks in the structural and cognitive foundation of the banking industry. In other words, the incompetence of regulators combined with the blissful ignorance of the players involved joined to create a perfect storm of ego-tripping. You follow?

Now, surely a strong argument can be made that if the human psyche weren't so Goddamned flawed, then the other factors wouldn't have affected it in the first place, thus all of the blame falls squarely at the feet of humanity's vast psychological faults, but then you're just getting into a great big "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" argument, and honestly it's 5:40 in the damn morning right now and I'm only confusing myself the more I write about this, so just go and read the thing yourself and make up your own damn mind, okay?!

Cocksure [New Yorker]

Gladwell begins with a recitation from the May U.S. Senate hearing on the newspaper industry, the one where David Simon spouted nonsense, and the one that has apparently become a sort of media Woodstock, dividing generations in the big ongoing publishing upheaval. Gladwell places himself firmly on the side of the oldies, and draws a tenuous parallel between the hearings and Anderson's book. Both apparently illustrate the stupidity of West Coast reefer hippies like Jeff Bezos and Arianna Huffington, who just hate selling content, or something.

In Gladwell's review, Anderson is constantly making imaginary pronouncements, which make him look like an idiot. He wants to turn the New York Times into Meals on Wheels, run entirely by volunteers! What a jerk. He says a free price is like "magic!" What?? And Anderson said nice things about YouTube, noted spectacular failure:

When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer... Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is "close enough to free to round down" [according to Anderson,] ...a recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube's bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars.

Of course, Credit Suisse numbers may well be grossly overstated, and Gladwell doesn't mention that YouTube is expected to take in $241 million in revenue this year, twice one estimate of last year's sales.

Which isn't to say he's necessarily wrong about Anderson's book, or about Google's user-generated content being "crap." But it does show that, if you're looking for a long-term investment, a Free poster child like Google is probably a better place to park your cash than the magazine group where the two money-losingest titles have big fights over who has less of a grip on the future.

Silver of course explained his decision through an adorable pie chart:

Silver adds:

...truth be told, the decision isn't nearly as scientific as all of that. I love cities — their intrinsic vitality, their polyphony of cultures, their food (!) — and as a lover of cities, I'd feel stupid if I were lying on my deathbed and hadn't lived in New York for at least a couple of years.

Translation: "I want to become a fabulously wealthy Gladwellian corporate consultant" and/or "I met a girl." Which only makes the move an even better idea.

That and the fact that winner-caller extraordinaire Silver's geographic endorsement gives everyone else in Gotham an excuse to proclaim that the city is "BACK." (Just don't mention the Oscars.)

[FiveThirtyEight]

The Don, who was featured in the New York Post a while back spoke to us, interview-style, and revealed just how he uses the teachings of the large-haired New Yorker staffer to help turn any old schmo into a pussy magnet, bro.

1. Learn the lessons of Blink: "One of the things they have to understand is the girl is thin-slicing them — what they're wearing, the kind of energy they're bringing, the whole presence."

2. Analyze Gladwell's anecdotes through the prism of pulling chicks: The Don sprinkles anecdotes from Gladwell throughout his teachings. Such as Gladwell's favorite chestnut about how Mary Tyler Moore and All in the Family did really poorly with focus groups. Lesson: don't ask girls about how to pick up girls.

3. Gladwell's books exist primarily to make vacuous people sound intelligent: "The best places to find conversation is to read a lot of books, and some of the books we recommend are Blink and The Tipping Point." Even celibate fools can understand and regurgitate them, to great effect, allegedly.

4. The mere whiff of a Gladwell book cover is an aphrodisiac: The Don has not read Outliers yet, but, he said, "it's sitting on my desk."

5. Imitate the ways of the Master: The Don on Gladwell: "It comes through in the books that guy would do great with women."

Malcolm Gladwell has 99 problems and corresponding theoretical proposed solutions, but women are not a category for which such a thing is necessary, if you know what we're saying.

While discussing his ancestral background, he interjects that Colin Powell is his cousin. Or at least, they're from the same "privileged Jamaican class," he tells Charlie Rose with his trademark nerdy enthusiasim.

Well, close enough to his cousin. As the New York Times noted in 2006, "Gladwell believes [Powell] may be a distant cousin on his mother's side."

Oh, Malcolm. You're such a Connector!

CNN interviewer: Another fascinating finding is that you are more likely to be in a plane crash if the pilot comes from a particular country. What's that all about?
Gladwell: Yes. That's a fascinating thing. The single most important variable in determining whether a plane crashes is not the plane, it's not the maintenance, it's not the weather, it's the culture the pilot comes from.

The pilot, after deploying fancy "research" and "records" and "analysis," claims this is "a reckless and untrue statement... absurd... I am extremely disappointed that somebody as influential as Malcolm Gladwell said it. In addition to being incorrect, it encourages the widely held notion that non-Western airlines are by their nature less safe than those of North America and Europe."

He also slaps Gladwell for not giving the Koreans enough credit for reforming their aviation system and for overplaying the importance of culture in bringing down a Colombian jetliner.

Which is fair enough! This guy is, after all, a pilot. And Gladwell probably was talking out of his ass in that quote from television, as people on television sadly tend to do, to fill dead air or not look dumbstruck. But Gladwell is, foremost, an author rather than a CNN talking head; and, anyway, who ever said the popular nonfiction writer was supposed to be the last or even second-to-last word on any scientific topic, any more than Jon Stewart would have (or want to have) the final word on any piece of news or Andrew Sullivan would think of his blog as anything other than provisional and part of a "superficial medium... reward[ing] brevity and immediacy?"

Leave the last word to scientific journals (not yet killed by evil evil Gladwell!); at least Outliers made the Salon pilot write this interesting blog post, got a doorman and cop to argue about the topics in Blink; and got the n+1 kids possibly briefly interested in something other than decadent literary self-absorption. As Sullivan wrote, of himself and his ilk:

He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

The Observer breaks the news that you will soon be able to buy Nate's book(s)!

According to someone who saw the proposal, Mr. Silver is looking to write two books. The first is a Freakonomics-style guide to politics that answers questions like "Is there really a Bradley Effect?" while the second is on the art of prediction, a book that will draw on interviews with people who have to predict things for a living. In his proposal, Mr. Silver spent two pages describing each book.

Two pages of numerical gold, no doubt. Considering how much Gladwell gets paid to give PowerPoint presentations to conferences of business executives about how to go with their gut instincts, Nate Silver will soon be a wealthy young man. [NYO; pic via Newsweek]

1. The Tipping Point Tipped Over.
Thesis/Antithesis: Network theory scientist Duncan Watts, who left Columbia to go work for Yahoo, says Malcolm Gladwell’s golden Law of the Few — "The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social skills" — is false. A small cadre of hipsters does not determine the retro market for Hush Puppies and it doesn't take Jacob Weisberg's mom to put you in touch with all the fun, quirky types of downtown Chicago (I hear the Obamas are good at that, too).

"A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power,” Watts says. “And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there." In order to demonstrate it, Watts repeated and updated sociologist Stanley Milgram’s groundbreaking “Six Degrees of Separation” experiment, upon which Gladwell based his Connector theory.

In 1967, Milgram had found that it took around six people to pass a given piece of information from point A to point F, but that in order to make it through the home stretch, a handful of savvy and tapped-in messengers needed to gather at point E. Milgram was restricted to a comparatively small messenger group and dissemination by snail mail. His trick was for decades not retested because its results sounded pretty commonsensical, and they were sexy. (If you want to appeal to marketers, tell them they need only appeal to a charismatic and influential few instead of a blundering and disparate many.) But in 2001, Watts made use of the Internet and vastly expanded the messenger group, enlisting around 61,000 people to forward emails to 18 targets around the globe. True, it did take on average six people to complete the chain of information, however, the “hubs” weren’t important after all. Only 5% of the emails, Watts found, ever passed through them; almost all reached their targets through a conduit of nobodies.

The tussle between Watts and Gladwell is largely over marketing metaphors. The Tipping Point creepily described consumer trends as being disease-like in the way they spread. Connectors act as viral vectors by increasing the rates of infection. Watts prefers to think of trends as forest fires because, as he sees it, both depend more on the environment than they do on who started them.

The Debate: Gladwell is all peaches and puppy dogs in responding to his challenger and possible debunker: "Duncan Watts is exceedingly clever, and I've learned a great deal from his research," he told Clive Thompson of FastCompany.com "In the end, though, I suppose that I feel the same ways about his insights as I do about Steve Levitt's disagreements with me over the causes of the decline in violent crime in the 1990s. I think that all books like The Tipping Point or articles by academics can ever do is uncover a little piece of the bigger picture, and one day—when we put all those pieces together—maybe we'll have a shot at the truth."

If I say that means "full refund at Barnes and Noble," will it spread like avian flu?

2. The Stupidity of The Wisdom of Crowds.
Thesis/Antithesis: As we reported last week, Jason Calacanis, early blog impresario and long-time industrial frenemy of Gawker, has quit blogging. He says he still loves the medium but laments what it’s become – namely, a playground for irate and ignorant commenters, who, taken as a whole, disprove the fashionable argument of pooled intelligence.

Calacanis refers frequently and derisively to James Surowiecki’s notion of the “wisdom of crowds” – all set down in the New Yorker finance columnist's 2004 bestseller by the same name – which posits that a group of loosely confederated independent minds will be smarter and more prescient than a single mind acting alone.

Surowiecki has plenty of rules to distinguish the functioning crowd from the unruly mob (Germany specializes in both), but his thesis did nothing if not propel the user-generated content movement of Web 2.0, of which Calacanis is now a sad and shattered ornament. He stormed off the Internet with all the passion of a jilted lover because he used to be a big fan of comments and the scads of traffic they produced for his site Engadget. Now Calacanis likens the squawking anonymities to trolls who reside under houses and drunken hobos who are allowed to critique Carnegie Hall performances (because when you think of blogs, you think of sturdy architecture and symphonies).

The Debate: There isn't one, really, probably because Surowiecki isn't mentioned by name and because in lieu of blogging Calacanis has taken to sending out private emails to an exclusive list of 750 subscribers. Jason’s keeping it real and kicking it old school, except that in his desire to pare down, he forgot that everything eventually gets leaked to blogs anyway. In the maiden installment of his one-man newsletter, he writes: “For the record, crowds are really frackin' stupid and to put your stock in crowds is about as bright as putting your faith in a dictator; they'll love you for as long as they feel like it, then they'll ripe [sic] you apart without mercy.”

If you want to know how the Nazis got started, you could do worse than scan the user-generated content at the Guardian's Comment is Free.

3. The Long Tail Gets Lopped
Thesis/Antithesis: In 2004, Wired editor Chris Anderson wrote a much-discussed article – later turned into (what else?) a bestselling book – entitled “The Long Tail” about how the web was changing our buying habits. Whereas brick-and-mortar stores were bound by conventional inventories and thus more likely to sell what everyone wanted to buy, Anderson argued, the Internet had opened up enormous vistas of cult shopping. The “long tail” referred to used and out-of-print books, indy records, vintage clothes and other niche goods that could only thrive in an virtual marketplace where consumers also acted as critics and advertisers. Netflix, iTunes, Amazon were not bound by the supply structures of Wal-Mart, and so patrons of those sites would opt away from the mainstream fare — what Anderson termed the “head” of the demand curve — in numbers impressive enough to constitute a genuine marketing trend.

Evidence: The unexpected success of the mountaineering book Touching the Void, a commercial failure when it was first published in 1988. It found an eager audience for high-altitude disaster and triumph when it was listed as an Amazon recommendation for readers of Jon Krakauer’s popular Into Thin Air, which Touching the Void soon surpassed in sales.

A few weeks ago Anita Elberse, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, published a strong rebuttal to the Long Tail in the Harvard Business Review. She found that the web had not in fact changed anything: consumers were herd-driven conformists at the keyboards just the same as they were at the shelves.

The Debate: Elberse’s piece led to a polite back-and-forth with Anderson, who pointed out that their analytical difference was rooted in the “concentration” of sales – i.e., an online retailer carries more products than an offline one, and so whatever doesn’t overlap should be counted as part of the Long Tail, not the Head, as Elberse counted it.

Technology writer Farhad Manjoo at Slate put it well: “There is no winning this technical debate. (Elberse calls Anderson's definitions ‘arbitrary.’) But even if Anderson is right and Elberse is wrong, the shift from hits to niches is obviously slight—we are not entering an era devoid of blockbusters.”

Which means that Anderson is still less right than many of his futuroid acolytes have made him seem. Ironically, the Long Tail theory is now a fixture of the Head of the marketing industry, which makes Anderson the Mad Hatter of the paradoxical business meme.

And that fact gets at the heart, I think, of why people are turning against the svengalis of new marketing. They've all become hugely famous and sought-after on the 5-figure lecture circuit by penning ephemeral "bibles" about the next big thing, proving only that they themselves were it. Can you really blame skeptics in a time of scarcity for denying them the ability to have their cake and pop out of it, too?

It began with Gladwell's retelling of an old, old story of his. He made up bullshit at the Washington Post. This amusing little tale became a tiny scandal! Does Gladwell write in defiance of the vaunted New Yorker fact-checkers? That scandal fizzled out, but the small height it reached is proof that something's in the air.

Now, this new book. It is about how some people succeed, and why, and how our metrics for predicting success are broken. Which means it will be a series of anecdotes, some about successful people, some about metrics for predicting success that don't work, and some about metrics for predicting success that do work. Also it will be about how to apply all of this to "the workplace." You can pretty much write it yourself. Or just read last Sunday's Times piece on it.

It probably will attach itself to the Times bestseller list, but will anyone be as kind to this book as they have been to his previous work? People still spend more time attacking Gladwell the corporate speaker, the wacky personality, and the amusing storyteller than the journalist and Thinker. But Morgan Meis, editor of 3 Quarks Daily and artist/academic type, finally got around to reading Blink, and he doesn't care for it!

The oddest thing about Blink, though, is the disconnect between these transformational claims and the actual arguments to be found inside. Throughout the book, Gladwell sorts his stories and anecdotes into two broad categories. On the one side are the stories about the so-called experts being shown up by the simple power of thinking without thinking. In these cases, we learn about the magical powers we all harbor within ourselves. On the other side, are stories about first impressions that have, in fact, led people astray. In these cases, we learn how to fine-tune and perfect our blinking skills in order not to get it wrong.

And then it turns out at the end that the way to do it is to have a lifetime of experience and be quite clever. Except even then sometimes you need to take more time and get more information so you don't screw up your initial response, which is the Blink thing the book is named after that is supposed to change the world. In other words it's all kinda bullshit.

Between this post, this similarly damning Blink revisit from a fellow Canadian (Happy Canada Day!), and the fact that someone told us as Keith Gessen's Internet Party that Gladwell hangs out with the n+1 crew even though they "all make fun of him behind his back," we think the intellectuals, such as they are, have finally turned against the Pop Sociologist Guru of Today. The blog backlash is already upon us. So maybe the rest of the middlebrow elite will catch up in time for the publication of Outliers.

WE'VE REACHED THE TIPPING POINT DO YOU SEE?

Gladwell is seriously becoming the "thinking" CEO's Stephen Covey. Here he is at the New Yorker Conference (which is the business-oriented sell-out version of their "festival") delivering a talk presumably based on the book. It's about how to hire great people, a topic he's sure you wrestle with at your organizations. He uses an elaborate sports analogy. You see, he went to the NHL scouting combine. You would think scouting combines would be great predictors of future success. BUT THEY'RE NOT. Conventional wisdom... overturned! It's quite obviously a centerpiece chapter of the book. It introduces "the mismatch problem," which is when "the criteria we use to prepare to assess someone's ability to do a job, is radically out of step with the actual demands of the job itself."

So. It turns out we don't know how to select teachers either! Or LAWYERS!

Mismatch problems grow as the complexity of workplace operations grow. So we need new ways of measuring success and ability. Ways Gladwell will explore in his upcoming book, available soon at an airport near you.

We came close once. Richard was on vacation and Wilson typed up what we thought was surely a family-friendly way of explaining the Santorum gag to unplugged newspaper readers. At about 7:00 p.m., we were all set to leave, when Post executive editor Steve Cuozzo—the Old Timiest of the Old Timey newsmen—came tearing out of his office, yowling, "Frothy discharge? Frothy discharge!?" Long story short: item killed.

What else do I miss about the Post? This lady right here. ::Sigh::