One of the items in this year’s Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue: dinner at the Alquonquin with Chris Buckley, Henry Louis Gates, Lewis Lapham, Adam Gopnik, cartoonist Roz Chast, Delia and Nora Ephron, Malcolm Gladwell, and George Stephanopoulous.
The price?
$200, 000.
Okay, okay, it’s for charity, so now I feel bad. But they won’t have to cook the food with all the hot air at that table….
A Harvard student proposes a whole new reason for Harvard students to suck up to their professors.
Basically.
Its users have dropped for the second consecutive month. And the only time people talk about it now is to mention how irritating it is. (Which it is.)
As CNBC’s Jim Goldman wrote on Friday November 13th,
Twitter runs the risk of devolving into another marketing tool by companies looking for what might seem like a cool way to speak to customers. But if that’s all it is, I’m not sure how many customers will be left to hear the message.
Reminds me of something someone else wrote on October 15th:
..which is the problem with Twitter: 98% of the people who actively use it are trying to sell you something. It’s like opening your (U.S.) mailbox and finding dozens of pieces of junk mail—every day. Quick: Can you think of anyone who Tweets who isn’t trying to sell something?
Oh! Wait. That was me.
At some point, Twitter will have to make money, or else it really will vanish.What will Ashton Kutcher do then?
What a charmer that Sarah Palin is, trashing the man who brought her to national prominence and ignoring the father of her grandchild completely.
But then, you do ultimately have to lay the blame on John McCain and his aides, who treated the vice-presidency so cavalierly that they thought Palin was an acceptable choice.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have my moments with turtles (see below).
So this story about how climate change might be dooming the existence of sea turtles in the Pacific really bummed me out.
Just as bands should be wary of releasing an album of B-sides, writers should probably refrain from releasing collections of their articles—it’s a sure sign that they’re trying to milk the brand for every last buck before things head south.
It’s also an invitation for critics who’ve been waiting for their moment to tee off on you…to tee off on you.
Which is precisely what Stephen Pinker does with Malcolm Gladwell in the Sunday NYTBR. (Exactly the kind of essay that would make the NYTBR a must-read, but is all too rare in that organ.)
The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation…
Indeed. This Gladwellian technique has long rubbed me the wrong way, for two reasons. I often find the straw man patronizingly simplistic and want to say to Malcolm (whom I know very slightly), “Actually, no, I don’t believe that at all.”
But more important, I never believe that Gladwell believes it, and so inherent in these “Straw We’s” is a irritating and false projection of modesty. Gladwell, who defines himself by the counterintuitive, clearly doesn’t believe that he runs with the herd in its willingness to embrace conventional thinking. So his assertion that, yup, he’s right there in it with us always feels patronizing. If it were so, he wouldn’t be making $40,000 a lecture.
Another problem I find is the recurring example out of context. “But a little-known study by a little-known social scientist at an off-the-beaten-track university suggests a different explanation to the question why so many presidents had fathers who worked for a car company.”
There follows an example which is said to stand on its own, a tower in the desert, rather than one idea noodling around like a Sunday shopper in a crowded parking lot.
This lack of context drives me nuts when I’m reading Gladwell. Well, I guess that could be right, I think. On the other hand, it could just as easily be wrong.
There’s just no way to know, because the information one would need to make a more informed analysis is never provided.
None of the theorems which Gladwell unearths are ever exposed to possible skepticism from others in the same field; readers have no idea whether, if you were an expert in auto-political genealogy, you’d have read little-known professor’s theory before, and known exactly why it is largely discredited among people who have actually read and thought about it.
Gladwell has a particular brilliance: His writing make us think, but not much; he makes his readers feel that, by reading him, they are becoming just a little bit smarter than they were previously. His hair grows high because he is patting us on the head, not the other way around. Just as the Dog Whisperer about whom Gladwell has written so fondly can reduce hostile pit bulls to gentle, whimpering pups, Gladwell surrounds us in a gentle cocoon; his essays are like the warm lighting and relaxing music you find in a high-end spa. The more we buy into the Gladwell construct—the Straw We—the less we actually think, and the more we nod our heads in admiration, rather than, say, wrinkling our noses and saying, “Well, actually, wait just a minute here…” In Malcolm Gladwell’s world, we are all early Babbitt.
Gladwell is without question a gifted writer with a knack for bringing fresh ideas and interesting people and ideas into mainstream thought.
But in the end, even he must realize how old this is getting, how the repetition of the formula makes us doubt its original credibility. Is this truth or shtick? Will any of Gladwell’s ideas—tipping points (didn’t we used to call that “critical mass”?), blink-think (a, sorry, silly book), and outliers endure?
Or will another Malcolm Gladwell somewhere out there in mediaworld come across an interesting little paper in a little-read journal and force us to “re-think” everything Malcolm Gladwell made us believe?
Harvard grad and corrupt congressman Bill Jefferson gets sentenced to 13 years in the pen—according to the Washington Post, “the longest prison term ever handed down to a member of Congress convicted of corruption charges.”
Meanwhile, things don’t look good for the alleged killer of Yale grad student Annie Le.
The affidavit laid out evidence the police had collected, including a bloody sock with the DNA of both Ms. Le and Mr. Clark on it; a pair of bloody boots marked “Ray-C” that were missing their laces; and a green pen that was found with Ms. Le’s body when the authorities eventually discovered it hidden behind a wall. On the day she disappeared, the affidavit said, Mr. Clark initialed his worksheets in green ink in the morning, but black ink later in the day.
Down the street from me, at Toast, my favorite local joint, a 59-year-old African-American Columbia professor of architecture hit his white girlfriend after they got into an argument about “white privilege.”
“The punch was so loud, the kitchen workers in the back heard it over all the noise,” bar back Richie Velez, 28, told ‘The Post.’ “I was on my way over when he punched Camille and she fell on top of me.”
Not cool. Toast has banned McIntyre for life. Unclear what Columbia has done.
The return of FU Penguin (on this blog, anyway).
Mandrill, I’d like to introduce you to a concept called restraint. Here’s how it works: I don’t make fun of the fact that you think chewing on a twig is cool, and you refrain from looking like your mom had sex with a box of Fruit Loops and made you.
See the full brilliance of it here.
Time picks the “10 Best College Presidents.” She ain’t one of them. But you can write a comment on the NYT blog about the article nominating her.
(Rick Levin, Lee Bollinger and Ruth Simmons have already been suggested.)
I mean, pick it up, Harvard PR people.
Writing about Goldman Sachs and its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, Dowd says….
When [interviewer John] Arlidge asked [Blankfein] whether it’s possible to make too much money, whether Goldman will ignore the people howling at the moon with rage and go on raking it in, getting richer than God, Blankfein grinned impishly and said he was “doing God’s work.”
Whether he knows it, he’s referring back to The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism — except, of course, the Calvinists would have been outraged by the banks’ vicious — not virtuous — cycle of greed and concupiscence….
…as far as doing God’s work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.
In between those ellipses is a screed against the money-hunger of what Dowd calls “Goldmine Sachs” and bankers in general, “wheedling concessions” out of Washington reformers and “laughing all the way to the bank.”
And of course Dowd brings up Matt Taibbi’s vastly overrated but oft-quoted line about Goldman Sachs being a “vampire squid…jamming its blood funnel into anything that reeks of money.” Taking its pound of flesh, would you say?
See what you think. I’m not perhaps the best authority on this subject, but to me, the answer to the question that begins this post is, in a subtle way, yes.