Googling Malcolm Gladwell

There’ll be an awful lot of ink spilled in the weeks ahead over University of Toronto graduate Malcolm Gladwell, whose book party for Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking happens next Tuesday at the fabled NYC restaurant Elaine’s, followed by two months of book signings. Blink is the follow-up to The Tipping Point, published five years ago, the kind of success that led to Gladwell procuring $40,000 per half-hour speaking engagement, according to his Fast Company cover profile, The Accidental Guru. Good thing Gladwell fled this backwater burg, following a failed attempt to break into advertising, in favor of an internship at the arch-Republican journal The American Spectator; had Gladwell stuck around, he could’ve written those couple of books and peddled the eight or so annual feature pieces he does as a staffer with The New Yorker and still not cleared that $40K in a year. The Tipping Point, with its lingo about “connectors” and “mavens” and “salesmen”, however, is the business book everyone can love – it makes the CEO and mailroom clerk feel at one, accomplices in some kind of great furthering of the cause. Who amongst them will admit to preferring the old static cling? Of course, taking innovative action is a different matter – the lack of which isn’t mitigated by a dog-eared copy of The Tipping Point on the shelf, sorry – and by shifting his focus to the psychology behind rapid cognition, Gladwell has cemented his stature as everyone’s fantasy sage. His elliptical anecdotes about Aeron chairs and The Pepsi Challenge reflect a world where you’re better off not thinking, not explaining, not deconstructing – at least until after the fact, when the inevitable triumph of this non-process will permit many hours of gloat-filled feasting off the spoils of letting a few lucrative accidents just kinda … happen.

Then why not eliminate the hassle associated with bringing something to market and just figure out how to get a career just like Gladwell’s? There is a million smackers in speaking fees available for projecting the right kind of smug modesty that comes with being able to cite wacky academic experiments in the process of staring down the entitlement that accompanies the short-sightedness of tall men. Gladwell was born in England and raised amongst the Mennonites in Elmira, Ontario when his father became a professor at the University of Waterloo, he transitioned from pubescent track runner to the teenage pamphleteer for something called Ad Hominem: A Journal of Slander and Critical Opinion. Nothing about Gladwell’s background doesn’t smack of amorphousness – racially, politically, hair stylistically, he’s been all over the place. Yet, while this might be the stuff of every guidance counselor’s nightmare, he has hooked into something whereas you have not. His writing communicates neat and tidy satisfaction rather than the high-pitched rhetorical tantrum that’s eternally reverberating beyond coherence. Dig this decade-ago piece from Saturday Night where Gladwell meets his peer David Frum, and shrugs off the silver-spooned neo-con braying about the havoc allegedly wreaked by a paternal welfare state.

Not that Malcolm G. is rooting for unadulterated socialism either. His perspective on health care – the fiber of our country’s journalism business – can be found in a 2000 dialogue with fellow Canada-bred New Yorker scribe Adam Gopnik here. It’s really not much different than Gladwell’s reaction to having his report on a serial killer-studying psychiatrist adapted into a play without his permission which, based on the resulting feature from last November. For him, remaining nonchalant generates more interesting dialogue than overbearing opinion. Oh, you probably live your doom-riddled life feeling drowned out, left behind, teetering on invisibility – but someone has already beat you to transforming those qualities into a career of telling people what they’re doing wrong without exuding actual criticism. At the conclusion of a 1996 article for The New Yorker called Black Like Them, Gladwell talks of meeting a classmate from Toronto happy to flee from a city being overrun by criminal Jamaicans, obviously oblivious to the fact that the law-abiding writer’s mother hails from there. There’s a fine line between being colorless and being a chameleon. Gladwell swaddled himself in all of the hues that were laying there unclaimed and now he shan’t be giving them away.