Malcolm Gladwell Pens Zingy Letter To NYT Editor Over Book Review
Over the weekend, renowned Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker penned a reasonably critical review of Malcolm Gladwell‘s latest, What The Dog Saw, a collection of his New Yorker features. But whereas many “bad” reviews resort to sloppy ad hominem arguments or sound merely like the settling of personal scores, Pinker’s careful intellectual and substantive piece has already garnered a response from the best selling, afro-ed writer in the form of a letter to the editor of the New York Times. Hooray for civil, engaging debate!
In the piece, Pinker was measured in his praise of Gladwell as a master essayist, “dilettante” and “writer of many gifts,” but the reviewer was also deliberate in his criticisms, dissection The Problem With Gladwell, which he dubbed “the Igon Value Problem” — a jab at a spelling mistake repeated through Gladwell’s book, used to demonstrate Gladwell’s lack of knowledge in an area he writes extensively about (in this case, linear algebra). Pinker:
[W]hen a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
… 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 … He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.”
Eventually comes the big wrap-up and summarization of larger points:
The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case.
It stings, a bit. But Gladwell is a relatively good sport, taking to his personal website to respond with his hopefully soon-to-be-published letter to the editor. (How quaint!):
“It is always a pleasure to be reviewed by someone as accomplished as Stephen Pinker,” he writes, “even if—in his comments on “What the Dog Saw” (Nov. 15)—he is unhappy with my spelling (rightly!) and with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism.” Fair and fun jab, no?
Then, Gladwell reveals that he emailed Pinker over a factual quibble relating to quarterbacks in the NFL (!), and Pinker was kind enough to respond with his sources, which included a racist marketing specialist (not John Madden), a blog post (not John Madden) and a fantasy football study (not John Madden!), all of which is to say, Malcolm Gladwell knows more about football than you do. And if you don’t like his book, you might be a racist.
Pinker’s review is here, while Gladwell’s spicy and polite rebuttal is here.
(photo via Todd Heisler/The New York Times)
