Hating on Malcolm Gladwell: Are Reviewers Just Jealous?
Malcom Gladwell, author, essayist, and perennial bestseller released his newest book, “What the Dog Saw,” a collection of essays previously published in The New Yorker. Despite or perhaps because of his success, Gladwell has always had detractors. Academics often accuse him of a classic fallacy: finding causation where only correlation exists. Yet Gladwell’s harshest critics often pair their disapproval with the reluctant, if not painful, admission that they admire his work. In the spirit of such inquiry, the following Gladwell critiques contain the best backhanded compliments, reserved praise and spiteful criticisms hurled at the author: • Don’t Write Books, That’s What I Do Steve Pinker, a Harvard professor of psychology and author of “The Language Instinct” and “The Stuff of Thought” reviews Gladwell’s new book in The New York Times: “Gladwell has become a brand,” writes Pinker. He is a “dilettante” with a “lack of technical grounding” whose “education on a topic consists of intervi
