(2006-05-18) Siegel Contr Gladwell

Lee Siegel doesn't like Malcolm Gladwell. Is there any aspect of existence he hasn't transformed into a strategy for coming out on top in a meeting? Is there any business strategy that he hasn't converted into a universal way of living?... Later in the week, in honor of the new film about Rudy Giuliani, I'm going to talk about how Gladwell uses Giuliani's crime-stopping policy of "BrokenWindows" as part of his argument in The Tipping Point. In the process, he distorts the facts and gets the history of that social moment all wrong. But that's nothing compared to how he manipulates and distorts the story of Paul Revere in that book.

Here's that follow-up on Paul Revere. But of course the main reason we remember Revere was that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about him. Needless to say, Gladwell doesn't mention Longfellow or his poem, either. No one had any sense that Revere had even played a special role in American history until Longfellow's mythologizing verse forty years later. And the reasons why Longfellow singled out Revere were Prescott's death, Dawes's obscurity and his possibly shady career, and the fact that Revere lived to become a powerful and influential businessman. Revere didn't save the colonies because he was a "Connector." If anything, Longfellow chose Revere because he was a "Connector." And yet for Gladwell, business's journalistic tout, Revere was successful in his ride because we remember him. It obviously never occurred to our behaviorist historian, in his thoroughly conventional notion of "what works," that in fact we remember Revere because someone else exaggerated his success. For Gladwell, popularity is the mark of intrinsic worth. Aren't you glad you aren't in High School any more?