Gladwell journalism

In the nascent writing genre that blends life-style journalism, science, and anthropology, The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell is in a league of his own. In fact Gladwell (pictured above, at shiny desk, presumably in his New York City high rise apartment) is probably solely responsible for it. One of The New Yorker's most popular staff writers, people jumped on Gladwell after the release of his first book, "The Tipping Point", where he examined social phenomenon and behaviors, and how they change, adapt or die without a moment's notice. If "The Tipping Point" was to be found on coffee tables of the literati all the way from London to New York, Gladwell's next book, "Blink", about how mindless, split-second decisions often provide more fruitful outcomes than if you'd spent months making the same decision, made sure almost anyone who'd walked into a bookshop in the last 18 months had heard, or at least seen the new era of Gladwell journalism.

I've read neither "Blink" nor "The Tipping Point", but I have been following Gladwell's New Yorker writings for the past year or so, and I can't get past an obvious contradiction his writing throws up. Now maybe the answer lies in "Blink", or something else of his I haven't been bothered to read (I know it's bad journalism, but just remember this IS a blog people), but Gladwell seems torn between a naturally fastidious type of journalism - a type of writing that's no doubt encouraged by the New Yorker's strict fact-checking regime, and need to provide measured analysis on any issue printed in the magazine - and the unconscious decision making that forms the backbone of "Blink". His most recent piece published in the New Yorker was a review of the sport's science book "The Wages of Wins", which Gladwell praises for its thoroughly mathematical approach to deciding how valuable any given NBA basketball player actually was during a game or season. What the authors, and implicitly Gladwell, came up with was a formula that took into more than just the standard figures commentators and judges use (shots taken/shots hit, rebounds, steals etc) to help rule or rank a team's most valuable players. Looking at the different rankings the formula turns up compared to the official rookie rankings of any given year, Gladwell concludes, "basketball's decision-makers, it seems, are simply irrational".

It's a case of quantified, carefully thought out research, which incorporates often overlooked and arbitrary factors that have been extrapolated to the nth degree, dunking all over the irrational decisions of some of the game's experts, who have used intuition and "Blink"-like decision making to come up with player rankings that Gladwell agrees is simply hogwash. It was the same sort of carefully attended details and rational thinking that made his piece from earlier in the year, which looked at the best way to protect the community from dangerous dogs, so fresh and engaging. If I was guessing on the title of Gladwell's next book, it would probably be something along the lines of "Don't Blink: How research invariably leads to more intelligent conclusions". Gladwell may find impulse purchases of "Don't Blink" down compared with "Blink", but that's to be expected.