Malcolm Gladwell S/D C/D

the guy's an absolute class a cunt. It was only a few months back he was lying his arse off about US healthcare on British tv in relation to a NHS "deabate", a fucking ridiculous corporate shill for private healthcare with zero credibility doesn't require that much intellectual rigour!

Way upthread I said "the best way to think about Gladwell is as a high class lawyer or public relations agent, where you don't know who his client is, and he pretends not to have one."

The Rick Rubin episodes of BR are consistently great.

There's a third guy, too, right?

yeah but he's not around all the time - bit of an outlier

lol

I once saw him at a restaurant in NYC with a tall, blond younger model type and thought, "She must be dating him for his looks."

"She must be dating him for his looks takes."

No doubt he'll get wheeled out on the BBC to give us some evidence based factoids about how cheap our prescription drugs will be when what is left of the NHS is paying four times the price for them from one of his US big pharma pals. Very funny and charming fellow though!

most of these intellectual snake-oil salesmen are exactly the same

I can't stand Gladwell most of the time, but I wish I'd been around for that Bowdoin discussion upthread. I went there for a year and they never stopped telling us how good the food was and how lucky we were to have such nice dining halls. (It was pretty mediocre food, just fancy mediocre.) They spent outrageous amounts of money on outdoor equipment so that you could do any kind of trip you wanted, with as many people as you wanted. The freshman dorms were all suites. And yet there were very few people there on financial aid, and those that were felt hideously out of place. Almost everyone seemed to be a child of multi-millionaires or billionaires, and even my roommate, the daughter of a multi-millionaire, felt out of place because her dad owned casinos and thus was definitely New Money.) I left because I feared that if I stayed I would begin thinking of that kind of wealth and luxury as normal.

Gladwell had a whole podcast which I enjoyed where he railed against giving any money to universities that already have massive endowments .

Lily Dale, I think that kind of college is a special case, because... why would you send your kid there unless you were very, very wealthy? If your kid can get into Caltech or Chicago or Yale or whatever, you can get a much better education for that amount of money (and those schools are much richer and offer more financial aid to families that need it.) Whereas if your kid is not getting into Caltech or Chicago or Yale, they can get as-goood-as-Bowdoin education at their state university for much less. Which means it's not clear why it makes sense to send your kid there except as a kind of prestige good, or because you know other kids-of-the-rich go there. I don't see why a family of normal means, or for that matter a family in the top 10% but not top 1% of household income, would make that choice.

people go to expensive private universities so that they can work at places that only hire graduates from said schools, or to meet other people with money so they can network with them and reinforce social structures

not knocking anyone who went to them who isn't rich, but the idea that mixing in kids on scholarships to break social barriers doesn't work nearly as well as they pretend. I think the amount of support for students when it comes to smaller class sizes, individual attention, etc. might be a little better

that is to say, Lily Dale otm

So you see, Sean, if you look into the patterns of history, you’ll find…whew, that one snuck up on me, could you pass the milk?…you’ll find that age of consent laws are pretty consistently cyclical, and we’re overdue for a correction

SEAN: Let’s talk about your Gram https://t.co/MB8in2bryq

— NBA on CorncobTV (@killakow) July 16, 2021

Gladwell said some stupid shit last week (stupid even for him, I mean), and Ed Zitron took him to task for it.

"Skeletal charlatan Malcolm Gladwell... is rich and famous because he is the king of the self-mythologizing that successful people engage in every day. His success has come from telling comfortable bedtime stories for the rich, helping them find confusing and complex ways to hide how their success - like Gladwell’s - came from privilege and luck. And the push against remote work is just another way in which the rich, powerful, and successful are attempting to rewrite history and create a narrative that they’ve “earned” their outsized paychecks and power... Gladwell and his fanbase of the single least-informed executives in the world have all told themselves that their success came from being in boardrooms and saying cool stuff that makes people think. When you break down their narratives, many of these successful people were privileged and lucky - born at a time when there was less competition for jobs, or able to borrow money from their parents (see: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos), or able to get into an ivy league school, or just happened to meet the right person (Wozniak and Jobs at HP). Their hard work is not irrelevant, nor is their intellect, but if they have to admit that their successes were a creation of them being in the right place at the right time and able to perform the necessary thing to progress, suddenly everything feels less satisfying."

"Gladwell is a spiritual leader for complacent executive liars. He is a totem that dimwits hold up to prove they’re intellectual, a standard-bearer for those who want the appearance of work rather than to create anything meaningful. Gladwell is only attacking remote work because he knows it will help embolden the executive sect’s ability to reap the rewards of other people’s work without having to justify their own existence. He is a religious leader roleplaying as a business author, Joel Olsteen for intellectual dullards, justifying the status quo by dressing it in the language (but not the fundamentals of) research and philosophical consideration."

he was literally shedding tears about the self-damage caused by people working from home, when you are that much owned by capital the only honourable option left is to kill yourself.

Really dislking this push to be "back in the office" "for the collaboration", oh, but you can't all be in on the same days, so all your meetings are online still. And you're in a mostly deserted office which is a million times more depressing than working from home with my cats and my partner in the same house.

Yeah, "hybrid" work seems pretty pointless and depressing, except for when I need to actually work in a lab with test equipment. However, WFH for a couple of years was not good for my health (mental and physical). I think this topic could use a little less of people deciding that what works for them should work for everyone else.

otm

I appreciate his exposé of the McDonald's french fry scandal.