I have to admit, since I'm tut-tutting at other people, that I like spoken-Gladwell much better than written-Gladwell. And it's the same style and the same stuff. It's disturbingly subjective (although it would have kept him out of Igon trouble).
Re:Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
by tptacek on Monday September 10, 2018 @03:12PM
(#17954244)
He's really quite excellent at what he does, which is "writing and speaking". I don't know why it was ever supposed to be a sick burn that he didn't know what a characteristic polynomial was.
I agree with you, I think. His writing is fantastic (just, like, as a deployment of the English language) but his podcast is better than most of his New Yorker stuff and definitely than his books. I've re-listened to the university funding stuff a couple times.
But popping a couple frames back off the stack: the argument that most of what's in the NYT is superficial or "bullshit" is silly. Though maybe stay away from the opinion section.
What's annoying is how hard these dumb barbs are to rebut, even when they're plainly fatuous. Like, I had to go navigate through the Pulitzer categories and relay back to the thread how to do it, and all the original commenter had to do was write "the NYT and USA Today are the same thing and both are just superficial made-up trash".
† though I'm sort of waiting to spring a little quiz on the next person who takes a shot at Gladwell for "Igon Values".