Most non-fiction books and essays are collections of anecdotes plus a guiding interpretation. Data (as in statistics) is hard to come by and rarely reliable. And without the interpretation, you simply have a bunch of mindless facts. The world has an infinite number of facts. Selecting facts and arranging them in a coherent interpretation is what most writing is about. Even the driest history textbook is mostly a work of interpretation.

Still, something about both Friedman and Gladwell really bothers me. I think it is simply that I believe their theories are mostly wrong or useless. It's not the style or methodology that is the problem, but the results.