It’s bizarre to think back to how intellectually prestigious Malcolm Gladwell was in the first decade of this century, Steve Sailer notes:
Virtually his only critics were Pinker, Judge Richard Posner, and myself.
I actually was moderately sympathetic to Gladwell because I bothered to understand his strengths and weaknesses.
The key to understanding Gladwell is to grasp that he is essentially a public relations professional of the kind that research universities employ to write press releases to make their professors’ academic papers more understandable to the upper middlebrow general audience. But Malcolm had somehow lucked into doing the same thing — punching up academic studies — for The New Yorker.
As I’ve pointed out several times, academic PR is a useful and honorable trade. I’ve frequently quoted PR specialists’ press releases about new papers rather than the original paper in a scholarly journal because the PR pro has emphasized the study’s most interesting finding, found vivid examples, added a little human interest, and otherwise provided amiable helps for us non-specialists. And he has the professor read it over before he sends it out to make sure he didn’t get anything too wrong.
The job is a little like being a trial lawyer in that you are supposed to make the best case for your client (in this case, the professor). But it’s less demanding because the other side isn’t employing a lawyer also trying to win the debate for his client.
Malcolm was extremely good at taking an academic’s technical research and polishing it up to be comprehensible and appealing to New Yorker subscribers.
Best description ever of him.