"Why did The New Yorker, which perpetuates the myth that they employ an army of meticulous fact-checkers, pollute our understanding of mind and brain by publishing these fabrications for decades?"

Asks Steven Pinker, on X, as he reads the New Yorker article "Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?"

Pinker answers his own question like this: "Because their primary commitment is to a belletristic, literarist, romantic promotion of elite cultural sensibilities over the tough-minded analyses of philistine scientists and technologists, their rival elite.... A common denominator behind Sacks's fabrications was that ineffable, refined intuition can surmount cerebral analysis, which is limited and cramped. It's a theme that runs through some of their other blunders, such as... [t]he many articles by Malcolm Gladwell (like Sacks, a fine essayist) which mixed good reporting with dubious statistical reasoning and misleading claims (e.g., that only practice, not talent, is necessary for achievement, or that IQ above 120 doesn't matter)."

From the New Yorker article, which is by Rachel Aviv: 

The problem with driverless cars is that they don't make mistakes.

OK, this is an original and good point.

pic.twitter.com/CmAHI9fUnr

— Bojan Tunguz (@tunguz) June 29, 2025

"Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author, has an office on a quiet street in Hudson, N.Y., where he sits at a desk under a poster of Mao Zedong, the former communist leader of China."

"Why? Maybe to signal how ideas can be dangerous? Nope, no particular reason. There are two other Chinese communist posters on the wall, too. 'I found them online for like $10,' said Mr. Gladwell, 61. 'I just think it’s funny.'"

From "Malcolm Gladwell Holds His Ideas Loosely. He Thinks You Should, Too. As he releases 'Revenge of The Tipping Point,' the best-selling journalist talks about broken windows theory, Joe Rogan and changing his mind" (NYT).

What if he had a Hitler poster and said "I just think it’s funny" and they were really cheap? Before you answer, remember when Jordan Peterson "bought like 400 Soviet paintings on eBay."

"There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol."

"I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require."

Mitt Romney texted Mitch McConnell on January 2, 2020, quoted in "The Juiciest Revelations From Mitt Romney’s Tell-All Biography" (NY Magazine).

Romney wrote that he'd just heard "from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th."

Another "revelation" from the book:

"This reminds me of a question I used for years in interviewing potential assistants: Do you know how to drive a manual transmission?"

"If you said no, you didn’t get hired. I know that sounds terribly arbitrary. But here’s my reasoning. It is not necessary to know how to drive a stick in the 21st century—particularly if you’re 22 years old. So the only people who do are those who are willing to take the time to master a marginally useful skill. Now why would a 22-year-old do that? One reason is that they like knowing how to do things that most people do not. Another is that they realize that the most fun cars in the world to drive are sports cars, and the most fun sports cars to drive are the ones with manual transmission, and they like the idea of being able to turn a rote activity (driving) into an enjoyable activity. I want to work with the kind of person who thinks both those things.... I think, in no small part, human happiness is a numbers game. The more small things in your life that you can turn from negative to neutral, or neutral to positive, the happier you are. The people who bother to learn how to drive a manual understand this. Like I said, these are the people I like to have working with me."

Writes Malcolm Gladwell in "Do You Know How to Drive a Manual Transmission? My reasoning behind the seemingly arbitrary interview question I used for years..."

Every car I've bought, up through the 2005 Audi TT that is still my main car, has had a manual transmission. I keep getting a manual transmission because it's more fun, and I like maintaining my skills. But I must say that I did not originally learn to drive a manual transmission for the fun of it. We needed to buy a car, and it was 1976, and a manual transmission was not only cheaper to buy in the first place, it got better gas mileage in those days, and we were in the midst of the damned energy crisis. Gas zoomed up to $1.20 at one point. It felt crazy and out of control. That was not fun at all.

"I think 27 years of superb reporting and commitment to The New Yorker should have been weighed against an incident that horribly embarrassed the magazine but mostly embarrassed himself."

Said Tina Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker, quoted in "The Undoing of Jeffrey Toobin How a leading man of legal journalism lost his sweetest gig" (NYT). 

Malcolm Gladwell, an important New Yorker writer, said: "I read the Condé Nast news release, and I was puzzled because I couldn’t find any intellectual justification for what they were doing. They just assumed he had done something terrible, but never told us what the terrible thing was. And my only feeling — the only way I could explain it — was that Condé Nast had taken an unexpected turn toward traditional Catholic teaching." He then, we're told he took out his... ... ... "Bible and read to a reporter an allegory from Genesis 38 in which God strikes down a man for succumbing to the sin of self-gratification."

And Masha Gessen, "who initially found the incident 'traumatic'" said: "I think it’s tragic that a guy would get fired for really just doing something really stupid. It is the Zoom equivalent of taking an inappropriately long lunch break, having sex during it and getting stumbled upon."

That's all from the near the end of the NYT article. What follows is this:  

But Mr. Toobin may not want anyone’s pity. Amid the 2018 Supreme Court confirmation process for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the journalist scoffed on CNN at Republicans who said white men, as a demographic, were being mistreated. “Garbage,” Mr. Toobin said. “All this whining about the poor plight of white men is ridiculous.”

Here's the Genesis 38 story, by the way. Not sure how what Catholics think about this story, but Gladwell and the NYT doesn't seem to care much about accurate textualism. It's not about "succumbing to the sin of self-gratification":

At that time, Judah left his brothers and went down to stay with a man of Adullam named Hirah. There Judah met the daughter of a Canaanite man named Shua. He married her and made love to her; she became pregnant and gave birth to a son, who was named Er. She conceived again and gave birth to a son and named him Onan.... Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death. Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to raise up offspring for your brother.” But Onan knew that the child would not be his; so whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death also.

Boy, what a minor character Er is! Onan got to be the eponym, but he's an eponym for something he didn't even do. As for the wife, she got slept with by 2 men, and we're not even told her name. 

CORRECTION: Sorry! She has a name. Tamar. The story continues (and it's more interesting than the Tale of Toobin):

When Tamar was told, “Your father-in-law is on his way to Timnah to shear his sheep,” 14 she took off her widow’s clothes, covered herself with a veil to disguise herself, and then sat down at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. For she saw that, though Shelah had now grown up, she had not been given to him as his wife.

Shelah is Judah's third son after Er and Onan. 

When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face. Not realizing that she was his daughter-in-law, he went over to her by the roadside and said, “Come now, let me sleep with you.” “And what will you give me to sleep with you?” she asked. “I’ll send you a young goat from my flock,” he said. “Will you give me something as a pledge until you send it?” she asked. He said, “What pledge should I give you?” “Your seal and its cord, and the staff in your hand,” she answered. So he gave them to her and slept with her, and she became pregnant by him. After she left, she took off her veil and put on her widow’s clothes again. Meanwhile Judah sent the young goat by his friend the Adullamite in order to get his pledge back from the woman, but he did not find her. He asked the men who lived there, “Where is the shrine prostitute who was beside the road at Enaim?” “There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here,” they said. So he went back to Judah and said, “I didn’t find her. Besides, the men who lived there said, ‘There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here.’” Then Judah said, “Let her keep what she has, or we will become a laughingstock. After all, I did send her this young goat, but you didn’t find her.” About three months later Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant.” Judah said, “Bring her out and have her burned to death!” As she was being brought out, she sent a message to her father-in-law. “I am pregnant by the man who owns these,” she said. And she added, “See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are.” Judah recognized them and said, “She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah.” And he did not sleep with her again. When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb. As she was giving birth, one of them put out his hand; so the midwife took a scarlet thread and tied it on his wrist and said, “This one came out first.” But when he drew back his hand, his brother came out, and she said, “So this is how you have broken out!” And he was named Perez. Then his brother, who had the scarlet thread on his wrist, came out. And he was named Zerah.

Rembrandt liked the story of Judah and Tamar: 

"In the weeks I spent listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, I learned that lobsters have serotonin, that Elvis Presley suffered from parapraxis and that Mr. Gladwell adheres to a firm life rule that he drink only five liquids: water, tea, red wine, espresso and milk."

That's a fine first sentence. The article is "With ‘Talking to Strangers,’ Malcolm Gladwell Goes Dark/Read by millions — but savaged by critics — the author has a new book on police violence, campus rape and other bleak terrain" by Amy Chozick (in the NYT).

Excerpt:

At 55, in clear-framed spectacles and a head of curls, Mr. Gladwell still has the spindly, featherweight look of someone who can break a five-minute mile on a casual weekend run. He lives in a two-story townhouse apartment in the West Village, brimming with books, vintage furniture and a set of eclectic paintings of the Ethiopian Army. We sat at a heavy wooden table as 90-degree August soup poured through the open windows....

Books take years to complete, but thanks to [podcasting], Mr. Gladwell’s typical reader — whom he has described as “a 45-year-old guy with three kids who’s an engineer at some company outside of Atlanta” — can partake in a virtuous cycle of Gladwell programming. The podcast teases interest in a souped-up “Talking to Strangers” audiobook, which builds an audience for more speeches, which stokes advertisers for the podcasts....

August souped-up?

It was a simple writing error to re-use the word "soup" there, and it amuses me, especially since neither use is about actual soup. "Soup" is conventionally used to refer to air that seems thick, mostly for fog, where the traditional expression is "pea soup fog." The OED traces that metaphor back to 1849, to an entry in a journal by Herman Melville: "Upon sallying out this morning encountered the oldfashioned pea soup London fog." That makes it sound as though people had been saying "pea soup fog" for a long time.

And what about the soup in "souped up"? The OED doesn't go into any detail here, but I think it's just an analogy to feeding human beings with the hearty, humble food provided to hungry poor people. The oldest uses are not about adding fuel, but tinkering with the mechanical works, readjusting the engines — of airplanes and cars... and jitneys:

Here come a flat-top, he was moving up with me
Then come waving goodbye in a little old souped-up jitney
I put my foot in my tank and I began to roll
Moaning siren, 'twas a state patrol
So I let out my wings and then I blew my horn
Bye-bye New Jersey, I've become airborne

No, that one wasn't in the OED. That's just what plays in my head. Chuck Berry. Wonder if he had parapraxis... or if I do... What is parapraxis?!

Parapraxis, the clinical terminology for “Freudian slips,” as the episode explains, means abnormal acts in speech, memory, or physicality....

Gladwell focuses on the parapraxis that seemed to occur during performances in the late 60s and early 70s of Elvis’s song “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” which contains a minute-long spoken-word section aimed at a long-lost lover. Though Elvis performed the song many times, he consistently tripped over the interlude. His final sweat-soaked performance of the song is iconic for all the wrong reasons: the words are almost all gone . . . replaced instead by maniacal, uncontrollable laughter.

The spectacle is hard to explain....

Or easy to explain:



And so, as you sally out this morning, souped up on espresso or tea or milk, have some laughs, have some lobsters, and good luck with your parapraxis.

The source of the myth that you need 10,000 steps a day is a Japanese clockmaker that marketed a pedometer called Manpo-kei in 1965.

There's no more science to it than that. Read Marketwatch, here.

Believing hitting the 10,000 number might motivate you to push a little further or to do it every day. Sorry to spoil that for you. But did you actually believe that 10,000 was magical?

Do you have any beliefs involving numbers? Do you know the point at which it deserves to be called "arithomania"? It would be funny if your answer to that last question had a number in it? (It's arithmomania when you've got 10 beliefs about numbers.)

Arithomania is a mental disorder that may be seen as an expression of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Individuals suffering from this disorder have a strong need to count their actions or objects in their surroundings. Sufferers may for instance feel compelled to count the steps while ascending or descending a flight of stairs or to count the number of letters in words. They often feel it is necessary to perform an action a certain number of times to prevent alleged calamities. Other examples include counting tiles on the floor or ceiling, the number of lines on the highway, or simply the number of times one breathes or blinks, or touching things a certain number of times such as a door knob or a table....

I'm empty and aching and I don't know why/Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike/They've all come to look for Arithomania....

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH brings up Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule and "New Study Destroys Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hour Rule." And Limited blogger said "I always thought 10,000 Maniacs was an unusually large number of maniacs." Here's the Wikipedia article "10,000" where you can make many discoveries about the meaning of 10,000. I'll just pick one, from Taoism:

The great Tao covers everything like a flood.
It flows to the left and to the right.
The ten thousand things depend upon it
and it denies none of them.
It accomplishes its task yet claims no reward.
It clothes and feeds the ten thousand things
yet it does not attempt to control them.
Therefore, it may be called "the little."
The ten thousand things return to it,
even though it does not control them.
Therefore, it may be called "the great."

So it is that the True Person does not wish to be great
and therefore becomes truly great.

"When it comes to cannabis, the best-case scenario is that we will muddle through, learning more about its true effects..."

"... as we go along and adapting as needed—the way, say, the once extraordinarily lethal innovation of the automobile has been gradually tamed in the course of its history. For those curious about the worst-case scenario, Alex Berenson has written a short manifesto, 'Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.' Berenson begins his book with an account of a conversation he had with his wife, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating mentally ill criminals. They were discussing one of the many grim cases that cross her desk—'the usual horror story, somebody who’d cut up his grandmother or set fire to his apartment.” Then his wife said something like “Of course, he was high, been smoking pot his whole life.'...  The first of Berenson’s questions concerns what has long been the most worrisome point about cannabis: its association with mental illness. Many people with serious psychiatric illness smoke lots of pot. The marijuana lobby typically responds to this fact by saying that pot-smoking is a response to mental illness, not the cause of it—that people with psychiatric issues use marijuana to self-medicate.... [Berenson] sits down with Erik Messamore, a psychiatrist who specializes in neuropharmacology and in the treatment of schizophrenia. Messamore reports that... he has begun to see a new kind of patient: older, and not from the marginalized communities that his patients usually come from. These are otherwise stable middle-class professionals. Berenson writes, 'A surprising number of them seemed to have used only cannabis and no other drugs before their breaks. The disease they’d developed looked like schizophrenia, but it had developed later—and their prognosis seemed to be worse. Their delusions and paranoia hardly responded to antipsychotics.'"

Writes Malcolm Gladwell in "The Return of Reefer Madness"... [just kidding!!] I mean "Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?/Permitting pot is one thing; promoting its use is another."

You know, "Tell Your Children" — Berenson's manifesto title — is the original title of the movie we know as "Reefer Madness." I think it's very strange that Gladwell never mentions that in his article (which appears in The New Yorker).

"In some ways, it’s never been easier to be a political comedian: the Trump jokes write themselves."

"In other ways, though, it’s never been harder: amid all the absurdity, the most consequential issues imaginable are at stake," writes New Yorker editor David Redneck...

Damn you, autocorrect.

That's New Yorker editor  David Remnick, writing in email pushing me to read various articles about "comedians who are helping us to understand and survive the chaos." They've got something about Samantha Bee, whose political satire is, we're told, “slash-and-burn” (which sounds like more chaos) and something about John Oliver, who, we're told, is "cable’s king of catharsis" (catharsis cures chaos?).

I'm interested in this idea that it's easy to do comedy now because "the Trump jokes write themselves," because I was just reading "SNL’s Toothless Trump Schtick Is Tired as Hell/After a record-breaking, Emmy-winning season, ‘Saturday Night Live’ is struggling to get laughs with its unimaginative Trump-bashing skits." 

That's by Matt Wilstein in The Daily Beast — published 2 days ago and thus not taking account of the Trump-bashing cold open on last night's show. Wilstein is particularly critical of comedy writing that is "barely an exaggeration of what the real Trump said during a speech a day earlier" (like when Alec Baldwin's comic Trump told the mayor of San Juan, "I don’t know if you know this, but you’re on an island in the water, the ocean water, big ocean, with fishies and bubbles and turtles that bite," after real Trump had said, "This is an island surrounded by water. Big water. Ocean water").

Last summer, before Baldwin had started playing Trump, author Malcolm Gladwell used another iconic SNL impression—Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin—to denounce what he viewed as the show’s “toothless” satire problem. Like Baldwin, Fey would often just repeat what Palin had actually said for comic effect. “They want the laugh, so they make fun of the way she talks,” Gladwell said on his podcast. “But the way she talks is not the problem.” The same could be said for Baldwin’s Trump.

And that’s the same critique that John Oliver levied this week on Late Night with Seth Meyers, albeit without naming Baldwin or SNL. “It’s easy to do bad comedy, because you just need to repeat what he says,” Oliver said. “And that’s not a joke, that’s repetition. Whereas comedy, especially if you want to try to do something that’s not just happening online all the time, is an effort.”

If it's easy, you're doing it wrong. That seems to be the proposition.

What I'd say is: Those who want to do anti-Trump humor need to understand that Trump himself is a comedian. I'm not saying Trump is just a clown, and it's crazy that we made a clown President. I'm saying, whatever his worth as human being carrying out the duties of the presidency, he is also a comic talent, with many humorous insights, great timing, and — like the greatest comedians — he's challenging us to see what's funny and what's serious as he mixes it up and causes anxiety that we can relieve if we climb out of the ocean of confusion and onto the island of laughter.

You don't have to like any given comedian, and a comedian who wields tremendous political power is going to fail to amuse most people. In fact, whatever your politics, you're not going to be a very funny comedian if you just think of the President as a wonderful humorist and laugh at his jokes. But you should understand the way in which he means to be funny and project yourself into the minds of the many people who do respond to his humor. You should do this, not because he deserves respect, but because it's the foundation for writing better humor yourself.

If you've been finding it easy to make fun of Trump, you are not working hard enough. It's like trying to write a brief in a hard legal case and believing your adversary's arguments are just stupid. You'd better understand the way they make sense and the thinking of the people who might hear these arguments as cogent or you're not doing it right.

"Might it be that non-Southerners, for cultural reasons, simply cannot understand why it’s difficult for Southerners to execrate their ancestors, even if their ancestors did bad things?"

"That thought came back to me after listening to this amazing episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast. It’s about country music, and what sets it apart from other American musical genres. Malcolm Gladwell is not the first person I would go to for insight into how country music works, but boy, was this great."

Writes Rod Dreher at The American Conservative in "Sad Songs." I haven't listened to Gladwell's podcast yet, but Dreher ends his column with an invitation to listen to The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”:

Listen especially to the third verse — the land, family, death, defeat — and know that for very many of us, that is the South. It’s not the whole South. “Strange Fruit” is also the South. But it’s one true story of the South, and if you can’t feel the tragedy and the heartbreak of a poor, proud Southern man laid low in this song, friend, I cannot help you:

I can't embed that without thinking of something I read in The New Yorker this week: "Who Owns the Internet?/What Big Tech’s monopoly powers mean for our culture," by Elizabeth Kolbert:

Consider the case of Levon Helm. He was the drummer for the Band, and, though he never got rich off his music, well into middle age he was supported by royalties. In 1999, he was diagnosed with throat cancer. That same year, Napster came along, followed by YouTube, in 2005. Helm’s royalty income, which had run to about a hundred thousand dollars a year... dropped “to almost nothing.” When Helm died, in 2012, millions of people were still listening to the Band’s music, but hardly any of them were paying for it. (In the years between the founding of Napster and Helm’s death, total consumer spending on recorded music in the United States dropped by roughly seventy per cent.) Friends had to stage a benefit for Helm’s widow so that she could hold on to their house....

Here's the album. You can still buy it.

By the way, the 3rd verse that Dreher talks about is the one with the lines: "Like my father before me, I will work the land/And like my brother above me, who took a rebel stand/He was just eighteen, proud and brave/But a Yankee laid him in his grave...." It made me think of the 140 Confederate soldiers whose nearby graves I visited the other day, after Madison's mayor, Paul Soglin, got a memorial removed. I took photographs...



... but only later did I learn that the headstones do not mark individual graves. What's under the ground is, in fact, a mass grave. The individual stones are a later effort at imposing dignity — an effort that corresponds to the effort we are experiencing today, the withdrawal of dignity.

The black female librarian introvert at the 5-day conference.

Instapundit writes:

YOU KNOW, STUFF LIKE THIS MAKES ME WONDER WHY WE EVER BOTHERED TO END SEGREGATION. IT’S JUST SO STRESSFUL BEING IN AN INTEGRATED ENVIRONMENT WHERE PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT FROM YOU. NYU librarian laments ‘fatigue’ from ‘presence of white people.

If you could send these stories back to 1964, would we even have a Civil Rights Act? Or would most of America have knocked itself unconscious from the massive face-palming.

The link goes to a Campus Reform report on this blog post by a black librarian named April Hathcock. From the actual blog post:

I’m an introvert, an over-achiever, and an over-joiner, so I’m always faced with having to be conscious about taking breaks, saying no, and engaging in other forms of self-care. But when you combine that with 5 days of being talked at, over, and through by folks in a profession that’s 88% white…well, let’s just say I hit my limit.

Its been 5 straight days of being tone-policed and condescended to and 'splained to. Five days of listening to white men librarians complain about being a “minority” in this 88% white profession–where they consistently hold higher positions with higher pay–because they don’t understand the basics of systemic oppression... Five days of having “nice white ladies” tell you to be “civil” and “professional” when you talk about the importance of acknowledging oppression and our profession’s role in it. 

See? She's raising the problem I call "civility bullshit."

Even with well-meaning white people, friends even, it’s been exhausting; the fatigue is still there. Five days of having white colleagues corner you to “hear more” about the microaggressions you’ve suffered and witnessed, not because they want to check in on your fatigue, but because they take a weird pleasure in hearing the horror stories and feeling superior to their “less woke” racial compatriots.

Hathcock is describing her personal experience as a black woman and — it's important to see — an introvert. It's difficult for introverts to do conferences and tp need to talk so much with people, even at a 2 or 3 day conference. But this was a 5-day conference! The hell! I'm not even sure I'm that much of an introvert, but after 3 days, I'd be running off and hiding in my room as much as possible, just because it's a 5-day conference. I can't imagine how bad that would feel, if, on top of the sheer difficulty of relating to other people for 5 days straight, I was continually having interactions that focused on something about me that puts me in a small minority, and I would be at my wit's end if those interactions entailed efforts to restrict how I talk, especially if I believed that my style of speech came from my emotional connection to my minority status and other people were advising me to rein it in.

April Hathcock's statements make complete sense to me. And I don't see how it undermines the arguments for banning race discrimination that there are going to be some negative experiences in a mixed-race environment. It seems really wrong to say: We gave you the integration you said you wanted, so don't complain about how you're treated now that we stopped excluding you.

In this light, you might want to read: "A Conversation with Malcolm Gladwell: Revisiting Brown v. Board." Excerpt:

I’m really examining the social science at the core of [Brown] and saying that the social science argument that the court made was wrong—or at least was painfully and tragically incomplete....

The court, for its own peculiar reasons, wanted to claim that black people, as a result of segregation, had suffered a kind of grievous and catastrophic psychological injury. And I’m sorry, that’s just not true....

[T]o draw the sweeping conclusion that the court did—that unless black kids can sit next to white kids in a classroom they can’t get an education—is nonsense!...

Here's Gladwell's podcast on the subject.

AND: Maybe it's time, once again, to read "Caring for Your Introvert."

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate?....

"Music that comes out of an enclosed, close-knit world is qualitatively, profoundly different from music that comes from a very diverse, open world."

"That’s the essence of the difference between country and rock ’n’ roll. I use the example of the saddest country song of all time to talk about how it could never have been a rock ’n’ roll song. Rock ’n’ roll is just incapable of speaking that kind of emotional language."

Says Malcolm Gladwell. He's teasing an upcoming podcast, and he doesn't name the "the saddest country song of all time." I haven't listened to country music all that much over the years, but I immediately assumed the song is "He Stopped Loving Her Today."

I guess I should wait until I can hear Gladwell's full argument about the difference between country and rock ’n’ roll, but his generalizations kind of irk me. I think what bothers me is the us-them of it and how it feels so much like the political liberal's distancing from the "deplorables" — those bitter clingers in their enclosed, close-knit world, those little people, so different from us — we who are thriving and flourishing in a very diverse, open world.

The Gladwell interview is mostly about something else, and I'm going to use that in the next post, so please, in this comments thread, only talk about the quote about the difference between country and rock ’n’ roll. Did it irk you too? For the same or a different reason? And is there any question that I've named the saddest country song?

"Strict laws prohibit government officials from disclosing secrets, yet leaking has been a constant feature of American political life."

"Since the passage of the Espionage Act, in 1917, the federal government has prosecuted only about a dozen cases concerning media leaks of state secrets. That’s an astonishingly small number. [David] Pozen, a Columbia law professor, cites one estimate that, between 1949 and 1969, 2.3 per cent of the front-page stories in the Times and the Washington Post were based on government leaks. Another study looked at just the first six months of 1986 and found that a hundred and forty-seven stories in the country’s eight major newspapers were based on leaks. The entire career of Bob Woodward, perhaps the best-selling political writer of his generation, is based on leaks. And yet, with a few symbolic exceptions, nothing is done.... Pozen easily dispenses with the idea that Administrations don’t prosecute leakers because they can’t find them. They can: information—particularly sensitive information—has a pedigree.... Pozen argues that governments look the other way when it comes to leaks because it is in their interest to do so.... 'For a strategy of planting to work, it is critical that relevant audiences not immediately assume that every unattributed disclosure they encounter reflects a concerted White House effort to manipulate the information environment. The practice of planting requires some amount of constructive ambiguity as to its prevalence and operation..... Plants need to be watered with leaks'...."

Writes Malcolm Gladwell in "Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whistle-Blower/From their backgrounds to their motivations, the two men have some striking differences." There are leaks, left unprosecuted because they camouflage plants from our government. But then what of hacks? Hacks are something else altogether — and that's the big difference between Ellsberg and Snowden. Ellsberg was a leaker. Snowden is a hacker.

Leakers... are interested in using and exploiting secrecy: they believe that secrecy, by its preservation and strategic violation, serves an essential purpose. The hacker, on the other hand, is a skeptic of secrecy. The anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has described hacking as the “aesthetic disposition” of craftiness and guile. “When lecturing to my class one security researcher described the mentality: ‘You have to, like, have an innate understanding that [a security measure is] arbitrary, it’s an arbitrary mechanism that does something that’s unnatural and therefore can be circumvented in all likelihood,’ ” she writes.

I was thinking about Gladwell's article when I was watching "This Week" this morning. Martha Raddatz was interviewing Donna Brazile:

RADDATZ: Well, do you bear any responsibility, does the Democratic National Committee bear any responsibility because they weren't prepared for something like this, or even have a chain of command going from, as you say, the Geek Squad up to more senior leadership.

BRAZILE: There's no question. I took full responsibility, Martha. I went to the Democratic convention. I spent the entire month of July, August apologizing because of the leaked, stolen emails....

As I watched that live, I thought Brazile said "leaked" then caught herself and substituted the word "stolen." I think she did not mean to say "leaked." That made me suspicious! Did the truth slip out?

Here, I've clipped out the precise point. Check my suspicion:



I hear resonance with what Julian Assange said the other day: "Our source is not the Russian government... We’re unhappy that we felt that we needed to even say that it wasn’t a state party... We have ... a strong interest in protecting our sources, and so we never say anything about them, never ruling anyone in or anyone out.... [W]e’ve had to come out and say 'no, it’s not a state party. Stop trying to distract in that way and pay attention to the content of the publication.'"

"By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job."

I wrote that on April 15, 2014, and I'm digging through my archive this morning, looking for Janet Reno, because I see that Janet Reno has died. She was 78 and had been suffering from Parkinson's disease since 1995, when she was the Attorney General of the United States. Her name is associated with 2 painful events in the Bill Clinton administration, Waco and Elian Gonzales. Reno was also the person under the now-defunct Ethics in Government law who determined when an independent counsel would be appointed and when that person should be removed for misconduct, so she was connected to the Bill Clinton impeachment, since she caused the independent Whitewater investigation to begin and she allowed Kenneth Starr to complete his mission.

From the NYT obituary:

Mr. Clinton, committed to naming a woman as attorney general, settled on Ms. Reno after his first choices — the corporate lawyer Zoe Baird and the federal judge Kimba Wood — withdrew their names in the face of criticism after it was revealed that they had employed undocumented immigrants as nannies....

Two months later, she gained the nation’s full attention in a dramatic televised news conference in which she took full responsibility for a botched federal raid of the Waco compound of an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists, the Branch Davidians.

The assault, after a long siege involving close to 900 military and law-enforcement personnel and a dozen tanks, left the compound in flames and the group’s charismatic leader, David Koresh, as well as about 75 others, dead, one-third of whom were children....

Questions about her handling of the Waco raid resurfaced in 1999, when new evidence suggested that the F.B.I. might have started the fire that destroyed the compound....

... Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy who was found floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida after his mother and 10 others drowned in a failed crossing from Cuba by small boat... became a unifying figure among Cuban exiles in South Florida, who were determined to see him remain in the United States in defiance of the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.

Ms. Reno favored returning Elián to his father in Cuba, and she became immersed in negotiations over his fate because of her ties to Miami.

Ms. Reno was on the phone almost up to the moment agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service burst into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives and took him away at gunpoint.....

Waco was the subject of that 2014 post of mine, quoted above. That old post was titled "Dick Morris says Bill Clinton 'hated' Janet Reno but wouldn't oust her because he feared 'she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.'"

"Reno threatened the president with telling the truth about Waco, and that caused the president to back down."

"Then he went into a meeting with her, and he told me that she begged and pleaded, saying that . . . she didn't want to be fired because if she were fired it would look like he was firing her over Waco... And I knew that what that meant was that she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.

"Now, to be fair, that's my supposition. I don't know what went on in Waco, but that was the cause. But I do know that she told him that if you fire me, I'm going to talk about Waco."

Morris was on TV to discuss the Cliven Bundy incident. What bad luck for Hillary: It has people needing to talk about Waco again....

By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job. What is Morris saying? First, the point seems to be that Reno convinced Clinton that to oust her would give rise to inferences that he believed his administration had done something wrong in Waco. Then Morris adds his inference of what he "knew" it "mean": that there was some "truth" that had been suppressed that would come out.

But Reno's argument didn't require that there be anything more to tell, and Morris knows that, because he goes right to his "to be fair" remark. He doesn't know. And if there was some suppressed truth Reno could tell, why hasn't she told it yet? One answer is that she doesn't want to tell on herself, but that would have been true at the point when she was begging and pleading to keep her job.

Perhaps she left a note. More likely, we will never know.

Here are the names and ages of the 76 people who died at Waco, including Startle Summers, Hollywood Sylvia, Chanel Andrade, and Paiges Gent, who were only 1 year old. They would be 23 years old if they had lived. There were also four 2-year-olds, including one with the sad name Little One Jones.

As for Elian Gonzalez. He's 22, and he just graduated from University of Matanzas with a degree in  industrial engineering. He spoke at his graduation ceremony, promising Fidel Castro that he and the whole class would "fight from whatever trench the revolution demands."

Why don't basketball players do free throws underhand?

It's not that they don't know it works better.

Chamberlain wrote — "I felt silly, like a sissy, shooting underhanded. I know I was wrong. I know some of the best foul shooters in history shot that way. Even now, the best one in the NBA, Rick Barry, shoots underhanded. I just couldn't do it."...

He's a high-threshold guy. He needs everyone to be doing something new before he's willing to join in. But Rick Barry? He's different.... What's interesting is that Barry actually has the same initial reaction as Wilt Chamberlain — I'm going to look like a sissy. But he thinks about it, and he decides it doesn't bother him....

That's exactly what it means to have a low threshold. If you have a threshold of 0, you're someone who doesn't need the support or the approval or the company of others to do what you think is right. Now, here's the catch — the person who thinks this way is not always easy to be around.... Half the players disliked Rick. The other half hated him....

Also at that link — Why don't football teams use all 4 downs to get 10 yards instead of punting? Research shows they'd tend to win 1 more game a year, and they know that. They're not stupid.

"My older sister once told me about 'Finals Friends With Benefits,' people you had sex with only during finals week to deal with the stress of exams."

"I never thought I would be the type until I asked Kam over on the last day of winter classes, and soon 'Want to take a study break?' became the sexiest of booty calls. Kam asked me if I wanted to watch a TED talk he had been assigned as homework...."

The ellipsis marks the place in a NYT "Modern Love" column where I had to stop and laugh. Something about the combination of "sexiest" and watching a TED talk. And it gets even unsexier. The TED talk is Malcolm Gladwell on the topic of marketing. If you do continue reading, you'll find that the author Sophie Dillon — "a junior at Yale" — uses Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk on marketing to explain different labels for sexual relationships. There's a "wide spectrum" that goes from "single, talking, friends with benefits, hookup buddies (all physical, no friendship), cuff (a temporary, reliable cuddle buddy for wintertime, when it’s too cold to go out and meet people, a special favorite of Northeasterners), exclusively hooking up (all physical with the same partner), dating, and then the finish line: 'in a relationship.'"

In the end, the young woman wants "a relationship" with Kam (a male), and after a drunk friend calls Kam "a coward" for not being willing to call what they have "a relationship" and she realizes she's "scared" to confront him about it, she finally confronts him with "Are we going to do this thing? Or does he want to chicken out?" Notice all the fear words.

Anyway, they end up at the so-called "finish line," "in a relationship."

Now, why doesn't this NYT column have a comments section? Young Sophie must be protected from the mean things people might say. Speaking of fear. But what is there to say about this? I have 6 things:

Atticus Finch said "The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people."

Michiko Kakutani reveals in her NYT review of "Go Set a Watchman," discussed in an earlier post, where I wonder about the discussion Harper Lee had with her publishers that led to the rewrite of the story, making Atticus Finch an idealize father and lawyer.

Let me guess, Lee and/or her publishers said Americans are still in their childhood as a people. This needs to be a children's book.

I reread "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1999, when I was invited to respond to another law professor's critique of it. Steven Lubet focused on the way Atticus Finch cross-examined the purported rape victim. Could Mayella have been telling the truth? I objected to Lubet's revisionist view of Atticus Finch precisely because the book is written to be understood by children:

That Mayella’s injuries were on her right side, that her father is left handed, and that Tom’s left arm is so entirely useless it slips off the Bible as he is taking the oath, clearly establishes Harper Lee’s overeagerness to assure us that Tom is innocent and to squelch any speculation to the contrary. (Professor Lubet breaks free of the author’s firm hold.) The author’s decision to forgo the usual subtleties of the novelist’s art undermines attempts at assessing Atticus’s legal skills. Indeed, Lee’s cartoonishly overdone evidence generates its own difficulties: Tom’s left arm is an entire foot shorter than his right arm and it hangs “dead at his side” and dangles a hand so shrivelled that Scout detects its inutility from the balcony, yet Atticus is able to trap both Bob Ewell and Mayella into testifying in a way that would require Tom to have an effective left arm, as if they had never laid eyes on him. Given this glaring lapse in the evidence, it is not surprising that Professor Lubet can pry a number of holes in the evidence and construct an interpretation that Tom is guilty, but I would still maintain that Atticus can be credited with an absolute belief that Tom is innocent and that readers entering Lee’s simplified moral world are compelled to adopt this belief as well.

ADDED: Lubet's argument is discussed in this Malcolm Gladwell article from 2009, "The Courthouse Ring/Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism."

Bob Dylan plays a concert for just one man.

"The incredible concert was part of an ongoing Swedish film series Experiment Ensam (Experiment Alone), where people experience things completely alone that are usually reserved for large crowds."

[41-year-old Bob Dylan superfan Fredrik Wikingsson said that on the day of the show] "I was a fucking wreck... Part of me was thinking, 'Maybe this won't happen and it'll be for the best. I don't want to impose on Mr. Dylan. I don't want him to stand there and be grouchy, just hating it.'"...

"I thought the first row might freak him out... I was like a guy picking the next-to-most expensive bottle of wine in a restaurant, which is a very Swedish thing to do. I figured the second row would be ideal. Malcolm Gladwell would probably have all sorts of theories about this."...

At the end of "It's Too Late (She's Gone)" Dylan performed a harmonica solo. "I always detest people that automatically holler and applaud every time he breaks out the harmonica," says Wikingsson. "But I found myself almost weeping when he played the solo. He could have just ended the song without the solo, he wanted it to be great."

Dick Morris says Bill Clinton "hated" Janet Reno but wouldn't oust her because he feared "she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco."

"Reno threatened the president with telling the truth about Waco, and that caused the president to back down."

"Then he went into a meeting with her, and he told me that she begged and pleaded, saying that . . . she didn't want to be fired because if she were fired it would look like he was firing her over Waco... And I knew that what that meant was that she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.

"Now, to be fair, that's my supposition. I don't know what went on in Waco, but that was the cause. But I do know that she told him that if you fire me, I'm going to talk about Waco."

Morris was on TV to discuss the Cliven Bundy incident. What bad luck for Hillary: It has people needing to talk about Waco again.

Which we were already getting back to Waco because of that Malcolm Gladwell article in The New Yorker, "Sacred and Profane: How not to negotiate with believers." But that Gladwell article doesn't mention Bill Clinton or even Janet Reno, and certainly not Hillary.

By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job. What is Morris saying? First, the point seems to be that Reno convinced Clinton that to oust her would give rise to inferences that he believed his administration had done something wrong in Waco. Then Morris adds his inference of what he "knew" it "mean": that there was some "truth" that had been suppressed that would come out.

But Reno's argument didn't require that there be anything more to tell, and Morris knows that, because he goes right to his "to be fair" remark. He doesn't know. And if there was some suppressed truth Reno could tell, why hasn't she told it yet? One answer is that she doesn't want to tell on herself, but that would have been true at the point when she was begging and pleading to keep her job.