...as to why he's popular, I think there are two separate explanations. One is that New Yorker readers are overjoyed because his essays mark a return to this tradition of long fugal essays that almost everyone was afraid had vanished with Tina Brown. There are other great essaists in the New Yorker these days -- Louis Menand, Adam Gopnick when he's on -- but none of the regulars are so essaistically meandering as him. And New Yorker fans are really happy to have this kind of writing back. It's a graceful vacation from the news into a deeper level of reflection that isn't however so deep that you get anxious or tired out. It's refreshing. It's what they came for. And it's something they thought was lost.
And the second, pretty much entirely separate, component of his popularity is that those silly books have been latched onto for their silliest features by the business community's after-dinner-speaker crowd for the same reason they latch onto anything: it makes them feel intelligent and current with very little work. The books are tiny and easy to read, they look like they touch on everything. And once something becomes a business fad, everyone's gotta buy it and cite it.
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Yes, this is directly on target.
For me there are, as you say, 'two Gladwells': the fun and informative New Yorker essayist and that fellow who writes books whose spring-ice thin attempts at unifying themes are held together with butterfly wings and business class banalities.
And you are so very right about the pleasure New Yorker readers experienced when Gladwell and company came to the fore. I learned about the magazine during undergrad; I would sit reading recent and back issues in the library during rare, quiet moments between classes and um, socializing. What I enjoyed was a certain no nonsense yet still elegant prose that glided smoothly across almost every page. Copying this style helped improve my college compositions (which previously were clever enough but heavily burdened with what one Prof. called "high school enthusiasms"). Of course, it wasn't earth shattering material but everything doesn't have to be.
Tina Brown's arrival appeared to be the short kiss goodbye to all that.
But then it returned and there was a reason to subscribe again.
It's not Monthly Review or even N+1 (which I'm really digging these days) but for well constructed light fare it's just right.
.d.
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In our age there has been much talk about the importance of doubt for science and scholarship, but what doubt is to science, irony is to personal life. Just as scientists maintain that there is not true science without doubt, so it may be maintained with the same right that no genuinely human life is possible without irony
Kierkegaard, "The Concept of Irony"