Revenge at the critical point: The rise of super stories, super propaganda and social engineering Malcolm Gladwell
Published in October 2024
A book that praises Malcolm Gladwell may not be the first path to helplessness with your academic colleagues, but it is very close. Share with any random social scientist you are reading Gladwell, you may hear a long speech detailing the flaws and shortcomings of Gladwell’s writing.
Ignore skepticism. Reading a Gladwell book is like listening to a well-crafted song: You can enjoy the experience without agreeing to the lyrics.
Gladwell’s latest book is revenge. Like all Gladwell books, the audiobook experience will be your best reading bet. Gladwell is an excellent writer. His narrative style is dialogue, intimate and energetic. revenge It is a brand new book that occupies the starting point of 2000 years Critical point Gladwell enters publications in the nonfiction stratosphere. Like the original revenge Try to discover hidden forces that drive social trends. The book uses a combination of stories and academic research and data to explain phenomena such as the Kuvid epidemic, the spread of opium addiction, and the rapid cultural and legal embrace of homosexual marriage.
For Gladwell’s critics (probably a large part) Internal Advanced ED reader), revenge A familiar set of objections will be generated. Our academic community will complain that Gladwell Cherry picks data to support narratives and does not contain information that might complicate the story. Gladwell’s approach is to construct his story about social phenomena, such as the mystery of murder, and Gladwell plays the role of Sherlock Holmes. Gladwell pieced together clues to reveal the culprits responsible for crime (policy or cultural phenomena) (related trends or social outcomes). As scholars, we know that various variables, forces, structures, and random causes can lead to most social trends. Gladwell’s book is satisfied because he is a master of filtering complexity. After reading Gladwell, you will feel smarter, even if you don’t.
Knowing that all of this will be used to read Gladwell, including revengecan help ensure that reading his book is pleasant and productive. For those of us who are in higher education, Gladwell has a lot to say about how colleges (well, elite universities) work. I found his explanation of why the highly selective school field has numerous sports teams in every possible sporting effort (from squash to Nordic skiing to equestrian to rugby) in order to invest time in Gladwell’s latest book.
We should not navigate Gladwell’s criticism of elite higher education with the ongoing attacks on many universities from the administration. But it is hoped that Gladwell might rethink his history of vivid moral absolutes when he condemned elite institutions, when he largely ignored social positivity and complexity. I suspect that the Ivy League is more prone to attack when played as a giant than defenders of academic freedom and against excessive challenges in government that recent events reveal our universities so clearly.
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