Check out my Simple Counterintuitive Idea

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book galumphs tastelessly over complicated questions, finds Tim Smith-Laing

MTALKING TO STRANGERS by Malcolm Gladwell 400pp, Allen Lane, £20, ebook £9.99

alcolm Gladwell is the king of 21st-century pop non-fiction. A hybrid of journalism, self-help and social science for the layman, his first three books – The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), and Outliers: The Story of Success (2008) – perfected a formula non-fiction that editors have been copying ever since. Present a surprising notion that explains just about everything, beef it up with engaging anecdotes and season it with lots of “studies have shown”, and you have it. Ur-title: Why Everything You Know Is Wrong, And this Simple Counterintuitive Idea Is Right.

The major problem with the Gladwellian Simple Counterintuitive Idea – which is on full display in his latest book, Talking to Strangers – is its tendency to oversell itself. Or, to put it another way, to remind one that what the publishing industry terms “non-fiction” is by no means synonymous with “true”. The distinction has seen Gladwell become perhaps the most serially debunked writer of modern times.

The Tipping Point’s fetishisation of New York’s unique “Broken Windows” policing policy as a magic bullet for crime-reduction turned out to be untenable given contemporaneous falls in crime elsewhere in America. Blink’s fetishisation of “thinking without thinking” was condemned by one eminent academic for conflating vastly different mental operations, obscuring academic studies with a “parade of poorly understood yarns”. Outliers’ fetishisation of 10,000 hours as the “magic number” for acquiring “true expertise” in anything and everything was shot down by the precise researchers whose work Gladwell cited for it. Others have pointed out that some Simple Counterintuitive Ideas (henceforth, SCIs) are born simpler than others, often to the point of banality.

This has not stopped Gladwell writing, nor his readers reading. Outliers has been on the New York Times bestsellers chart for some

287 weeks; and his last book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (SCI: some disadvantages are actually advantages), despite critical panning, debuted at number four. So it is no surprise that Talking to Strangers should hew to the formula. SCI: the major problem of modern society is that we do not know the people we do not know.

While this counts among the more shrug-worthy SCIs in Gladwell’s canon, Talking to Strangers turns out to be both more controversial and more disagreeable than anything he has written so far. The book is framed as a response to the death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old AfricanAmerican who committed suicide in a Texas jail in 2015 after being arrested in the course of a routine traffic stop. Her original infraction was changing lane without indicating. State trooper Brian Encinia found her “argumentative and uncooperative”, and as the conversation escalated, he ordered her out of her car at Taser-point, before calling for backup, and placing her, with considerable physical force, under arrest.