Maureen Tkacik, writing “Gladwell for Dummies” in The Nation. It’s a pretty sweet burn.

For all of Gladwell’s feints towards complexity, he always treats the world as amenable to both metaphor and science, understandable using our current cognitive tools and a little bit of hard work. It’s a fundamentally optimistic view, almost a throwback to the America in the ’60s when we imagined a world advanced by scientific inquiry - every problem the opportunity for a solution - all encompassed within a generation or two.

For all the assumptions that Gladwell goes through the motions of upending, he leaves intact our faith in the current course, running through a process of textual inquiry more palliative than curative.