Way Up In The Sky Is The Leader Of The Greatest Band Of All Time

Where the fuck has Moe Tkacik been? I have no idea, she’s a difficult woman to get in touch with and she’s apparently stopped updating the bloggery and social-networking things that keep us up to date on what our favorite writers produce. The last I spoke with her was a drunken text conversation from Yankee Stadium when I asked for cultural advice about those from the financial sector. But here she is with a new seven thousand essay on Malcolm Gladwell for The Nation. I’ll read it when I have the time, which is to say not now. But the joy of Tkacik is to spin the cylinder of her prose’s revolver and simply pull the trigger, so:

Stars! They’re just like us. Which is to say, every time Gladwell begins to close in on a conclusion of real meaning or intellectual impact, he clicks his heels and returns to the mental Melrose Place of quippy clichés. What’s more, he apparently has no problem espousing the whole-truthness of two antithetical clichés–the innateness of genius and “The Power of Context” (as Gladwell had christened this truism in The Tipping Point) at almost simultaneous moments in time. Reduced further, depending on Gladwell’s narrative needs, genius is either nature or nurture, and he has cheerily eaten his cake, wrapped it up neatly in a take-away box and left us wondering where the crumbs disappeared to.

It may seem obvious to some that these are false dichotomies; neither half is ever true to the exclusion of the other. But that is the rub: there are a great many book buyers determined to hedge their bets in precisely this Gladwellian mode.

The power of context, indeed!