Tough review

A Slate contributor takes the ever-popular pop-psy author Malcolm Gladwell to task:

Accessorizing your otherwise inconsistent or incoherent story-based argument with pieces of science is a profitable rhetorical strategy because references to science are crucial touchpoints that help readers maintain their default instinct to believe what they are being told.  They help because when readers see "science" they can suppress any skepticism that might be bubbling up in response to the inconsistencies and contradictions.  I believe that most of Gladwell’s readers think he is telling stories to bring alive what science has discovered, rather than using science to attach a false authority to the ideas he has distilled from the stories he chooses to tell.

Malcolm Gladwell's name inexplicably tends to take up the space that more properly in reserved in my memory for Matt Ridley, an excellent author who deserves considerably more attention.  (My favorite popular science writer, however, remains Nick Lane.)  This Slate review also suggests to me that a better use of my time than reading Gladwell's latest ("David and Goliath") would be to read the reviewer's own "The Invisible Gorilla." The title refers to a video experiment many of us probably have watched, in which viewers are asked to count the number of passes in an excerpt from a basketball game, and uniformly fail to notice a man in a gorilla suit who runs through the players in the middle of the action.  The book is about our deceptive intuitions concerning our powers of attention and memory.