Malcolm Gladwell set the standard for non-fiction writers to emulate. No other writer existing in the non-fiction genre today has the ability to boil down ideas into a palatable narrative like Gladwell can. When reading a Malcolm Gladwell book, one feels like they are best friends with stone-cold experts on a subject. Events are given a Shakespearean stage direction. A graceful style and beautiful readability bless every page of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, which is why you feel like you were personally forsaken by God when it doesn’t work.
This is Talking To Strangers.
Talking To Strangers is Gladwell’s most recent book, published in 2019. It is his first book since 2013’s critically underwhelming David And Goliath. The latter book was my first Gladwell book and thus is one I have a special fondness for. I was quite surprised that critics weren’t all that wild about it. It wasn’t until the next book that I finally got what the critics were talking about.
So what changed between David and Goliath in 2013 and Talking To Strangers in 2019?
Two Digressions, One More Salient Than The Other
The first thing that happened between those two books was the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President. Thankfully, as I’m drafting this review, Trump was soundly defeated by Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 General Election. But looking back on those years of Trump’s term, it really is surprising how many writers absolutely lost their minds, so to speak.
There was a tension, a disbelief and a daily moral outrage in the air. This is threatening to become a tangent, but the point still stands: Gladwell, like many other writers, underwent a change that I don’t think was good for him.
The second article of change afflicting Gladwell between 2013 and 2019 was his sheer and utter dominance in other media. Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast exploded in popularity. I think, admittedly without much evidence, that around 2016 was the time that the Internet’s style of conversation reached a tipping point (pun completely intended).
There was too much information, and the ability to concentrate became evermore scarce. Thoughts were shallower and less clearly thought out. It should be no coincidence that Cal Newport’s Deep Work and Digital Minimalism came out in these years.
I have a pet theory that Gladwell’s brain, like the brains of countless other talented writers, reached an “attention saturation point” whereby a more thoughtful analysis became impossible. Flashy bullshit and more extreme content captured people’s attention in the years Gladwell spent writing Talking To Strangers.
I could completely wrong about all of that. Hell, it is somewhat ironic that I’m criticising Gladwell’s latest book for being too shallow by not going way down the theory rabbit hole myself. Regardless if I’m right or wrong, something changed between Gladwell’s two books that might make the reader take pause.
What Is In The Book?
Normally I like to perform an A/B comparison of what I liked and disliked in a book when reviewing it. However, the structure of Gladwell’s book renders that task utterly impossible. Talking To Strangers is structured like a detective story, theoretically anyway. It begins with Gladwell recounting the story of Sandra Bland, a young black woman who was pulled over by a white police officer in Texas. However, the traffic stop spiralled way out of control and Bland was arrested. She committed suicide in her jail cell three days later. Rather than do a deep dive into what made the two characters so isolated from each other, Gladwell instead yanks the reader away from the Texas roadside, promising that they will return there at the end of the book—after they explore the danger of dealing with strangers. The “detective story” was Gladwell examining other incidents between “strangers” to determine what went wrong in the Bland case.
To find out what went wrong, the reader is sent on a whirlwind Cliffnotes tour of the biggest scandals in the past 15-20 years, all of which Gladwell proclaimed were caused by “strangers” interacting with each other. Immediately, we have a problem not present in some of his other books.
Gladwell’s definition of “strangers” jumps around a lot. The characters and recounted events in this book vary hugely in scope. The Sandra Bland incident involved just two people. However, Gladwell also includes anecdotes from the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State (involving way more than two people in the university), and the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, a situation involving god knows how many people who were either participants in, or victims of, his fraud.
I was often startled by how thinly Gladwell spread his definition. Why would he do this? The objective answer is that Gladwell was trying to demonstrate what happens during “interactions” between “strangers” on a universal level. It didn’t matter if it was two people or two million people, the result was the same.
A Problem Of Scale
If you’re reading Talking To Strangers and you get a little bit uncomfortable with how dramatically overarching Gladwell’s narrative is, I wager that your concern has to do with the book’s scale. To clarify, I am referring to the book’s size in relation to the scale of the problem Gladwell is analysing. For example, Talking To Strangers is officially listed as having 400 pages. Those 400 pages are further subdivided into twelve chapters plus an introduction.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation will make the reader realise that a 400 page book containing (deep breath now) the Sandra Bland story (along with the Kansas City patrol experiment of the early ‘90s), the Sandusky scandal, the Brock Turner rape trial (and by extension a discussion about the effects of alcohol), Bernie Madoff’s fraud, the abuse scandal involving Larry Nasser, an examination of Chamberlain’s failed peace talks with Hitler, a discussion on Sylvia Plath’s suicide, the Ana Montes spy scandal, waterboarding, the Amanda Knox murder trial, and wrapping all of the above under the same causal bow of “truth-default theory” will have serious logistical problems.
In contrast, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature is a book solely devoted to making the case that violence has declined in recent decades and centuries. That sounds like a broad subject, but Pinker’s effort is no less than 832 pages long plus an additional hundred or so pages for notes, data sources, and further readings.
Hampering Gladwell further was the string he used to tie everything all together, a psychological theory called the “default to truth”. Default to truth, the notion that in absence of any other evidence people will assume someone is telling the truth, may indeed be a string tying all of those anecdotes together. However, the mistake Gladwell makes is that he heavily implies truth-default theory is the only cause that could explain those incidents.
That was what didn’t sit right with me when I read Talking To Strangers. The huge range of topics in such a small book violated some kind of logical rule in my brain. It didn’t feel sufficiently plausible. I estimate that Gladwell burned through three or four books of good material by including the stories he did. Every one of the incidents he highlighted could have their own book devoted to them.
In fact, Gladwell hints at what could have been a great book with the Sandra Bland story. Another story featured in Talking To Strangers was an experiment in Kansas City that involved introducing heavy police patrols in one particularly crime-ridden district to great effect. Gladwell interviews the expert who introduced this idea to the Kansas City police chief. This story’s relation to the Sandra Bland incident ultimately came full circle at the end of the book, but given the breathlessness of the preceding chapters, I felt like I was reading Gladwell’s outline.
The Final Achilles Heel
Talking To Strangers should have worked for me, but given the serious issue of scale, it didn’t. However, it did get me thinking. Gladwell’s other books feature a similar style without much issue. He takes several anecdotes that people might be familiar with and then bolts them to unusual psychological papers or some other interesting concept. For Outliers, it happened to be Anders Ericsson’s research into expert performance. Yet that book also received some criticism for being too simplistic. Indeed, these were some of the same criticisms that so bewildered me when I read the reviews for David and Goliath.
Looking for something in common, I made this note about Gladwell’s books: The parts are true, but the whole is false.
To me, that is the ultimate weakness of every Malcolm Gladwell book, which some exhibit more than others. He takes a story that is true and pairs it alongside another true story which in turn is placed alongside a third true story and so on, but as a whole, the stories combined create a book that is false.
To be clear, Gladwell is not lying to you, deceiving anybody, or acting maliciously in any way.
Nevertheless Malcolm Gladwell’s unorthodox combination of different subjects puts him in serious danger of something called The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. According to yourfallacyis.com, the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy involves “cherry-picking data clusters to suit an argument or finding a pattern to fit a presumption.” (For those wondering about the goofy name, it comes from the proverbial Texas cowboy who fires a gun at a barn and then proceeds to paint targets around the bullet holes to show what a good shot he is.) The pattern Gladwell found when examining the Sandra Bland case was one of “two strangers interacting” which in turn got applied to just about every third rail story under the sun.
A deep dive into the subjects of interactions between white police officers and black suspects/Chamberlain’s peace talks with Hitler might find they are related in several other ways. Additionally, such a deep dive might also reveal the patently obvious ways they are different. For example, Chamberlain and Hitler were both Europeans while the Bland incident involved Americans. The former was a diplomacy failure while the latter was a policing failure. One could analyse the differences to the point of being pedantic, but that doesn’t give Gladwell a get-out-of-reasoning-jail-free card.
Conclusion
Talking To Strangers features a wide-range of interesting topics in isolation. But when smushed together, none of it works.