Malcolm Gladwell is not merely a pseudo-intellectual but an anti-intellectual corporatist hack
The world's smartest dunce collecting $45,000 per speaking engagement is fine, but his plagiarism, slandering of truth-bearers, and ambassadorship of corporate lies is not
Malcolm Gladwell is an underrated miler, an overrated thinker, and a malign force in running.
Most runners are aware that he’s one fast coot, having logged a 5:15 mile in May 2021 at age 57. He was also unusually fast at 14, running a 4:05 1,500 meters (equivalent to a 4:24 mile). His lifetime personal best for 1,500 meters, 3:55, is quick but easily the least impressive of these marks. I’m envious of his ability and willingness to periodically attack the mile over a span of five decades.
And most people who can read know that Gladwell has risen to rhetorical prominence despite authoring a series of works that—while entertaining to numbers-crunchers—embody narrow and biased thinking packaged in glib and baroque sophistry. He’s also not above pimping of the work of his artistic betters, though he’ll assure you he’s above everything and everyone else.
But you may have missed the unfailingly venal Gladwell popping up a couple of times in an undisguised image-management capacity for Nike in 2021. This was no accident. Gladwell long ago established his insatiable appetite for discursive whoredom, while Nike that same year announced that it was mass-corrupting running pundits and mainstream-media journalists. This is the part people should pay attention to, at least anyone who cares about whatever integrity professional running still retains. (Journalism itself is finito.)
Gladwell was one of the alleged industry experts who lent their male voices to Nike’s Big Bet, an unabashed cinematic defense of Alberto Salazar by an “independent” filmmaker released in April 2021. "It is so typical of the dysfunction of track and field that we will bring down the house on someone operating at the margins,” burbled Gladwell in his role, perhaps unaware that Salazar has admitted to doping as an athlete but more likely not even considering this and related angles. And who exactly is “we”?
As I noted at the time, Erin Strout and other women (and men) were right be to be infuriated that no women were included in a film about a coach who had been accused of mistreating women athletes, with some allegations reaching into the realm of criminal behavior. That is, if they assumed or pretended that the film was supposed to be objective, which I’m assuming they…didn’t?
And as I pointed out, Strout, like everyone else in the running media and meta-media save Letsrun.com, has never evinced one iota of skepticism toward the Bowerman Track Club, the Salazar-less cut-out of the Nike Oregon Project whose members might as well be leaving chemtrails in their wake as they circle the track.
None of the anti-Salazar people care about clean sport or fairness as a concept; they just cherry-pick their ethics as situations demand.
Partick Larson of The Harrier was dismayed, but not confused, by Gladwell’s contribution to Nike’s Big Bet.
This was my own take on Gladwell’s participation in the effort:
I didn’t watch Nike’s Big Bet, a collection of “Did Salazar cross lines or not?” opinions from men both learned and daft, because the trailer was enough to convince me it was bullshit. For one thing, Malcolm Gladwell, who talks as much from his ass as from his mouth whenever running comes up, states that Salazar would never stoop to actual cheating, when in fact Salazar has—probably unbeknownst to Gladwell—admitted to using banned performance-enhancing drugs as an athlete himself.
Also involved in Nike's Big Bet was Citius Mag founder Chris Chavez, a man formerly eager to broadcast his supposed contempt for Nike-based malfeasance. This scolding stopped completely after Nike co-founder Phil Knight announced in April 2021—the same month Nike’s Big Bet was released— that he had personally bought the already unreliable and nigh unreadable Citius Mag along with a swell of other outlets and reporters.
Nike BTC athlete Shelby Houlihan, the American 1,500-meter and 5,000-meter record-holder and the program’s nominal female face, had been suspended in January of that year for a doping violation. But because Houlihan, Inc. claimed in the spring that she was sorta-injured when in fact she was banned and striving fruitlessly not to be, the public wouldn’t learn about her suspension until June. It’s almost as though Knight—despite being in his eighties and probably never even venturing online—had somehow caught wind of the bad news, and decided to start spinning things in Nike’s favor in advance of the public inevitably learning about the Houliban.
Gladwell surfaced in the fall of 2021 to weigh in on Houlihan’s suspension. His considered verdict was that Houlihan wouldn't have knowingly used banned substances because she knew the risk and potential consequences of getting caught.
Don’t believe me? Take it from me.
This premise is so insane that it’s hard to propose rational explanations for its existence other than “Malcolm Gladwell should see a neurologist” and “Malcolm Gladwell is a freewheeling liar.” His opinion here is as frankly mindless or mendacious as "No one ever steals anything from stores that have cameras visible!” from the mouth of someone laughing at a television show featuring thieves who have been caught shoplifting thanks to prominently displayed in-store video-surveillance equipment.
Does he think every one of the thousands of top-level athletes who have been sectioned in various worldwide sports over the years were unaware that they were cheating and that people were (in theory) watching? Does he believe that no athlete has ever heard about other athletes getting suspended for PED use?
While not glowing with cognitive candlepower, Gladwell can at least walk and gobble corporate knob at the same time, whereas Chavez and his entire Citius Mag Ritalin-splotch, Strout, Alison Wade of Fast Women, and other pro-Nike klown-kamps presumably have to alternate between these exercises to avoid exhaustion. So it's clear that Gladwell is a corporatist shill who will say anything for money.
And it's not as if this was a mystery. By 2005, Gladwell was getting up to $45,000 per speaking engagement—worth about $68,000 now and maybe $76,000 by the time you read this in a week—and favorably impressing noted humanists Donald Rumsfeld (former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Iraq War co-architect and spinmeister) and Gavin Newsom (currently among the most proudly unconscionable and destructive actors in American politics).
But that kind of money wasn't enough, so in 2011 he started shilling for Bank of America—all while expressing support for the various anti-capitalist “Occupy” movements.
Bank of America has the distinction of incurring sixteen judgments against itself and its subsidiaries totaling half a billion dollars or more. Thirteen of these were levied between 2011 and 2014. This has financially hurt their shareholders and executives no more than someone canceling their Beck of the Pack subscription would hurt me, though I shouldn’t tempt anyone.
Gladwell was credibly accused of plagiarism in 2017. The source of that story is funny, since these days The Daily Beast (or any Noah Shachtman enterprise) outing someone's intellectual dishonesty is like someone masturbating to child pornography and pausing to call the cops on a peeping Tom lurking outside a window across the street.
But there it was.
Gladwell didn't even deny what he'd done. Instead, true to his egomaniacal and slimy nature, he directed critics to his own website and one of his own essays from 2004, which he later deleted from his site. He’s just a wreck of denialism, bad ideas, and puffery. And today, of course, he’s thriving, not caring how dishonest and brain-dead he looks because it hasn’t cost him anything.
In 2022, Gladwell began to trend more senile than shady when talking or writing about running, as nothing he says about how to improve the sport makes any sense. But he also favors large-scale efforts to protect disinformation merchants, such as the one he embarked on last month in teaming up with fellow fabulist and longtime New York Times bozette Michelle Goldberg to debate independent journalists and full-fledged hominids Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray.
The latter pair advanced the “mainstream media are historically unreliable" side (here’s Taibbi’s opening statement), while Gladwell and Goldberg lied ineptly and without real enthusiasm on behalf of their corporate benefactor-puppeteers.
A portion of the debate transcript exemplifies Gladwell’s smarmy blend of ignorance and deflection as a defense mechanism. Here, he bunts aside Taibbi’s point about Walter Cronkite’s enduring trust among Americans with “but oppression!” while being decades off in his claim.
Before the debate, the audience favored trusting the MSM 52% to 48%. Afterward, the crowd was 67% to 33% against the MSM, the largest such swing in the history of the Munk debates. You’ll see why if you watch the video. And you should, just to watch the ruthless Douglas Murray in action.
But Gladwell is still out there getting paid, and the amount of money Knight has distributed (it’s a billionaire thing) to ensure warped coverage of himself and Nike—while as unknowable as the breadth and depth of its reach—is obviously sufficient to do the job of keeping a bunch of already craven and incurious pundits from acknowledging a single unflattering fact about Nike, probably for the rest of their lives.
I have more than a feeling that some of the dough is going to various unspecified actors who churn out running newsletters and articles and podcasts tacitly or actively supportive of Houlihan, the BTC, and Nike athletes no matter what these athletes or their associates do, but who don’t mention being supported by Knight because why on Earth would they?
Remember too that Malcolm Gladwell has long written for the same crowd that lives for self-stroking chum—educated and cultured sorts who in private follow none of the rules they pretend to; laptop urbanites who can work forever from couches in supine positions if they must work at all, preaching all the while about the need to protect others and, moreover, do what the media tells you to do.
And it’s not for nothing that the mainstream media are propagating the notion of permanent masking and similarly authoritarian measures, as this keeps all of us awash in the idea of accepting permanent mandates generally and soporific about what should be a frightening prospect. Malcolm Gladwell—a liar, a midwit, an rhetorical prostitute, a hypocrite, and even a copycat—is a part of this effort. And all of those traits ensure that in today’s journalistic climate, he’ll enjoy continual prominence and somehow command respect, or at least cash.
No matter how rich all this has made Gladwell, he will go to his grave knowing that for all his financial success and the praise heaped on him by the hoi polloi, his smart-person imitation was always a howl in the eyes of anyone properly attuned to his My Pillow-level deceits.