Gladwell Talks Stranger Than Ever

Why Talking to Strangers is the worst Malcolm Gladwell book by far

Content warning: This article contains references to sexual assault, specifically the Jerry Sandusky, Larry Nassar, and Brock Turner cases that Malcolm Gladwell covers in this book. If that’s not something you feel comfortable reading about right now I’d recommend skipping this one.

“It has become necessary to point out in any review of a Gladwell book that the author, now also a popular and successful podcaster, is subject to disdainful criticism from academics and other less populist intellectuals, who say he is a simplifier, an entertainer rather than a social scientist. These critiques are usually caustic and condescending in tone and they have the unmistakable tinge of envy about them.”

-Russell Smith, reviewing Talking to Strangers

“You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.”

-Malcolm Gladwell, in Talking to Strangers

I worried I was going too hard on the Malcolm Gladwell criticism. After writing a three part series wrestling with the pop nonfiction genre Gladwell basically invented, I wondered if I was too overstated in my critiques and becoming too negative in my writing. Was my passion for a good take down turning me into one of those cantankerous contrarian internet types, a soulless ring wraith who doesn’t really stand for anything other than yelling at other people and starting shit, like a liberal arts grad version of Skip Bayless? Was the Gladwell I was critiquing really as flawed as I said or was I as guilty of straw man arguments as he was? Maybe I was just jealous of his success, fame, and writing ability.

So I went back and read a few of his essays from What the Dog Saw, and while none of them were airtight theories, several were downright interesting. Even the skeptical gents at If Books Could Kill, whose fervor and rigor for debunking Gladwell inspired and informed my essays, seemed to be coming around on him. In a marvelous episode on Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, Peter confides that, when he initially critiqued Gladwell, he hadn’t realized just how good his writing was and how relatively benign his arguments were. Sure his explanation about airline crashes wasn’t correct and might be racist, but at least it was engagingly written, right? Contrasted with wind bag authors like David Brooks or Thomas Friedman, whose flimsy conclusions are based entirely on personal observations, unhelpfully broad use of metaphor, and smug absolutism about the world around them, Gladwell is curious and even references data from time to time. Plus, the writing itself is undeniably masterful. So I decided to revisit Gladwell by checking out the one pop science book of his that I never got around to reading: 2019’s Talking to Strangers.

I really thought I’d gone too hard on Gladwell, that is until I read this book, which was awful in multiple sense of the word. Reading it not only validated many of my earlier critiques of his style, but it also gave me a lot of new reasons reasons to believe that this is the year when I formally leap off of the Gladwell train and parkour roll to safety.

I want to be explicitly clear about three things before I dive in further. I don’t think Malcolm Gladwell is a bad person. I don’t think Malcolm Gladwell is a bad writer. I do think this is a bad book. I’m not sure if the reason is that I’ve just outgrown Gladwell’s style or if he’s run out of interesting things to say. I suspect it may be a lot of both. What was very clear to me as I kept incredulously highlighting the batshit paragraphs that make up this book in my Kindle was that I now share Andrew Ferguson’s conclusion when he began his review of Talking to Strangers in The Atlantic by wondering aloud: “After 20 years, has the author’s formula at last been exhausted?”

1. There is no thesis to understand, only questions about misunderstandings— if that sounds confusing it’s because it is

The motivating question for this book is: why do we sometimes misunderstand or misread people? In vintage Gladwellian fashion he proceeds to refract this question through his quirky intellectual prism so it becomes a baker’s dozen anecdotes answering a bunch of dubiously related questions: Why did Sandra Bland’s traffic stop go so tragically wrong? Why were Cuban spies hard for the CIA to catch? Why did Neville Chamberlain believe Adolf Hitler would keep his word? Why did Jerry Sandusky get away with his crimes for so long? Why was Amanda Knox mistakenly imprisoned for a murder she didn’t commit? Why did Sylvia Plath die by suicide? In attempting to braid together all of these questions into something resembling a book, Gladwell is more obsessed with speedily leaping from one why to the next than Jadakiss is in his hit single “Why.” After finishing this book I now believe I would have enjoyed it more if Jadakiss had written it. At least then the hook would have been better.

His structure is of course iconic, so let’s start there. Writing for The Atlantic, Andrew Ferguson brilliantly describes Gladwell’s books structure as:

“the high-journalism version of Bond or Bourne movies, breakneck adventures that take us on a tour of exotic intellectual locales.”

In Talking to Strangers, however, this speedy topical island-hopping isn’t dazzling or invigorating; it’s just ineffective. As each chapter adds more complexity and less clarity, you begin to realize that at its core this book doesn’t have anything resembling a thesis, just an ever growing list of questions, generalized observations, and caveats. Everything is so couched in qualifiers and buried beneath zig-zagging tangents that it’s never clear what he thinks or if he even agrees with what he’s just said the page or chapter before. Perhaps this was a conscious response to his critics, but the result is that he’s gone from having too much confidence in the point he’s making to making no point at all.

Additionally, many of the examples he selects not only don’t support what you could generously describe as a clusterfuck of an argument, they don’t even qualify as examples of people talking to strangers. The fact that Jerry Sandusky knew his victims personally doesn’t seem to concern or even interest Gladwell. He wants to have a chapter on him, so he shoehorns it in. This is the first thing that felt off about this book. Throughout it he doubles down on the irritating trend I identified in Outliers, selecting the most colorful edge cases to discuss at the expense of the integrity of his own argument.

More frustratingly, the substance and tone of this book are one and the same, a truly bizarre form of what I can only call performative befuddlement. Throughout Talking to Strangers, Gladwell is positively, theatrically baffled with basic aspects of human existence. In earnestly trying to unpack the reasons that we sometimes trust liars and believe con artists, he proceeds to incredulously discover widely known parts of being alive like trust and facial expressions and react with the deadpan sincerity of someone describing how DNA works. Of course he doesn’t just call it trust, he has to rechristen it as “default to truth.” When we trust people we are “defaulting to truth,” by assuming that most people we meet are honest. Here’s his explanation about why we do this:

“If every coach is assumed to be a pedophile, then no parent would let their child leave the house, and no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth— even when that decision carries terrible risks— because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise.”

While he’s right on the money that trust is indeed central to living in a society, this gratuitously intellectual explanation offers remarkably little insight. All of us are well aware of the importance of trust. It’s the reason you’re reading this article right now and not clutching a shotgun and staring warily out your blinds. Lest I imitate that which I’m critiquing, what I’m getting at is that giving the counterfactual of a society where nobody trusts anyone is not useful. As he did in Outliers, he’s positioning his stories and examples against a ridiculous straw man to make his claims look more substantive and important than they actually are. This book has more straw men than a scarecrow convention.

2. Gladwell theatrically misunderstands pedophilia and sexual assault for multiple chapters

Okay, hold on because this is about to get dark, but important, so bear with me. Gladwell’s shtick has long been that of a nerdy tour guide. I even began my last Gladwell critique by pointing this out:

“Reading his books felt like an intellectual safari to me. From the first page I got the cushy thrill of hopping in an air-conditioned vehicle as the author took me on a meandering tour of human history, helpfully pointed out the counterintuitive cheetah, hidden hyena, and greatly important giraffe.”

There are many problems with Talking to Strangers in my opinion, but the biggest among them is Gladwell’s choice of subject matter. Simply put, not all areas of human existence are equally well suited for this style of brainy, gawking, drive by examination. A surprising amount of this book is about dark and complex topics like sexual assault, pedophilia, police violence, and suicide. I suspect that in addressing triggering news stories like Brock Turner, Jerry Sandusky, Sylvia Plath, and Sandra Bland, Gladwell is either trying to finally tackle more substantive fare with his work or using the shock value of these well-known cases to make his cute theories seem more consequential. Whichever project it is becomes irrelevant as his efforts fall flat.

My problem here is not that this book is a downer to read, though it is. It’s what Gladwell does, or rather doesn’t do with this dark material. Listening to someone pontificate about pedophilia and assault with Gladwell’s skeptical curiosity and allergy for consensus ends up coming across as callous, dismissive, and arrogant. Yet there he stays throughout the book, the nerdy wallflower rubbernecking some of the most hideous corners of human existence, occasionally chiming in with interjections that boil down to: “Wait, so it seems like this guy said he was telling the truth but was actually lying. Why did people believe his lies? I know why, but it’s not what you think it is.”

The “isn’t that odd?” curious asides that might have worked for sneaker marketing in The Tipping Point or youth hockey in Outliers come across as tone deaf and amoral here. What does Gladwell himself even believe? He’s remarkably reluctant to take a stand on the things he analyzes, even when those things are despicable crimes. It’s often hard to know what Gladwell actually thinks about these horrific events other than “isn’t it interesting that people deceive each other sometimes?” which is precisely the wrong reaction to have to behavior this heinous.

There’s also a bigger problem, which is that it seems like Gladwell neither fully understands sexual assault nor appears truly interested in doing so. He uses examples of sexual assault to have something consequential to apply his theory to, but is so intent on shoehorning his emphasis on misunderstanding strangers and misplaced trust into these cases that he repeatedly and deliberately ignores the power dynamics that allow criminals like Jerry Sandusky or Larry Nassar to get away with their crimes for years. In explaining how Sandusky wasn’t put in jail sooner, he keeps harping on how our default tendency to trust people is the problem. By focusing so much on trust and believing abusers lies, he implicitly and repeatedly shifts the blame onto the victims of assault and their friends and families. He displays little interest in exploring Sandusky’s powerful role as a coach, how he used his foundation to groom young boys, or how the Penn State administration turned a blind eye to his indiscretions for so long.

In addressing the crimes of Larry Nassar, Gladwell again misses the power dynamics at play and the shocking, numbing trauma that occurred, instead acting confused by how, “his alleged victims didn’t misinterpret what he was doing to them. They acted as if nothing ever happened.” He doesn’t address why victims of assault would keep quiet or not be believed because he’s so stuck on why the parents would have trusted Nassar in the first place. By forcing everything through the lens of misunderstanding and misreading people, Gladwell creates a misunderstanding of his own by leaving out the much more insidious dynamic of manipulation, intimidation, and silencing.

In a review titled “An easy book to dislike” Mike on Amazon put it this way:

“I expected the pseudo-scientific hypotheses supported by little more than anecdotes, but I did not expect things to go so backward, like when Gladwell tacitly suggests Jerry Sandusky was falsely accused, absolves the Penn State administrators of their failings, and kind of blames the parents for being deceived by Larry Nassar because we "default to truth."

I’ll say it again because it bears repeating: the Sandusky case is particularly ill-suited for this book because the crux of the case was that Sandusky was not a stranger to his victims. Yet Gladwell insists on examining Sandusky’s crimes only through the lens of strangers and trust, which excludes the much more relevant ways in which people like Sandusky and Nassar benefitted from their positions of authority, the power of being a known entity, to get young people and their parents to trust them before horrifically violating that trust. Sandusky and Nassar were not strangers with incredible deception skills, they were exploitative and manipulative creeps in positions of power and history shows that white men in positions of authority tend to get away with a lot of shit. Yet Gladwell’s approach can’t tolerate anything that widely agreed upon so he misses the point by repeatedly applying ill-fitting theoretical frameworks.

When he gets to the Brock Turner case, Gladwell manages to yet again swing and miss by forcing everything through the lens of misunderstanding strangers, in this case, because of alcohol. In discussing college binge drinking, which for the record is indeed a problem and is often involved in sexual assault cases (though not the sole cause of them in my opinion), Gladwell yet again manages to state a bunch of facts in a way that still misses the mark. He then takes a lengthy unsolicited detour through the rituals of rural Bolivian binge drinking. While it’s interesting to learn about, understanding this totally different culture doesn’t really explain the point at hand— if anything it distracts from the specific context of the Turner case. You’re left wondering at what point Gladwell’s stereotypical digressions start to be running away from making your point instead of running towards a conclusion. At what point is an argument this meandering just abdicating all responsibility for having a point at all?

After exploring the case from too many different angles, Gladwell arrives at this bizarre conclusion where he files the Turner case as a type of “misunderstanding” where the victim and perpetrator’s alcohol consumption may be the real culprit. To avoid being accused of victim blaming, Gladwell quickly shares Chanel Miller’s powerful statement about how alcohol wasn’t to blame for Turner’s crimes, of course. He was. However, he can’t resist getting cute about the conclusions we ought to draw about this harrowing case and adds a caveat that Miller and the rest of us ought to think about the role alcohol played, too.

Assessing Gladwell’s chapter on the Brock Turner case, Inside Higher Ed had this to say:

“How can I say this diplomatically? Some of the parts of the book struck me as dangerous bullshit.

Gladwell makes the unfortunate choice to unpack the effects of alcohol on stranger interactions through the prism of sexual assault. He argues that if we want to reduce the incidence of assaults, then a more scientifically based and honest conversation about the effects of alcohol would be in order.

This all may be true. But the specific case Gladwell chooses to highlight is such a clear example of a sex crime - and not an alcohol-fueled misunderstanding between strangers - that the author’s broader arguments end up being almost completely overshadowed.”

Most of this book is like this, insensitive at best and intellectually and morally bankrupt at worst. His myopic, aphoristic style is woefully unsuited to much of what he applies it to. The tonal and cognitive dissonance here is deafening. The theatricality of his curiosity and his penchant to retreat from the conclusions of others so he can hide in a contrarian cave until a quirky explanation rescues him made me suspect that Gladwell has gotten so good at moving words and ideas around in the vacuum of being a wildly successful writer that he may have lost track of the importance of tact, tone, and self-awareness. Not every topic needs a “well, actually” counterintuitive explanation. His insistence on imposing his cerebral, skeptical take on these horrific news stories ends up feeling violating and offensive, the intellectual equivalent of grave robbing. He opens up fresh wounds only to have little or nothing of importance to say about them.

When he comes full circle on the Sandra Bland case at the end of the book he manages to miss the issue of race in the same way that he misses power in the Sandusky and Nassar cases and gender in the Turner one. In assessing why Sandra Bland’s traffic stop went so tragically wrong he doesn’t talk about racism at all and instead pins it on an obscure social science concept called “coupling” that the officer involved didn’t understand.

It’s maddening to read. At every turn he’s fixated on asking precisely the wrong questions. There’s missing the forest for the trees, and then there’s what Gladwell is doing throughout this book which is looking at fleeing, wheezing animals and wondering why they’re suddenly so interested in cardio when they’re clearly running to escape a forest fire.

3. New levels of tone-deaf transitions and mind-numbingly obvious conclusions

Gladwell’s style has always favored dramatic transitions, whip-panning with the precision and intensity of a Wes Anderson film from an anecdote to a social science study, from a historical episode to a portrait of a tortured genius. Yet in this book the shifts in tone and subject matter are so jarring that they verge on self-parody. The chapter about Jerry Sandusky opens with a graphic depiction of sexual assault in a shower. I hope you’ve replaced your car’s suspension recently, because here’s the hard cut that follows, as Gladwell opens the next chapter with:

“By its fifth season, Friends was well on its way to becoming one of the most successful television shows of all time.”

Excuse me?! You just had a whole chapter about a man violating children in nauseating detail while drawing dizzyingly off-base conclusions from the whole affair and you follow that up with an explanation of why Friends is popular? How rushed was this book’s publication that the editor thought this was a good transition?

It gets worse. The takeaway from the Friends chapter is a belabored yet heartbreakingly obvious summation of a social science study that found out, I do hope you’re sitting down for this, it turns out that facial expressions are important in how we interpret other people’s emotions. He literally has a social scientist use her fancy facial expression reading software to analyze the scene in Friends where “Ross sees Chandler and Monica embracing, then rushes over in anger.” What a frivolous and self-indulgent use of an academic’s time. It’s like reading about someone using an electron microscope to analyze the chemical composition of his own farts. Now that I think about it, a chapter on farts would have actually been more useful than the Friends chapter as here’s the insight he extracts from analyzing an episode:

“If real life were like Friends, judges would beat computers. But they don’t. So maybe real life isn’t like Friends.”

Someone get this man a Pulitzer Prize already.

4. He didn’t present anything resembling a conclusion, but I will try

In an early session in 2020, my therapist gave me some uncharacteristically direct advice: “Your greatest weakness is often your greatest strength with the volume turned up too loud.”

In his 2004 New Yorker essay “The Ketchup Conundrum,” Gladwell introduced me to a comparably pithy Yiddish saying: “to a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.”

In a miniature feat of Gladwellian analysis, I submit that combining both of these unrelated aphorisms tidily explains why a writer as prolific as Gladwell ran into so much trouble with Talking to Strangers.

To a hammer, everything is a nail. To Malcolm Gladwell, anything worth writing about is a fascinating puzzle box. Unraveling these confounding conundrums requires a combination of social science studies, anecdotes, and counterintuitive explanations that only he can deliver. While this method initially worked great and launched his meteoric rise, it’s not an infinitely applicable approach to journalism. It’s his own iconic style that becomes his limiting factor and the source of his biggest failures in Talking to Strangers.

I won’t tell anyone what they can write about, but my final take here is that a book like this was perhaps inevitable for Malcolm Gladwell given his style and popularity. If you rise high enough as a public intellectual, an Icarus moment like this becomes more and more likely. He got so good at his own formula that due to hubris, curiosity, or egging on by his publisher decided to apply it to a series of real life examples that were never going to bend to his trademark approach to journalism. Just as my tongue-in-cheek tone, wry analogies, and penchant for Lord of the Rings references, while appropriate for analyzing shark movies, Taylor Swift, and reality television would be ill-suited for an article about immigration law or police violence, having a writer like Gladwell try to explain things as complicated and emotionally charged as racism, suicide, and sexual assault was, to borrow a term from this book, “mismatched.” The result was about as awkward and lacking self-awareness as booking a break dancer for a funeral or hosting a child’s birthday party at the DMV. I don’t hold this book against him, but do hold him accountable for creating it. And yes, for what it’s worth, I’ll also admit that it would be a dream to one day have my writing be read by so many people than a 33 year old with too much time on his hands writes a lengthy takedown of my fifth book.

By now, perhaps Gladwell and I are are both overdue to stop and write about something else. All I can say that I definitively learned from Talking to Strangers is four things. Sometimes people lie. Sometimes people misunderstand each other. Sometimes people commit horrific crimes. Sometimes people write bad books. But wait, you protest (as I did), why do these bad things happen? Is it because of evil people, misunderstandings, or lots of other factors that I didn’t cover? My answer is the same as the most charitable distillation of this book’s gesture at a thesis: it depends.

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