Rich People Flings
It's been a week of nice surprises in my mailbox: retro Chinese posters from mi_tigre (who now lives in China), a BluApple set from my sister in Chicago, and an X-Men magnet from my sister in Oklahoma City. I also received a new oven glove I ordered last week--not a complete surprise, since I ordered for myself, but a small surprise because of its unexpectedly early delivery.
With my cleaning for the new year completed, I've been spending my free time this afternoon reading (and now writing). Earlier this week I checked out Chris Lehmann's Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class. Rich People Thing No. 13 is Malcolm Gladwell. The name rang a bell, and I soon realized why: when I went to see Macklemore last month, he mentioned Gladwell's book Outliers in a brief monologue before one of his songs. He talked about his childhood interest in rapping. Like a lot of childhood endeavors, his rapping wasn't good, but with his family as an audience, his rapping was always warmly received anyway. Outliers was the book that told him how to get from there to where he is today. It offered the ingredients for genius, for breakthrough, for success.
However much the book inspired Macklemore, his monologue didn't inspire me to read it. It sounded like the kind Panglossian, management self-help book you pick up in the business section of an airport bookstore. Chris Lehmann confirmed my hunch:Gladwell is the bestselling author of fizzy zeitgeist titles of pop sociology such as The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. These books all, in various registers, serve as motivational slogans to the nation's ever-anxious managerial class, otherwise prone to deeply uncertain efforts to divine the market's true will and rampant second-guessing at the slightest setback....The counterintuitive thrust of Outliers was that prime opportunities often lurk at the margins of the mainstream, and that conventional measures of achievement like academic performance are often worthless. Translation: "Use your snap judgments and market instincts to burrow out profitable dark-horse stratagems!"
Gladwell churns out "empirically bankrupt" business-class fluff--not what I expected of Macklemore. The first song I ever heard by Macklemore was "White Privilege," so I imagined that he read authors like tim_wise--not cheese like Malcolm Gladwell.
I didn't mention it last month, but I actually saw Macklemore the next day as well, completely by coincidence. I was on Speedway and decided to stop at Whole Foods to pick up bagels and watermelon radishes. There he was, in sunglasses and a sleeveless shirt, standing in the check-out line. I said hello, but he either didn't hear me or decided to ignore me (hard to tell, since he was in sunglasses). That, too, was unexpected. Macklemore has collaborated with Blue Scholars, who take exception in one of their songs to artists who "think they too hard to talk to their fans." I thought Macklemore might share their sentiment.
I must be a sucker for disillusionment, though, because I still like Macklemore.
With my cleaning for the new year completed, I've been spending my free time this afternoon reading (and now writing). Earlier this week I checked out Chris Lehmann's Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class. Rich People Thing No. 13 is Malcolm Gladwell. The name rang a bell, and I soon realized why: when I went to see Macklemore last month, he mentioned Gladwell's book Outliers in a brief monologue before one of his songs. He talked about his childhood interest in rapping. Like a lot of childhood endeavors, his rapping wasn't good, but with his family as an audience, his rapping was always warmly received anyway. Outliers was the book that told him how to get from there to where he is today. It offered the ingredients for genius, for breakthrough, for success.
However much the book inspired Macklemore, his monologue didn't inspire me to read it. It sounded like the kind Panglossian, management self-help book you pick up in the business section of an airport bookstore. Chris Lehmann confirmed my hunch:Gladwell is the bestselling author of fizzy zeitgeist titles of pop sociology such as The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. These books all, in various registers, serve as motivational slogans to the nation's ever-anxious managerial class, otherwise prone to deeply uncertain efforts to divine the market's true will and rampant second-guessing at the slightest setback....The counterintuitive thrust of Outliers was that prime opportunities often lurk at the margins of the mainstream, and that conventional measures of achievement like academic performance are often worthless. Translation: "Use your snap judgments and market instincts to burrow out profitable dark-horse stratagems!"
Gladwell churns out "empirically bankrupt" business-class fluff--not what I expected of Macklemore. The first song I ever heard by Macklemore was "White Privilege," so I imagined that he read authors like tim_wise--not cheese like Malcolm Gladwell.
I didn't mention it last month, but I actually saw Macklemore the next day as well, completely by coincidence. I was on Speedway and decided to stop at Whole Foods to pick up bagels and watermelon radishes. There he was, in sunglasses and a sleeveless shirt, standing in the check-out line. I said hello, but he either didn't hear me or decided to ignore me (hard to tell, since he was in sunglasses). That, too, was unexpected. Macklemore has collaborated with Blue Scholars, who take exception in one of their songs to artists who "think they too hard to talk to their fans." I thought Macklemore might share their sentiment.
I must be a sucker for disillusionment, though, because I still like Macklemore.