Now Malcolm Gladwell Says He's English


gladwell.jpg

New MG sighting in the FT! A pretty Ferguson ink-and-colorwash of him in a v-neck jumper and t-shirt, with a baby face and not too much hair. He's the subject of the Financial Times's weekend interview, where you are given the restaurant's menu along with the subject's opinions. This is a very different Gladwell from the one we had before. For one thing, he is no longer Canadian (as everyone else has reported). No, he's English. Or says he is. At least he was born there but his parents left for race reasons. Right, so they went to Canada? What am I missing here? Malcolm likes to eat hamburgers at the Savoy in SoHo, where he wrote most of his new book, Blink. That's a nice homey touch. But he continues to parlay the tired line about his afro, which we've seen in at least two other interviews. He says he grew his hair out as an experiment, and found that he was being stopped by cops when driving, and often pulled out of airport lines for questioning. Oh please! I'll buy a hamburger and drink for Malcolm at any SoHo boite of his choice if he can prove to me that either of these annoyances actually happened more than once. Drop the afro, Malcolm, and drop the Black Like Me routine too, while you're at it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Linda LeBoutillier's Obit in the Daily Local Yokel, February 2021

Image
I simply will not get Linda LeBoutillier out of my mind. Did we ever speak with each other? Surely she was over at my house, at my sister's birthday or something? Did not take good care of herself, from the looks of things. But wait, she was ill.  Obit mentions her last husband, but there were a couple of others. Pace her old pal Scott K.'s description, she did finish Bryn Mawr.  High school group photo. Far right, second row.   LINDA LEBOUTILLIER OBITUARY  Linda Anne LeBoutillier 69, of Downingtown, died Tuesday February 23, 2021. She was the wife of Francesco X. Moscia with whom she shared 26 years together. She was the daughter of the late Roberts and Zelinda Paolini LeBoutillier. She attended Henderson High School, graduating as valedictorian class of 1969. She graduated cum laude Bryn Mawr College class of 1972, and received a Masters of Arts English and Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University. Most of her career was working in sales, pu...
Read more

The Old Howard Johnsons Story from Ms. Weir

Image
  As usual, the chosen illustrations for HJ in the original link are completely inappropriate, showing a Times Square-area cocktail lounge and a 1960s-era gabled building used for Motor Lodge offices and only rarely for restaurants:   What Killed Howard Johnson’s? Jane Weir, American Renaissance, October 8, 2019 Former French President Jacques Chirac died a few days ago, and once again Howard Johnson’s was back in the news. In the summer of 1953, when young Jacques was taking a summer course at the Harvard Business School, he worked the counter at a local Howard Johnson’s, where he was a dab hand at making banana splits. Years later, he liked to say that the company founder, old Howard Deering Johnson, came by one day and commended the future president of France as “an excellent sodajerk.” The obituaries mangled the tale as they usually do when Howard Johnson’s turns up in the news. The Daily Beast had Chirac “scooping ice cream at a Howard J...
Read more

The Movie Was Better

Two years now, and I have been stalled on the novel I drafted 3-4 years ago, decided was unwieldly, and decided to tighten up. "Decided" here means I had a velleity to tighten it up into a swiftly moving current of irresistible reading pleasure. I did not do this, though I still fully intend to. The story was simple enough. At a young age, though not a particularly tender one (who's tougher than a 14-15 year-old, I ask you) I was dragooned into being a panelist on a proposed kiddie show in New York. The writer/producer of this kiddie show seemed to have impeccable credentials. He had been a writer for two well-known daytime television programs, one an NBC game show and the other an intellectual children's show syndicated out of Boston by WGBH-TV. Soon after I was invited to join the cast, it became obvious to me that our impresario was a confused pederast who had brought me aboard as a sort of "beard." All the other kids involved in the show were boys--boys...
Read more