Malcolm Gladwell’s Valentine’s Day article for the New Yorker on the importance of criteria weighting when evaluating colleges, football, and cars was more profound and unnoticed by the blogosphere than it had any right to be. It went completely under the radar. We, as bloggers, typically do a stand-up job of pulling in all sorts of events, affairs, and going-ons into the automotive realm, even if, like Jalopnik, they are at best connected to the auto industry by their possession of a motor. But when Gladwell gave a Stone Cold Stunner to one of the icons of print motoring journalism, he shed light on a piece of human psychology that we as petrolheads use as a crutch rather than a platform.
Gladwell is not a demonstratable car enthusiast in any sense. He is primarily a social psychologist and a popularizer of scientific research. His focuses are business, psychology, and the elucidation of surprising patterns in everyday normativeness. Yet, it often takes the perspective of an outsider (not Outlier) to see the decay within.