Why Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker essay bugs me, but first, a few things worth mentioning but not developing:

How sad is it that my work email returns any missive that contains profanity? No f-bombs thanks to the profanity filter, not even in essay drafts where the word might serve a purpose. No wonder I never get any of my mother’s emails.

Do major league baseball stadiums keep pitch counts on the scoreboard so the fans can all pretend they’re managers?

At what point will America tire of “To Catch a Predator?”

And now, your feature presentation.

So let me get this straight, Malcolm Gladwell: You get the Hendrik Hertzberg essay in the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker, and you waste it with the most ill-informed, ill-conceived essay ever to occupy that section of the magazine. And this only weeks after you wrote that great article about the Irish economic miracle and dependency ratios.

For those of you who didn’t read the piece, Mr. Gladwell seems to be addressing the case of Rhett Bomar, the former University of Oklahoma who got paid tens of thousands of dollars for a no-show job. Nobody in sports thinks that any D-I athlete is a naïf, ignorant of the corrupt boosters and crooked programs that have turned the NCAA into the asinine, overreactive and plodding organization it is. But Mr. Gladwell seems to have missed the last thirty years of college sports. Good thing he writes about it. According to the essay, Bomar’s dismissal from Oklahoma’s football team is too strong a punishment, as if compliance with NCAA rules, especially at a university currently feeling NCAA sanctions because of violations in its basketball programs, had never come up in any conversations between Bomar and his coaches. Bomar sold himself to a booster for a few thousand dollars, and in doing so, jeopardized the careers of every player on his team, and threatened the number of scholarships available to future students. And Oklahoma released him as a pre-emptive strike before the NCAA investigation. But Gladwell treats him as a rube from Hicktown who couldn’t possibly know the difference between right and wrong, and so shouldn’t be held responsible for his actions.

I used the word “seems” in the preceding paragraph because he may be using the Bomar story to advance a “boys will be boys, so why hold them accountable for bad behavior” thesis. He uses the story of Robert Oppenheimer’s attempt to poison a teacher who hadn’t given him enough attention as a way of warning us against punishing gifted people for their misdoings. I suppose Gladwell felt that OJ’s Heisman Trophy and NFL rushing records justified his acquittal from killing Nicole and Ron.

It seems crazy as we witness the deterioration of civility in American society to suggest that we should approve of excessive drinking and fighting, but Gladwell does just that. I don’t really object to the idea that he can make that argument, but when he makes it in the space where Hendrik Hertzberg advances eloquent arguments relative to the big political events of the week. (I don’t necessarily have the same politics as Hertzberg – or Frank Rich for that matter – but you can count on both to write well-informed, well-reasoned columns, whether you agree with them or not.) Hopefully, the New Yorker will keep Gladwell’s personal observations in the more trivial places toward the tail of the Talk.