This was just what we needed

I’m still stuck in the black hole of looming deadlines, but some things are too crank-inducing to pass up, like Malcolm Gladwell’s recent post on the whole Kaavya Viswanathan thing (which has been covered to death on Galleycat, I know.) I think this was supposed to be insightful or something (in that OPAL MEHTA is soooo firmly rooted in genre fiction, be it “teen literature”) but instead he offers up gems like this:

If I wrote a detective story, set in 1930’s Los Angeles, about a

cynical, hard-bitten private eye, with a drop dead gorgeous secretary

and a series of lonely housewife clients, would anyone bat an eye?

Nah, but it might not sell, readers might not buy, and you’d be missing the point.