The Tyranny of Malcolms
malcolm (n.) A folksy anecdote used to begin a chapter in a popular nonfiction book, in an attempt to draw in uninterested readers. (Named for Malcolm Gladwell (b. 1963), who popularised the technique and spawned many less sure-handed emulators)
I recently read Paul Johnson’s excellent Follow the Money, a book about British public finances. I liked it mainly because it’s incredibly well written and well informed, about an important subject that I care about. But another reason that I liked it is that it the refreshing absence of gratuitous malcolms.
If you’ve read popular nonfiction books in the past twenty years, you’ll have come across malcolms, even if you didn’t know what they were called. A malcolm is a lengthy anecdote used to begin a chapter, before the author gets to the actual point they’re trying to make. Let’s say the author has written a chapter arguing that that rivals make the best teams. Often nowadays they will begin the chapter with a long story about John Lennon getting in an argument with Paul McCartney, before recording a classic Beatles album, or about two rival basketball teammates, or whatever. The aim is to make the reader care about the more abstract points that the author wants by providing a tangible, relatable, surprising example.
Now don’t get me wrong: a good malcolm is a thing of beauty. Malcolm Gladwell, in whose honour they are named, uses them superbly, as you’d expect from one of the world’s most successful nonfiction writers. His stories are deeply engaging, and because he is a very skilled writer, they pivot weightlessly into the substantive points he writes about, making the reader emotionally engaged in what are often reasonably technical subjects.
They can be especially useful when the author of a book is a technical expert making a foray into writing for a general audience. Many specialists (such as economists) are a lot more comfortable with talking about trends and data, and a lot less interested in anecdotal examples than laypeople. This is often an advantage, because anecdotes can be misleading, but not if you’re trying to write for the general public. Writing malcolms can force quantitativrly minded writers to meet their reader half-way.
The problem is that, these days, malcolms seem to be absolutely everywhere. It’s as if a memo went out to every expert writing a popular book explaining that each chapter of their book has to begin with an anecdote, in the same way it has to have an index and page numbers. And as the quantity of malcolms has increased, the quality has declined.
(Quick aside: it’s very striking to skim through a few general popular nonfiction books — ie not great classics, just OK books that are now mostly forgotten, landfill nonfiction if you like — from the 1990s or before and see how much more variation in style there is. On the whole, pre-2000 nonfiction books strike me as noticeably less clearly written than books today — they’re more prone to abstraction and are less well signposted. They also seem to contain a lot of the kind of factoids and cliches that nowadays can be debunked with thirty seconds of Googling. But occasionally the stylistic variation you get in older books gives rise to something enjoyably quirky and distinctive, like Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness (which seems to have been written just before Gladwell’s first book was published; I wonder if it would be published now?). I suspect the success of writers like Gladwell and of books like Freakonomics and Nudge did a lot to improve the style of popular nonfiction books, but at the same time led to more homogeneity. I’d love to read something written by a nonfiction editor or agent who actually knows about this stuff explaining how the changes happened. But in the mean time, you’ve got me.)
As I was saying, the ubiquity of malcolms means that most of them are not Gladwell-quality. Partly this is because they’re hard to write well. Writing emotionally resonant stories takes practice, and is a different type of skill from clear exposition of interesting research.
Researching malcolms is hard too. Finding an original and true story that speaks to your underlying general point requires real journalistic skill. One failure mode is deploying anecdotes that are under-researched and turn out not to be entirely true. (I’m very grateful to historian Anton Howes for helping me and Jonathan Haskel avoid factual errors in a malcolm we wrote about lighthouse technology in Restarting the Future; I’m sure other malcolms I’ve written contain factual errors I haven’t spotted.) In this respect, even Homer nods: Malcolm Gladwell himself was criticised for factual errors in the (very cool) stories in his 2021 book, The Bomber Mafia.
What’s more, a writer also needs a good grasp of what sort of anecdotes their reader will find surprising, rather than trite or hackneyed. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve read popular economic books that introduce questions of growth with the anecdote of the man in Newcastle telling a panellist “that’s your bloody GDP, not mine!”, or that frames the financial crisis with the story of how the Queen once asked some economists what had caused it, and they said they didn’t know. (I think I have used at least one of these malcolms myself. Sorry!) To avoid this trap, you need to have a pretty good idea of what your typical reader will already have read, which is not easy.
All this means that writing twelve or so good malcolms (one for each chapter) is really difficult, especially for writers who aren’t professional journalists (whose job is in a sense to research and write up surprising anecdotes). I’ve not infrequently found myself reading pretty dull accounts of how some researcher discovered Idea X, clearly intended to provide a human-interest introduction, when you know the author actually just wants to tell you about Idea X itself (which would probably be a lot more interesting).
At this point, you might expect me to provide lots of examples of really bad and gratuitous malcolms to illustrate my point. But I’m not going to, because it feels mean-spirited. When experts write popular non-fiction books, they are typically making a very significant effort for relatively little reward: this is an important public service that enriches the public debate. To single someone out for criticism feels churlish and wrong. If you’re not convinced that gratuitous malcolms exist or you are not bothered by them, all I can say is good for you. It’s a case of if you know, you know. I’ll be the first to put my hands up and admit that my own writing is full of malcolms (I even have entries in my calendar for days when I was writing setting aside to time to ‘research malcolm for chapter 7’ or whatever). But was it the best use of my writing time? I wonder.
What’s perhaps most vexing about the overuse of malcolms — about the compulsion to always deploy them — is what it implies about people who read books. It rests on a subconscious assumption that what the author has to say is fundamentally a bit dull, and that the doltish reader must be cajoled into it with some spicy human interest.
Perhaps this is true if you’re trying to sell a niche nonfiction topic to millions of airport book buyers. If that’s your goal, you’ll want to use every writerly trick in the book to get them to care. And of course the rewards for doing that are huge. But assuming a more realistic definition of success, is spending time on great malcolms the best way to improve a book draft?
To come back to Paul Johnson’s excellent book, part of the reason it works is credits its readers with some interest in the UK’s public finances (they’ve picked up a book on the subject, after all), and uses that as a starting point for its journey, rather than beginning with a vignette about the Chancellor taking a big sip of coffee, staring out of his window at the trees swaying in St James’s Park and preparing for the make-or-break Budget statement. And it’s no less readable for that.
So here’s my modest call to action: malcolms are good, but they’ve gone too far. If you write, publish or read books, it’s time to push back against the tyranny of malcolms.
