The marketing of science …

… The Age Demanded an Image | Books and Culture. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Gladwell himself is not just allergic to traditional ethical discourse; the threat of it sends him into a sort of intellectual anaphylactic shock: in What the Dog Saw alone, he writes the blame out of the Enron scandal, the missed warnings about 9/11, and the Challengerdisaster. Gladwell's essay about this last tragedy has, in fact, a decisive counterweight in the popular media: Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist alive at the time, summarized the accountability by dropping O-rings into ice water at a press conference. This showed that, contrary to their manufacturer's claim, they could become inflexible in predictable atmospheric conditions, allowing a fuel leak from the joints they were supposed to be sealing. The Space Shuttle's design and operation weren't a hopelessly complex system to Feynman (hopeless complexity being Gladwell's standard plea, even though he acknowledges that complexity can be artificial and a blind)—nor to the public, when a truly expert, objective scientific communicator stepped forward.