Featured today on Grantland is an exchange between Bill Simmons and Gawker friend-of-the-program-du-jour Malcolm Gladwell.

In the sixth paragraph of the piece Gladwell takes a hard left turn and starts to talk about the recent Carson biography by long-time Carson lawyer Henry Bushkin. Simmons, being duly impressed, links to the book on Amazon.

In the back and forth that follows, Gladwell mentions the clout of the (then) William Morris Agency.

Advertisement

To me it just seemed like a commercial was cut and pasted into this. Adjusting my headgear of preference, I decided to poke around the relationships at play here.

Fact pattern:

1. Malcolm Gladwell is represented by Tina Bennett at William Morris Endeavor

2. "Johnny Carson" is published by Eamon Dolan Books - an imprint of Houghton Miflin Harcourt

Advertisement

3. There are numerous examples of authors thanking agent Tina Bennett and publisher Eamon Dolan in the acknowledgements section of their books.

I would imagine that it is industry standard to have these kinds synergistic relationships between agents and editors/publishers.

Could it be possible that Bennett suggested that her client plug her friend's book? Probably. And honestly, I don't mind that it happened at all. It looks like an interesting read.

Advertisement

What I do mind is that this seemed to be planted by Gladwell so artlessly. It's actually kind of insulting. I've never read any of his books, so this might just be the way he writes and thinks. In that case, I'll just pack up my tinfoil for another day.
http://crosstalk.kinja.com/please-prepare-your-tinfoil-hats-1482912269
crosstalk.kinja.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-34
608384
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:DJESY7CAF6OL7MUT4PLSYRSEUKS3VGLY
<urn:uuid:3c7c8ff4-11f4-4593-8b82-3177cf98dd5e>
2017-08-24T05:08:25Z
151.101.65.34
text/html
sha1:RUYNUY6FZQXYR662FH4CSFY5LMNJ6C7P
<urn:uuid:21c43557-d793-42b7-859c-44d6c233eabc>
http://crosstalk.kinja.com/please-prepare-your-tinfoil-hats-1482912269
response
<urn:uuid:8c23ecd9-c832-46be-8903-6e3da4077660>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-166-17-219.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-34
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf