Malcolm  Gladwell has become a respected author who reaches audiences that general academic writers cannot. He has a new book, "David and Goliath" which immediately shot up the bestseller charts.

Gladwell is a columnist for the New Yorker, and his books are meant to educate and entertain. While not exactly a scientist, readers have respected his assumptions and what he sometimes describes as 'laws.' For academic reviewers, this is both irresponsible and disconcerting.

In his review of the book, Christopher Chabris of Slate.com warns Gladwell's readers of taking his assertions as gospel truth. His admonition: "I take him and his publisher at their word. On their face, many of the assertions and conclusions in Gladwell's books are clearly meant to describe lawful regularities about the way human mental life and the human social world work. And this has always been the case with his writing."

His further warnings are based on Gladwell's first book "The Tipping Point" wherein he has the 'Three Rules of the Tipping Point' and where he calls patterns of behavior 'laws.' Chabris states: "To say something is a law is to say that it applies with (near) universality and can be used to predict, in advance, with a fair degree of certainty, what will happen in a situation. It says this is truth you can believe in, and act on to your benefit."

In "David and Goliath" Gladwell centers on overcoming difficult odds and considering them as 'desirable difficulties.' He supports his assertions with cited studies which most readers find convincing. Chabris contends: " The point is that Gladwell makes absolutely no mention of any uncertainty over whether this effect is reliable. All he does is cite the original 2007 study of 40 subjects and rest his case. As I mentioned in my review, in 2013 this is virtual malpractice for a sophisticated writer whose beat includes social science, where the validity of even highly cited results has come into question. Readers who have been hooked by Gladwell's prose and look to the endnotes of this chapter for a new fix will find no sources for the "hard stuff"-e.g., the true state of the science of "desirable difficulty"-that he claims to be promoting."

Chabris' final message is that Gladwell's writings are not supposed to be taken as scientific fact or infallible laws: "Malcolm Gladwell says that he is a storyteller who just uses research to "augment" the stories-who places the stories in the lead and the science in a supporting role, rather than the other way around-he's essentially placing his work in the category of inspirational books like The Secret."

Will readers take Chabris' warning, or will they dismiss it as academic snobbery-which will further propel them to the street-level, hard-nosed intellectual, Malcolm Gladwell?