George Orwell, no stranger to the astute snap judgment, once said that the best books are the ones that tell you things you know already. In that sense, Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink is very good book indeed, right up until it forgets that it’s told us what we knew already and decides to keep on telling us. Namely, that the enlightened hunch -- manifest in a perceptual method Gladwell calls ‘thin-slicing’ -- can trump the labored, data-glutted rationale. Clichéd catchphrases abound to account for how familiar this stuff is to us. “Too Much Information” leads to “Analysis Paralysis.” Gladwell's novelty is in demonstrating how these things can result in the quotidian miscalculation (a lousy date, a lousier marriage) or the major prime time screw-up (an art museum’s phony Bronze Age statuette, a truckload of misdiagnosed cardiac patients).

But outside the Old Curiosities Shop industry of non-fiction publishing, such observations about human intuition don’t seem all that, well, counterintuitive. Nor do Gladwell's findings represent a cultural breakthrough by any means. The wonders of untutored species sense have been sufficiently gauged and authenticated by common sense. And a tipping point has surely been reached when every show on television now deals with lawyers, FBI agents, criminal psychics and ER residents who weekly defeat cant and expectation with shoot-from-the-hip savvy.

Only by briefly limning the recent advances in cognitive science does Gladwell ever really freshen up this idea of Gut-IQ. The rest of the time he's just pulling fun or tiresome vignettes -- some of which would be better suited to the medium of chain e-mail -- off the shelf. (The best of these has a grizzled Vietnam veteran performing a low-budget takedown of the Pentagon war game machine: the legend of John Henry updated for the regime change era.)

Still, for someone whose thesis concerns the perils of intellectual overkill, Gladwell succumbs to the temptation too often himself. The overlarding suffers worst when it suffers from pedantry. Here he is, in a slow chapter on marketing, elaborating a food-taster’s scale for measuring the slipperiness of mayonnaise: “And on the 15-point slipperiness scale, where 0 is not slippery at all and 15 is very slippery... Whitney’s vanilla yogurt is a 7.5, and Miracle Whip is a 13. If you taste something that’s not quite as slippery as Miracle Whip but more slippery than Whitney’s vanilla yogurt, then, you might give it a 10.” Yes, you might. Thanks, Malcolm.

Though even when the panorama seems flush, a good many of the stories in Blink are engaging enough to be read for their own sake, like brisk New Yorker essays anthologized around a sluggish theme.