I rather liked the way that he built up his "hook" to lead the reader on, deeper into the piece. I thought it was quite clever, and I enjoyed reading it.
Until he started talking about the history of the Yeardye family. One long digression about some specific people I have no previous reason to care about is tolerable. When he went back to them I decided to drop the article and just read comments, because the gossip/substance ratio was clearly too high.
OTOH I enjoy reading Malcolm Gladwell, and he's been shown to be kind of wrong about most stuff.