It’s a fair point, if a fairly obvious one, but Gladwell leads up to this moment by dispensing suggestive morsels of theory, like a trail of bread crumbs; his italicized conclusions are designed to hit us with the force of revelation when it finally dawns on us how everything fits together.

Amping up the drama like this doesn’t have to feel cheap; there’s a fine tradition of storytelling as benign manipulation, and in his articles for The New Yorker, Gladwell often gets the balance right. But not here. In “Talking to Strangers,” he uses theory like a cudgel on sensitive material. A chapter on the Stanford rape case from 2015 is a prime example. A jury convicted Brock Turner, a freshman, of sexually assaulting Chanel Miller (who recently revealed her name to the public and whose memoir will be published later this month). Gladwell deems what happened between them that night a case of “transparency failure on steroids.”

“A young woman and a young man meet at a party,” Gladwell writes, “then proceed to tragically misunderstand each other’s intentions — and they’re drunk.” This is a bizarre way to describe a situation that ended with a conscious Turner being found on top of an unconscious Miller behind a dumpster. He had pulled down her dress, removed her underwear and assaulted her with his fingers. In what universe is this the result of a tragic misunderstanding?

This is where Gladwell’s insistence on theory can be distorting, rather than clarifying. Theory can provide a handy framework, transforming the messy welter of experience into something more legible, but it can also impose a narrative that’s awkward, warped or even damaging. Gladwell himself seems to realize as much. His 2000 book “The Tipping Point” endorsed the “broken windows” theory that aggressive policing of minor infractions can prevent more serious crimes; years later, as debates about mass incarceration came to the fore, he conceded that the theory was “oversold,” and that he regretted his part in promoting it.

In “Talking to Strangers,” there are glimpses of this mildly chastened Gladwell, more skeptical of theory’s explanatory powers and struggling to break free. He begins and ends his book with the story of Sandra Bland, who was pulled over for failing to signal a lane change and later died in police custody, in what officials deemed a suicide. Bland was black; the officer who pulled her over, Brian Encinia, was white. Gladwell slips in a “cautionary note,” saying that for all the theory he presents “the right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”

But this anodyne sentiment is too vague and banal to explain anything, much less carry a book, and Gladwell knows it. In his strenuous bids for novelty, he has to minimize existing explanations of Encinia as a racist and a bully (“we can do better”), concluding instead that the best way to understand Encinia is as “the police officer who does not default to truth.”