This book is bad. Don’t read it. Why? Gladwell is clearly an intelligent man. He isn’t blind to the injustices in the world. This book however, seems to suggest that how he has learned to cope with those injustices, built on a society designed to benefit him in many ways, is to dismiss the idea of there being systems in place to perpetuate harm which is not only bad for the individual but for society. It’s premise is that the reason for so many tragic […]

I’ve read at least four books by Malcolm Gladwell, and I’ve found them consistently interesting and educational. So, I was pretty excited when I was finally able to check out the audio version of Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know (2019) by Malcolm Gladwell. The audio version was billed as more of a podcast experience. Whenever possible, real audio clips of real people were used, and there was even a theme song that recurred throughout the book. It was also […]

I’ve liked every Malcolm Gladwell book I’ve read and that includes this one. Prior to reading it, I feel like I read a lot of criticism about Gladwell and the book. That criticism came from the cesspool that is Twitter, which means that I was aware there was criticism but I don’t know EXACTLY what the root cause was which is why I looked it up to better understand the issues behind the criticism. It seems to me that most of the criticism is (1) […]