6/24/2023 0 Comments Blink book malcolm gladwellGladwell also rediscovers something Poe described in “The Haunted Palace”: our eyes and our faces are windows to the soul. We have a power lunch with some professional food-tasters-the author quips that it was like cello-shopping with Yo-Yo Ma. (Unconventional people sometimes surprise.) We ponder the odd political rise of Warren G. We learn about the Aeron chair, All in the Family, Lee at Chancellorsville. There are stories of a rock star fighting the odds, of cops shooting an innocent man who looked suspicious, of Coca-Cola making a big marketing mistake. The author’s great strength lies in his stories, and here he crafts a number of engaging ones: an account of art experts fooled by a fake a summary of how a psychologist, looking at an hourlong video of a married couple conversing, can predict with 95% accuracy if they will divorce an unnerving narrative about the Millennium Challenge, a war game in which a maverick commander deals a devastating blow to the bean-counting rule-followers on the team that was supposed to win. Gladwell’s second entry into the aren’t-our-brains-amazing genre ( The Tipping Point, 2000) has an Obi-Wan Kenobi flavor, a “trust-your- feelings-Luke” antirationalism that attempts, in some ways, to deconstruct the Force. We need to place more trust in our “thin-slicer”-our capacity to make instant judgments-but we also need to sharpen its edge more keenly with experience and education.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |