Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and What the Dog Saw, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers---and why they often go wrong. How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to each other that isn't true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland---throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

I've been listening to podcasts and other things instead of reading lately, so I thought this audiobook would be a good transition back, it's produced like an episode of Gladwell's podcast.

I like Gladwell's ability to find interesting stories/people and draw broad conclusions from them. He generally stays on a topic just long enough for it to remain interesting before moving on to a tangentially related but fairly different one.

I enjoyed this book, but it didn't interest me as much as some of his other's. Concepts such defaulting to truth or mismatched presentation were well explained, but I didn't think the conclusions that were reached from some of the stories told about them were as thought provoking as I hoped they would be.

This has the same Gladwellian tempo and somewhat tenuous conclusions as his other books; but as always, fantastic writing and superb storytelling, many showing different sides to quondam media controversies that are always interesting to consider, albeit with a critical eye.

4.5 stars.

This was not at all what I thought it would be. Granted, any new book by Malcolm Gladwell gets added to the library list, regardless of what it's about, so I didn't even read the description.

It is not about how to make better conversation with strangers. It is a thought-provoking look at the kind of assumptions we make about reading people that are so deep we would never think about them if we didn't read books like these. Mostly. There were some sections that I felt were rather obvious, if not still instructive: Succeeding in public society is partly tied to your ability to present yourself well, whether you can be trusted or not. That's common sense. But can you tell who is accurately representing their character? Nope. And neither can intelligence agencies, judges or law enforcement. Because they're strangers. It's rather depressing to see studies on this and reminds me of some of the research showing that algorithms are better at investing than people.

The biggest takeaway, for me, was the origin of police officers making up ridiculous traffic violations in order to pull people over to look for bigger problems. This is such an obvious tactic that has happened to myself and multiple people in my family. Knowing that it originated as a solution to extreme crime for use in a certain way in a certain part of town and has been extrapolated to the entire nation... wow. A classic example of copycat strategy without understanding why the strategy worked in the first place. And is clearly causing more harm than good. I feel almost like this theme, which seems to be the goal he's working toward, should almost be a separate book. Not that everything in the middle isn't interesting, but this topic could stand alone. It feels like he started with his premise and wrote backwards.

Coupling, related to this, was also interesting, which is roughly another way to describe context. When you understand how reductionist Western society is compared to other parts of the world this isn't surprising.

I enjoyed his chapter on transparency, illustrated by the tv show Friends (which I have never watched), because I absolutely despise sitcoms, and I wonder if this is why. Not only are the plots unrealistic, the expressions are too.

I enjoy Malcolm Gladwell's books because they're a mile wide and foot deep. He makes you think in an engaging way, and his books are a quick read. It's enough to pique your curiosity or inform you of new research. The more in depth books—deep dives into a narrow field of study—are what I prefer to read, so his books give me references to more material (reading about his oversimplification of the “10,000 hours rule” vs. reading Peak, the book by that researcher, for example). Also my expectation of pop nonfiction isn't super high. This isn't his best work, but if you enjoy a little history, psychology, science and drama, it's an enjoyable book and will make you think twice the next time you're trying to read a stranger.