Malcolm Gladwell’s Next Book?
January 3rd, 2007 by MikeI highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article in the New Yorker entitled, “Open Secrets”.
While the article is obstensibly about Enron, Gladwell is developing a much larger theme here about the shift, in our ever more complex world, from puzzles to mysteries. Puzzles have answers and simply require more information to solve. On the other hand, mysteries do not have precise answers and more data typically makes determing a likely outcome more difficult. The article explores this theme in the realms of business, medicine, and foreign intelligence.
Expect to see Gladwell dig up some other fun applications of the theory. This is just the type of sprawling topic with broad applicability that Gladwell can turn into a bestseller (seemingly) overnight.
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January 14th, 2007 at 9:19 am
[...] But this particular rant is, in fact, linked to movies after all. Because its about complexity. Global warming and its effects is one of the most important, but by no means the only, example of how complexity shapes our modern world. On how cause and effect are not linear, but endlessly iterating and interconnected. And how not appreciating that subtlety, leads to all sorts of problems. See Martin Gladwell’s excellent piece in this week’s New Yorker for the difference between Mysteries and Puzzles for an illustration of this. So we live in a complex world. And to understand the world we need to understand complexity. And one of the chief ways we come to understand our world, is through the media, and king of media is movies. So movies, to continue to be relevant, should help us understand complexity. Right? [...]