Malcolm Gladwell

“Malcolm Gladwell is at something of a professional tipping point,” said Amy Chozick in The New York Times. Once nearly universally praised, the author of 2000’s The Tipping Point and four subsequent best-sellers is rolling out a new book to a divided audience. To his fans, he remains a brilliant explainer of human behavior;

“to others, he is a faux intellectual.” So maybe it’s fitting that Talking to Strangers is about being misunderstood. Gladwell, a Canadian-born New Yorker writer, gets that his immense success might aggravate fellow writers. But he’s far more worried about misunderstandings that arise between strangers because of the way media shapes everyone’s presumptions. “On every level,” he says, “I feel like there is a weird disconnect between the way the world is presented to us in the media and the way it really is.”

The good news in Talking to Strangers is that we are wired to trust one another, said Sean O’Hagan in The Observer (U.K.). Gladwell loves talking about our instinct to believe strangers—and how society would collapse without it. But the bad news is how many ways that instinct can be confounded. “Any element that disrupts the equilibrium between strangers, whether it is alcohol or power or place, becomes problematic,” he says. The book begins and ends with a tragedy: the 2015 death in police custody of 28-year-old Sandra Bland. Bland, we’re told, wouldn’t even have been arrested if not for misunderstandings. “Very few people are going to read Talking to Strangers and agree with every argument in it,” Gladwell says. “The point is to help them reflect on the way society behaves.”