blink

I love the New Yorker and I adore those who publish there. I've found so much great material in it, coming at me from corners where I would have never looked. Transvestites in Omaha, a gigantic tapestry at the Moma, a Californian origami aficionado who turned his hobby into a lucrative consulting business. How do you know what's interesting if you don't read voraciously and with complete disregard for the topic? If it's in the New Yorker, it's good. There is too much of a good thing, though. The New Yorker is great precisely because it is so varied, so incongruous and unapologetically non-sequitur. Much of this freshness is lost when sorted and bundled into books 300 pages fat.

At the moment, I'm reading David Sedaris's When you are engulfed in flames, a collection of short stories, most of which were first published in the New Yorker. Halfway through the book I stumbled across The Waiting Room, a hilarious tale I first read two-and-a-half years ago. I was rolling on the floor with laughter back then. Now, I'm barely raising the corners of my lips in an attempt to smile. My senses were blunted by page after page of highly similar prose. It feels like I got to know the author a little bit, but that's not what I expect of good writing. The story should speak to me, not the writer. Collections only work when the short stories in them were written by different people.

That short stories can quickly grow old was new to me. I had no idea. What I already knew is that one shouldn't give a New Yorker writer time enough to write an entire book, unless that writer happens to be Truman Capote. And if they had had enough time and even managed to published their prolific writings, one should steer clear of them. They find something worth writing about and instead of putting the final full stop after seven or eight pages, they just ramble on. They make their point, over and over again, with repetitious examples and complete disregard of potential conflicting ideas, tunnel-visioned into ignorance.

This I learned the hard way, and the mark should be left in my brain. But when I saw an immaculate copy of Blink at the Oxfam store the other day, I couldn't help it. I did it again, despite my best intentions, picked up the book and, to my great surprise and delight, breezed through it with utter enjoyment.

At first glance, this book strictly follows protocol. A incredible, maybe even counter-intuitive, hypothesis is put forward and supported with countless examples. The books mentioned above leave it at that. Example follows superfluous example, probably in the misguided believe anything can be proven by repetition. The reader is kept entertained by the strength of the writing and the depth of the research, but is not intellectually engaged.

Malcolm Gladwell's latest book is satisfyingly different. After the initial case studies and examples, counterpoints are being presented, caveats opened and concessions made. The point of the book is the power of the subconscious. Our mind makes decisions and judgments long before we are aware of it. We are sometimes fooled by these intuitions but more often tremendously helped. We know things without knowing them and react quickly to stressful situations without being able to give reasons afterwards. The books looks at various aspects of these mind games, suggests ways of exploiting or at least controlling them and of minimizing their shortcomings. Nowhere in the book is there a cure-all. There is no magic. All insights are described in their context and with the warning attached that things might be different in a different context. The reader is encouraged to make use of his brain and evaluate the words in front of him. This is no pseudo-scientifc lulaby but educational entertainment of the finest kind.