*Talking to Strangers*, the new Malcolm Gladwell book
Definitely recommended, talking to strangers is one of the most important things you do and it can even save your life. This book is the very best entry point for thinking about this topic. Here is a summary excerpt:
We have strategies for dealing with strangers that are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary. We need the criminal justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it — and, as we’ll see in the next two chapters, we’re not always honest with each other about just how terrible at it we are.
One recurring theme is just how bad we are at spotting liars. On another note, I found this interesting:
…the heavy drinkers of today drink far more than the heavy drinkers of 50 years ago. “When you talk to students [today] about four drinks or five drinks, they just sort of go, “Pft, that’s just getting started,'” the alcohol researcher Kim Fromme says. She says that the heavy binge drinking category now routinely includes people who have had twenty drinks in a sitting. Blackouts, once rare, have become common. Aaron White recently surveyed more than 700 students at Duke University. Of the drinkers in the group, over half had suffered a blackout at some point in their lives, 40 percent had had a blackout in the previous year, and almost one in ten had had a blackout in the previous two weeks.
And:
Poets die young. That is not just a cliche. The life expectancy of poets, as a group, trails playwrights, novelists, and non-fiction writers by a considerable margin. They have higher rates of “emotional disorders” than actors, musicians, composers, and novelists. And of every occupational category, they have far and away the highest suicide rates — as much as five times higher than the general population.
It also turns out that the immediate availability of particular methods of suicide significantly raises the suicide rate; it is not the case that an individual is committed to suicide regardless of the means available at hand.
Returning to the theme of talking with strangers, one approach I recommend is to apply a much higher degree of arbitrary specificity, when relating facts and details, than you would with someone you know.
In any case, self-recommending, this book shows that Malcolm Gladwell remains on an upward trajectory. You can pre-order it here.