I’ve just completed reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book: a collection of his essays from The New Yorker, ‘What the Dog Saw’ and found it, in a phrase of my father’s, a most bracing ‘brain-scrub’: a hugely enjoyable challenge to lazy assumptions about how the world works and simultaneously a mental work-out in making sure that the author’s elegant prose and persuasive skills didn’t disguise lazy assumptions or spurious reasoning of his own.  On the whole, they didn’t, and I recommend the book hugely.

Gladwell’s great skill is to find, in desperate stories and disciplines, coherent new ways  of looking at problems that plague our world, and to communicate those with a penetrating, percussive simplicity that begins to suggest new solutions, or at least new approaches towards solutions.

In this, he shares a commonality with some of my other favourite popular social scientists (Steven Berlin Johnson, Steven D. Levitt): a consilient mind, a way of thinking and of writing which I very much aspire to.

As a kind of tribute to Gladwell, and to continue my mental work-out a little longer, here is, from memory, my listing of the best essays in the book and my fortune cookie sized summary of the epistemological learnings contained in each:

The Pitchman: Ron Popeil & the Conquest of the American Kitchen

- the wonders that happen when product development, market research and sales are perfectly integrated – in this case in one body.

Blowing up: How Nassim Taleg Turned the Inevitability of Disaster into an Investment Strategy

- Black Swans (it’s a profile with that book’s author, some years before he wrote the book). How planning for rare but ultimately inevitable and extraordinary events can be more useful than planning for frequent but ordinary ones.

John Rock’s Error: What the Inventor of the Birth Control Pill Didn’t know about Women’s Health

– how historical and social context shapes scientific innovation, as much as the underlying technological breakthroughs

Open Secrets: Enron, Intelligence and the Perils of Too Much Information

& Connecting the Dots – The Paradoxes of Intelligence Reform

- on the difference between puzzles and mysteries, and why more information doesn’t mean more certainty. Better Analysis of limited information can be more valuable. Information quality and analysis quality don’t always go together.

Late Bloomers: Why Do we Equate Genius with Precocity?
&
The Talent Myth: Are Smart People Overrated?

on the myth of the overnight success, and the fact that most individual success is predicated on the support (and love) of a network, and intelligent organisational/social design. The core of the ideas that would become OUTLIERS.

I’ve omitted a bunch, either because the reasoning in them is suspect, or because the ideas aren’t big enough (though the stories themselves interesting and often beautifully written), but I hope this little sprinkling of fortune cookies will get you to go out and buy the book, it will make you rethink the way you, well, think.

Unusually, I’m plugging a book rather than a move, The Atheists Guide to Christmas, an excellent and borderline bestselling volume penned by 42 Atheists and edited by the new poster girl of Atheism, Arianne Sherine is out in all good book shops now.

David Baddiel and I wrote an essay together for the book, on the question of why they aren’t any Atheist Movies. And then as soon as we had written it, bloody Ricky Gervais went and made one in THE INVENTION OF LYING.

But in any case, the essay, and the book (and the cause behind the book, 50% of all royalties go to the Terrence Higgins Trust) are all excellent. You can hear David and I talking about our piece here and buy the book from Amazon and anywhere else. Click on the jacket to be taken there….

And once again, realise how much of a movie set this town is. Every street is a frame in a film well loved. Makes you understand why American films do better globally, when even walking down a street in New York makes me feel a nostalgic buzz for a history that isn’t remotely mine – but one that I have absorbed from Hollywood.

As an illustration, compare these two clips

That’s LIFE ON MARS – the original Kudus UK series.

Now this:

Which is the trailer for the US remake.  Not making any point about the quality of the acting or film-making. Just about a city that is forever filmic in the mind’s eye.

Is a question I get asked a lot. So much so that I decided to write an article about it, which can be found over at BlockBuster Buzz at The Times Online. Views welcomed.

A moving, perceptive and useful talk about the creative process and the pressures of the genius in the closet by a writer whom I am now going to take more seriously. Click on the photo for the talk.