Talking To Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

    I bought my brother Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell around a year ago. It didn't take him long to finish, and when he gave the book to me to read, it was covered in sticky notes. He had gone through and marked all the interesting points in the book, and there were a lot. I recently got to reading it and was constantly amazed with every word. Malcolm Gladwell changed my perception of myself and everyone around me. 

    The structure of Talking to Strangers is much different from any book that I have read before. Malcolm Gladwell discusses a few main topics or behaviors regarding interactions with peers throughout the book. For each topic he will describe popular events where  and picks apart each action made by the characters in the event. It was incredible to see him take these events and inspect them in ways that I've never considered. He often pointed out the flaws in the people's perceptions of strangers and it surprised me. There are so many situations that seem would have been a lot simpler had assumptions and viewpoints been different. Malcolm Gladwell also introduced some studies where the behavior was observed in a more controlled environment and once or twice invites you to participate too. 

    I loved reading Talking to Strangers because Malcolm Gladwell discusses social science in easy terms. Throughout the whole book I was able to keep up, though I did have to go back and look up names of people and places a few times. What is also great about his book was it was entertaining to read. He paces the book out so new insight and studies are frequently introduced and you are never stuck reading the same thing in different wording (like I find mind and mental health books tend to do). I would recommended reading this book, I had lots of fun reading it and hope you will too. 

Thanks for reading!

 - Sophie A. 

    

On The Ubiquity of The Book Review (Or, A Response To The Professional's Guide To Writing Blog Comments)

Recently, it has come to my attention that a certain classmate of ours has posted his guide to writing appropriate and well-structured comments on these blogs, a small but still relatively significant portion of our class activity; titled The Professional’s Guide To Writing Blog Comments and peppered throughout with the writer’s signature sense of humor, the post delineates the exact formula for writing what is essentially the commenting equivalent of a nice loaf of bread - almost universally pleasing and easy to procure.  Reading through his guide, I immediately thought of the fact that clear patterns in these comments and their structure must be evident in order for our classmate to be able to write something of this nature, and then of the fact that these patterns are most likely caused by how numerous the comments are; below is a discussion of another common occurrence of our classroom reading blogs that I have observed, that of the book review, and some of my musings as to why this is the case.

 

Perhaps the most prominent aspect of the book review is its straightforwardness as a blog post structure, particularly useful when one is faced with the dreaded enemy that is writer’s block. The very nature of the book review as an overview of a book or a series that one has read recently makes for an approachable format, and it is hard not to see its intrinsic appeal; the information about the book’s contents required to write the book review is readily available, and elaborating on and analyzing said contents is also an accessible and familiar task. Book reviews also happen to be rather common online as well, so the basic structure of one is rather easy to recreate and then build upon, creating a format that is easy to work with.

 

Book reviews also serve the sole purpose of informing the audience about particular books that one has read and their positive and negative attributes; being centered on this goal makes them an easy format to navigate, as the main idea of the post is decided by default. Their role as a source of information also adds to their value as a blog post structure; through perusing the many posts of this nature both on our classroom reading blogs and elsewhere on the Internet, I have been introduced to many interesting titles that I would not have encountered otherwise. Their value in turn adds to their “popularity” as a format, further explaining their ubiquity.

 

In conclusion, two key aspects of the book review  - its simplicity and its informativity - contribute to why it is such a common type of blog post. However, its prevalence combined with the two qualities discussed above create a tendency for its structure to become formulaic and almost mechanical - not necessarily a bad thing for something as small and ultimately inconsequential as a comment, but something that could end up damaging the quality of blog posts over time. As writers, we should always seek to create original and thought-provoking content; therefore, we should handle the writing of book reviews thoughtfully, so that we may avoid this potential danger.

- Jade Li

12 Rules for Life Reviewed by Zhaoxin Sun

I have recently gotten into watching self-help Youtube videos and books, and trying to pick up good habits that way; this month, I read 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology. This book was intriguing in the beginning because I couldn’t help but notice how precise his writing style was. He talks about the importance of being “precise in your speech” in Rule 10, which was obvious to me when he took a silly example of birds and said “chickens, like suburbanites, live communally. Songbirds, such as wrens, do not, but they still inhabit a dominance hierarchy” (Peterson 3). The writing in this line is far from the deepest and most specific language he used in the book, but I was surprised and impressed to see how concisely he related songbirds to a fundamental idea in his chapter (dominance hierarchies and territory).

My interest was piqued at this point, but I started to take him more seriously after he wrote,“There will always be people better than you--that’s a cliche of nihilism, like the phrase, In a million years, who’s going to know the difference? The proper response to that statement is not, Well, then, everything is meaningless. It’s Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters. Talking yourself into irrelevance in not a profound critique of Being. It’s a cheap trick of the rational mind” (Peterson 87). I have always been doubtful of the moral validity of sentiments expressed on Instagram, the almost melodramatic expressions of people crying about their woes, complaining about the difficulty of existence and their thoughts of giving up, of the futility of their existence. Their feelings of defeat may well be true for them, but it certainly is not an example of how to live, nor a mindset to commend and pass on to future generations. I felt immense respect for the author when he perfectly summarized the cowardice of such a mindset; I could relate to his writing very deeply because he managed to describe perfectly what I was struggling to flesh out myself. At this point, I got the impression that he was a highly intelligent person that I should really pay attention to.

He has rules including “don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them” and “stand up straight with your shoulders back.” I think these are excellent rules because he backed them up with extremely compelling examples. For example, his justification for the rule about children was that if children are not taught the basic social rules that make them pleasant to be around, they will be continually rejected by peers and adults who could help them. Again, this struck home with me because I always feel that my mother completely spoils my younger brother to the point where I find him almost unbearable to be around. If he is impossibly frustrating and an absolute nuisance to even me, his older sister, how would he be received by everyone around him that isn’t his family? It was quite an eye-opening point.

I personally agreed with and related to a lot of what he said, but I think that this book could be worth exploring even if that is not the case. When he talks about his first rule of standing up straight, he explains its importance as a physical adjustment of posture to reflect mental preparation to be combative and present in life. Even if that is not your life philosophy, what I found most interesting about this chapter was his example of lobsters. He uses the dominance hierarchies of lobsters to prove that they exist naturally (and are therefore not just a man-made oppressive structure), weaving a fascinating narrative with them. I am sure some people will disagree with what he says, but I think his logic and examples read much like a story. Even if you disagree with his conclusions and don’t relate to his examples, it’s still interesting to follow his reasoning.

All in all, I would absolutely recommend this book. It was pretty boring in the beginning and I fell asleep several times, but his precision of language, apparent intelligence, compelling examples, and general mental narrative made it a worthwhile read for me. His ideas and the reasoning behind them are obviously not for everyone, but I still think it’s an overall good book.