Talking to Strangers

Preview

There is a strange confidence that rises in us whenever we meet another person. We think we can read them. We think a face will tell us what is true, that a voice will reveal intention, that a pause, a smile, a nervous gesture, or a burst of charm will help us make sense of who stands before us. We walk into interviews, traffic stops, blind dates, police interrogations, intelligence briefings, courtrooms, and casual conversations with that confidence humming quietly in the background. And most of the time we do not even notice it. We simply assume that understanding strangers is one of the basic human things we know how to do. This book begins by asking what happens if that confidence is badly misplaced. What if the problem is not that a few people are unusually deceptive, unusually evil, or unusually hard to read, but that all of us are far worse at dealing with strangers than we like to imagine. What if the mistakes that shape modern life, from diplomatic disasters to courtroom scandals to needless deaths, are not random accidents at all. What if they come from a handful of deep habits built into the way human beings make sense of one another. That is the pulse running through Malcolm Gladwell’s account. He does not approach the subject like a professor assembling a theory in neat little boxes. He approaches it like a storyteller walking through a field of wreckage, asking why so many collisions happened in the same ways. Again and again, he returns to moments when one person looked at another and got it terribly wrong. A young Black woman pulled over in Texas. A charming fraudster welcomed into the highest circles. A spy trusted for years. A poet who died in a prison cell....