I know this is late notice (it was late notice for me too) but I’ll be in SF all this next week. If anyone wants to get together for dinner, drinks, etc., drop me a line.

I have often said that Malcolm Gladwell’s success is based on his ability to take the interesting work done by sociologists (and psychologists) and package it for the general public. He’s like the Cliff’s notes for Big Ideas in academic social science. (An even less kind characterization would be Big Ideas in Social Science for Dummies). I don’t mean that as a derogatory remark. God knows that academics are generally pretty poor at making their points accessible outside the ivory tower. And Gladwell does an amazing job of pulling out and synthesizing the most important points, sometimes in ways that I think the original authors could gain something from. That’s not to say that he’s always successful but I’d say he’s definitely hitting more than missing. A recent good job is this review/summary of Charles Tilly’s book “Why” that Gladwell recently published in the New Yorker. I’ve been a fan of much of Tilly’s work for a while now. I especially like it when he steps out of his historical/political work to do more general sociology like “Why” and “Durable Inequality”. I think Tilly’s new book on reason-giving will be especially helpful for those of us tasked with qualitative user research. Of course, thanks to Gladwell, you don’t have to read Tilly’s book to get Tilly’s insight.

As with so many others, I find there are no words for this picture. But I LOVE it.