Anyone who enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point or Blink or Steven D. Levitt’s Freakonomics, will likely be interested in The Wisdom of Crowds by the New Yorker’s business columnist, James Surowiecki. Surowiecki’s premise is that groups of diverse people can collectively come to a better conclusion than even the smartest individual. Like other books of pop economics, Surowiecki employs dozens of real world examples. Among the most interesting was a discussion of why “groupthink” led to the crash of the space shuttle Columbia. Another was Surowiecki’s persuasive argument that a “market” where the probability of terrorist attacks (or other threats) could be bought and sold, would be better at predicting those attacks than our current system of intelligence. Unlike Gladwell, however, Surowiecki fails to make his examples sing. Crowds is weighed down by long stretches of prose in which Surowiecki touches on one academic study after another, continually referring back to his premise, “the wisdom of crowds,” as if trying to drill it into his readers’ heads. Certainly, though, anyone with a passing interest in economics – and especially the behavioral aspects of economics – will enjoy the book, but it fails to compete with the genre’s better examples.
Book Review: The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
In Alexandra Tanner’s ‘Worry,’ Illness Is the Status Quo
In a novel where sisterhood entails constant conflict, illness provides an unexpected emotional salve.
●
●
●
At Long Last, a Translation Worthy of ‘Pedro Páramo’
The latest translation of 'Pedro Páramo' is a mystifying work, in the dual sense that it is confounding and that its language possesses an almost mystical quality.
●
●
●
The Collaborative Alchemy of W.G. Sebald’s Photographs
By rephotographing the material Sebald brought to him, Michael Brandon-Jones played a critical role in helping the writer achieve a tonal consistency between text and image.
●
●
●
Kelly Link’s Romantic Imagination
Though Link’s stories often keep closer bedfellows with Karen Russell and Aimee Bender, her novel is pulpier and more bathetic, in some ways a piece of straight fantasy.
●
●
●
The Everyday Horror of ‘Other Minds and Other Stories’
In someone else’s hands, these stories might be little more than typeset urban legends, the stuff of 2000s-era AOL email chains, but Sims renders them as something both terrifying and mesmerizing.
●
●
●
The Violent Truths of ‘Brutalities’
The impulse to simplify the complicated nature of touch, argues Margo Steines, is not just an intellectual but an ethical failure.
●
●
●
The Truthful Distortions of ‘The MANIAC’
'The MANIAC' is a kind of triptych, presenting us with the conception, painful birth, and exponential growth of the digital computer and its own disquieting offspring, artificial intelligence.
●
●
●
The Visionary Memoirs of Péter Nádas
'Shimmering Details' is a delicate fusion, supplementing the high-modernist realism of Proust and Musil with an expressionist’s commitment to the distortions generated by strong feeling.
●
●
●