By Malcolm Gladwell
This one was ok. I thought the same about the original. I loved Outliers and Talking to Strangers, but tipping point talk is only so-so for me.
In this one I learned:
- What a “superspreader” really is. When I heard that term during the pandemic, I assumed that it meant an infected person who was particularly social. Perhaps an asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic person. Here, he talked about studies that show that different people aerosolize particles in wildly different amounts. When some people talk, very few particles are put into the air, making them very unlikely to spread disease through airborne transmission. Others produce a lot and could infect people who enter the same room after they left. There have been many cases where my wife or I have gotten sick and the other spouse did not. I was always surprised by that, but this information makes sense.
- Harvard has a lot of sports because sports enable them to justify selection mechanisms that favor rich white people (eg that’s who make elite tennis players).
- The opioid epidemic is uniquely American. Some states slowed it down with laws that required doctors to use special prescription pads to prescribe opioids. They had triplicate copies and they needed to save for their records, and also send in one of the copies to an org that tracked them. This made doctors significantly less likely to prescribe opioids. Also, Purdue Pharma aggressively targeted susceptible doctors to encourage prescriptions.
I was less interested in the medicare fraud of Florida or the difference in surgical practice between Buffalo and Boulder.