Bearings Online
19 November 2020
Dear Malcolm Gladwell,
It is too bad that the malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com website doesn’t work anymore. I hope you enjoyed the gentle ribbing back in the day. Your well-crafted books— The Tipping Point, Blink—offered big ideas with catchy titles, and became so culturally ascendent as to earn the backhanded praise of parody. Me? I’m still working up to 10,000 hours on the mandolin. I need to sound like Bill Monroe or David Grisman someday, y’know.
How about a book called Infrastructure? I know, I know. Yawn. That title won’t sell a lot of books. But work with me …
But seriously, what we really need is to save the planet. If we ever needed an elegant, memorable way to name the mistake that seems to cut from right to left and back again, or the recognition that would help us correct it, it is now. So since the website is down, I’m at a tipping point, to coin a phrase. To coin another phrase, I am going back to the source. You.
