Talking to Strangers
What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know
Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and What the Dog Saw, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers — and why they often go wrong.
How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to each other that isn’t true?
Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, he argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.
Back Bay Books (September 28, 2021)
Little Brown (September 10, 2019)
Interviews
Malcolm Gladwell And 'Talking To Strangers' — It's Been A Minute with Sam Sanders | NPR
Malcolm Gladwell's newest book demonstrates how miscommunication can have tragic consequences — K5 News
Interview — Full Disclosure With James O'Brien
Reviews
Talking to Strangers — Publishers Weekly
Talking to Strangers — Kirkus Reviews
Podcasts
Why Are We So Bad At Understanding People We Don’t Know? Malcolm Gladwell Thinks He Knows Why — WBUR
Malcolm Gladwell on the Future of Books, Kanye Tirades, Sandra Bland, Donald Sterling, Joe Paterno, and Intuition — The Bill Simmons Podcast
Malcolm Gladwell on ‘Talking to Strangers’ (Live) — Larry Wilmore: Black on the Air
Best-Selling Author Malcolm Gladwell On ‘Talking To Strangers’: A Live Conversation — It’s been a minute with Sam Sanders | NPR
Video
Why ‘Friends’ is Misleading — Jimmy Kimmel Live!
